8 pirate streaming sites now blocked in Ireland

mark085

Will definitely miss go stream
And a couple of others
Better job security for the already over paid people in the film industry pfffft god love them

But luckily now the Irish have access to only safe and legal content

Eight illegal pirate websites showing movies and TV shows have been blocked in Ireland

http://www.joe.ie/movies-tv/illegal-pirate-websites-ireland-612771?utm_campaign=app_share&utm_source=email

maximoose

Have never used any of them, only heard of one.

This will do very little to stop piracy.

Homer

Idiots chasing their tails.. There was a particular site that "a friend" told me he used quite a lot which got shut down, and came back a few weeks later with a 2 at the end of the domain name.. Fighting a losing battle but I guess they have to be seen to try tackle it!

ShaneU

I went to one of them and it brought me to a mirror site automatically.

cursai

1337x.to? Lolz

heroics

What a waste of time and money.

Just checked the one I recognised and it’s now moved to .to

jimmycrackcorm

Totally pointless exercise.
I have netflix and Kodi and prefer netflix where available as it's superior. I don't see any of these sites showing up and even if they did there are numerous others swapped in with no effort.

It's so obvious that providing the content to netflix is the answer to getting the revenue the studios 'think' they are losing.

The on demand subscription at reasonable cost is the inevitable future, but until then they'll be just pissing in the wind.

Capt'n Midnight

jimmycrackcorm wrote: »

It's so obvious that providing the content to netflix is the answer to getting the revenue the studios 'think' they are losing.

The on demand subscription at reasonable cost is the inevitable future, but until then they'll be just pissing in the wind.

Plenty of stats out there of peer to peer traffic decreasing when netflix enters a new market.

In the music world most services offer you most of the music that's out there.

In the Video world there's still too much fragmentation where you have to subscribe to multiple services.

TAFKAlawhec

It's all very much a game of legal whack-a-mole with such sites. And I agree with the general consensus that a move to providing a reasonably priced subscription service would seem to be the best way of the future. If they have trouble getting their heads around that, they should ask the music business that realised that whacking Napster down didn't do anything to prevent several other P2P networks from springing up and that such sharing only started to actually go down once well promoted, legal alternatives were offered that didn't cost an arm & a leg either for MP3 (and later AAC+ & FLAC etc.) downloading like iTunes or 7digital (and Spotify later on), or to get albums on CD significantly cheaper, in particular thanks to online retailers.

As an example for the latter (I'm a northerner, so I'm working with sterling), if I wanted to get Now 29 on double CD back in 1994/95 it would have cost me between £16-£18, or around £30-£33 today taking into account inflation. On Amazon I can pre-order Now 99 which is released next month for £12.99.

icdg

The music business is making up the money it’s losing on album sales on concert tickets though. It’s now not uncommon for the major artists to charge ticket prices starting at around €100. One major British artist will have concert tickets going on sale at 9am today for concerts not taking place until 2019, for prices well in excess of that amount. And he will sell out.

What’s the equivalent for pay TV?

Today we’re possibly (but probably not) going to hear the latest inflated prices Sky and BT (probably) will be paying for the Premier League for the next three years. They have only two ways of making up that money - subscriptions and advertising. And the advertisers (who can only count legitimate viewers) sure won’t be paying any more if the number of legitimate viewers drops to go to illegal means. So sub prices will go up again. It’s chicken and egg, sure, but Sky is of the view that Football is vital to its entire business model.

Peregrinus

icdg wrote: »

The music business is making up the money it’s losing on album sales on concert tickets though. It’s now not uncommon for the major artists to charge ticket prices starting at around €100. One major British artist will have concert tickets going on sale at 9am today for concerts not taking place until 2019, for prices well in excess of that amount. And he will sell out.

That, and Spotify, mean that piracy is now seen by the music industry as much less of a threat than it was 10 or 20 years ago. Unfortunate, though, if your taste is for live music, since the cost of that has risen substantially.

icdg wrote: »

What’s the equivalent for pay TV?

Netflix, basically, is the film and TV equivalent of Spotify for music. In both cases, what we now know is that consumers will pay for content, if it's cheap enough, and sufficiently more convenient/of higher quality than what they can get for free from the pirate sites. Obviously, games of whack-a-mole with pirate sites can achieve only limited success, but the objective is not to suppress them entirely; it's to make the users' experience more uncertain and/or inconvenient and so maximise the relative attractions of Netflix, etc.

icdg wrote: »

Today we’re possibly (but probably not) going to hear the latest inflated prices Sky and BT (probably) will be paying for the Premier League for the next three years. They have only two ways of making up that money - subscriptions and advertising. And the advertisers (who can only count legitimate viewers) sure won’t be paying any more if the number of legitimate viewers drops to go to illegal means. So sub prices will go up again. It’s chicken and egg, sure, but Sky is of the view that Football is vital to its entire business model.

Live coverage of sports is an interesting case, since people will pay a lot more to see a live high-profile football game than they will to see even a very good film, or to see the same game after the result is known. And pirating genuinely live coverage is that bit more difficult to do, and that bit easier for rights-owners to interdict.

But it all depends on the premium that consumers attach to actual live coverage. If it's really important to me to see the game live, then the option of seeing it for free on a six-hour delay is not going to affect me very much; I'll still pay a respectable amount to see it live.

But if there are effective, reliable, free piracy options for genuinely live coverage then, yeah, the big-bucks pay-per-view business model is broken. Which is a big problem not just for Sky but for the Premier League and its member clubs (and for analogous stakeholders in other sports codes).

icdg

I’m not sure I’d equate Netflix with Spotify in that manner. What Spotify and its rivals (if they are really rivals, that is) have in common is, well everything. They all give you access to mostly the same songs and compete on price and UI.

Netflix on the other hand is really just another pay TV provider, albeit one that doesn’t go for linear tv and only offers on demand. Indeed it’s shown no inkling of going into the live content business at all. It’s rival - such as it is - Amazon Prime Video has dipped its toes into that waters with NFL’s Thursday Night Football and tennis. But it’s rights to TNF are non exclusive, those games are already on at least one tv channel in the US (NFL Network), some of them are on terrestrial tv also, while its tennis rights don’t cover the only tournaments the casual viewer is interested in - the majors. So dipping the toe is all it’s done, so far. For live sports the traditional providers are still absolutely dominant.

Wanderer78

icdg wrote:

For live sports the traditional providers are still absolutely dominant.

I'd agree with this but illegal viewing of these channels is still very high, these providers really need to seriously reduce their subscription prices in order to try stop it

Peregrinus

icdg wrote: »

I’m not sure I’d equate Netflix with Spotify in that manner. What Spotify and its rivals (if they are really rivals, that is) have in common is, well everything. They all give you access to mostly the same songs and compete on price and UI.

Netflix on the other hand is really just another pay TV provider, albeit one that doesn’t go for linear tv and only offers on demand. Indeed it’s shown no inkling of going into the live content business at all. It’s rival - such as it is - Amazon Prime Video has dipped its toes into that waters with NFL’s Thursday Night Football and tennis. But it’s rights to TNF are non exclusive, those games are already on at least one tv channel in the US (NFL Network), some of them are on terrestrial tv also, while its tennis rights don’t cover the only tournaments the casual viewer is interested in - the majors. So dipping the toe is all it’s done, so far. For live sports the traditional providers are still absolutely dominant.

Yes, I take your point. But of course viewing live sports is a very small part of overall film/video/TV consumption, just as listening to live performance is a very small part of music broadcasting/streaming. Spotify and Netflix have this in common; they have demonstrated that if you make a substantial volume of high-quality content conveniently available for a reasonable cost people will pay for it, and this has substantially eroded the market for pirated content of this kind (and therefore has provided a substantial degree of comfort to the content producers).

Live consumption of sports events is a niche aspect of broadcasting/streaming, but it has it own economics and business models. I agree with you that if legitimate distributors charge enough for it, they create a demand for pirated content, but it's much more difficulty to pirate this stuff, which means the legitimate distributors can get away with charging much more for live sports events than they can for other kinds of content. They won't be able to do that if effective and convenient methods of distributing live pirated coverage are developed.

icdg

It is a niche in terms of viewership, sure. It is also the house on which the entire pay TV industry is built. Particularly since the advent of free to air satellite rendered the original big driver of pay TV in Ireland - access to the BBC/ITV/C4 - somewhat obsolete.

Sky’s business model is based around one TV rights deal, the Premier League. Prior to the Premier League it was seen primarily as a broadcaster and a struggling one at that. That original deal in 1992 probably saved the company. It certainly turned it into a success. It’s conversion into a fully fledged “wireless cable” company took place a year later in September 1993 when Sky Multichannels was launched, though it arguably only took full form with the 1998 launch of Sky Digital.

Since 1992, Sky have placed retaining the Premier League above all else it does, paying out more and more money each time. This has led to higher and higher subscription costs. I am not sure to what extent Sky can absorb any cut in subscription fees, never mind a cut down to the type of price Netflix charges. Yes it encourages piracy. But those who pirate do need to remember that the continuing existence of any material to pirate depends on traditional broadcasters remaining in business.

Some of us can remember what sports broadcasting was like before Sky. It was Grandstand/World of Sport/Sports Stadium on a Saturday afternoon and if we were lucky some midweek European football. The thought of 9 24/7 sports channels seemed far fetched in those days.

Peregrinus

Let me cut to the chase.

icdg wrote: »

. . . I am not sure to what extent Sky can absorb any cut in subscription fees . . .

That depends on to what extent the Premier League can absorb any cut in licensing revenue.

And the answer is, of course, quite a lot. Footballers are absurdly overpaid, and you can run a quality national football league, employing talented footballers who play highly watchable football, on a fraction of the revenues that the Premier League enjoys. Especially if there is no rival with the revenues of the Premier League bidding your players away from you.

Basically Sky (which stands here for all premium pay TV outfits built on live sport) and the Premier League (which stands for all providers of highly-marketed content to Sky) enjoy the kind of profits they do because their product cannot be easily or effectively pirated and they can charge, within rather broad limits, what they like for it. If that changes, they won't be able to command those kinds of profits. They'll be able to charge whatever people will pay in order not to watch pirated content, which we know is more than nil. People will still kick balls around fields, and other people will want to watch them and will be prepared to pay for it, and if Sky and the Premier League can't or won't reconfigure themselves to meet that demand effectively then someone else will. The world is full of less bloated and less profitable football leagues who get by just fine selling their product to broadcasters.

The explosing in sports coverage isn't just down to Sky's pay TV model and the grotesque rents built into it; it's also down to technology. I don't subscribe to any paid content at all - not even Netflix - and I have a couple of dozen channels available to me, including dedicated sports channels (financed by advertising). If Sky disappears, there will still be dedicated sports channels, and there will still be pay-TV dedicated sports channels. They'll be cheaper, is all, and there won't be so much money sloshing around the Premier League.

icdg

The problem with that is that Sky would be taking a massive risk by lower their bid. The risk is that someone else (BT, Amazon or whoever) doesn’t lower their bid and Sky lose the PL. That means you just swap one pay TV master for another.

The PL rights cost will only come down if either (a) all bidders agree to lower their bids (illegal, by the way), (b) the PL sets a maximum price it will accept (and turkeys will vote for Christmas) or (c) the English public fall out of love with football.

What has been repeatedly hypothesised is that eventually Sky will hit a price that the public are unwilling to pay. But I have seen Sky Sports price increase from £2.99 to €40 over the last 25 years and the public has shouldered every increase. Why? Because football.

Peregrinus

icdg wrote: »

The problem with that is that Sky would be taking a massive risk by lower their bid. The risk is that someone else (BT, Amazon or whoever) doesn’t lower their bid and Sky lose the PL. That means you just swap one pay TV master for another.

The PL rights cost will only come down if either (a) all bidders agree to lower their bids (illegal, by the way), (b) the PL sets a maximum price it will accept (and turkeys will vote for Christmas) or (c) the English public fall out of love with football.

No. If the content can be pirated effectively, then that affects all potential purchasers for rebroadcast. The considerations that would cause Sky to bid less would also cause BT or Amazon or whoever to bid less.

This doesn't require any concerted agreement between them to limit their bids. The content is only as valuable as it is so long as it cannot be pirated. If it can be pirated, it is not so valuable, and a rational broadcaster will be willing to offer less for it.

Obviously, in the effect that effective technology for pirating life sports coverage becomes available, that'll be hugely disruptive, and in the disrupted market you could get anomalies. For example a well-funded new entrant to the market might decide to bid more than the content is strictly worth in order to establish a presence and build up market share, and might be willing just to swallow losses from piracy for a couple of years. But that would be a transitional thing; it wouldn't last for ever. Ultimately, live sports coverage which can be pirated is just not as valuable as live sports coverage which cannot be pirated, and the market will adjust (with some pain) to this reality.

cursai

Saorview is where its at.

Wanderer78

icdg wrote:

What has been repeatedly hypothesised is that eventually Sky will hit a price that the public are unwilling to pay. But I have seen Sky Sports price increase from £2.99 to €40 over the last 25 years and the public has shouldered every increase. Why? Because football.

I actually suspect more and more people are actually viewing football illegally nowadays than ever before, if this is true, is their model actually working? There's no question sales of sky sports is high, but are we codding ourselves that it's that successful?

Peregrinus

Wanderer78 wrote: »

I actually suspect more and more people are actually viewing football illegally nowadays than ever before, if this is true, is their model actually working? There's no question sales of sky sports is high, but are we codding ourselves that it's that successful?

Well, if sales of Sky Sports are high, isn't that the definition of "successful" as far as Sky Sports are concerned?

It may be true that "more and more people are actually viewing football illegally nowadays than ever before", but so long as most people are paying to see it, piracy hasn't fatally undermined the business model.

Wanderer78

Peregrinus wrote:

It may be true that "more and more people are actually viewing football illegally nowadays than ever before", but so long as most people are paying to see it, piracy hasn't fatally undermined the business model.

I'd love to know the true figures of illegal viewing, I suspect it's very high, i know a large proportion of people doing it, some have been doing it for years. Companies such as sky certainly invest heavily in protecting their asset, but illegal operators certainly don't give up too easily either, as it's very lucrative, interesting game

lertsnim

You also have people who use legitimate Sky account details that they've gotten from a subscrber to watch content on the likes of Sky Go. That must be costing Sky a lot of subscribers.