I too got tired of paying so much for TV so I canceled and just stopped watching it.
I find the attitude that one is entitled to entertainment media fascinating.
People like to say that it’s not stealing because there is no physical product the producer is being deprived of, which is factually true, but even so why are you entitled to it at no cost?
I don't think people feel entitled to free entertainment, they're just tired of being so badly ripped off.
It used to be that you'd pay one company a little extra, and get all the extra channels you actually wanted. Now you pay multiple companies _a lot_ extra, and still might miss out on what you want.
They very much do. There's an Australian streaming service called Stan that bought the rights to the English Premier League this year. They post highlights videos to YouTube.
Every single video they post is full of comments about how short the video is, how it didn't replay this or that important moment, and finishes with an ad for Stan.
Compared to 20 years ago where the only highlights you could get for free were in a news program that might spare 1 minute for just the most important match if you were lucky, these videos are incredible.
Yes, I remember when Netflix was going to "save" us all from the cable company.
When there is only one streaming service, being subscribed to that streaming service means you get everything. Now there are 15 different ones to choose from, each licensed to show a different set of content.
Watching NHL hockey in Canada is a strange situation right now, but I'm not sure how it compares to the original cable situation.
Desire, convenience, and price are always in tension. Someone may desire to watch something, but it's too inconvenient. It may also be that there is not enough convenience for the price being paid. We see this issue regularly with DRM.
Do people need to watch the content? No. Are people entitled to the content? Is it "stealing" or not? That last one is probably up for date.
Regardless, the answers to those questions don't matter in the end. The public has made its demands clear time after time. The rightsholders can either deliver a convenient experience at a reasonable* price, or they can play whack-a-mole with pirates forever. Spotify managed to do it; Steam managed to do it. Only video media companies are so stubborn these days.
*There is always much debate on what constitutes a "reasonable" price, but it is certainly no more than a consumer is willing to pay. If that's less than the cost of producing the product, then perhaps the business model simply isn't viable.
I think its Copyright rules make people feel this way. US copyright last for author life + 70 years. That makes no sense, not only will the author be dead but there children are likely to be dead before the those terms end. Corp duration is 95 years since publication. Why? Are they saying they will be so unable to innovate and generate new content that unless that last 95 years they cannot make profit. I think there revenue positions beg to differ.
Could you not make enough money in the first 15 years to justify? We don't let other professions profit for 15 years after they do the work (except landlords). People can touch there pipes after there installed. They can read and lend a book after they read it. Digital stroage is essentially free but makes air tight copyright and that is problematic.
It's weird that we give such board lasting complete ownership of the collective stories of society. Maybe the correct timeline is 15 years or 30 years but Life + 70 seems like it way overvalues the creative works and I think steals money from new creative works by making consumers choice between the "classics" and the new. This is not to say you cannot charge for TV service where you store and distribute but that is a service rendered. If you want to do it yourself why is the law so protective here? To me it feels like society is selling out its rights for higher marginal returns for a very small segment of people.
Entertainment we watch becomes part of our culture. It is absorbed and forms part of our thoughts. It becomes part of our self, and more often than not that part is owned by someone else. NFL is a great example. It is part of shared American culture. Of course people are pissed when someone wants to charge rent on some part of their identity. The rights are very much on the side of producers, and not enough on the side of consumer rights. Maybe society will address this and grant itself the rights it seems to want.
I grew bored with Television over 4 years ago, I bought a 86" Tv 4 years ago also and I've never cared enough to take it out of it's box. If I get bored enough I'll watch something using free streaming services. I just buy physical discs of anything I might want to watch. Friends tried to get me to watch football and other sports but it's just too boring. I know the rules but it's just people chasing a ball back and forth. To enjoy sports you have to care who wins, and I don't care, who wins or loses means nothing to me.
Gonna need quite a large swing back in the favor of regular people since we're being squeezed by endless subscriptions already before I have any sympathy for the multi-billion dollar corporations.
So maybe it's just that. Life feels like it should be better although it's the best it's ever been in many first-world countries. I am sure that entitled attitude is very common among rich people too.
In some areas, you can 'pirate' live TV directly from the sky!
You need this thing called an 'antenna' which captures invisible radio waves and decodes them into a picture with audio. You can't pause or rewind, and you have to be in front of the TV at specific times, so it is not precis the same, but you can access TV this way.
The last time I watched OTA/Cable was over a decade ago. I remember paying $120/month for cable, and getting low quality highly recompressed HD shows, which looked terrible on the 1080p TV I had at the time. Digital artifacts made the stream not very pleasant to watch at all.
Technically it was "1080p HD", but in reality it was more like 720x480 upscaled and smoothed.
Digital cable is generally more heavily compressed than HD OTA primary channels (usually x.1 subchannel). OTA only gets bad when they pack in too many subchannels.
Don't know your age, but today's $20 indoor antennas are pretty unobtrusive and don't require much adjustment beyond the initial placement. Its a nicer experience with digital hd antennas for sure than what we experienced 30+ years ago. Mine is a single flat antenna taped onto the wall behind my tv and shared to all other tvs and devices via hdhomerun + plex.
>People like to say that it’s not stealing because there is no physical product the producer is being deprived of, which is factually true, but even so why are you entitled to it at no cost?
Well, the major services like Google and Facebook provide content without requiring payment because they extract value from their surveillance of user behavior, plus ads. The users have now accepted that they are the product, but they get little kickback in the form of entertainment. Why should TV be any different?
I've given up on tv and while I still pay Netflix for kids programming, I pay ... other people who have a better understanding of the actual value of this sort of entertainment _and_ the way I like to consume it.
* Continually produce 'new and exciting' series only to cancel them after 1-2 seasons
* Continually raise the price
* Continually split off into ever more services - so instead of having 1 or even 3 good streaming services, there are dozens of them with limited content
I would not mind paying for 1-3 good, well-made services with a reasonable price tag. As it stands, I would need to pay for more like 8+ to get coverage of what I want to watch, and their prices are all $20+ a month. And almost every month I'd find something I really enjoy has been taken down. I'm not paying $160 a month for streaming that I barely use. I cancelled all of mine.
I can understand someone jumping to piracy. These services are terrible and don't need to be - they're that way because of absurd greed.
Even worse than cancellation is when there's sloppy writing that is very obviously in place to push the series into another season while a bunch of plot threads go unresolved. It's like the corporate greed is being placed front and center of the content itself.
That's because we do feel entitled to it. This century is the first in human history where people in power have decided that once something is created it's IP that belongs to the creator for well over a hundred years and maybe even forever.
Frankly, IP should last 7 years, 14 at the most.
Why are we paying for Alf year after year, decade after decade?
Why are we required to pay for stuff while also being advertised to and having our data sold?
Now when you do buy something, you're buying a revokable license you can't even buy it and own it.
We'll if buying isn't ownership, then pirating it isn't stealing it. Plain and simple.
NFL does ~$23B/year in revenue, and is targeting ~$25B/year by 2027, there is no victim for those not paying them. In various US markets, the content is free over the air. To take the other side of the "entitlement" argument, I am fascinated by the "Felony Contempt of Business Model" mental model.
"You can just do things." Public airwaves? Consumer owned compute enabling adversarial consumption and interoperability? Good luck.
I watch cable TV only in hotels and it is infuriating. Almost every channel has 5 min long ad breaks. It’s almost impossible to watch anything since you’re constantly switching channels. I don’t remember it being this bad when I was a kid.
I find the attitude that one is entitled to entertainment media fascinating.
People like to say that it’s not stealing because there is no physical product the producer is being deprived of, which is factually true, but even so why are you entitled to it at no cost?
NFL games aren’t water or food.