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maglag
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Post by maglag »

Did music piracy destroy the music industry? No, it led to the creation of itunes and their rival services that allow anyone to buy music in a cheap, easy and efficient way instead of being forced to search for specific DVDs and be forced to buy a bunch of extra tracks along you don't really care about.

Did PC gaming piracy destroy the PC gaming industry? No, it led to the creation of Steam where you can get games in an easier, cheaper and more efficient way than before.

I (and probably a lot of other people out there) are still waiting for the itunes/Steam version of anime (and manga would be nice too) where we buy what we want when we want, and not be forced to either annoying ads in the middle of the product or full subscriptions.

People will gladly pay money for good services delivered in an efficient way. It's a fact, and the reverse is also true. If people prefer piracy to your service, it's your goddamn fault.

Also tanget, it's hilarious how companies label "piracy" a public service where people pour out their own time and sweat to deliver something to the community without expecting any material compensation, yet when companies seek to torture you while bleeding you of your money so they can add a new sports cars to their private collection, it's of course all honest business.
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Post by Mechalich »

Kaelik wrote:It's funny how when you just ignore all the free anime you can watch, you can't watch any streaming anime...

Jesus Mechalich, do you ever get tired of assuming a blatantly untrue statement that has nothing to do with reality and makes you look silly as the basis of all your arguments?
What are you talking about?

I related a point that, to some people, including at times myself, the free crunchyroll experience is so bad that it has a net negative value. As in the ads are so frustrating that they more than cancel out any enjoyment to be gained from watching the episode. Saying that something is not worth doing is not saying that it can't be done.

Watching ad-supported anime on Crunchyroll is a miserable experience. It's miserable enough that people would rather choose piracy, or block the ads, or simply not watch the content at all than deal with the site as it is currently configured. This is something that many people, over the life of Crunchyroll, have complained about, and it has, if anything, gotten worse over time. The very existence of the ripper streaming sites like Kissanime is a testament to the absolute failure of Crunchyroll's ad-supported half.

Crunchyroll's complete and total failure to fix this or even seriously attempt to fix it is indicative that they don't care about the quality of their 'free' streaming service. I, and several other people, have made the point that this is on some level deliberate, that the free service is maintained at a low level of quality with a terrible ad experience specifically so people will get frustrated with it and eventually decide to fork over $7 a month. It has also been argued that, over the long term, this sucks both for the consumer and the industry.
maglag wrote:People will gladly pay money for good services delivered in an efficient way. It's a fact, and the reverse is also true. If people prefer piracy to your service, it's your goddamn fault.
Well, it's a little more complicated than that. Streaming, in particular, has proven difficult to effectively monetize - witness all the complaints against Spotify by musicians, and, yet again, Hulu terminating the free streaming experience for all its TV shows.

There seems to be a cost/popularity break point and certain kinds of media are on different sides of it. Great music has become extremely cheap to produce, the cost of cramming a band into a studio and putting out a professional quality record and then distributing it has really dropped. TV, not as much.

In the case of anime, the best example of the new paradigm out there is RWBY, which is...polarizing.
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Post by Sigil »

maglag wrote:I (and probably a lot of other people out there) are still waiting for the itunes/Steam version of anime (and manga would be nice too) where we buy what we want when we want, and not be forced to either annoying ads in the middle of the product or full subscriptions.
You want an a la carte storefront for short episodic content? Is there actually a storefront out there that does this successfully for a large user base? I'm not talking about a service like amazon video that does offer a la carte episodes, but where the majority have a subscription and stream, but a service where that's actually just what they do. I know I'm not willing to pay even $2 dollars per episode of a show, amazon wants to charge $2.99 for an episode of The Walking Dead season 7, or $24.99 for the season. Does that actually seem like a good deal to you? Hell, lets look at something older and less popular. Paw Patrol, seaon 1 from 2013... oh look its still $2.99 an episode, though you can get the whole season for the absolute steal of a price for $14.99. Or... oh wait, what the fuck? I can subscribe to netflix for a month and a half for that price? Or even Crunchyroll for two (and 1/7th) months? Hmmm...

Let me ask you a question. How do you feel about Netflix? It's a widely loved subscription only service with content aggregated from other parties (though now they have more original content). If you do like Netflix, how would you feel if they offered a free version where you had to watch ads? Would you have a problem with Crunchyroll if they were only subscription based and didn't let you try the product first? I will point out that crunchy roll offers a free premium trial just like Netflix does, so the services have a relative parity with the exception that Crunchyroll offers an ad supported version that they'll never cut you off of. Pandora and Spotify also also operate on the same model.
maglag wrote:Also tanget, it's hilarious how companies label "piracy" a public service where people pour out their own time and sweat to deliver something to the community without expecting any material compensation...
Because it literally is. It's piracy. It might be done without any malice with good intentions. It might not be harmful to the content creator at all. But when the people who own the content decide, for themselves, that they want to bring their product to a market they have the right to have it taken down (or not, or whatever the fuck they want to do). I remember watching bleach fansubs from dattebayo. Do you know what happened when a company, crunchyroll, acquired the rights to simulcast episodes of Bleach with english subs? Dattebayo stopped doing fansubs of Bleach. They weren't forced to do it, they did it of their own accord. Here, I even found it on the wayback machine for you:
https://web.archive.org/web/20100610232246/http://dattebayo.com/pr/135 wrote:2010/06/07
As most of you are probably aware, Crunchyroll has recently acquired the rights to simulcast Bleach. As we previously stated, DB will therefore be dropping the project. We will release one more episode so that our staff can say goodbye to one of our favorite shows, and so we can conclude the project with having subbed 225 total episodes of Bleach. This means that Bleach 274 will be DB's last episode of Bleach.

Please note that Crunchyroll did not in any way force, coerce, recommend, or suggest that we drop Bleach. DB has in fact not had any communication directly with Crunchyroll regarding this issue or any other. We are dropping Bleach because we support legal alternatives to fansubs and we hope you will too. As with Naruto, the best way to make sure this service is giving you what you want is to give it a chance and then send your feedback to Crunchyroll and to Viz, preferably framed in as polite as a way as you can manage so they might actually listen to you.

DB is also officially dropping Ookiku due to its having overloaded timecop's hate circuits. We will continue to sub Hakuouki and perhaps the occasional episode of Pythagoras Switch, and will hopefully have fun new projects in the future!

Finally, and as always, this decision is not up for negotiation, so don't bother writing to us and trying to change our minds. People who do so will NOT be banned, but WILL be doused in honey and left in lafnear's ant-infested yard.
maglag wrote:...yet when companies seek to torture you while bleeding you of your money so they can add a new sports cars to their private collection, it's of course all honest business.
Torture? Bleeding you of your money? Are you that entitled? Crunchyroll isn't some company forcing you to work in a coal mine and paying you in corporate scrip. They aren't some monopoly on a necessary good. They aren't even a monopoly on entertainment. And they sure as fuck aren't waterboarding you. You can literally just not watch an anime and live a happy and successful life. You can't be systematically deprived of all entertainment and still live a happy life, humans need entertainment, but that's not the situation you're in. You can actually watch the very anime you want to watch, for free, with the minor inconvenience of advertisements. Or you can subscribe for $7 a month, only slightly above the price of a bacon clubhouse burger, fries, and a coke ($6.49, served as a meal at mcdonalds) and not watch any ads at all. You've twisted and contorted your world view until you're literally willing so say watching ads on crunchyroll is torture, just so you can feel good about pirating anime.
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Post by maglag »

Surely there's a price where you would consider it worth to pay for a single episode, no? 1 buck? 50 cents? 10 cents? Plus the cheaper you make it, the more people you get willing to buy it. Steam is infamous for getting people to buy games they actually never play just because they can get so cheap.

And yes, I feel a lot better about Netflix, and would feel better about Crunchroll too if they dropped the mode with crappy ads mode altogether, because it would show they do care a bit about their consumers. As you point out, they offer a free month trial and everything. But if the first taste I get from them is annoying ads at the climax moments of an anime episode, that surely does not fit most people with confidence for them.

And yes, Crunchyroll isn't a coal mine company.

But the guys distributing ad-free anime sure aren't physically raiding Crunchyroll's ship fleet nor throwing their workers to the sharks or demanding ransoms of prisioners. So why call them pirates again? Because the companies want to demonize them instead of actually upping their own game, that's why.

As already pointed out, watching ad-interrupted anime just feels worst than watching no anime at all to certain people. It is there to make you feel bad and want to buy a subscription just to end the ad suffering. Or go to the people who are willing to let you watch ad-free anime without the compromise of monthly bleeding of your wallet.
FrankTrollman wrote: Actually, our blood banking system is set up exactly the way you'd want it to be if you were a secret vampire conspiracy.
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Kaelik
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Post by Kaelik »

Also, as a brief completely not directly about Mechalich aside, let's not pretend the dumbasses I was mocking two pages ago actually care about the length, variety, or obtrusiveness of ads, that is purely an excuse they made up after last time they fought this same dumb fight, everyone criticized them (including DSM) because they literally argued that youtube adds were too long and too obtrusive too.

But now back to making fun of specifically Mechalich.
Mechalich wrote:What are you talking about?
Well I'm talking about how in half your posts, including the last one, you once again repeat the same stupid lie about how Crunchyroll doesn't offer free streaming of anime. Like This:
Mechalich wrote:Now it's a matter of reasonable debate whether or not an ad-revenue based model could function viably for something like anime (and in fact, with the exception of sports, is gradually becoming a question for TV as a whole). What is not open to debate is that Crunchyroll is not attempting to offer such a thing, and neither is any other streaming service.
Or like the very beginning or your first fucking post on the subject:
Mechalich wrote:The point is that the service Crunchyroll purports to offer: free streaming of anime episodes supported by ad revenue, is not the service Crunchyroll actually offers
Here you are, yet again, claiming that Crunchyroll is not attempting to offer free anime streaming. Just like how you started by saying it's something they weren't doing.
Mechalich wrote:Saying that something is not worth doing is not saying that it can't be done.
Well then stop saying it's isn't being done when it manifestly is, you disingenuous idiot.
Mechalich wrote:The very existence of the ripper streaming sites like Kissanime is a testament to the absolute failure of Crunchyroll's ad-supported half.
No you fucking idiot. If 1/4th of all people who watch anime for free on crunchyroll stop doing that and then support an entire additional site without the overhead, that doesn't magically make the 3/4ths that do watch Crunchyroll non existent.

You are literally the fucking "well it either creates a black hole that swallows the planet, or it doesn't, two options, so 50% chance" guy.

You keep making the same dumb bold allegations about how because there exist some people who don't watch crunchyroll free, therefore none can possibly exist. It's fucking delusional.

Also, unrelated to Crunchyroll, but related to Mechalich saying something dumb:
Mechalich wrote:Anime made from 2005-2015 was much less experimental, risk-taking, and quality-controlled than anime from 1995-2005. Example: the skyrocketing number of cookie-cutter magical academy shows.
You are a fucking idiot. This is completely untrue to anyone with any knowledge. Every year of every decade from before you were born (probably) anime has been producing a bunch of cookie cutter shit anime of some type or another. You just don't remember any of them, because of confirmation bias, and mostly you didn't watch/see them. If something didn't do well in Japan, such as because it was one of a variety of cookie cutter shit anime, then it didn't get exported.

I fucking haven't watch Asterik War or Chivalry of a Failed Knight, because they are both garbage shows aimed at 14 year old boys that aren't made very well. That's not the end of the fucking world, but I won't remember that either exists in ten years, and I only remember that they exist now because I just googled "Exclusive anime" to confirm that Hulu, Netflix, Amazon Prime had like one exclusive anime a piece across the history of the internet.
DSMatticus wrote:Kaelik gonna kaelik. Whatcha gonna do?
The U.S. isn't a democracy and if you think it is, you are a rube.

That's libertarians for you - anarchists who want police protection from their slaves.
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Post by Kaelik »

maglag wrote:But the guys distributing ad-free anime sure aren't physically raiding Crunchyroll's ship fleet nor throwing their workers to the sharks or demanding ransoms of prisioners. So why call them pirates again? Because the companies want to demonize them instead of actually upping their own game, that's why.
WHAT DO WORDS MEEANNNNNNNNNN!

ISN'T THE FACT THAT WORDS COULD BE DEFINED TO HAVE DIFFERENT MEANINGS ACTUALLY PROOF THAT I AM GOD INCARNATE AND YOU SHOULD GIVE ME ALL YOUR MONEY?!
Online Etymology Dictionary wrote:the word pirate has been used to mean "one who takes another's work without permission" as far back as 1701, a year in which piracy on the high seas would have been a common topic of conversation.
Also according to the same source, the concept of pirate radio, to mean "unlicensed radio broadcaster", was first recorded in 1913. In 1964, an unlicenced British radio station actually started broadcasting from a ship off the Essex coast, cementing the term pirate radio.
But yes, let's demand a complete refusal to use a word to avoid accidentally making people who don't even feel bad feed bad.
Last edited by Kaelik on Sat Jan 07, 2017 9:22 am, edited 1 time in total.
DSMatticus wrote:Kaelik gonna kaelik. Whatcha gonna do?
The U.S. isn't a democracy and if you think it is, you are a rube.

That's libertarians for you - anarchists who want police protection from their slaves.
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Post by DSMatticus »

I would like to note that Spotify has had a significant effect on decreasing music piracy while being revenue neutral according to all of the two studies that have been conducted on it (one of which was sponsored by Spotify, so, uhh, let's not get carried away, I guess). Piracy really does seem to be - at least in part - a proportionate response to corporate dickitude. It is helpful to understand that global entertainment is a sea of massively powerful monopolies and that where regulations fail piracy is still wholly capable of breaking those monopolies. I mean, let's be blunt: traditional media has not come willingly into the digital age. I'm pretty sure we are all old enough to have watched the evolution of the music industry, and can all agree that there is literally no point in time when the industry was not several years behind consumers whilst trying to lasso them backwards. The reason 99% of legal streaming services (subscription or otherwise) exist is because nobody could stop the illegal ones, and after years of trying the rightsholders finally threw up their hands and cried 'fuck it, let's at least make money off this.'

The fact is that monopolies are shitty things that stifle innovation and raise prices. Monopolies have little to no incentive to improve the products they offer and their disproportionate market power allows them to charge prices in excess of the value they add. Economic competition today is likely lower than it has ever been at any point in the history of the modern economy; not just in entertainment, but in everything from the toilet paper people wipe their ass with to the drugs people take in order to not die. You are likely being ripped off by double-digit percentages in the majority of transactions you make in your average day. This is a real problem, and it's been so overwhelmingly ubiquitous throughout your entire life that it's difficult to even conceptualize it as "a problem" instead of "the way the world works."

And no matter how shitty you think it is that there are people out there watching Game of Thrones without paying a penny back to its creators (which is pretty shitty), you likely have those exact people to thank for the existence of HBO GO. That is a service that exists because people were watching HBO's shit online anyway, so why not go ahead and provide that service to legitimate customers before they cancel their subscriptions and just pirate it like everyone else? That is an innovation in accessibility that exists because a bunch of dirty fucking criminals were going to provide it for free if HBO GO didn't, and as someone who has and uses an HBO subscription despite spending 99% of their leisure time in a room without a television I'm pretty fucking happy about that. Two wrongs sometimes do make a right - or at least voltron together into one not-quite-as-wrong. It is honestly kind of naive to take a broad ethical stance against piracy. The future you are enjoying is not the future the media empires wanted, and you really should take the time to understand that the people who fought them did so illegally purely out of their selfish desire to get shit without paying for it and you are either a lying fucker or an idiot if you say you aren't happy the criminals won.

Does any of this have fuck all to do with Crunchyroll? Well, sort of? I mean, anime piracy predates any of the legal streaming services, so you likely have the ubiquity of fansubbed TV rips to thank for the existence of whatever services you are using for your anime fix. Obviously Crunchyroll wasn't part of the problem, what with them being busy not existing (at least not in their current form); it was entirely the fault of Japanese TV executives. I'm not blaming Crunchyroll for anything here. It is also entirely possible that anime exists in a small enough niche that it genuinely cannot be supported by advertising revenue and needs to operate on a subscription model, which is... fine? I don't really care? I am not ethically opposed to subscription services, though I have to admit they concern me. We tried that; it's called cable television, and it's incredibly exploitative of both creators and consumers. Everytime I hear about a "____ exclusive" I die a little inside, and frankly so does the economy. It is much better for content creators if they have lots of options through which to distribute their content, and it is much better for content consumers if there are multiple companies competing to serve them that content. But the thing where Crunchyroll offers a free service and then attempts to convert free users into subscribers through raw annoyance is problematic, and that one is all their fault. People do install adblock and anti-anti-adblock scripts and shit to get around Crunchyroll's ads, and they carry that adblocker to other sites which aren't assholes about it, and advertising as a whole is a less viable business model as a result. Spotify is awesome fuck you stop ruining it.
maglag wrote:But the guys distributing ad-free anime sure aren't physically raiding Crunchyroll's ship fleet nor throwing their workers to the sharks or demanding ransoms of prisioners. So why call them pirates again? Because the companies want to demonize them instead of actually upping their own game, that's why.
Kaelik ninja'd me, but the etymology on copyright infringement as piracy is several hundred years old. I wouldn't be surprised if it was coined as such because it was referring to smuggled copies of illegally duplicated works; some of the earliest uses I've seen were in the context of customs law. That would be kind of funny if true. We call piracy piracy because the original pirates were literally pirates.
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Post by Sigil »

maglag wrote:Surely there's a price where you would consider it worth to pay for a single episode, no? 1 buck? 50 cents? 10 cents? Plus the cheaper you make it, the more people you get willing to buy it. Steam is infamous for getting people to buy games they actually never play just because they can get so cheap.
Of course. There's a (low) price I'd be willing to pay to watch individual episodes of shows. Probably 50¢ or less, regardless of whether it was 15 minutes or an hour long. Problem is the content owners obviously feel its worth far more than that, because they charge far more than that. I just don't see disposable episodic content being that cheap on a large scale any time soon, or perhaps ever.
maglag wrote:But the guys distributing ad-free anime sure aren't physically raiding Crunchyroll's ship fleet nor throwing their workers to the sharks or demanding ransoms of prisioners. So why call them pirates again? Because the companies want to demonize them instead of actually upping their own game, that's why.
Fuck off if you just want to intentionally misconstrue words by reading them without context. Also your implication that companies are somehow turning copyright infringers into creatures from hell (or perhaps fusing or otherwise combining them with existing demons) is bizarre, and I think you need to seek out a mental health expert.
maglag wrote:As already pointed out, watching ad-interrupted anime just feels worst than watching no anime at all to certain people. It is there to make you feel bad and want to buy a subscription just to end the ad suffering. Or go to the people who are willing to let you watch ad-free anime without the compromise of monthly bleeding of your wallet.
I'm not disputing that for some people watching a show with ads is less enjoyable than not watching the show at all. I honestly don't even care when people, on an individual level, pirate shit (except that it can potentially have negative consequences for everyone if it happens in a large enough scale). My point from the beginning was that it's not behavior you should brag about, it's not some form of moral high road, at best it's a necessary (though minor) evil. If you brag about it, and promote it as the moral high ground, expect to get shit on.
DSMatticus wrote:Stuff I mostly agree with.
Yeah, I'm glad I have access to all these services that came about because the entertainment industry was struggling with piracy. My stance is simply that if a reasonably priced way to get something without pirating it exists, you should probably take advantage of it. I subscribe to spotify, youtubered (so I dont get ads while still supporting youtube channels), my favorite two twitch streamers (so I don't have to feel bad about blocking ads on the channels), and when I feel like watching a bunch of anime (when a new season of something I want to watch same-day comes out) I subscribe to crunchyroll for the duration of time I'm going to be using it. If there isn't a reasonably priced alternative I really don't care if people pirate. I play NES roms in retroarch, I won't pay $5 to play a 20 year old game on a proprietary console, but I also won't go around telling people (I guess unless I'm being candid in an discussion about piracy?) about the minor evil I'm committing and promoting the practice. It was purely the brazen entitlement about piracy that got me hot and bothered enough to actually post in this thread.
Last edited by Sigil on Sat Jan 07, 2017 10:38 am, edited 2 times in total.
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Post by DSMatticus »

Sigil wrote:Of course. There's a (low) price I'd be willing to pay to watch individual episodes of shows. Probably 50¢ or less, regardless of whether it was 15 minutes or an hour long. Problem is the content owners obviously feel its worth far more than that, because they charge far more than that. I just don't see disposable episodic content being that cheap on a large scale any time soon, or perhaps ever.
A 30s slot on the second season of Empire would have cost you half a million dollars and bought you access to an average of ~12 million viewers. With approximately about 30 such slots per hour long episode, that is about $1.25 in ad revenue per hour of viewership. That is freakishly high.

A 30s slot on the ninth season of The Big Bang Theory would have cost you about half that and bought you access to an average of ~15 million viewers. With approximately 15 such slots per half hour long episode, that is about $.50 in ad revenue per hour of viewership. This is on the high end of normal.

The data costs are negligible even on this scale; even though we are measuring the cost of an episode in nickels and dimes, the cost to send that episode to your computer is measured in pennies.

If you want to sanity check that, the average Netflix subscriber consumes about ~50 hours of content each month. That's about $.20 per hour of viewership.
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Post by Prak »

DSMatticus wrote:If you want to sanity check that, the average Netflix subscriber consumes about ~50 hours of content each month. That's about $.20 per hour of viewership.
Interestingly, that means it is literally impossible for a single person to watch all the netflix they're paying for-

Quick Head Math
50 hours=$.2
*5=250 hours for $1
*10=2500 hours for $10 (Netflix without DVDs is, iirc, $9.99)
/24=104.17 days.

You'd need three and a half people watching Netflix on the same account every hour of the day to watch what you're paying for.

Edit: alternative, one person could do it with four screens. All playing at once.
Last edited by Prak on Sat Jan 07, 2017 9:35 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Cuz apparently I gotta break this down for you dense motherfuckers- I'm trans feminine nonbinary. My pronouns are they/them.
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You should gain sanity for finding out that the problems of a region are because there are fucking monsters there.
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Post by John Magnum »

Prak, that's $.20 *per hour* not *per fifty hours*. Ten dollars per fifty hours is 0.2 dollars per 1 hour.
-JM
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Kaelik
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Post by Kaelik »

Prak, he literally divided the netflix subscription by 50 hours. .... Why are you claiming that it's impossible for people to watch 50 hours of netflix in a week?
Last edited by Kaelik on Sat Jan 07, 2017 9:42 pm, edited 1 time in total.
DSMatticus wrote:Kaelik gonna kaelik. Whatcha gonna do?
The U.S. isn't a democracy and if you think it is, you are a rube.

That's libertarians for you - anarchists who want police protection from their slaves.
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Post by erik »

Prak you failed your sanity check. Pay up.

Image

p.s. Kaelik, 50 hours in a month, not a week. But still, Prak has to make a visit to the Asylum.
Last edited by erik on Sat Jan 07, 2017 11:25 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by DSMatticus »

He misread a thing.

Other fun math: Netflix represents about a third of all internet traffic, which is approximately 16 billion gigabytes annually. Back when they were on Akamai, they were probably paying $.02 per GB. They've since switched to an in-house solution in an attempt to save money; only they know whether or not they were successful. That's over 300 million dollars a year, but Netflix spends ten to twenty times that much on licensing and original content. Data costs are basically negligible, and any viewer - whether they're watching ads or paying for a subscription - should be able to cover what they consume. It comes down to whether or not you can afford to pay your licensing costs, but those costs are (mostly) flat, so it's entirely a "you must be this tall to ride" check. Anime is pretty fucking niche, but Crunchyroll seems to be okay; they're making enough money to pull a pseudo-Netflix and have cofinancing agreements with a couple anime production companions. It looks like you probably can survive as a video streaming service with about half a million subscribers, which is promising for niche markets.
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Post by Whipstitch »

FWIW, what DSM is saying about data costs vs. licensing costs matches up very well with what I've read about the niche sports and pro wrestling livestreaming industries. For example, there was never any plausible speculation that the WWE Network would fail to be profitable since the company was already successfully producing marketable content in-house. Much like with many other industries the digital question wasn't a matter of whether you could make money but rather whether you can make as much money as you could with the old models.
Last edited by Whipstitch on Sun Jan 08, 2017 3:40 am, edited 2 times in total.
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Post by Prak »

Yeah, I misread while I was putting on my boots to head out. My mistake.
Cuz apparently I gotta break this down for you dense motherfuckers- I'm trans feminine nonbinary. My pronouns are they/them.
Winnah wrote:No, No. 'Prak' is actually a Thri Kreen impersonating a human and roleplaying himself as a D&D character. All hail our hidden insect overlords.
FrankTrollman wrote:In Soviet Russia, cosmic horror is the default state.

You should gain sanity for finding out that the problems of a region are because there are fucking monsters there.
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Post by Hiram McDaniels »

Just saw a commercial for crunchyroll on cable television the other day. Imagine the most utterly preposterous premise for a crunchyroll advert. No, not quite Dos Equis "most interesting man in world" style, but you're not far off the mark. More like a disaronno ad from the 90's where the bar tender wants to suck your cock if you order a cool enough drink, only replace the jazz with EDM and replace the drink with like Blue Exorcist or something.
Last edited by Hiram McDaniels on Sun Jan 08, 2017 10:22 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by angelfromanotherpin »

I've been watching some Harmonquest, and it's mostly meh and very occasionally actually funny, but my real problem is the overarching epic quest plot which just seems to get in the way of the funny without contributing. I think they really needed to accept that the show was never going to be more than goofy rando misadventures and just run with that.
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Hiram McDaniels
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Post by Hiram McDaniels »

angelfromanotherpin wrote:I've been watching some Harmonquest, and it's mostly meh and very occasionally actually funny, but my real problem is the overarching epic quest plot which just seems to get in the way of the funny without contributing. I think they really needed to accept that the show was never going to be more than goofy rando misadventures and just run with that.
The outtakes of Harmonquest had Kumail Nanjiani saying one of the funniest lines I've ever heard.
The most dangerous game is man. The most entertaining game is Broadway Puppy Ball. The most weird game is Esoteric Bear.
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Post by Maj »

I just watched Suicide Squad. I want my hours back. It was a disgrace to the forces of evil.
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Post by Username17 »

Maj wrote:I just watched Suicide Squad. I want my hours back. It was a disgrace to the forces of evil.
Suicide Squad was a genuinely bad movie where the problems with plotting were so obvious that they could have been explained by a freshman literature major. You need a villain that the team is opposed to. Or a treasure everyone is after. Or both. Or something. Fucking anything. As is, it's just some infighting and double crosses with no stakes or goals at all.

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Post by Schleiermacher »

This doesn't really belong here because I still like Strong Female Protagonist a great deal and think what's currently going on in the comic is quite interesting, but couldn't Brennan have found a more dynamic way of bringing up these points than having two people take turns talking to themselves in a public park?
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Post by Blade »

I completely agree, one of the big interest of handling complex subjects in fiction is that you can "show, not tell", which is what SFP had mostly been doing before.
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Post by hyzmarca »

Schleiermacher wrote:This doesn't really belong here because I still like Strong Female Protagonist a great deal and think what's currently going on in the comic is quite interesting, but couldn't Brennan have found a more dynamic way of bringing up these points than having two people take turns talking to themselves in a public park?
It is an interesting conversation. But I'm waiting for Max to go full Lex Luthor and organize the Legion of Doom to kill Alison. Which is, ultimately, the real reason she shouldn't have done what she did.

We're basically having a huge argument about consequentialist vs dentological ethics, but ultimately the reason you don't throw the fat person off the bridge is that if doing so became standard policy then the fat people would revolt and you'd be crushed to death by an 800 pouind woman during the post-war political purges

The trolley problem is too concerned with numbers and not sufficiently concerned with social stability. Social instability is ultimately a bigger killer than a runaway train.

In this scenario, Max has no choice but to kill Allison, if he doesn't want to be her bitch forever. He has money, he has political connections, and he has the ability to supercharge other superhumans. That makes him the perfect leader of the Megagirl Revenge Squad. He uses his mom's political connections to get some of the supervllains she put away out of prison, supercharges them, and sends them after her, which they will be happy to do. The death toll could be greater than all the organ recipients that Feral saved.

But she seems to be glossing over that possibility.
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Post by tussock »

Telling sociopaths that he can make them more powerful is exactly what Max has spent his life avoiding. He's not a mastermind, he can't manipulate people, all he does is make them more powerful, and he fucking hates that because it just makes him less cool by comparison.

He's also a dick, but really he just hates that supers have better powers than him and will not be making that worse. He might tell him Mum, but he also might not.

The real threat is that Alison's project might find itself missing funding or facing a string of enquiries over privacy issues or whatever, that's the sort of thing Max and his Mum might pull.
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