Increased streaming service bullshit = Increased piracy and torrenting

Every independent assessment of the causes and "costs" of piracy have come to same conclusions:

1. People who torrent content also buy a lot of content;
2. The easier it is to access content, the less likely people are to torrent that content;
3. The lower the cost is to access content online, the less likely people are to torrent that content.

In other words, cut a deal to distribute content on, let's say, Netflix, and people will happily pay for Netflix (who pay content owners, in turn) for access. Insist that people subscribe to six different streaming services, however, all of which cost the same as Netflix, but none of which provide the same value that Netflix used to, and you can count the days until confused consumers decide that your content is just not worth what you're asking, anymore, and start torrenting that content, instead.

So with everybody and their dog having decided that they can be Netflix better than Netflix, and starting their own streaming services because dollar dollar bills, y'all, what consumer response would you predict to all this naked, greedy, corporate cash grabbing? If you guessed increasing torrenting, then give yourself a no-prize, because it looks like that's exactly what's happening.

Back in 2011, Sandvine stated that BitTorrent accounted for 52.01% of upstream traffic on fixed broadband networks in North America. By 2015, BitTorrent’s share of upstream traffic on these networks had dipped to 26.83 percent, largely thanks to the rise in quality, inexpensive streaming alternatives to piracy.

But Sandvine notes that trend is now reversing slightly, with BitTorrent’s traffic share once again growing worldwide. That’s especially true in the Middle East, Europe, and Africa, where BitTorrent now accounts for 32% of all upstream network traffic.
One major reason for BitTorrent’s rising popularity? Annoying exclusivity streaming deals.

“More sources than ever are producing "exclusive" content available on a single streaming or broadcast service—think Game of Thrones for HBO, House of Cards for Netflix, The Handmaid's Tale for Hulu, or Jack Ryan for Amazon,” Sandvine’s Cam Cullen said in a blog post.

“To get access to all of these services, it gets very expensive for a consumer, so they subscribe to one or two and pirate the rest.” Cullen said.

Surprise! It turns out that people are simply not willing to spend the equivalent amount of a Netflix subscription, for less content than Netflix provides, to each of Netflix, CBS, Disney, HBO, and Hulu, all at the same time, especially when they're only watching maybe one show on each of the last four entries on that list.

Canadian cord-cutting accelerates because cable companies are the worst

Once upon a time, Canadian cable customers were unhappy.

They were so unhappy, in fact, that the CRTC actually noticed, and held hearings. They asked Canadians what was wrong with Canada's cable television options; they asked consumers what they wanted to buy, and how much they were willing to pay for it.

The answer was clear: Canadians wanted pick-and-pay. They wanted a bare-bones package, at a reasonable rate, that they could supplement with the additional channels they wanted, and only those channels. They wanted reasonable access to the content they wanted to see, at a reasonable price, with no onerous conditions or restrictions.

Given those things, Canadians would happily pay for cable; in the absence of those things, they would happily choose Netflix instead; and, if Netflix failed to provide the content they wanted to watch, then they'd pirate it, rather than continuing to pay through the nose for bundles that forced them to pay a premium for channels they never watched, just to access to the few that they were interested in.

Canada's cable companies, long used to dictating terms to customers that lacked other options, wanted to continue restricting the options and charging more than was reasonable or fair, and they lobbied hard for the status quo. The CRTC, somewhat surprisingly, sided with consumers on this one, and mandated $25 skinny cable packages, along with individually-priced channels that customers could pick and choose. 

What cable companies actually provided, though, was shit.

You see, while they were legally required to have a basic package, they weren't required to advertise it, and many didn't -- consumers had to know about the $25 skinny package, ask for it specifically, and insist on getting it, rather than being shunted back into the bundle ecosystem. Additional fees were added to the $25 skinny packages that the bundles didn't have; additional channels saw stand-alone costs of cost four or five times what they cost when bundled by cable companies.

The result was skinny packages that the cable companies weren't actively selling, and had made so unpalatable that customers weren't interested in buying them anyway.

The CRTC was flooded with complaints, as customers who'd wanted a fairly-priced, basic, a la carte cable option, found that it simply didn't exist, in spite of the CRTC's mandate. Cable companies smugly declared this to be a good thing -- evidence, basically, that they'd been right all along, and that "skinny" basic cable packages had been proven to be unnecessary.

From CBC News:

When asked whether nearly 600 complaints is concerning, [CRTC spokeswoman Patricia] Valladao responded that big changes always require an adjustment period.

She added that the new deals aren't going to appeal to everyone, and that customers can always stick with their current packages. "It's not like they're under the gun to change," the CRTC spokeswoman said.

The Consumers' Association of Canada has also been inundated with complaints about the skinny packages — more than 300 at last count.

President Bruce Cran is less sanguine about the flood of unhappy comments.

"We weren't expecting this," he said. "The sort of common theme is that nobody thinks the skinny package is of any great value."

That was March 17th -- just weeks after the mandates skinny packages were first rolled out. It is now November 13th. How do things look for Canada's cable customers, and cable providers, today?

Once again, I give you CBC News:

The lure of a $25 basic TV package has not helped stem the tide of Canadians cancelling their cable subscriptions. And critics believe the added pick-and-pay channel options coming next month may not help much either.

Canadians continued to cut the cord in record numbers following the launch of the CRTC-mandated basic TV plans on March 1.

This is according to Mario Mota, with Boon Dog Professional Services, an Ottawa-based research and consulting firm. Mota crunched subscriber numbers for Canada's seven major publicly traded TV providers, including Bell, Rogers, Telus and Shaw.

He found they lost a combined total of 98,476 TV customers in their first two fiscal quarters during the period of March through September.

That's a loss of 13 per cent more customers than the same period in 2015.

So.... about as I expected, really.

Cable companies decided to play cute with the CRTC's rules, here, making pick-and-pay options so unattractive that people would see them as completely worthless. Well, guess what? It worked. And those people are now opting out of cable subscriptions entirely, just like they said they would.

GG, Canadian cable companies. GG.

Because here's the thing. Those customers, having finally taken the plunge into a cable-free world? They're discovering just how liberating and inexpensive it is to not pay for cable anymore. They're discovering that they like it. They're wondering why they put up with their cable company's bullshit for so long, when there were other, superior, and less expensive options.

The fact that cable companies are grudgingly going to start offering customers what they'd wanted for years is just too little, too late.

Unintended, yet predictable, consequences

Oculus' attempt to shut down Revive, ostensibly to prevent piracy, seems to be having exactly the result that one would expect:

A new software update for the Oculus Rift VR headset that was supposed to “curb piracy and protect games and apps that developers have worked so hard to make” has actually had the opposite effect. Whoops.

The creator of the Revive hack, which had allowed HTC Vive owners to play Oculus-exclusive programs before Rift’s latest update, has now released a workaround which restores functionality to his code.

Revive’s creator, Libre VR, tells Motherboard that “the original version of Revive simply took functions from the Oculus Runtime and translated them to OpenVR calls...the new version of Revive now uses the same injection technique to bypass Oculus’ ownership check altogether. By disabling the ownership check the game can no longer determine whether you legitimately own the game.”

This is the thing about DRM: it may stop honest, paying customers from using the products they've paid for, in the ways that they feel are reasonable, but it does very little stop actual pirates, who can usually find away around it. Even when that's not really something they really even want to be doing:

Libre VR later added on Reddit that “This is my first success at bypassing the DRM, I really didn’t want to go down that path. I still do not support piracy, do not use this library for pirated copies.” He also told Motherboard that “if he finds a workaround that doesn’t need to disable the ownership check, he’ll implement it.”

I'm reminded of the formerly paying Canadian Netflix customers, who are reportedly considering a return to piracy, now that Netflix won't deliver the same content to Canadian as to their American customers. Or the legion of Canadians pirating Game of Thrones, in large part because HBO won't make HBO Now available north of the 49th parallel.

Note that we're not talking about people wanting something for nothing, here. Canadian Game of Thrones fans are willing to pay for Game of Thrones; they're just not willing to pay for everything else on HBO Canada to get it. Canadian Netflix customers were paying for the service, only to find the service that was being delivered to them had been rather drastically curtailed.

Early adopters of Revive want to buy games from Oculus... they just want to be able to play them on any compatible hardware, something Oculus used to be OK with... until they discovered that Vive was going to actually give them a run for their money, at which point they suddenly weren't so OK with it.

So much for those principles, eh, Palmer Luckey? GG.