Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - January 27th, ’24

[JackSpratts]

Since 2002































Early Edition



January 27th, 2024














Streaming Pirates Are Hollywood’s New Villains

Illegal subscription services that steal films or TV shows bring in $2 billion a year in ads and subscriber fees.
Thomas Buckley

Ever since taking on Netflix Inc. at its own game, old Hollywood has struggled to turn a profit in streaming, with the likes of Disney+, Peacock and Paramount+ losing billions of dollars each year, sparking concerns on Wall Street that the services will never be as profitable as cable once was. But the age of streaming has been a boon for some unintended winners: pirates that use software to rip a film or television show in seconds from legitimate online video platforms and host the titles on their own, illegitimate services, which rake in about $2 billion annually from ads and subscriptions.

With no video production costs, illicit streaming sites such as myflixer.to and projectfreetv.space have achieved profit margins approaching 90%, according to the Motion Picture Association, a trade group representing Hollywood studios that’s working to crack down on the thousands of illegal platforms that have cropped up in recent years.

Initially the rise of legitimate online businesses such as Netflix actually helped curb digital piracy, which had largely been based on file uploads. But now piracy involving illegal streaming services as well as file-sharing costs the US economy about $30 billion in lost revenue a year and some 250,000 jobs, estimates the US Chamber of Commerce’s Global Innovation Policy Center. The global impact is about $71 billion annually.

In the US, which counts almost 130 subscription piracy sites, the MPA estimates that the top three combined have about 2 million users paying $5 to $10 per month for films, TV shows and live sports. Analysts say the user number could soar as the cost of subscriptions from legitimate companies such as Walt Disney Co. approach $20 per month as they seek to bolster the finances of their streaming platforms. “Some of these pirate websites have gotten more daily visits than some of the top 10 legitimate sites,” says Karyn Temple, the MPA’s general counsel. “That really shows how prolific they are.”

Last year, Philadelphian Bill Omar Carrasquillo—who broadcast his lavish lifestyle to about 800,000 followers on YouTube and who the FBI said ran one of the most “brazen and successful” TV piracy schemes ever prosecuted by federal officials—was ordered to forfeit $30 million in assets including a dozen properties, a Lamborghini and $6 million in cash. At its peak, the illicit streaming business GearsTV had 100,000 subscribers and brought in about $1.5 million in monthly sales. In March 2023, Carrasquillo was sentenced to five and a half years in prison.

Some pirate sites are invitation-only platforms that can gain traction on the dark web. But most are legitimate-looking streaming websites, searchable on Google and advertised on Facebook and TikTok. They’re funded by ads as well as subscriptions and offer a buffet of film, TV and live sports that’s wider in variety than legitimate outfits because they usually steal content from multiple services. (In some cases, viewers mistake the platforms for legitimate streaming services because of how slick they look.) Subscription payments are sometimes made in cryptocurrency, but they’re more often processed via credit cards and PayPal—which can help the MPA find the businesses and shut them down.

The MPA says that in recent months, Russian crime rings have paid patrons to sneak into theaters with camcorders and record films including Book Club: The Next Chapter, Barbarian, Smile and Lyle, Lyle, Crocodile at AMC Entertainment Holdings Inc. theaters in Los Angeles. The footage is then uploaded to the internet and watermarked with links to illegal online casinos owned and operated by the same criminal organizations, to encourage viewers to place bets on those gambling platforms.

“The people who are stealing our movies and our television shows and operating piracy sites are not mom and pop operations,” says Charlie Rivkin, chief executive officer of the MPA, who adds that some of the operators also engage in drug trafficking, child pornography, prostitution and money laundering. “This is organized crime.”

Rivkin, a former US ambassador to France and onetime CEO of the Jim Henson Co. (home of the Muppets), joined the MPA in 2017 after the organization failed five years earlier to build consensus between Hollywood and Silicon Valley to win passage of legislation in Congress aimed at stopping online piracy. Web companies such as Google and Yahoo! said the move would give the government too much power to shut down sites accused of infringement. In 2017 the association formed the Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment, an enforcement task force of about 100 detectives circling the globe—and sometimes skirting death threats—to help local authorities arrest streaming pirates. It’s led by Jan van Voorn, a veteran of Interpol and the Marine Corps, where he helped combat drug trafficking.

ACE says it’s helped shrink the number of illegal streaming services in North America to 126, from more than 1,400 in 2018, aided in part by the MPA’s support for a 2020 federal law that made large-scale streaming of copyrighted material a felony rather than a misdemeanor. But internationally, piracy increased 39% for films and 9% for TV shows in 2022, led by demand for movies such as Paramount’s Top Gun: Maverick and series including HBO’s House of the Dragon, according to data tracker Muso’s latest report. The reach of illegal streaming services is booming, with a record 215 billion visits to the illicit sites in 2022, Muso says. And measures by legitimate streaming operators to shore up earnings—for instance, cracking down on password-sharing—will further increase visits to illicit platforms, according to Muso.

The main red flag that a site is operating illegally is pricing, which starts at about $5 per month—less than a third of a basic Netflix subscription—for access to a seemingly limitless trove of films and shows from multiple streaming platforms. Another clue is that a site is anonymously registered, obscuring ties to its owner. To fight the pirates, the MPA’s investigators track down a platform’s operators and puts them on notice with cease-and-desist orders.

If they don’t comply, the MPA begins what Van Voorn calls “the disruption phase,” which seeks to disable their payment and hosting platforms, social media accounts and domain names. If the perpetrators still won’t comply, the MPA escalates the case to civil or criminal status and works with Europol, Interpol and national police forces dedicated to intellectual-property theft and cybercrime. It’s taken as little as two weeks to dismantle a site’s operations in Egypt and as long as four months in Spain, Van Voorn says.

Consulting firm Parks Associates predicts that legitimate US streaming services’ cumulative loss from piracy since 2022 will reach $113 billion in the next two years. “While there is some optimism that emerging countermeasures and best practices may see piracy begin to plateau by 2027, there is no consensus among stakeholders as to when it may begin to decline,” says Steve Hawley, a Parks Associates analyst.

For now, Van Voorn says he’ll continue to fight bootleg streamers—even if it sometimes feels like whack-a-mole. In November, ACE shuttered Zoro.to, Goku.to and ShowboxMovies, which together had close to 400 million visits per month. The same month it closed down the two largest illegal video platforms in the former Soviet republic of Georgia and formed a partnership with sports streaming giant DAZN to shut down illicit live sports site watchwrestling.ai, which operated out of India. Van Voorn’s team also had a breakthrough in Vietnam—historically a piracy hot spot—when it helped close down 2embed, a site that provided films and TV shows to hundreds of criminal platforms around the world.

The move is part of ACE’s mission to target disseminators at the top of the bootleg food chain that farm out pirated shows and movies to illegal sites. “Taking down these content sources and therefore impacting 25 or more services at once is a very effective strategy,” Van Voorn says. “We’re working hard to be the one-stop shop for the growing piracy issues around the world.”
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/artic...llywood-piracy





Netflix is Going to Take Away its Cheapest Ad-Free Plan

The Basic Netflix subscription that costs $11.99 per month in the US is being “retired” — Canada and the UK will be the first to see it go.
Emma Roth

Although Netflix no longer allows new or returning members to sign up for the ad-free Basic subscription that costs $11.99 per month, company executives told investors while reporting its earnings results today that it’s retiring the plan in some countries where ad-supported plans are available. It’s starting with Canada and the UK in the second quarter of this year.

That leaves subscribers with Netflix’s $15.49 per month option as Netflix’s cheapest ad-free plan. Going from $11.99 to $15.49 per month is a pretty big jump, and means there’s really no middle ground for ad-free plans. Otherwise, subscribers will have to pay $6.99 per month for its ad-supported basic plan or $22.99 per month for the Premium tier. Netflix stopped letting new subscribers sign up for its Basic plan in Canada last year before rolling out the change to the US and UK.

[i]In Q4‘23, like the quarter before, our ads membership increased by nearly 70% quarter over quarter, supported by improvements in our offering (e.g., downloads) and the phasing out of our Basic plan for new and rejoining members in our ads markets. The ads plan now accounts for 40% of all Netflix sign-ups in our ads markets and we’re looking to retire our Basic plan in some of our ads countries, starting with Canada and the UK in Q2 and taking it from there.[/i\]

In a video interview for investors, co-CEO Greg Peters said the ad-supported offering is now at 23 million monthly active users and that Netflix’s priority for it is “scale.” He said that included making it more attractive with upgrades like last year’s changes to the cheapest version that bumped the resolution to 1080p, added multiple streams, and switched on downloads, and how Netflix is “shifting our plans and pricing structure in other places.”

Netflix also announced that it added 13.1 million subscribers during the final quarter of 2023, bringing its total number to 247 million globally.

Netflix’s service has added a lot of new features over the years, with 4K streams and its push into gaming, but don’t expect those upgrades to come for free forever. The executives write, “As we invest in and improve Netflix, we’ll occasionally ask our members to pay a little extra to reflect those improvements.” Netflix raised the prices of its Basic and Premium plans last year.

Earlier today, Netflix made the surprise announcement that it struck a 10-year deal to air the WWE’s Monday Night Raw. The $5 billion deal will bring the live weekly show to streaming after over three decades of airing on linear television. Under the terms of the deal, Netflix will get Monday Night Raw for 10 years, with a chance to end the contract after five. NBCUniversal’s Peacock currently has a library of WWE content on its service, but it doesn’t air Monday Night Raw live. Peacock also still has the rights to the WWE’s premium events, like the Royal Rumble and Wrestlemania.

Netflix has only been wading deeper into live sports over the past several months — even after the streamer said it would stick to “sports-adjacent” streaming. In November, the company aired its first live sports broadcast — a golf competition between PGA pros and F1 racers — and later announced its plans to host a live tennis match this March featuring veteran player Rafael Nadal and Carlos Alcaraz. Netflix’s WWE deal marks its biggest foray into sports yet.

Disclosure: The Verge recently produced a series with Netflix.
https://www.theverge.com/2024/1/23/2...rnings-q4-2023





Piracy, Preservation, and the Devs Who Don't Mind if You have to Pirate their Game

The founder of the Video Game History Foundation and the devs of Slay The Princess on the place piracy has today
Nic Reuben

“Most of videogame history is alive and well due to the ability to pirate old video games,” Frank Cifaldi, founder of the Video Game History Foundation, tells me over a call. Last year, the preservation and archival non-profit put out a study revealing that 87% of games made before 2010 are out of print. “There's no way to access them without either pirating them or buying antiques from vendors. That's a scary place to be.”

The carnival of games discourse long ago sold off its other rides in favour of one giant merry-go-round, and even such shocking statistics rotate out of the zeitgeist far too soon - unless, of course, you live and breathe this stuff like Cifaldi. But the conversation has felt especially pertinent recently. UK high street mainstay GAME have recently opted to cease trade-ins, Ubisoft pulled one of their classic PR wins by insinuating a physical-media free future was on the cards, and Sony dabbled with deleting content that users had already paid for, before managing an about face.

RPS famously gave up console gaming in late 1872, shortly before the release of the first PC, but as console-focused as these sea changes are, they still point towards a worrying trend of dwindling consumer choice. Moreso in the wake of consolidation already reaping disastrous consequences. “The video game industry started essentially mimicking Hollywood,” says Cifaldi. “There's basically five companies that own everything now. That sucks in a lot of ways.”

Talk of preservation inevitably leads to the ever-taboo topic of piracy. “Reading the temperature of how people are feeling about how they consume media right now,” says Cifaldi, “we might be coming full circle back to piracy being something that we need to be literate in, in order to be able to access the things that we love. Digital streaming scooped everything up and we all got content with it. We're already seeing things wiped from existence before our eyes.”

Over the holidays, I saw two tweets. One may well have been a rephrasing or resurfacing of an old sentiment - if not, kudos to the OP for such powerful phrasing. “If buying isn’t owning, piracy isn’t stealing,” it read. The other was from Black Tabby, the two person dev team behind the popular and excellent horror game Slay The Princess. “Since a lot of new folks are discovering Slay The Princess: The game is at its best if your first experience is playing it yourself instead of watching someone else's play-through. (And if $ is an issue, pirate it and buy a copy later when you have money if you liked it!)”

I’d like to make clear here that this article isn’t intended to place either Cifaldi or Black Tabby as spokespeople for a larger cause. They’re each speaking for themselves, from different experiences, and many developers and industry folk have expressed similar sentiments before. I do feel that Black Tabby’s tweet is, at least contemporarily, significant due to the success of their game. As a genuine indie outfit, they’re in the position to decide how their audience interacts with their work. The impetus for me reaching out to everyone featured was simply that I think this is a conversation worth having pretty much constantly, and I appreciate their personal insights, experience and thoughts on the topic.

“We both think that the best way for people to experience it is to play our game first hand,” Tony Howard-Arias of Black Tabby tells me. “We don't want money to necessarily be the game ender. We've all been broke college students, so there's a degree of empathy for just like the frustration of arts and entertainment being financially inaccessible.” And piracy, adds Abby Howard, “is just going to happen no matter what. So it's just a thing where we're just telling people they don't have to feel bad if that's how they experience the game.”

“I think at the end of the day,” says Howard-Arias, “people are, you know, they're fundamentally good. I think that when folks have a meaningful experience with art, they want to support the artists who make those experiences. Neither of us here need to be that protectionist about it.”

Howard describes Slay The Princess as about “Perception, and how that can actively shape the people around you, and the world that you’re in.” Howard-Arias says “if you like the Stanley Parable and you like Disco Elysium, you'll probably like this.” Both feel that their approach to narrative design means that, as the tweet says, they’d rather folk pirate it than have a second-hand experience. Black Tabby tell me they didn’t intend for the tweet to necessarily be an advocation of piracy in general, but I still found it refreshing and powerful in the sense that, even if they’re just speaking for themselves, developers openly acknowledging that piracy isn’t the evil it’s often portrayed as lessens the taboo.

Cifaldi tells me he believes that “piracy literacy,” is dwindling, especially among young people that might not know how a torrent works (whatever that is). Tweets like Black Tabby’s might well spur on some research. Xitter agreed: Black Tabby were officially based, with many suggesting they were far more likely to buy the game now anyway. He says it’s hard to quantity, but Howard-Arias felt there’d been an uptick in sales, and also tells me that none of the conversations they’ve had about potential physical editions were hurt by their public stance. There was some minor pushback, however, mostly through misinterpretation.

“Something that has been challenging as this sort of tweet has spiraled out of our control is that, a lot of people tend to view this stuff through like a single perspective lens,” says Howard-Arias, “but multiple things can be true at the same time.” Some wrongly assumed Black Tabby were upset at streamers. Howard-Arias describes their position as a “strange intersection”. As artists, they want people to experience their art. Naturally, they’d also want a sustainable business. “We want people experiencing it in the way it's intended to be played. And we also really like when streamers play the game and get it out in the world and share their experiences. So it's like it's a situation where all of these things are true at the same time.”

Do Black Tabby feel there’s any potential risk of normalising piracy in a harmful sense? Not really. There are, says Howard-Arias, much riskier trends in indie dev, like undercutting prices to unsustainably low levels. He loved Vampire Survivors and its -likes, but felt the price had an impact. “A lot of people were interested in exploring that space. But it meant that if you’re going to be competitive, you also have to charge like $3,” he says. That’s before Steam’s 30% and card fees, which aren’t insignificant at such a low price, meaning developers have to shift huge numbers just to survive in that genre space. “I don't blame any developers for doing that, but I think the tendency for indies to undervalue and underprice their work is a much more real risk to sustainability than, you know, not being mad at people for pirating your game.” Pirated copies, says Howard, aren’t ones they would have sold anyway. “These are numbers aren't just cutting into your bottom line so much as they are bonus numbers. That's how it's always felt to me.”

Black Tabby's approach to their player base feels fitting; Slay The Princess felt to me like a story born of a deeply empathetic design ethos. A certain scene sees you trying desperately illuminate your situation by asking a limited amount of questions from a huge dialogue tree. It’s the kind of thoughtful and exhaustive list that could only be written by asking repeatedly: how would players feel here? What would they want to know? Its that sheer breadth of individual experience that can make a first playthrough feel almost magical in its fluidity. Its no wonder Black Tabby want people to experience a first run first-hand.

They’re not finished yet, either. The Pristine Cut is a free update slated for sometime this year, aiming to add several new chapters to the game. Much of it is ideas and elaborations on the story inspired by seeing the game in the wild. “It's one thing to construct something like this, and then another to see people experience it,” says Howard.

Again, I don’t want to put revolutionary slogans in Black Tabby’s mouths. But in making great art, continuing to work on their game after release just out of a vision for how much better it could be, and then refusing to be protectionist over their work, their stance definitely felt like a torch at the end of a rough year for the industry. Or, you know, a candle illuminating a twisted staircase leading to a horrible basement containing a chained princess.

Meanwhile, Cifaldi says there are, at least, a few reasons to be hopeful about the future of preservation. “One of the hurdles toward a game staying in print, which is the question of of legal ownership and what company owns the code, I think that's starting to be solved,” he says. “And the idea of remastering a game for the next hardware refresh has become normal.”

Still, though, is a strong note of caution. “I don’t believe that we’ve found a commercial solution for your video game staying alive forever. No one is against the idea of video game preservation, but companies and their shareholders are against the idea of not making a profit,” he adds. “It's a technical black hole; It costs a lot of money to port a video game, and if the margins are just not there, then there's not a business rationale to keep things alive.”

So, if anyone knows what a ‘torrent’ is, please let DM me. It sounds like they could be useful.
https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/pir...ate-their-game
















Until next week,

- js.



















Current Week In Review





Recent WiRs -

January 20th, January 13th, January 6th, December 30th

Jack Spratts' Week In Review is published every Friday. Submit letters, articles, press releases, comments, questions etc. in plain text English to jackspratts (at) lycos (dot) com. Submission deadlines are Thursdays @ 1400 UTC. Please include contact info. The right to publish all remarks is reserved.


"The First Amendment rests on the assumption that the widest possible dissemination of information from diverse and antagonistic sources is essential to the welfare of the public." - Hugo Black