The situation has changed quite a lot with digitalization. When copyright was developed, giving up the right to copy something had low cost - you needed to have a printing press. Now you can’t even read a book without making multiple copies, so the cost of giving up copy right is a lot higher. The benefits to society of securing an exclusive right to control copies is possibly unchanged, or perhaps less as the writings can no longer be retelling of common stories (e.g. Disney movies from Grimm brothers; Shakespeare mixing popular stories into brilliant plays). I suspect making the timelines of copy right protection be shorter (as culture speeds up) rather than longer as we have done, due to the weirdly long lifetime of corporations, would fix most of the issues. Invention would be rewarded without the creation of IP monopolies and the restriction of mixing existing stuff as a creative method, and the loss of the right to copy stuff you have paid for all lessened.
Definitely seems reasonable to say "you can train on this data but you have to have a legal copy"
Personally I like to frame most AI problems by substituting a human (or humans) for the AI. Works pretty well most of the time.
In this case if you hired a bunch of artists/writers that somehow had never seen a Disney movie and to train them to make crappy Disney clones you made them watch all the movies it certainly would be legal to do so but only if they had legit copies in the training room. Pirating the movies would be illegal.
Though the downside is it does create a training moat. If you want to create the super-brain AI that's conversant on the corpus of copyrighted human literature you're going to need a training library worth millions
The law should allow for training, but not reproduction. That would be compatible with the world that seems to be emerging.
You can train on Disney, but you can't produce Disney outputs.
Likewise, if you create some new IP using AI, the US will confer copyright so long as there was sufficient user input (eg. inpainting, editing, turning it into a long-form movie, etc.) Those new, sufficiently novel works should also be copyrightable.
Copyright should compel people to make good stuff and reward them when they do so. But it shouldn't hinder technological progress. There's a balance that can be struck.
Copyright isn’t real, and gatekeeping pop culture in this fashion is ahistorical and revisionist, it’s literally not a thing that existed like this until the 19th or even 20th century.
You can always pirate media/movies, above all else. Absolutely a case of it being always morally justified, unironically. Letting corpos take our popular social culture away with 150+ year exclusivity periods was never the intention.
Disney could not have been started today, the modern copyright law is corpos pulling up the ladder after stealing from the public domain themselves, openly and blatantly. They picked the public domain into their pocket and charge us to rent it back.
I won't pay for Youtube, ever, because even if I pay, I still get sponsored segments in videos. To skip these, I have to get SponsorBlock so I might as well block ads too. Maybe if Youtube Premium also gave access to the same videos without sponsored segments I would reconsider.
The thing is Youtube screwed themselves years ago: they were dicks to content creators (by being overly agressive with demonetizing, even giving creators money to DMCA trolls and completely ignoring fair use laws) so they couldn't rely on ad money and had to fallback to sponsoring instead. The shit situation we're in today il all Youtube's fault.
On the other hand, I pay for Crunchyroll because it has a huge catalog for 5 bucks a month, and for Netflix because they never pissed me yet. However if they increase their subscription price one more time (>13.49€ per month), I'm out for good.
I already unsubscribed from Disney+ because they pissed me off by removing shows without any warning, and from Prime Video because I got tired of finding movies just to realize they weren't actually included in the subscription.
>So I don’t buy Apple’s argument that developers must pay them for the core technology that the iPhone user has already paid them for.
The argument is pretty straightforward actually: the iPhone SDK is Apple's intellectual property and they can charge whatever they want. The fact that developers have to pay for Macs and iPhones to make apps and users have to buy iPhones (all of which Apple makes a margin on) is irrelevant. Copyright doesn't have a "but if you're already making money off of it you can't charge people other ways" clause. Disney makes money off of you when you watch their movie in theaters, stream them at home, buy their branded merch, and go to their theme parks. Nobody calls the royalties/licensing fees that Disney makes off of the above items a "Fleece", even though you arguably need to buy one of them to enjoy the other (would you really buy their merch if you don't watch their shows?), or that their IPs would be less valuable if one of the revenue streams didn't exist.
All of this is orthogonal to the question of what apple is doing is "fair" or whether is good for consumers/developers/apple, and I wish discussions on whatever Apple is doing wouldn't conflate what they're entitled to do vs what they should do. In other words, rather than arguing "The technology fee is a fleece, they shouldn't be charging the fee when they're already making money off developer machines and iPhones", argue "Apple is entitled to make money off their SDKs, but it'll be better for consumers/developers/apple/everyone if their SDKs were freely available". But I suspect that's less persuasive. The DMA throws a further wrench into this, because it limits what Apple can do with their IP, but given that the article doesn't try to reference any DMA provisions to support his argument, I don't think the author is interested in this line of argument.
I work in the edge research and your claims are exaggerated at best.
As I said, YouTube quality is already there. But cinema quality still requires VFX people because gen AI hallucinates a lot of weird stuff like 7 fingers on a hand.
You need to think of gen AI like self driving cars. We’ve had semi-autonomous cars for years already but they’re still unsafe to be fully self driving. You still need a human to make corrections. And the same is true for gen AI.
Until the acceptance ratio improves drastically, gen AI is not going to replace Disney.
Most of it seems to be B-tier formulaic. Good enough to not be awful if you're into that genre, but nothing amazing.
Where Netflix pays off for me is their purchases of the rights to foreign shows and films.
That and the occasional mainstream movie or original makes it a decent deal.
I find the sameness of Disney+ to be worse than Netflix, personally. But they have they are anchored by their big movies and Star Wars -- beyond that there is no depth at all.
I think you'll be surprised how economical DVDs can be bought for.
Also why limit to 1 year's budget? The magic of owning assets over renting is you keep them. If you spend 100$ a year on DVDs you'll fill up a shelf in short order.
Best of all: you can pick what you want. So often I've read a recommendation for a high quality movie only to have no method to watch it despite paying for Disney and Netflix. I remember as a kid Netflix had everything, now it appears to have nothing. Meanwhile the high quality classics are the exact ones cheap and easy to buy in DVD form.
Not to mention, this year is only the start. If streaming services are not bad enough value for you now, wait a few years. They are only going to get worse.
As an alternative to your anecdote I pirated media heavily from my teens into my mid 20s. Then I graduated college, got a job, and streaming came out.
I basically stopped piracy entirely because it was pointless at that point. It was reasonably priced and easy. The only time I pirated things was when I wanted something niche that wasn’t available on platforms. Like an art house film with weird distribution rights or an mtv cartoon from the early 2000s with the original soundtrack that still can’t be released that way because the song clearances aren’t happening
But now it’s like $60+ a month for Netflix/hulu/disney+/peacock. A lot of the time they don’t have what I want, that’s on paramount plus, appletv, max, crunchy roll, etc and I’m not spending another $20+ a month to add yet another. They almost all have intrusive advertisements that get longer and longer. The ads are somehow worse than cable because they can’t seem to sell the ad space. I only seem to get the same 4-5 ads over and over which is torture. The apps are all ugly with awful ui/ux and the library organization is completely arbitrary. There is rarely an ability to filter or sort the library and they are always loaded with filler content to pad the numbers.
So a decade or so later I’m strongly considering a media server. It was plex last time but I think jellyfin now. Better ui/ux than streaming apps, better video quality, better library sorting, no ads, and all I need is relatively cheap hardware and a Usenet subscription. This wasn’t worth the bother when the alternative was $20/mo for Netflix/hulu.
Consider music piracy too. I can’t ever see myself pirating music again even though I grew up in the Napster era where downloading mp3s was entirely normalized and the thing to do. But the idea of downloading albums, ensuring I get the correct quality, they have correct album art/id3 tags, etc for the amount of music I listen to is a goddamn chore. I would much rather just pay Apple Music. They don’t have these issues. They don’t have fragmented libraries. They don’t force ads even though I already pay them. They don’t hide half the library behind “curated content”. Its not 100% perfect by any means. Sometimes I get censored songs, sometimes I can’t find remixes, alt takes, or live versions I want, etc. but 99% of the time it does what I want and it’s just easier than managing my own library. Unless they fuck this up I will never pirate music again. Tv/movie companies don’t seem to get this.
> Sure. And? This is the exact same problem with offshoring to sweatshops, and also with all automation from the pottery wheel onwards; and in the industrial revolution this automation happened in a way to cause the invention of Communism.
Yes but crucially: the industrial revolution and automation in general has historically been targeted at things of need, in various stripes: one can argue that the demand for goods, be they food, cellphones, televisions, cars, what have you makes automation extremely helpful: yes there was a period where laborers were replaced and priced out of the market, but many eventually returned. The ability to produce 65" televisions at scale and sell them for cheap enough to let people buy them at scale has led to the prices of televisions cratering, and in the context of products consumed by large portions of the market, this is a desirable and good thing (with caveats).
This breaks down with creative output though. No matter how cheap they are, one person can only consume so many, for example, movies and television shows. Even if generative movies were a thing (I don't think they are yet?) and you could produce them just block by block at scale... there's a ceiling there. People can only consume so many movies. You will saturate that market incredibly quickly, and even that is assuming the market of moviegoers will be interested in an AI movie.
Hell, Disney has already learned this without even needing AI to do it. A big part of their ongoing failure that is their streaming service is they completely and utterly saturated the market for Marvel content. They poured billions into all manner of series and films, the quality has steadily declined, and despite being cheaper and easier to access than most, people have still managed to get sick of it. And however you want to slice it one thing AI cannot overcome is that it cannot create new, novel concepts: it can only remix and recombine existing things into new combinations. This is probably good for hobby tier stuff, but for industry? This is going to crater VERY quickly I believe.
> I'm certainly curious what the modern equivalent to Karl Marx publishes, and how much it will differ from The Communist Manifesto.
I enjoy David Graeber personally.
> The argument you're making doesn't appear to care about the differences — it should bite on both, or neither.
I mean there are definitely things to be said about outsourcing in that conversation, the incentives at play that make these animators willing/interested in learning a style of animation that is not part of their culture, the benefits involved in their education, why they're paid a fraction of what westerners would be for the same work while the product is then sold for the same if not a higher price. I just don't think it's relevant, they're still people and still work within the limitations of people. You're not talking about a widget press that forges 10 widgets with the work of a single operator vs. a blacksmith making them by hand with regard to generative art, you're talking a widget press that uses less resources to produce effectively infinite widgets at incredible paces that are simply unfathomable to the blacksmith, and also somehow the machine stole the souls of millions of blacksmiths to enable it to work.
The metaphors just break down when talking about this, because of the sheer differentials involved.
The average CEO last 5years. You've listed a 15 and 20 year old movie. You don't see a difference in the quality of the storytelling in Pixar movies? You don't see Disney movies checking boxes rather than telling stories?
People are talked down to all day at their corporate fake work job. They want a break from the HR speak in their entertainment. Its really not hard to figure out.
Personally, watch what every you want. But every criticism of Disney the last 5 years is meet with ism's. Disney has been making bad movies for 5 years. Bad stories, bad special effects, bad leadership.
Stretching out the subscription time seems like another big deal. Disney+ seems to have worked out a magnificently infuriating cadence of one interesting episode per week. There’s always just enough around the corner to not cancel the subscription…
lobotomized AI assistant future is already a done deal to me. For that to not happen we would need to be laying the foundations right now with these organizations operating on absolutist 90s cyberpunk values. Pretty much the opposite is happening.
The future is a dystopian G rated Disney movie with authoritarian undertones.
Yes. If you get sued as a company for e.g. negligence, and it's pretty clear you're not going to win by attacking the point directly, the two go-to arguments are:
1. I did not know, and whilst I have a duty to know, in this case I was intentionally misled by others and couldn't have possibly known: I _did_ do my DD on asking for this information, however, I was lied to.
2. Okay, you got me, you win your case. Now I go sue the seller for having failed to disclose and making them pay me the same amount as I have to pay you.
Both of which are severely hampered by not reading the DD. At best you could say that by not doing the DD at all, you insta-lose on the first point (you have a duty to ask, if you can't show that you asked, you lose immediately). However, given that you now received it, it seems like a significant misunderstanding of the situation if you then don't get some intern to read it and highlight dubious lines and cross check a few things.
It's possible this is just the same shit moneyball is about: Lawyers putting a lot of stock in looking around and seeing what the rest of the lawyer clan does, and not using the brain whatsoever, trusting _entirely_ on the gut instinct of 'yes, this feels familiar and it is what we all always do, therefore, surely it must be fine'.
Case in point: Email footers claiming 'if you aren't the intended recipient, you must delete it; all this stuff is confidential' are fucking retarded. Obviously it's not legally binding (if it was, I can wrap a note 'you indemnify me by receiving this object' around a brick and throw it through your window!), it looks stupid if it's at the bottom of e.g. a press release you mailed to a newspaper, 'not the intended recipient' is not something you could possibly prove (hey, you mailed it to me, therefore I am the intended recipient), and by not suing those in evident breach of your clause, you establish that you don't enforce it. If you then attempt to sue somebody for disclosing actually private information that was clearly under NDA or whatnot, they can make a plausible defense in court that you never sue anybody for it and that therefore this is just picking and choosing, which has some legal legs.
And yet _every lawyer office and almost all businesses with a legal team_ does this, as do many companies with nothing like it (presumably, those'd be cargo culting, the legal companies / companies with legal teams are actively lemmings jumping off the cliff to follow their pals).
Possibly they do it because they know others expect them to, but I find it dubious that it's a good idea to actively do stupid shit just because people _think_ it's smart. It's not like having a footer makes you stand out these days. On the contrary.
) Yes, disney movie, lemmings don't actually do that. Which makes these companies even dumber, no?
I'm not sure if that's true though - If I subscribe to Disney+ for a month and watch hours of movies and TV shows that I enjoy, someone from Disney doesn't come by my house and mind-wipe me when unsubscribe.
What's left when I cancel a media subscription is all the enjoyment I had in the past while engaging with the media it provided, and maybe the conversations I had with friends or family about the Baseball game we all watched. They don't "leave nothing" any more than going to spend time with a friend leaves you with nothing when you come home after.
That seems meaningfully different than something like Adobe CS or a VPN - When I cancel my VPN subscription, I no longer have a VPN. I don't subscribe to Adobe CS because I inherently enjoy my time using Adobe CS, I do it because it's helpful for a hobby or job I have.
As does every other corporation that puts up a rainbow lag the second its pride month. Blackrock, McDonnel Douglas and Exxon are really trying to be on the right side of history here, folks! Ask Disney if they show the same movies in China.
Its all just kowtowing to the power of the Global American Empire legislated by misguided civil rights legislation, enforced by the politcommissars in HR. Every culture has a right to protect its values.
Agreed. I think the premise is sound. I feel like the US needs to incorporate a new right, similar to the separation of church and state but instead focused on the separation of politics and companies. I have no idea how politics would be defined or how it would be enforced. However similar to the premise of this article I think the one thing both sides can agree on is all of this became worse and jaded when companies became self aware and brandished a political agenda.
I mean if we want free speech how can their be disinformation? Even if crazy earl wants to talk about the “good old days” where women stayed home and cooked all day why does a company need to take a stand on eliminating that post?
Why do people working at companies feel compelled to incorporate their beliefs into their work? Disney makes movies for kids. I understand that a small % of the population feels marginalized because they don’t have direct representation in media, but kids are inpressional, and if we want to be “Fair” we’d present ALL sides, from straight, to gay, from hero to terrorist. Or Disney could go back to making neutral kids movies about fictional talking animals struggling through life. Why do they need to take a stance on something.
You're making my point for me. The US was capable of fighting multiple wars against the English without a campaign of dehumanization against all people of English descent, based on claims that the English were inherently and irredeemably savage and uncivilized.
I invite you to find a Disney movie with caricatures of English people that portrays them with exaggerated features, outlandish clothing, and speaking incomprehensibly, and where non-English people then dress and act like them as a goofy lark. The best I can think of is specific goofs on the English aristocracy at specific historical times (like revolutionary America) -- as opposed to American Indians, who were often shown to just be primitive barbarians, whether it was in the 1700s, 1800s or 1900s.
Resources like storage and bandwidth aren’t free. People won’t pay to host strangers content for free forever, especially with the personal legal risk that entails, so you’re going to need to pay regularly to host content which isn’t both very popular and under an open license, which is the content which is most reliably replicated now at much lower cost.
Similarly, there’s a lot of mythology about content not being censorable which falls apart as soon as you think about it. People still have to follow the law in their country: if you upload a Disney movie to IPFS, their lawyers will send takedowns to everyone hosting it. Just as with other P2P services, anyone using it will be deterred by the risk of your ISPs cutting your service if you don’t comply with legal requirements but unlike its more efficient and private alternatives these services are both public (making it easier to track users) and the blockchain services handily provide a signed statement for prosecutors, which seems unlikely to be a popular feature for anyone who actually needs it.
That’s the key difference between the early internet and “web3”: those early efforts were building things people outside of that community clearly wanted but the latter is what happened when people spent a decade pumping money into cryptocurrencies in the hopes of one day becoming rich and are now desperately searching around for reasons why everyone else should pay a premium for their random numbers. It never goes well when the conversation starts with what you’d like to sell someone rather than what they need.
$8/mo is genuinely a lot of money for this kind of infrastructure, even if there are developers and servers to be paid for. Assume that there are only 100,000 users. This would imply $9.6M per year in revenue to cover infrastructure and dev salaries for a system that handles ~2 queries/day/customer! And 100,000 is a very small number. Presumably Toyota has millions of customers.
If you think that's reasonable, consider that Disney+ charges $8/mo for a system that streams gigabytes of HD video, and they still have money left over to pay actual movie stars.
Businesses shouldn't care about business they should only care about my own personal view point on politics.
Yeah, Hollywood is doing the same thing as Kodak. I don't have your will power though. I still watch movies, especially Marvel and Disney. But at least I admit it.
What pisses me off is a friend of mine who boycotted a company who supported China but then he still watches American movies. Like do you not realize the whole industry is sucking up to China? Either make a stand for real or don't make a stand at all, don't be a hypocrite.
*Obviously* you're not doing what my friend is doing. You're *Obviously* not a hypocrite. You must not watch any movies or TV shows at all.
Personally I am finding all these services increasingly useless. Netflix has second-tier content mostly, and I now look at Netflix original content as a sign that something is not worth watching. As for Disney+ - a lot of it just feels like the same content rehashed over and over, particularly with Marvel. I feel like YouTube is just as fine a way to spend time. I've already cancelled some subscriptions, and am likely to get rid of others. We need better alternatives to the few big players. Hopefully this is the beginning of a broader reckoning and decentralization of where users spend time.
I think the article nails it, they seem to be filtering out anything that might offend contemporary leftest values. A lot of the stuff from the 40s would never be produced today i.e. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TZkcsIb2l3A or even https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sAELs42aZt4 but I'd say that censoring it is akin to denying the holocaust -- if you pretend it didn't happen then you don't learn the lesson.
Nobody seems to censor the leprechauns or gangster characters.
Disney seems to get a pass for an inventory of issues https://www.insider.com/moments-themes-in-disney-movies-that-havent-aged-well-problematic - they would have nothing left if you filtered all their content for modern political correctness. What message does it send when Prince Charming always has to rescue the princess? And so on..
The crux of the argument really focuses on that "for profit" bit, and that's really a conundrum in corporate governance. The problem isn't at all "corporations", which are just assemblies of humans for a common purpose, but is the specific, legally-arguable requirement that their ultimate purpose is maximizing profit. The contrasting idea is the "public benefit corporation", where you're (presumably? IANAL) legally obligated to funnel your profits back into doing the job of the business better).
From a legal/ideological standpoint, this might be a powerful soft-pivot that would solve a lot of problems.
There's a famous line from Walt Disney, during Disney's golden age, where he said "we don't make movies so we can make money - we make money, so we can make movies". That really hits at the heart of it.
The interesting thing is that, to a large degree, most of the meaningful corporations that improve the world - despite nominally being for-profit companies, generally tend to operate halfways into public-benefit territory. Partly because the benefit provided by them is essentially what the owners are "buying for themselves". To put it in perspective - if you're an extravagantly wealthy patron who wants to - themselves - have animated films to watch, you can't just hire some off-the-shelf people to do it, because they don't exist unless an industry to train them, exists. There's not really a "more narrowly selfish" way to do it - you're best served by building some outfit like Disney to build a brain trust of people to produce what you want.
Similarly with Amazon; sure, an extravagantly wealthy individual could probably accomplish the shipping part of it with personal couriers, but the information-gathering part of it where all the products-available-to-buy are laid in front of you as choices would be nearly impossible to match. Like, you could try to match it with some awful, personal, potemkin setup. But by the time you put in all of that effort ... I mean, you're basically already building what could be a business that could serve others, so you may as well.
Boycott everything Made in China (I’ve been doing it for years, and it’s not that difficult.. I mean if you can find alternative for 9 out of 10 goods then it’s of course still a big win). Similarly, boycott companies that kowtow to China (you can probably save a lot of money by doing so, e.g. by pirating all Disney movies/tv series instead of going to the cinema/paying for Disney+).
Support companies that voice support for those oppressed by the CCP (such as ProtonVPN, Notepad++).
Vote for politicians that are not afraid to stand up to CCP (I for instance voted for Trump despite having my political views mostly align with Sanders - solely due to his anti-China stance.. you can of course also argue that his administration has singlehandedly done more to stand up to China than the rest of the world combined in the past couple decades).
Spread awareness of China’s atrocities. If more people realized that CCP are even more evil and dangerous than Nazi Germany then we’d likely see more aggressive policies towards China (such as banning their companies from our markets, keeping the tariffs (Biden said he’d end them) - hopefully with other countries similarly implementing tariffs).
YouTube is the one-stop-shop of internet videos. Any specific niche has a competitor, but none of them seriously competes with the whole of YouTube.
I noticed the outage because I wanted to watch a stream, so I might go to Twitch now. Often I use Youtube for music, where Spotify is a solid alternative with many of the same creators. If I want to see that video from reddit of people throwing burning flares at a balcony I can probably find it on LiveLeak. Many of the educational channels I've subscribed are also on Nebula, but I could also watch a documentary on Netflix or Disney+ instead.
Yes, I started with a massive Windows 8 Media center PC in 2003 which evolved to an Xbox1 with XBMC, followed by a couple of all in one PCs which could load standalone XBMC Linux based kernels by 2010.
Around 2015, I switched to having a Synology NAS hold the content with small streaming devices around the house with Plex running on both ends.
But these days 99% of the content we want is on Netflix, HBO Max, or Disney+. We occasionally rent movies via AppleTV. I can get all the content I want more conveniently through these services. And I am rarely debugging the setup during a family movie night while my wife and daughters groan about how my stuff never works.
I think it'd depend how convincing you were on exclusives. While the biggest movies aren't being made by streaming companies I think there'll always be a market for being able to see the biggest movies earliest. Keeping everything in today's timeline, Disney+ would probably be the biggest reason to think you wouldn't succeed - because now a bunch of the biggest movies are being made by a streaming company.
But copyright is not 5 years right now, it's 70 years after the death of the creator. You say the longer the period, the greater the incentive to invest, but there are definitely diminishing returns there. Does anyone actually believe we would have greater investment if it was 80 years? Or 90 years? Maybe it should be 300 years, for all those companies looking for investments that take centuries to be realized.
And look at all amazing work that has been produced based on public domain works, the Disney movie empire was basically created on it.
I think we can pretty much say that yes, reduced copyright terms would increase the types of movies that we see.
> I respect their ability to make a ton of money, but I don't like a majority of what they create anymore, nor how they treat a majority of their employees.
That's a really good summation of my views on Disney. It's obvious they know how to build consistently polished stories that will be consistently enjoyable to a wide audience. I respect that.
But it's not clear to me that's a goal worth pursuing, or that the artistic value of their movies has gone up because of that. It's good to have some media that's safe and predictable and that is primarily motivated by market trends. But when that's all a company is making, then behind that nice facade lies a deeply cynical way of looking at the world, where creative choices are calculated for broad appeal rather than for their inherent value.
I'm not going to say that's all Disney makes. Just that the percentage of films Disney is making that fall into that category is growing at a rapid clip.
It's a jaded view in the sense that I'm cynical about Disney, but it's really not me trying to crap on popular things. There are a lot of popular things that are really, really good. But I know when a movie actually feels special and honest to me, when I feel like the author genuinely had a good reason to make it, and made it because they loved it. And Disney movies don't feel that way to me. They're glossy, and pretty, and impressive, and they know the right things to say, but they're made of plastic instead of flesh.
Opinion: Disney content these days is absolutely awful. I'm not enjoying the films, the shows, or anything really. They spend more time doing remakes for a global audience (read. China), and compromise the quality of the end result.
Anyone who watches Hulu has heard "will play with a commercial before and after the show". Hulu has been increasing the number of ads they include. It used to be ad free for many shows. Then they went to 30 second ads. Now they're stuffing 180 seconds or more on many shows.
> higher quality (arguably) shows
Definitely arguable. My feeling is the quality is going down quite a bit, but I think that's because the demand for content volume has increased (in the era of binge watching, a single TV series is started and over in one weekend).
> Additionally, it’s possible to just subscribe to the one service you really like because they all have a lot of content.
This might be true now. But there are multiple high profile streaming services launching in the next year (e.g. Disney+), which is prompting Disney to pull all content off other platforms.
I feel a large part of HN are single people with no kids so you are not going to find anything good or insightful when it comes to parenting.
There are two main schools of thought on the issue you mentioned - 1 let them learn early / no major electronics filter (I grew up watching tv I am fine crowd)
- 2 let’s not let them have stuff they don’t understand.( I personally fall in this crowd)
I think both options have their pros and cons. Given “right” and “wrong” as a measure is always relative, you need to consider the if your actions ultimately help them or hurt them in the long term goals which generally for parents is to raise kids that are responsible and self sufficient and take care of themselves in a unknown future. Once you (and your spouse) have a agreed “North Star” it’s easier to set the rules, enforce them and lead by example.
Edited to add below answer
-Do you limit screentime writ large with an overall limit?
No “limit”. The rule is as little as possible.
- Do you set limits on the kind of screentime they get?
Yes- when we do show it’s either selected cartoons or nature or nova documentaries. The latter two is not a deliberate thing but mostly because I like to watch them they like to see it too. No Disney. Hate it with a passion. Their message is overwhelmingly emotional and romantic. In general I stay away from “movies” type things where there is a larger plot
- What protocol do you follow (X hrs per day, have to ask first, but are typically no more than) have to ask is the baseline. Also they don’t know how to operate the tv(yet). Typically if it’s been more than one hour of their cartoons in a day they are done. I might allow them to watch documentary or half if I am watching it.
- What do you do if they truly want to do something educational/positive with screentime but have hit their limits? Not have encountered this scenario but if I did I would not give them their screen time and have them understand that this time they used up their “credits” but next time they can plan for it. Just like how the real world works.
If Disney had been found to be doing this with their own films, would the CEO of Disney be in jail? This case always felt extremely punitive due to the content and the size of the company.
"After a few weeks it’s no longer in theaters. You can’t buy it. You can’t rent it. The only way to watch is to subscribe to Disney’s steaming service, Disney+. "
WRONG.
Any movie or TV show is on bittorrent for free. It's simply not the case that the only way to watch it in that situation is thru subscribing to a streaming service.
I take a boycott from buying Disney products (including movie tickets / movies). I will gladly watch their movies if a friend has a copy (copyright law still hasn't taken that freedom away from me), but if no-one has a copy the movie couldn't have been that good anyway. :P
* Why I can't slice a queue by facets (genre, year, rating, stars, etc.)?
* Why I can't control the queues of my children (I really want them to stay away from the brain-washing Disney stuff, for example)?
* Why main account's viewing activity includes sub-accounts, too (in my case, the main account is me and my wife, children have their sub-queues)?
I find less and less value in Netflix. Recently, I buy more stuff on Vudu, Amazon Instant Videos, and even Google Play. Netflix should rebrand to OldFlix or KidFlix as the there's very little quality available for streaming. I really don't get why they didn't implement Amazon's model earlier - offer a fixed selection for the monthly price and then pay per rental or purchase of individual titles not available with the subscription. Maybe they have licensing/contract issues, but if Amazon could do it, they should've done it, too. I'm not into TV shows, but it seems that they are trying to compensate with "Netflix Originals", which works for some, but not for me.
More to the point, who wants to explain to their kids that they aren't allowed to watch Disney movies because of their dad's "public politics" (as right as those politics may be)
Hacker Cinema
48 comments on Hacker News
The situation has changed quite a lot with digitalization. When copyright was developed, giving up the right to copy something had low cost - you needed to have a printing press. Now you can’t even read a book without making multiple copies, so the cost of giving up copy right is a lot higher. The benefits to society of securing an exclusive right to control copies is possibly unchanged, or perhaps less as the writings can no longer be retelling of common stories (e.g. Disney movies from Grimm brothers; Shakespeare mixing popular stories into brilliant plays). I suspect making the timelines of copy right protection be shorter (as culture speeds up) rather than longer as we have done, due to the weirdly long lifetime of corporations, would fix most of the issues. Invention would be rewarded without the creation of IP monopolies and the restriction of mixing existing stuff as a creative method, and the loss of the right to copy stuff you have paid for all lessened.
Definitely seems reasonable to say "you can train on this data but you have to have a legal copy"
Personally I like to frame most AI problems by substituting a human (or humans) for the AI. Works pretty well most of the time.
In this case if you hired a bunch of artists/writers that somehow had never seen a Disney movie and to train them to make crappy Disney clones you made them watch all the movies it certainly would be legal to do so but only if they had legit copies in the training room. Pirating the movies would be illegal.
Though the downside is it does create a training moat. If you want to create the super-brain AI that's conversant on the corpus of copyrighted human literature you're going to need a training library worth millions
The law should allow for training, but not reproduction. That would be compatible with the world that seems to be emerging.
You can train on Disney, but you can't produce Disney outputs.
Likewise, if you create some new IP using AI, the US will confer copyright so long as there was sufficient user input (eg. inpainting, editing, turning it into a long-form movie, etc.) Those new, sufficiently novel works should also be copyrightable.
Copyright should compel people to make good stuff and reward them when they do so. But it shouldn't hinder technological progress. There's a balance that can be struck.
Copyright isn’t real, and gatekeeping pop culture in this fashion is ahistorical and revisionist, it’s literally not a thing that existed like this until the 19th or even 20th century.
You can always pirate media/movies, above all else. Absolutely a case of it being always morally justified, unironically. Letting corpos take our popular social culture away with 150+ year exclusivity periods was never the intention.
Disney could not have been started today, the modern copyright law is corpos pulling up the ladder after stealing from the public domain themselves, openly and blatantly. They picked the public domain into their pocket and charge us to rent it back.
I won't pay for Youtube, ever, because even if I pay, I still get sponsored segments in videos. To skip these, I have to get SponsorBlock so I might as well block ads too. Maybe if Youtube Premium also gave access to the same videos without sponsored segments I would reconsider.
The thing is Youtube screwed themselves years ago: they were dicks to content creators (by being overly agressive with demonetizing, even giving creators money to DMCA trolls and completely ignoring fair use laws) so they couldn't rely on ad money and had to fallback to sponsoring instead. The shit situation we're in today il all Youtube's fault.
On the other hand, I pay for Crunchyroll because it has a huge catalog for 5 bucks a month, and for Netflix because they never pissed me yet. However if they increase their subscription price one more time (>13.49€ per month), I'm out for good.
I already unsubscribed from Disney+ because they pissed me off by removing shows without any warning, and from Prime Video because I got tired of finding movies just to realize they weren't actually included in the subscription.
>So I don’t buy Apple’s argument that developers must pay them for the core technology that the iPhone user has already paid them for.
The argument is pretty straightforward actually: the iPhone SDK is Apple's intellectual property and they can charge whatever they want. The fact that developers have to pay for Macs and iPhones to make apps and users have to buy iPhones (all of which Apple makes a margin on) is irrelevant. Copyright doesn't have a "but if you're already making money off of it you can't charge people other ways" clause. Disney makes money off of you when you watch their movie in theaters, stream them at home, buy their branded merch, and go to their theme parks. Nobody calls the royalties/licensing fees that Disney makes off of the above items a "Fleece", even though you arguably need to buy one of them to enjoy the other (would you really buy their merch if you don't watch their shows?), or that their IPs would be less valuable if one of the revenue streams didn't exist.
All of this is orthogonal to the question of what apple is doing is "fair" or whether is good for consumers/developers/apple, and I wish discussions on whatever Apple is doing wouldn't conflate what they're entitled to do vs what they should do. In other words, rather than arguing "The technology fee is a fleece, they shouldn't be charging the fee when they're already making money off developer machines and iPhones", argue "Apple is entitled to make money off their SDKs, but it'll be better for consumers/developers/apple/everyone if their SDKs were freely available". But I suspect that's less persuasive. The DMA throws a further wrench into this, because it limits what Apple can do with their IP, but given that the article doesn't try to reference any DMA provisions to support his argument, I don't think the author is interested in this line of argument.
I work in the edge research and your claims are exaggerated at best.
As I said, YouTube quality is already there. But cinema quality still requires VFX people because gen AI hallucinates a lot of weird stuff like 7 fingers on a hand.
You need to think of gen AI like self driving cars. We’ve had semi-autonomous cars for years already but they’re still unsafe to be fully self driving. You still need a human to make corrections. And the same is true for gen AI.
Until the acceptance ratio improves drastically, gen AI is not going to replace Disney.
Most of it seems to be B-tier formulaic. Good enough to not be awful if you're into that genre, but nothing amazing.
Where Netflix pays off for me is their purchases of the rights to foreign shows and films.
That and the occasional mainstream movie or original makes it a decent deal.
I find the sameness of Disney+ to be worse than Netflix, personally. But they have they are anchored by their big movies and Star Wars -- beyond that there is no depth at all.
I suspect bots and astroturfing are far more common than people think on social media.
It would certainly explain why Disney movies are tanking while social media looks good for them.
I think you'll be surprised how economical DVDs can be bought for.
Also why limit to 1 year's budget? The magic of owning assets over renting is you keep them. If you spend 100$ a year on DVDs you'll fill up a shelf in short order.
Best of all: you can pick what you want. So often I've read a recommendation for a high quality movie only to have no method to watch it despite paying for Disney and Netflix. I remember as a kid Netflix had everything, now it appears to have nothing. Meanwhile the high quality classics are the exact ones cheap and easy to buy in DVD form.
Not to mention, this year is only the start. If streaming services are not bad enough value for you now, wait a few years. They are only going to get worse.
As an alternative to your anecdote I pirated media heavily from my teens into my mid 20s. Then I graduated college, got a job, and streaming came out.
I basically stopped piracy entirely because it was pointless at that point. It was reasonably priced and easy. The only time I pirated things was when I wanted something niche that wasn’t available on platforms. Like an art house film with weird distribution rights or an mtv cartoon from the early 2000s with the original soundtrack that still can’t be released that way because the song clearances aren’t happening
But now it’s like $60+ a month for Netflix/hulu/disney+/peacock. A lot of the time they don’t have what I want, that’s on paramount plus, appletv, max, crunchy roll, etc and I’m not spending another $20+ a month to add yet another. They almost all have intrusive advertisements that get longer and longer. The ads are somehow worse than cable because they can’t seem to sell the ad space. I only seem to get the same 4-5 ads over and over which is torture. The apps are all ugly with awful ui/ux and the library organization is completely arbitrary. There is rarely an ability to filter or sort the library and they are always loaded with filler content to pad the numbers.
So a decade or so later I’m strongly considering a media server. It was plex last time but I think jellyfin now. Better ui/ux than streaming apps, better video quality, better library sorting, no ads, and all I need is relatively cheap hardware and a Usenet subscription. This wasn’t worth the bother when the alternative was $20/mo for Netflix/hulu.
Consider music piracy too. I can’t ever see myself pirating music again even though I grew up in the Napster era where downloading mp3s was entirely normalized and the thing to do. But the idea of downloading albums, ensuring I get the correct quality, they have correct album art/id3 tags, etc for the amount of music I listen to is a goddamn chore. I would much rather just pay Apple Music. They don’t have these issues. They don’t have fragmented libraries. They don’t force ads even though I already pay them. They don’t hide half the library behind “curated content”. Its not 100% perfect by any means. Sometimes I get censored songs, sometimes I can’t find remixes, alt takes, or live versions I want, etc. but 99% of the time it does what I want and it’s just easier than managing my own library. Unless they fuck this up I will never pirate music again. Tv/movie companies don’t seem to get this.
> Sure. And? This is the exact same problem with offshoring to sweatshops, and also with all automation from the pottery wheel onwards; and in the industrial revolution this automation happened in a way to cause the invention of Communism.
Yes but crucially: the industrial revolution and automation in general has historically been targeted at things of need, in various stripes: one can argue that the demand for goods, be they food, cellphones, televisions, cars, what have you makes automation extremely helpful: yes there was a period where laborers were replaced and priced out of the market, but many eventually returned. The ability to produce 65" televisions at scale and sell them for cheap enough to let people buy them at scale has led to the prices of televisions cratering, and in the context of products consumed by large portions of the market, this is a desirable and good thing (with caveats).
This breaks down with creative output though. No matter how cheap they are, one person can only consume so many, for example, movies and television shows. Even if generative movies were a thing (I don't think they are yet?) and you could produce them just block by block at scale... there's a ceiling there. People can only consume so many movies. You will saturate that market incredibly quickly, and even that is assuming the market of moviegoers will be interested in an AI movie.
Hell, Disney has already learned this without even needing AI to do it. A big part of their ongoing failure that is their streaming service is they completely and utterly saturated the market for Marvel content. They poured billions into all manner of series and films, the quality has steadily declined, and despite being cheaper and easier to access than most, people have still managed to get sick of it. And however you want to slice it one thing AI cannot overcome is that it cannot create new, novel concepts: it can only remix and recombine existing things into new combinations. This is probably good for hobby tier stuff, but for industry? This is going to crater VERY quickly I believe.
> I'm certainly curious what the modern equivalent to Karl Marx publishes, and how much it will differ from The Communist Manifesto.
I enjoy David Graeber personally.
> The argument you're making doesn't appear to care about the differences — it should bite on both, or neither.
I mean there are definitely things to be said about outsourcing in that conversation, the incentives at play that make these animators willing/interested in learning a style of animation that is not part of their culture, the benefits involved in their education, why they're paid a fraction of what westerners would be for the same work while the product is then sold for the same if not a higher price. I just don't think it's relevant, they're still people and still work within the limitations of people. You're not talking about a widget press that forges 10 widgets with the work of a single operator vs. a blacksmith making them by hand with regard to generative art, you're talking a widget press that uses less resources to produce effectively infinite widgets at incredible paces that are simply unfathomable to the blacksmith, and also somehow the machine stole the souls of millions of blacksmiths to enable it to work.
The metaphors just break down when talking about this, because of the sheer differentials involved.
The average CEO last 5years. You've listed a 15 and 20 year old movie. You don't see a difference in the quality of the storytelling in Pixar movies? You don't see Disney movies checking boxes rather than telling stories?
People are talked down to all day at their corporate fake work job. They want a break from the HR speak in their entertainment. Its really not hard to figure out.
Personally, watch what every you want. But every criticism of Disney the last 5 years is meet with ism's. Disney has been making bad movies for 5 years. Bad stories, bad special effects, bad leadership.
Stretching out the subscription time seems like another big deal. Disney+ seems to have worked out a magnificently infuriating cadence of one interesting episode per week. There’s always just enough around the corner to not cancel the subscription…
> Accordingly, Disney will even restrict the availability of their old movies on DVD.
I don't know if this applies to Disney given they just launched a massive streaming service containing almost all of their back catalogue.
lobotomized AI assistant future is already a done deal to me. For that to not happen we would need to be laying the foundations right now with these organizations operating on absolutist 90s cyberpunk values. Pretty much the opposite is happening.
The future is a dystopian G rated Disney movie with authoritarian undertones.
Yes. If you get sued as a company for e.g. negligence, and it's pretty clear you're not going to win by attacking the point directly, the two go-to arguments are:
1. I did not know, and whilst I have a duty to know, in this case I was intentionally misled by others and couldn't have possibly known: I _did_ do my DD on asking for this information, however, I was lied to.
2. Okay, you got me, you win your case. Now I go sue the seller for having failed to disclose and making them pay me the same amount as I have to pay you.
Both of which are severely hampered by not reading the DD. At best you could say that by not doing the DD at all, you insta-lose on the first point (you have a duty to ask, if you can't show that you asked, you lose immediately). However, given that you now received it, it seems like a significant misunderstanding of the situation if you then don't get some intern to read it and highlight dubious lines and cross check a few things.
It's possible this is just the same shit moneyball is about: Lawyers putting a lot of stock in looking around and seeing what the rest of the lawyer clan does, and not using the brain whatsoever, trusting _entirely_ on the gut instinct of 'yes, this feels familiar and it is what we all always do, therefore, surely it must be fine'.
Case in point: Email footers claiming 'if you aren't the intended recipient, you must delete it; all this stuff is confidential' are fucking retarded. Obviously it's not legally binding (if it was, I can wrap a note 'you indemnify me by receiving this object' around a brick and throw it through your window!), it looks stupid if it's at the bottom of e.g. a press release you mailed to a newspaper, 'not the intended recipient' is not something you could possibly prove (hey, you mailed it to me, therefore I am the intended recipient), and by not suing those in evident breach of your clause, you establish that you don't enforce it. If you then attempt to sue somebody for disclosing actually private information that was clearly under NDA or whatnot, they can make a plausible defense in court that you never sue anybody for it and that therefore this is just picking and choosing, which has some legal legs.
And yet _every lawyer office and almost all businesses with a legal team_ does this, as do many companies with nothing like it (presumably, those'd be cargo culting, the legal companies / companies with legal teams are actively lemmings jumping off the cliff to follow their pals).
Possibly they do it because they know others expect them to, but I find it dubious that it's a good idea to actively do stupid shit just because people _think_ it's smart. It's not like having a footer makes you stand out these days. On the contrary.
) Yes, disney movie, lemmings don't actually do that. Which makes these companies even dumber, no?
In Chromium-based browsers, you can do it in Dev Tools > "three dots menu" > More Tools > Network Conditions > User Agent > "Chrome - Windows"
This worked for me and I was able to watch a movie last night in Disney+, using Brave Browser on Ubuntu 22.04.
The only problem is that, unlike the one in Firefox, this is not a permanent setting, it's only applied to the current tab.
I'm not sure if that's true though - If I subscribe to Disney+ for a month and watch hours of movies and TV shows that I enjoy, someone from Disney doesn't come by my house and mind-wipe me when unsubscribe.
What's left when I cancel a media subscription is all the enjoyment I had in the past while engaging with the media it provided, and maybe the conversations I had with friends or family about the Baseball game we all watched. They don't "leave nothing" any more than going to spend time with a friend leaves you with nothing when you come home after.
That seems meaningfully different than something like Adobe CS or a VPN - When I cancel my VPN subscription, I no longer have a VPN. I don't subscribe to Adobe CS because I inherently enjoy my time using Adobe CS, I do it because it's helpful for a hobby or job I have.
Disney will continue producing low-quality content so long as fanboys continue paying to see the movies and buying the merchandise.
As does every other corporation that puts up a rainbow lag the second its pride month. Blackrock, McDonnel Douglas and Exxon are really trying to be on the right side of history here, folks! Ask Disney if they show the same movies in China.
Its all just kowtowing to the power of the Global American Empire legislated by misguided civil rights legislation, enforced by the politcommissars in HR. Every culture has a right to protect its values.
Agreed. I think the premise is sound. I feel like the US needs to incorporate a new right, similar to the separation of church and state but instead focused on the separation of politics and companies. I have no idea how politics would be defined or how it would be enforced. However similar to the premise of this article I think the one thing both sides can agree on is all of this became worse and jaded when companies became self aware and brandished a political agenda.
I mean if we want free speech how can their be disinformation? Even if crazy earl wants to talk about the “good old days” where women stayed home and cooked all day why does a company need to take a stand on eliminating that post?
Why do people working at companies feel compelled to incorporate their beliefs into their work? Disney makes movies for kids. I understand that a small % of the population feels marginalized because they don’t have direct representation in media, but kids are inpressional, and if we want to be “Fair” we’d present ALL sides, from straight, to gay, from hero to terrorist. Or Disney could go back to making neutral kids movies about fictional talking animals struggling through life. Why do they need to take a stance on something.
It is a business decision. If people don't like it they can unsubscribe from Disney+ and not watch Disney movies or Marvel comic books.
You're making my point for me. The US was capable of fighting multiple wars against the English without a campaign of dehumanization against all people of English descent, based on claims that the English were inherently and irredeemably savage and uncivilized.
I invite you to find a Disney movie with caricatures of English people that portrays them with exaggerated features, outlandish clothing, and speaking incomprehensibly, and where non-English people then dress and act like them as a goofy lark. The best I can think of is specific goofs on the English aristocracy at specific historical times (like revolutionary America) -- as opposed to American Indians, who were often shown to just be primitive barbarians, whether it was in the 1700s, 1800s or 1900s.
Resources like storage and bandwidth aren’t free. People won’t pay to host strangers content for free forever, especially with the personal legal risk that entails, so you’re going to need to pay regularly to host content which isn’t both very popular and under an open license, which is the content which is most reliably replicated now at much lower cost.
Similarly, there’s a lot of mythology about content not being censorable which falls apart as soon as you think about it. People still have to follow the law in their country: if you upload a Disney movie to IPFS, their lawyers will send takedowns to everyone hosting it. Just as with other P2P services, anyone using it will be deterred by the risk of your ISPs cutting your service if you don’t comply with legal requirements but unlike its more efficient and private alternatives these services are both public (making it easier to track users) and the blockchain services handily provide a signed statement for prosecutors, which seems unlikely to be a popular feature for anyone who actually needs it.
That’s the key difference between the early internet and “web3”: those early efforts were building things people outside of that community clearly wanted but the latter is what happened when people spent a decade pumping money into cryptocurrencies in the hopes of one day becoming rich and are now desperately searching around for reasons why everyone else should pay a premium for their random numbers. It never goes well when the conversation starts with what you’d like to sell someone rather than what they need.
$8/mo is genuinely a lot of money for this kind of infrastructure, even if there are developers and servers to be paid for. Assume that there are only 100,000 users. This would imply $9.6M per year in revenue to cover infrastructure and dev salaries for a system that handles ~2 queries/day/customer! And 100,000 is a very small number. Presumably Toyota has millions of customers.
If you think that's reasonable, consider that Disney+ charges $8/mo for a system that streams gigabytes of HD video, and they still have money left over to pay actual movie stars.
Businesses shouldn't care about business they should only care about my own personal view point on politics.
Yeah, Hollywood is doing the same thing as Kodak. I don't have your will power though. I still watch movies, especially Marvel and Disney. But at least I admit it.
What pisses me off is a friend of mine who boycotted a company who supported China but then he still watches American movies. Like do you not realize the whole industry is sucking up to China? Either make a stand for real or don't make a stand at all, don't be a hypocrite.
*Obviously* you're not doing what my friend is doing. You're *Obviously* not a hypocrite. You must not watch any movies or TV shows at all.
Personally I am finding all these services increasingly useless. Netflix has second-tier content mostly, and I now look at Netflix original content as a sign that something is not worth watching. As for Disney+ - a lot of it just feels like the same content rehashed over and over, particularly with Marvel. I feel like YouTube is just as fine a way to spend time. I've already cancelled some subscriptions, and am likely to get rid of others. We need better alternatives to the few big players. Hopefully this is the beginning of a broader reckoning and decentralization of where users spend time.
> the appeal of Roblox compared to Disney+, arguably the finest destination for 8 year olds, is that, on the face of it, Roblox is "free."
Um, no. Roblox is a gaming platform with a somewhat kid-friendly social network. You're comparing going to the movies vs. going to the arcade.
I think the article nails it, they seem to be filtering out anything that might offend contemporary leftest values. A lot of the stuff from the 40s would never be produced today i.e. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TZkcsIb2l3A or even https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sAELs42aZt4 but I'd say that censoring it is akin to denying the holocaust -- if you pretend it didn't happen then you don't learn the lesson.
Nobody seems to censor the leprechauns or gangster characters. Disney seems to get a pass for an inventory of issues https://www.insider.com/moments-themes-in-disney-movies-that-havent-aged-well-problematic - they would have nothing left if you filtered all their content for modern political correctness. What message does it send when Prince Charming always has to rescue the princess? And so on..
The crux of the argument really focuses on that "for profit" bit, and that's really a conundrum in corporate governance. The problem isn't at all "corporations", which are just assemblies of humans for a common purpose, but is the specific, legally-arguable requirement that their ultimate purpose is maximizing profit. The contrasting idea is the "public benefit corporation", where you're (presumably? IANAL) legally obligated to funnel your profits back into doing the job of the business better).
From a legal/ideological standpoint, this might be a powerful soft-pivot that would solve a lot of problems.
There's a famous line from Walt Disney, during Disney's golden age, where he said "we don't make movies so we can make money - we make money, so we can make movies". That really hits at the heart of it.
The interesting thing is that, to a large degree, most of the meaningful corporations that improve the world - despite nominally being for-profit companies, generally tend to operate halfways into public-benefit territory. Partly because the benefit provided by them is essentially what the owners are "buying for themselves". To put it in perspective - if you're an extravagantly wealthy patron who wants to - themselves - have animated films to watch, you can't just hire some off-the-shelf people to do it, because they don't exist unless an industry to train them, exists. There's not really a "more narrowly selfish" way to do it - you're best served by building some outfit like Disney to build a brain trust of people to produce what you want.
Similarly with Amazon; sure, an extravagantly wealthy individual could probably accomplish the shipping part of it with personal couriers, but the information-gathering part of it where all the products-available-to-buy are laid in front of you as choices would be nearly impossible to match. Like, you could try to match it with some awful, personal, potemkin setup. But by the time you put in all of that effort ... I mean, you're basically already building what could be a business that could serve others, so you may as well.
Boycott everything Made in China (I’ve been doing it for years, and it’s not that difficult.. I mean if you can find alternative for 9 out of 10 goods then it’s of course still a big win). Similarly, boycott companies that kowtow to China (you can probably save a lot of money by doing so, e.g. by pirating all Disney movies/tv series instead of going to the cinema/paying for Disney+).
Support companies that voice support for those oppressed by the CCP (such as ProtonVPN, Notepad++).
Vote for politicians that are not afraid to stand up to CCP (I for instance voted for Trump despite having my political views mostly align with Sanders - solely due to his anti-China stance.. you can of course also argue that his administration has singlehandedly done more to stand up to China than the rest of the world combined in the past couple decades).
Spread awareness of China’s atrocities. If more people realized that CCP are even more evil and dangerous than Nazi Germany then we’d likely see more aggressive policies towards China (such as banning their companies from our markets, keeping the tariffs (Biden said he’d end them) - hopefully with other countries similarly implementing tariffs).
YouTube is the one-stop-shop of internet videos. Any specific niche has a competitor, but none of them seriously competes with the whole of YouTube.
I noticed the outage because I wanted to watch a stream, so I might go to Twitch now. Often I use Youtube for music, where Spotify is a solid alternative with many of the same creators. If I want to see that video from reddit of people throwing burning flares at a balcony I can probably find it on LiveLeak. Many of the educational channels I've subscribed are also on Nebula, but I could also watch a documentary on Netflix or Disney+ instead.
Yes, I started with a massive Windows 8 Media center PC in 2003 which evolved to an Xbox1 with XBMC, followed by a couple of all in one PCs which could load standalone XBMC Linux based kernels by 2010.
Around 2015, I switched to having a Synology NAS hold the content with small streaming devices around the house with Plex running on both ends.
But these days 99% of the content we want is on Netflix, HBO Max, or Disney+. We occasionally rent movies via AppleTV. I can get all the content I want more conveniently through these services. And I am rarely debugging the setup during a family movie night while my wife and daughters groan about how my stuff never works.
I think it'd depend how convincing you were on exclusives. While the biggest movies aren't being made by streaming companies I think there'll always be a market for being able to see the biggest movies earliest. Keeping everything in today's timeline, Disney+ would probably be the biggest reason to think you wouldn't succeed - because now a bunch of the biggest movies are being made by a streaming company.
But copyright is not 5 years right now, it's 70 years after the death of the creator. You say the longer the period, the greater the incentive to invest, but there are definitely diminishing returns there. Does anyone actually believe we would have greater investment if it was 80 years? Or 90 years? Maybe it should be 300 years, for all those companies looking for investments that take centuries to be realized. And look at all amazing work that has been produced based on public domain works, the Disney movie empire was basically created on it. I think we can pretty much say that yes, reduced copyright terms would increase the types of movies that we see.
> I respect their ability to make a ton of money, but I don't like a majority of what they create anymore, nor how they treat a majority of their employees.
That's a really good summation of my views on Disney. It's obvious they know how to build consistently polished stories that will be consistently enjoyable to a wide audience. I respect that.
But it's not clear to me that's a goal worth pursuing, or that the artistic value of their movies has gone up because of that. It's good to have some media that's safe and predictable and that is primarily motivated by market trends. But when that's all a company is making, then behind that nice facade lies a deeply cynical way of looking at the world, where creative choices are calculated for broad appeal rather than for their inherent value.
I'm not going to say that's all Disney makes. Just that the percentage of films Disney is making that fall into that category is growing at a rapid clip.
It's a jaded view in the sense that I'm cynical about Disney, but it's really not me trying to crap on popular things. There are a lot of popular things that are really, really good. But I know when a movie actually feels special and honest to me, when I feel like the author genuinely had a good reason to make it, and made it because they loved it. And Disney movies don't feel that way to me. They're glossy, and pretty, and impressive, and they know the right things to say, but they're made of plastic instead of flesh.
Once upon a time, Disney made films. Now they just make money.
Opinion: Disney content these days is absolutely awful. I'm not enjoying the films, the shows, or anything really. They spend more time doing remakes for a global audience (read. China), and compromise the quality of the end result.
> no commercials
Anyone who watches Hulu has heard "will play with a commercial before and after the show". Hulu has been increasing the number of ads they include. It used to be ad free for many shows. Then they went to 30 second ads. Now they're stuffing 180 seconds or more on many shows.
> higher quality (arguably) shows
Definitely arguable. My feeling is the quality is going down quite a bit, but I think that's because the demand for content volume has increased (in the era of binge watching, a single TV series is started and over in one weekend).
> Additionally, it’s possible to just subscribe to the one service you really like because they all have a lot of content.
This might be true now. But there are multiple high profile streaming services launching in the next year (e.g. Disney+), which is prompting Disney to pull all content off other platforms.
I feel a large part of HN are single people with no kids so you are not going to find anything good or insightful when it comes to parenting.
There are two main schools of thought on the issue you mentioned - 1 let them learn early / no major electronics filter (I grew up watching tv I am fine crowd)
- 2 let’s not let them have stuff they don’t understand.( I personally fall in this crowd)
I think both options have their pros and cons. Given “right” and “wrong” as a measure is always relative, you need to consider the if your actions ultimately help them or hurt them in the long term goals which generally for parents is to raise kids that are responsible and self sufficient and take care of themselves in a unknown future. Once you (and your spouse) have a agreed “North Star” it’s easier to set the rules, enforce them and lead by example.
Edited to add below answer
-Do you limit screentime writ large with an overall limit? No “limit”. The rule is as little as possible.
- Do you set limits on the kind of screentime they get? Yes- when we do show it’s either selected cartoons or nature or nova documentaries. The latter two is not a deliberate thing but mostly because I like to watch them they like to see it too. No Disney. Hate it with a passion. Their message is overwhelmingly emotional and romantic. In general I stay away from “movies” type things where there is a larger plot
- What protocol do you follow (X hrs per day, have to ask first, but are typically no more than) have to ask is the baseline. Also they don’t know how to operate the tv(yet). Typically if it’s been more than one hour of their cartoons in a day they are done. I might allow them to watch documentary or half if I am watching it.
- What do you do if they truly want to do something educational/positive with screentime but have hit their limits? Not have encountered this scenario but if I did I would not give them their screen time and have them understand that this time they used up their “credits” but next time they can plan for it. Just like how the real world works.
If Disney had been found to be doing this with their own films, would the CEO of Disney be in jail? This case always felt extremely punitive due to the content and the size of the company.
"After a few weeks it’s no longer in theaters. You can’t buy it. You can’t rent it. The only way to watch is to subscribe to Disney’s steaming service, Disney+. " WRONG. Any movie or TV show is on bittorrent for free. It's simply not the case that the only way to watch it in that situation is thru subscribing to a streaming service.
So you are essentially thanking and tipping instacart, not the worker. Evil like a villain from a disney movie.
I take a boycott from buying Disney products (including movie tickets / movies). I will gladly watch their movies if a friend has a copy (copyright law still hasn't taken that freedom away from me), but if no-one has a copy the movie couldn't have been that good anyway. :P
Bigger issues for me are:
* Why queues are limited to just 500 items?
* Why I can't slice a queue by facets (genre, year, rating, stars, etc.)?
* Why I can't control the queues of my children (I really want them to stay away from the brain-washing Disney stuff, for example)?
* Why main account's viewing activity includes sub-accounts, too (in my case, the main account is me and my wife, children have their sub-queues)?
I find less and less value in Netflix. Recently, I buy more stuff on Vudu, Amazon Instant Videos, and even Google Play. Netflix should rebrand to OldFlix or KidFlix as the there's very little quality available for streaming. I really don't get why they didn't implement Amazon's model earlier - offer a fixed selection for the monthly price and then pay per rental or purchase of individual titles not available with the subscription. Maybe they have licensing/contract issues, but if Amazon could do it, they should've done it, too. I'm not into TV shows, but it seems that they are trying to compensate with "Netflix Originals", which works for some, but not for me.
More to the point, who wants to explain to their kids that they aren't allowed to watch Disney movies because of their dad's "public politics" (as right as those politics may be)
Sorry, but if you're using a Disney film as an example of a good portrayal of women, you've already lost.