A decade and a half on from the Pirate Bay trial, the winds have begun to shift. On an unusually warm summer’s day, I sit with fellow film critics by the old city harbour, once a haven for merchants and, rumour has it, smugglers. Cold bigstrongs in hand (that’s what they call pints up here), they start venting about the “enshittification” of streaming – enshittification being the process by which platforms degrade their services and ultimately die in the pursuit of profit. Netflix now costs upwards of 199 SEK (£15), and you need more and more subscriptions to watch the same shows you used to find in one place. Most platforms now offer plans that, despite the fee, force advertisements on subscribers. Regional restrictions often compel users to use VPNs to access the full selection of available content. The average European household now spends close to €700 (£600) a year on three or more VOD subscriptions. People pay more and get less.
According to London‑based piracy monitoring and content‑protection firm MUSO, unlicensed streaming is the predominant source of TV and film piracy, accounting for 96% in 2023. Piracy reached a low in 2020, with 130bn website visits. But by 2024 that number had risen to 216bn. In Sweden, 25% of people surveyed reported pirating in 2024, a trend mostly driven by those aged 15 to 24. Piracy is back, just sailing under a different flag.
Lets not forget the BS when Shows are only partially available, like only Season 1-5,8-12 and so on. Not only is it expensive but also a shitty service with shitty quality and experience.
patient gaming and patient streaming, 90% of modern media is slop, i just live my best media life 10 years in the past when it can be had for cheap, except for music.
Eh, for most things, sure. I’m right with you for most media, but there’s a lot to be said for confining content when it’s part of the cultural zeitgeist. Ain’t nobody talking about Game of Thrones now, and it’s only 6 years old, not even a decade.
With any sort of piracy setup, almost all mainstream media is incredibly easy to get within a few hours of release, and most “Long Tail” content can be found pretty easily, too. If it’s so obscure that you still can’t find it, then that’s likely a good indication that you’re solidly pushing into indie content that hardly earns any income, so they could really benefit from us paying for their content.
We do try to make sure indie content creators get paid, though. For example, Kindle Unlimited is pretty amazing for us. My wife and I share an account, and we read so voraciously that authors get paid out about 10× what we pay for the service. Maths out roughly like this: ~30 books/month, on average, at ~1¢/page (actual pages, not Kindle standardized e-reader pages, which are only half a page), at ~250-300 pages/book is $75-90/mo, and we pay for 2 years in advance at I think $7ish/mo.
But I’m totally with you on games. I spend lots on videogames, but almost entirely for indie game bundles at $1-2/game, typically. I have literally thousands of games I’d love to play going back decades, so I don’t need the latest releases unless it’s a game I’m super excited for.
Sometimes i remember that some people actually PAY for the shitty little TV shows they make. I get them all for free, and i still don’t watch most of them lol. The only one coming out right now I’ve been watching is Foundation.
Foundation
My solution, just put everything on a different streaming service in the “I’ll watch in 2 years when I renew my Netflix subscription for 1 month” bucket. I’m probably never gonna get around to renewing said subscription because I have so much stuff to watch regardless of which platform I use. I’ll spend the rest of my time touching grass (or more realistically, on Steam)
That was partially our plan as well - rotate across streaming services - but the convenience of not having to do that definitely overtook that plan in under a year.
Yarr.
I’m not so much rotating as I am sticking with one until I (never) run out of stuff to watch. Although I mostly watch anime so 90% of everything is on one service anyway.
how much longer do you think i’ll take before they start colluding with each other or enshitify enough to make sure that you can’t get what you want in the 1 month subscription?
I wouldn’t put it past them to abolish 1-month subscriptions.
Removed by mod
I thought this was a shitpost copypasta but there was no punchline and it ends with contact information… Is this a parody of a scam or someone actually trying to pull a scam?
