Streaming in 2024 and how piracy is becoming appealing again…

Here we are and it is only 10 days into 2024 and there are already a lot of moans and mumbling around streaming services. Now I am not talking about livestreaming per se here but the mainstream streaming services for movies/podcasts and tv. I am in the UK and a few things have happened recently that just seems to mean that piracy is once again looking to be a better option (unless caught and dealt with) than paying for the myriad of streaming services and then the new feature of paying more to see no ads, which of course means that you will see a heck of a lot more ads unless you cough up your hard earned cash…

The reason I am writing about this subject right now is that recent changes on a few of the livestreaming platforms seem to be not heeding the current state of play and are seeing numbers of streamers and numbers of viewers dropping. I think there are quite a few reasons for this but on deep discussions with people the same things come up time and time again… Most people don’t like ads, and the more ads there are the less likely people are to use a service. Couple ads with increased prices and people are doubly annoyed. Couple ads with extra costs to remove them plus price increases, and well you can guess where this is going! Youtube recently had a bit of a lovers tiff over adblockers and adblocking, and to be honest it came out far worse for youtube than the viewers as far as I can see and (once again) they appear to have beaten a hasty retreat. Lost the battle not the war though if I’m honest as google are gunning for ads in a big way, and not to help the punters either, which is what seems to be happening. Twitch also seems to be fighting ads and how to (not) do them right whilst other platforms are gaining traction because they refuse to run ads. We watch a fair amount of streaming services but they are currently a right mess with series being unavailable, behind a paywall, crippled with ads or just plain buffer more than you watch them despite us having very good tinternet. This has made watching iplayer probably the nicest experience right now as there are few ads and they are only for other BBC shows and there is rarely buffering and the picture quality is pretty decent as well… At this point I must mention certain american streaming services which appear to have started nasty lower third ads that you can’t skip and just obscure 30% of the screen… they really help nobody and if they catch on I can see people really going back down the piracy route which is again no help to anybody!

Now it isn’t all bad, I mean recent changes seem to have increased streaming quality for most. Faster tinternet is coming to many places in the UK now and that will only help – but I see many people completely changing their tv habits. I know many churn services regularly, pay for a service for a month, watch all the content that they want to and then cancel and go elsewhere and repeat, usually only keeping one active service each month. Now surely that is counter productive for the suppliers and the consumers isn’t it? I mean you cram all those shows in and then swap to something different, I mean your life balance must suffer 9or perhaps it doesn’t and you are happy about that). The knock on effect is also the almost complete disappearance of physical media and actually owning the shows/films/music even, and this is how many people are turning back to piracy because they can easily own a copy, watch when they want and delete if they need to. These big corporations seem to have failed to grasp this simple problem and they will pay for it in the long run because I can see piracy becoming popular once again in 2024.