It’s disappointing that copyright infringement could cause these people to spend time in prison, but the predatory practices of the companies they where competing with are punished with no more then fines. A “cost of doing business” for the corporate aristocrats. This is the threat the upper class uses on the rest of us, and all too often do not suffer themselves.
“Rules for thee, but not for me” - Corporations
I like how a big part of the headline just explains exactly why people pirate things instead of obtaining legal access to them. No one wants to subscribe to netflix, hulu, vudu, and prime video, people just want one platform to watch everything
My main thought here is that if they were based out of a non-US location, maybe they could have kept on operating. If I were Cuban, I’d be looking to startup something like this and offer global services. Hardware is cheap so the main cost is bandwidth which has been coming down. You would have trouble with CDNs as they would get muscled out of supporting the platform but that could be overcome with geographic partners.
That was kind of my thought too. These people were offering a subscription based service that people were paying for. This shows pretty conclusively that people are willing to pay for content when it is conveniently packaged. When it’s broken apart and fragmented, piracy and alternative consumption method become more appealing.
Could you imagine if the music industry operated in the same way? Instead of choosing whether to use Spotify, Apple Music, etc, you needed to have both just to consume a relatively small collection of popular music? That would be madness—and it’s madness for film and television content as well.