Sarah J. Frick, Deborah Fletcher, Austin C. Smith, Pirate and chill: The effect of netflix on illegal streaming, Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Volume 209, 2023, Pages 334-347, ISSN 0167-2681, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jebo.2023.03.013. (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0167268123000793) Abstract: Over 188 million people in the United States use a subscription video streaming service, yet digital piracy remains prevalent and costs the U.S. economy an estimated $29.2 billion annually. This paper investigates the relationship between a movie's availability on Netflix, the largest video subscription service, and intent to illegally stream the movie. We leverage a contract dispute that caused Epix (a cable network company) to move all its movies from Netflix to Hulu, representing a substantial decrease in the legal streaming availability of these movies. Using a difference-in-differences design, we find that reducing legal streaming access via the removal of Epix movies from Netflix results in a 20% increase in piracy intent relative to movies that remained on Netflix, as measured by Google search volume. This study contributes to the understanding of the substitution between legal streaming services and movie piracy and has implications for content owners deciding what platform to offer their movie on. Keywords: Piracy; Online streaming; Digital goods; Netflix; Google searches

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[–] nfreak@lemmy.ml 27 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

Same. I've never been much of a tv/movie person in general, but netflix in its prime was fantastic. But nowadays there are like 30 different streaming services, every single one is egregiously priced, and everything has their own exclusive libraries. Hell I'm surprised they're not streaming genAI slop "movies" yet at the rate they're all going (or maybe they already are, who knows). Fuck all of that noise.

Spotify did the same thing for me years ago. Went from a hand-maintained local library to Spotify, held on to that for like 10 years, ditched them at the start of this year when they were overwhelmingly supporting fascists with political donations. Switched to Tidal for a bit since it has higher quality and better artist payouts, but today I'm right back to hosting a local library (which is better than ever these days), buying what I can directly from artists to support them rather than subscription fees.