# Piracy is fair game ## Concept A handful of mediocre services became the gatekeepers of culture. Piracy is justified. ## Disclaimer There is no disclaimer. Sue me. ## The Eden So a long time ago, there were dozens and dozens of movie studios, producers, fighting in the low-budget, mid-budget and high budget space, mostly in the US, but also so many across the world. A mid-budget was a real feast, often made by good directors, people with passion. I could go to a theater with friends to watch a movie. We'd look, once there, at the movies, and something will be good enough, and sometimes really good. In addition, internet and the DVD came. Internet was the wild west. People would just download movies by the hundreds, and recirculate them. Then the studios were recycling past movies and editing current in DVD, and that's what gave me access to 60's Hong Kong movie, Japanese Chambara. While watching Reservoir Dogs and Black hawk Down. Also, again, we had rental shops, each had well enough curated 2,000 movies or so. Obviously we could also buy online, or watch an old VHS. Not to forget how new genres were coming, like drama, the X-Files to Lost is really what defined what can be done in series. And yet we would casually watch black & white Twilight zone because it was so cool. But you even had Netflix DVD rental if you were in the States, lucky you. Some say 100,000 titles in the US, no shit! That's super good, because Bollywood aside, there were 350,000 movies published, starting from the 70s. All that made for an absolutely phenomenal offer of movies. And same for music but even more, because it is so much wider. You'd go to Times Square and go in the basement, and there would be 10,000 DVD, 200,000 CD, some real good music, more than you would need in an entire life. ## The fall Yesterday, I was looking at my feed on Netflix and once I was just disgusted, there was nothing. People think there is too much to choose. I say there is nothing. 100 movies/drama in my feed, half I've watched, a third that is garbage, and the rest I'm not interested in. The rest... you can navigate through movies you would like, but it is not really meant for it. You select a movie, often, the cast and director are not written. You select details, you can't navigate that. You can't think "oh, I liked this actor" or "hey, S.F. of the 2000's is cool". You are not allowed that. Then you search... and you need, I joke you not, the exact title. This problem was solved 30 years ago. Phonetic approximation, common misspellings, it is **super** easy to implement. I implemented it just before going to Japan, and I may have been drunk if it was a Friday. They don't like you search stuff. You may understand how little there is. ### Netflix is 6,000 titles at most That's nothing. Especially if curation is that bad. You find movies that are a shame filler for that small list, mediocre movies from 20 years ago, 4.9/10 on imdb. It makes no fucking sense from a user stand point. And that's if you can find that movie. I doubt there is 2,000 decent, accessible movies on Netflix. I have personally watched about 5,000 movies or more in my life, and so many that are just mainstream cinema are not anywhere in streaming. That's what I call righteously gate-keeping: they don't provide the access to cinema. They prevent access to it. ## The trap We doubled down! Add Amazon Prime, add Disney+, HBO, Hulu, we even have some local like U-Next (Japanese movies). And we got so trapped, because the whole is small. We spend a lot but for no choice and no ownership. We went from the extraordinary 500 movies I owned to nothing to watch tonight. With traps within the traps. Ever wondered why there are anime, and K-Drama, and this and that? It would feel like they want to satisfy everyone. But it is not like they make a decent effort at it. It has to be enough to hook someone not paying in a household. And that's how I can't leave Netflix because "they have the K-Drama faster" and Disney+ because they have Princess my ass. ## The quality It's garbage, they say 5Mb/s, I doubt it is more than 2 in many cases, it is too bad, the chroma is crushed, the noise is destroyed before or after compression, the darks are smoothed, it is not good at all. It is not Blu-ray quality from 20 years ago, and it is not 5Mb/s in a re-encoding of one. I mean that, Aliens happens to be accessible in many places. The movie is noisy, and you have either to spend time to reduce the noise without breaking the movie, or accept a high bitrate because compression works a lot with temporal stability of the picture: - Disney+ has the best but not very good version. It may be 5, maybe more. But on some pan you get a luma static noise that shows a temporal denoising. It is not great. - Amazon Prime started from a noisy master, compressed harshly, it is disgusting from artefact, in no way 5Mb/s - Netflix, they went full on denoising before encoding. Given the result quality, they were really into low bitrate, not 5Mb/s at all. It looks fake, but not noisy. - A Blu-ray, 25Mb/s, it is digital noise replacing analog noise, but in motion it feels organic, textured. It is good. - A undisclosed low bitrate copy: well, it is Amazon Prime territory. It is side note, but it really annoys me that in addition to gate-keeping access to movies, they cheap out quality. ## The reality Almost all movies that ever existed, they are not available because streamers do not provide access and other means to watch them. Are all way of watching them dead, though? Not all. ## Piracy Well, if someone steals your access to culture, which is our ability to have fun, to relate through shared emotion, to share the culture with younger people, take away some catalog you paid for at some time, piracy sure is fair game. Now, you look at your country laws, gray-zones, you read a bit about the best practices, and you may want to give it a shot. And it's not just piracy that is back, CD sales, BR, they are all exploding, it is still very modest, but one of the most growing trend of the past few years. And I think that's because we passed a milestone. It is adversarial at that point. The service is here to engage you by making you click on "don't recommend", absolutely not to fulfill you. ## The algorithms "The algorithms did it", it's bullshit. There are no "algorithms" here to get you. These are company decisions ruthlessly implemented: if the trend is rage bait, they will rage bait your ass off. If they want to sell you a Furby, you'll get a Furby. They are some of the best coders in the world, thousands of them, with a decade of know-how and metrics on users. If they don't show you something cool tonight, that ain't because "the algorithm". There ain't skynet. They are to extract money more, whatever the societal cost, not to make you feel good. I love algorithm, I read Introduction to Algorithms, 1,300 pages, I was reading that for fun. There ain't no nothing about presenting you a depressing home page. So, fuck them. ## Conclusion A handful of mediocre services became the gatekeepers of culture. Piracy is justified.