Month: April 2016

This Millennium’s Best Picture Oscar Winners Are Not On Netflix

netfAn often heard excuse from pirates is that they can’t find the content they’re looking for in their home country, at least not for a decent price.

In recent months Hollywood has started to attack what they see as a myth, pointing out that movies and TV-shows are more widely available than ever before.

“The number of online platforms for legally viewing movies and TV shows continues to grow steadily, making more creative content from all over the world available to more audiences than ever before,” the MPAA’s Julia Jenks wrote last week.

“There are now more than 480 unique legitimate online services available in countries around the world and 120 such services available in the United States.”

This is correct and backed up by a recent MPAA-commissioned study. But there’s also an important element missing from the analysis. Unlike the music industry, where subscription services such as Spotify offer the most popular content, the video market is much more scattered.

Perhaps the public doesn’t want to use dozens of different services to watch movies and TV-shows?

And what about the news that the content library of the dominant video platform Netflix is shrinking rather than growing? Earlier this week Allflix showed that the U.S. Netflix catalog has shrunk by more than 2,500 titles since 2014.

This prompted us to conduct a small survey, looking at some of the top movies made over the past two decades – the winners of the Academy Award’s Best Picture category. Quite surprisingly, none of the films that won the prestigious award this millennium are available on the U.S. version of Netflix.

We have to go all the way back to 1999 to spot the first Best Picture Oscar winner on Netflix, American Beauty.

Interestingly, many of the more recent Oscar winners are available in other regions, such as Afghanistan, Antarctica, Aruba, Canada, Guyana, Haiti and Venezuela, to name a few.

As can be seen in the table below, the only Best Picture-winning film that’s not on a non-U.S. version of Netflix is Spotlight, which makes sense as it hasn’t been released for the home-entertainment market yet.

Best Picture Oscar Winners on Netflix? (April 2016)

Year Movie Available US? Available elsewhere?
torrentfreak.com
2015 Spotlight No No
2014 Birdman No Yes, Canada
2013 12 Years a Slave No Yes, Japan and South Korea
2012 Argo No Yes, Afghanistan and 115 others
2011 The Artist No Yes, Aruba and 10 others
2010 The King’s Speech No Yes, Venezuela and 51 others
2009 The Hurt Locker No Yes, Cuba and 58 others
2008 Slumdog Millionaire No Yes, Samoa and 23 others
2007 No Country for Old Men No Yes, Guyana and 58 others
2006 The Departed No Yes, Antarctica and 34 others
2005 Crash No Yes, Suriname and 45 others
2004 Million Dollar Baby No Yes, Holy See and 3 others
2003 The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King No Yes, Azerbaijan and 131 others
2002 Chicago No Yes, Haiti and 45 others
2001 A Beautiful Mind No Yes, Norfolk Island and 21 others
2000 Gladiator No Yes, Montserrat and 45 others
1999 American Beauty Yes Yes, Bhutan and 210 others
1998 Shakespeare in Love Yes Yes, Puerto Rico and 6 others
1997 Titanic No Yes, Canada
1996 The English Patient Yes Yes, Martinique and 52 others

The Oscar-winner limitations don’t seem to be tied to the Best Picture category either. Of the twelve films that won an Oscar in 2013, only two are listed in the U.S. Netflix library.

The two films are “The Lady in Number 6: Music Saved My Life,” which won an Oscar for the best short documentary, and “The Great Gatsby” which won the Oscars for best costume and best production design.

We can’t and won’t point any fingers as to the source of this availability “problem.” It might be that the studios are reluctant to put their most acclaimed titles on Netflix, or perhaps Netflix isn’t willing to pay enough.

However, the above does illustrate that in its current form, Netflix alone is certainly not going solve Hollywood’s piracy problems. This is an important note, as Netflix is by far the most popular consumption platform for films and TV-shows.

Ultimately, it doesn’t really matter whether there are 12 or 12,000 legal video platforms in a country. More services may actually mean that it becomes less convenient for consumers, as long as the content is scattered.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.


Source: TorrentFreak

Rightscorp Plans to Hijack Pirates’ Browsers Until a Fine is Paid

hijackEarlier this week, anti-piracy outfit Rightscorp published its results for 2015. They make for dismal reading, with the company recording a net loss of $3.43m, up from the $2.85m net loss recorded in 2014.

The company has a number of problems. First and foremost it has too few clients and somehow needs to expand the catalog of copyrights under its protection. With a wider spread and greater volume it could do better, but that’s only part of the problem.

Internet service providers in the United States aren’t generally fans of copyright trolls like Rightscorp. They prey on valuable customers who often incorrectly conclude that their provider has been spying on them. Of course the sting in the tail is the compensation that Rightscorp demands, all conveniently delivered to the Internet subscriber by their ISP.

In its filing this week Rightscorp blamed falling revenues on a reluctance by ISPs to pass on these automated fines. Nevertheless, the company isn’t giving up on improved cooperation with service providers since it has a plan that could streamline its business and more or less force users to pay up.

Rightscorp says this could be achieved via a “next generation technology” its developing called Scalable Copyright, which will shift warnings and settlement demands away from easily ignored emails and towards an altogether more aggressive delivery method.

“In the Scalable Copyright system, subscribers receive each [settlement] notice directly in their browser,” the company reports.

“Single notices can be read and bypassed similar to the way a software license agreement works [but] once the internet account receives a certain number of notices over a certain time period, the screen cannot be bypassed until the settlement payment is received.”

The idea of locking browsers in response to infringement allegations is nothing new. Users of some ISPs in the United States already receive these warnings if too many complaints are made against their account. However, to date no company has asked for money to have these locks removed and the idea of ‘wheel clamping’ a browser is hardly an attractive one, especially based on the allegations of a third-party organization.

Still, Rightscorp seems confident that it can persuade ISPs to come along for the ride.

“Its implementation will require the agreement of the ISPs. We have had discussions with multiple ISPs about implementing Scalable Copyright, and intend to intensify those efforts. ISPs have the technology to display our notices in subscribers’ browsers in this manner,” the company notes.

While ISPs do indeed have the ability to hold their customers to ransom on Rightscorp’s behalf, the big question is why they would choose to do so. On the surface there seems no benefit to ISPs whatsoever, since all it will do is annoy those who pay the bills. But Rightscorp sees things somewhat differently and says that the system will actually be both cheap and beneficial to ISPs.

“We provide the data at no charge to the ISPs. With Scalable Copyright, ISPs will be able to greatly reduce their third-party liability and the music and home video industries will be able to return to growth along with the internet advertising and broadband subscriber industries,” the company explains.

That third-party liability is the requirement under the DMCA for service providers to terminate repeat infringers or face the prospect of losing their safe harbor protections.

“U.S. ISPs have a safe harbor that is conditional on terminating repeat copyright infringers. Rightscorp has the technology to identify these repeat infringers. ISPs either need to work with copyright holders to reduce repeat infringers identified by Rightscorp or face significant liability,” the company warns.

As the recent case between BMG and Cox Communications illustrates, ISPs do need to be cautious over the issue of repeat infringers and they must have policies in place to deal with them. However, the notion that a browser-lock system like this one needs to be deployed is unlikely to be on the agenda of many ISPs, especially considering Rightscorp’s track record.

While the MPAA/RIAA Copyright Alerts program limits the numbers of warnings that can be sent to single subscriber in order to avoid labeling them as repeat infringers too quickly, Rightscorp is on record as sending 112 notices to a single Comcast user in less than 48 hours over the sharing of a single torrent.

But despite all the rhetoric, these ambitious plans to hijack browsers to generate revenue will require ISPs to co-operate more with Rightscorp, not less, so the current downward trend in forwarding the company’s notices is hardly encouraging.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.


Source: TorrentFreak