It's not fully accurate to lay the blame at the feet of Netflix. At the time, they just saw the writing on the wall and did what they had to do to survive. Their catalog was massive because, early on, no one thought streaming would work. They had a massive collection of shows and movies that didn't pull enough of an audience to air on TV for ad revenue. Netflix was able to get a TON of long-term deals that they used to grow, but when those contracts were coming due, the rights holders pulled out and started trying to make their own services. At that point, Netflix basically had to become a studio and pivot to original content, or else they wouldn't have content at all.

The long and the short of it is that because Netflix was first, it got to set the stage for the golden age of streaming, but because it worked, it was inevitable that streaming would become cable.

It's not Netflix's fault. It's just the course of the entertainment business. They suck now, but back then, I couldn't think of a single bad thing to say about them... well, maybe that they got rid of the 5-star rating system. That system was definitely used to get metrics for their early programming.

OP must be a 2000s kid, because we were definitely pirating stuff over the Internet long before that.

They also didn't mention Netflix's DVD service, nor that it was really Steam that did what they described.

The order here is a little wrong, but it's mostly correct.

Production houses started to see Netflix raking in cash hand over fist and decided that they could do that too and started pulling their shows.

This made Netflix need to pivot hard into in-house content in order to not look like a barren wasteland.

Sometime around 2007

Bahahaha! Oh, OP, please tell us you're ≈20yrs old without saying it outright. 🤣

To the point: I, and everyone I knew, was pirating everything they could —from the early 90s onward.

Yes, all of us would've "downloaded a car" in a heartbeat (well, maybe a week of them, at those baud modem speeds. 😅)

The order is a bit off. Production companies starting pulling their content from Netflix after they saw how profitable streaming services could be.

This forced Netflix to start producing their own content.

Anyone who had a dual cassette deck back in the 80's didn't have much issue copying music or game cassettes. Floppy disks were easy to copy too.

Piracy didn't start in 2006, before that there was limewire and Napster, and before that bootleg DVDs, and before that the MPAA spent billions lobbying to ban VHSs with a record function and get draconian punishments for recording movies.

I was downloading cracked video games from BBSes in the early '80s.

For me, there was never any move to netflix or any streaming. Piracy has always been cheap and convenient, and I don't want to deal with big corps

Also, piracy not popular before 2007? Pirate dvd/cd/vhs/etc stands were a very popular thing, at least around here. There was already a lot of piracy before the internet became popular

Piracy very much existed before the internet took off. Recording VHS, then burning dvd's and cd's, and the like. Many stores in the hood would openly sell burned cd's even. Others out of the trunk of their cars.

And the need to pirate never went away, fuck netflix, never had them, never will.

Woefully inaccurate, the entire P2P file sharing craze kicked off by Napster all went down before 2007 and there were plenty of online piracy venues before then too like IRC, 90s copper internet was perfectly capable of all that. And I was torrenting movies right alongside my Netflix DVD rentals. Piracy has always been here and has never left.

The real winners here are pirates because thanks to companies streaming quality media, we get quality pirated media the moment or hours later, whereas with film we had to wait until DVD until we got quality pirated film.

Daisy chained vcr watch parties.

suddenly Netflix

You can't give a history of online piracy and just entirely skip over music/limewire.

Pirating music was very popular for the short period where limewire could be used without fear. Then corporations started suing the shit out of normal people. Then apple opened the iTunes store, and pirating music became more niche again. No more burned cds from tracks discovered on limewire, but playlists with paid-for music on an iPod

Can confirm we definitely did not pirate anything before 2007.

While VALVe somehow made piracy obsolete for video games then after that they decide to make gaming on linux easier jumpstart the pc handheld market AND making one of the best first party controllers

I remember paying $30 USD for a DVD with 3-4 episodes at most of an anime series. 26 episode Cowboy Bebop season? ~$120 USD.

Sure I downloaded that episode of Excel Saga once (❤️). It was 320x240 and took more than a day on my 56k dialup.

At some point I remember going on ebay and buying the entirety of Witch Hunter Robin (which at the time, I chose over Naruto that had just started airing as well, this would turn out to be an important tone setting point in my life ...) and getting it for ~$20 USD. Basically just the cost of someone else to download it and burn it to CD for me. Did the same thing with Wolf's Rain.

Good memories. Of the anime. This shit always sucked.

In my case, i went back to physical media. Bought a blhray player and now my boyfriend and I are gradually expanding our movie library when we feel like it. Some movies and shows don't exist on dvd/bluray, but that's okay. I think there is something healthy about not having access to absolutely everything you want at all times. Besides, for me, there is also something satisfying in having ti get up from the couch and change discs and so on. I missed the physical aspect of watching movies and remember how much streaming services fried my fucking brain while i still used them.

It was to the point where you barely register wtf you are watching because everything on streaming services is about the next thing.

Movies werent movies on streaming services, but content and I heard people starting to refer to movies and shows as content at some point and was like "this is fucked".

Content. Content to fill the void. Not to experience or educate, enlighten or provoke your senses and morality. Just content to distract you.

Ew.

I dont mimd piracy, but i prefer physical media. I no longer wish to follow technollgical advancements. I want to go back and stay at a place where there was some level of conscious and physical effort to watch a movie. That way you remember it better, you slow down and you appreciate the piece of art in front of you rather than seeing it as content.

He skipped over LUSERnet and LimeWire, which was before 2007. Usenet was a big sharing community too before 2007.

Piracy has always been around. It's the underhand method of getting what someone wants. Empires didn't mint coins because it was fun, but they needed to identify forgeries. Also, scales were used (and people would use lead) to trick it instead of coin.

"Piracy" (in a sense of unauthorized copying and distribution of copyrighted materials) was a thing ever since copyright became a thing. Otherwise you wouldn't need copyright to be a law.

Movie/video piracy existed since the 80s, before TPB there were bootleg DVDs, before then there was bootleg VHS. For music it goes back even further, reel-to-reel machines which could copy entire albums at good-enough quality existed back in the 1950s, and compact cassettes got good-enough for music in the 70s.

Jesus Christ, these kids really think nothing existed before widespread high speed internet adoption eh?

same story with spotify, except that spotify itself started as a piracy service…

never paid for netflix or other services, some people never had the money for it and continued buying some films (DVDs were still sold until 2019 pretty widely here) or renting a film every X time and pirating others until the first became impossible and piracy was the only thing.

then the streaming services go to shit with subscription fees, not getting all the content and such, and you see people who showed off being able to pay for those services before or still keep one struggling to get content and slightly becoming pirates again.

this is the other side of the situation. you warned them, they trusted the corpos, and corpos gave them shit.

You wouldn't download a car!!! I would if I could and soon with 3d printers you bet I will!

History? That's cute.

Never paid for any of these streaming shit

Also, production companies started pulling their shit from netflix long before Netflix Originals became a thing. Wrong on all accounts

bad history.

even in 2007, piracy was a niche thing. your lame cousin probably didn't download from demonoid or the pirate bay. more people did then than now but it wasn't substantial.

there was still a reason to pirate even with netflix--there was a ton of content not available on DVD at that time.

at least 10 years ago all the good private torrent sites became severely restricted, some even entirely closing the doors for new members.

not sure where this piracy resurgence is going on, but it's not on the good sites.