We tend to look at piracy as the antithesis of Netflix, Hulu, Spotify, or Prime Video. But as it turns out, you can thank ruthless digital pirates for the low price and high quality of your favorite streaming services.
Piracy Created Streaming
Without piracy, streaming wouldn’t exist. Or, at least, it would only exist in some bastardized form. This is a bold claim, but if you look at the history of streaming, the connection seems quite apparent.
Let’s start with iTunes. While iTunes isn’t a streaming service, it’s arguably the first true precursor to services like Spotify. And guess what, its inception was a direct response to piracy.
During the ’90s and early 2000s, record companies charged ridiculously high prices for CDs. Their idea was that, if people liked a hit single, then they’d shell out $20 (about $30 when adjusted for inflation) for a CD just to own the single.
Naturally, this business model can’t work digitally. On a digital store, people can purchase a hit single and avoid buying a whole album. So, record companies avoided digital services like the plague. In response, piracy boomed. P2P services like Napster made music free for everyone, and the record industry is still reeling from the after-shocks.
Apple saw this as an opportunity and put together iTunes, the first successful digital music store. But in the end, iTunes led people back to piracy because of its stupid DRM (anti-sharing) policies that Steve Jobs openly hated. Services like Spotify cropped up in response, and the rest is history.
A year after the launch of Spotify, Netflix unveiled its video streaming services, mostly to fill a similar hole in the market. DVDs were expensive ($25-$30 each), and even video rentals were unfairly priced (not to mention inconvenient) due to the massive overhead that comes with running a store like Blockbuster.
Piracy Encourages High-Quality Streaming
We’ve spent a lot of time complaining about the cable-ization of streaming services. As video streaming becomes more popular, subscription costs go up, streaming libraries get smaller, and more businesses build exclusive services. Not to mention, big streaming services sometimes try to cut costs by damaging the user experience.
In 2018, Amazon quietly cut its Prime Video file sizes in half. Obviously, this lowered the video quality of Prime Video, and it pissed a lot of people off. And oddly enough, the biggest (and fastest) response came from the pirate community.
