'F1: The Movie' Coming to Apple TV+ on Friday, December 12

Should have been added ages ago

But I also don't think your rationale fully works -- the availability of pirated works has a direct impact on the number of people that will fall into A or B.

Again ... marginal cost of nearly zero.

If they want to keep piracy at bay, make the prices and terms more attractive, don't gum it up with ADs and too many tiers and make the Apps and experience great.

THAT is what keeps mainstream Piracy at bay...

Trying to "lock it down more" and "limit the screens in use" and "screw with folks sharing a password with family" or too many "geo restriction hassles" or a hot garbage App experience..-- all of that pisses people off and you encourage them to seek other means.

For some faction of folks, there will always be piracy and they are not "gettable" as customers and not worth worrying about.

Anything else is like trying to "squeeze the air out of a balloon".

Again ... marginal cost of nearly zero.

If they want to keep piracy at bay, make the prices and terms more attractive, don't gum it up with ADs and too many tiers and make the Apps and experience great.

THAT is what keeps mainstream Piracy at bay...

Trying to "lock it down more" and "limit the screens in use" and "screw with folks sharing a password with family" or too many "geo restriction hassles" or a hot garbage App experience..-- all of that pisses people off and you encourage them to seek other means.

For some faction of folks, there will always be piracy and they are not "gettable" as customers and not worth worrying about.

Anything else is like trying to "squeeze the air out of a balloon".

Exactly.

Let's not forget that one big factor contributing to the success of the iTunes store 20+ years ago was simply:
- it was less hassle than piracy.

There wasn't a global sentiment of "Oh no, we have to support the poor records labels".


Imagine you had the same situation as the movie streaming market: There would have been half a dozen competing stores, one for each major label. Barely any overlap in their catalogues. More than half of it region-locked. And now imagine you'd need to pay a subscription for every single one of them to listen to your whole music collection.
You'd imagine people who would usually be willing to pay for a song would just find it easier to pirate stuff to not have to deal with this kind of corpo nonsense.

They messed up with that clooney/pitt film, wolf last year. It was going to be a theatrical release but then Apple pulled that at the last minute and went straight to streaming. The director went mad and vowed not to work with Apple again or do a sequel I think.

Basically it didn’t move the needle on Apple subscription sales. So they’ve figured out finally that big name actors straight to streaming doesn’t really do anything but cheapen the perception of the content your getting from streaming.

What keeping movies in the cinema does is let a title “marinate”. And grow its perceived value. So now if you buy an Apple subscription in December you will feel that your getting a 20 dollar movie for free, one that people left their house to see on purpose and wasn’t just given to them as part of a package deal.

I feel like series like Severance or Ted Lasso sell streaming services better than just a place to get movies. And for the movie part to make sense you’ve got to know the movie before hand and that means the whole cinema/rent/dvd cycle.

Also, films get buried when they go to streaming. It’s prominent for a few weeks maybe on the front page but then it’s buried after that. Most people only look at what is on there first few scrolls. So the ease of streaming is actually killing are ability to see the good films and programming. Needs a change somehow.

:apple:Music (iTunes) was introduced to combat piracy, therefore it follows that :apple:TV's aim is the same.

To have a subscription service that many people subscribe to produce a film & withhold it from their subscribers (& offer it for sale before) seems to defeat the main purpose of why it exists in the first place.

I'm not advocating piracy, but the whole thing is counter to why streaming services were created in the first place, specifically :apple:'s.

The problem is that the whole "bypass distributors and go direct to streaming" model is precisely why movies are increasingly unprofitable. It therefore needs to stop.

It used to be that a movie would be first be distributed via cinemas, then budget theatres, hotels / airlines, pay-per-view, physical media such as DVDs, Cable and finally free-to-air TV. That's potentially up to 7 different outlets by way that a media company could monetise their content (not including other avenues like merchandising). Which also explains why it's fine if a movie is not immediately profitable in the box office.

When you go straight to streaming, you risk collapsing 7 windows into 1, vastly reducing their ability to make money off a particular piece of content. And the reality is that movies are expensive, what more if you want good movies made possible by companies willing to invest time and effort into fleshing out the script and production.

It doesn't help that a streaming service is also extremely costly to run and maintain. Plus post-covid, it seems like fewer people are going to the theatre than ever. Throw in the massive opportunity costs, and it's little surprise why most of them are still not profitable (and likely never will be).

Many of you here will undoubtably go "Why should I care". If you have ever complained about how original content on services like Netflix and Disney+ seem shallow and devoid of "feel", that's why. These shows are not there to make money; they are simply there to fill a quota and keep subscribers on the platform. There's no reason to make them "good" when you don't have to worry about incentivising people to watch them in a cinema, or purchase a DVD box set to own. You watch it once, moan about how you have just wasted 2 hours of your life, and never go back to it again.

So the sad reality is that we are all already seeing and feeling the negative impacts of companies pivoting to a primary streaming model. The solution, ironically, is not to continuing pouring money into undifferentiated streaming services with massive direct costs, but to go back to what they are good at - producing quality content not available anywhere else, and which won't be devalued by people holding out and waiting for it to come to streaming. This is how you ensure that there will continue to be a steady stream of quality content available to watch. Not through piracy, but by voting with your dollar and showing that you are indeed willing to pay (the same way 20% of the world made Apple the richest company in the world by demonstrating that they were indeed willing to pay a premium for a premium experience).

Of course there will always be pirates, it's just a reality we are going to have to live with, and no, I don't think their existence ought to be acknowledged or celebrated at all.

Almost like they're trying to make money off the thing they invested hundreds of millions of dollars in.

Encouraging people to steal a movie just because it isn't discounted or available to rent soon enough for your tastes is wild.

It’s more that I’m encouraging people to not support scummy business practices. Piracy is on the rise for a reason, it’s not the consumers’ fault.