It's Thanks To The Pirate Community That Amazon's Attempt To Degrade Its Streaming Service Is Now Public
from the honor-among-thieves dept
It’s said that there is no honor among thieves, but it should be obvious that such a blanket axiom is bound to be at least partially bullshit. Still, this mantra gets applied to the pirating community by its enemies, with those that rip and/or view pirated content labeled as ungrateful kid-slobs, simply looking for any content they can gobble up without any payment whatsoever. Any value or benefit derived from this community is denied or ignored, with the spotlight being only on the inflated injury this same community inflicts on unimaginably wealthy companies and studios.
Again, it should be obvious that this is all bound to be bullshit.
In fact, we’ve discussed the potential benefits to be found within these communities often in the past. Pirate communities can be viewed as a sort of market study companies get for free, serve as a spotlight on under-served potential customers, and not to mention that this community often buys more content then does their non-pirating cousins. None of this is to excuse copyright infringement, of course, but rather serves to remind us that the world is not black and white, and is instead muddled, complicated, and mushy.
Much like Amazon’s streaming service the past few weeks, actually. A fact we only really know about due to this same pirating community doing the investigative work for free.
This week there’s been a sustained chorus of disapproval over the quality of pirate video releases sourced from Amazon Prime. The anger is usually directed at piracy groups who fail to capture content in the correct manner but according to a number of observers, the problem is actually at Amazon’s end.
Discussions on Reddit, for example, report that episodes in a single TV series have been declining in filesize and bitrate, from 1.56 GB in 720p at a 3073 kb/s video bitrate for episode 1, down to 907 MB in 720p at just 1514 kb/s video bitrate for episode 10. Numerous theories as to why this may be the case are being floated around, including that Amazon is trying to save on bandwidth expenses. While this is a possibility, the company hasn’t made any announcements to that end.
Reports suggest the drop in quality is no small thing. Further investigation has shown that the streaming quality via Amazon Prime has had something like a 50% drop. Given how clear it is that the quality of legitimate services has a direct impact on the public’s willingness to engage in piracy, we can only speculate on why Amazon thought that downgrading its streaming quality was a good idea. What doesn’t seem to be in question, however, is that it did so on purpose.
With Amazon distancing itself from the issues, piracy groups have already begun to dig in the knife. Release group DEFLATE has been particularly critical.
“Amazon, in their infinite wisdom, have decided to start fucking with the quality of their encodes. They’re now reaching Netflix’s subpar 1080p.H264 levels, and their H265 encodes aren’t even close to what Netflix produces,” the group said in a file attached to S02E07 of The Good Fight released on Sunday. “Netflix is able to produce drastic visual improvements with their H265 encodes compared to H264 across every original. In comparison, Amazon can’t decide whether H265 or H264 is going to produce better results, and as a result we suffer for it.”
An expert in video encoding that TorrentFreak spoke with took things further into the technical realm, but the upshot is that the stream quality has been cut in half in a way that looks to be an attempt to serve videos at reduced bandwidth. We still can only guess, because Amazon isn’t talking. Unlike the pirate community, however.
With the situation failing to improve during the week, by the time piracy group DEFLATE released S03E14 of Supergirl on Tuesday their original criticism had transformed into flat-out insults.
“These are only being done in H265 because Amazon have shit the bed, and it’s a choice between a turd sandwich and a giant douche,” they wrote, offering these images as illustrative of the problem and these indicating what should be achievable.
With DEFLATE advising customers to start complaining to Amazon, the memes have already begun, with unfavorable references to now-defunct group YIFY (which was often chastized for its low quality rips) and even a spin on one of the most well known anti-piracy campaigns.
As of the past few days, it seems that Amazon has made changes on its end, restoring the original quality of Prime’s streams. The company is still refusing to provide any kind of explanation as to why any of this happened to begin with, but it seems quite clear that without the pirating community calling them out, Amazon’s customer service claims that all issues were at the end-user and not with the stream itself would have been accepted for much longer, if not indefinitely. Without the pirate hobbyists, they would have gotten away with it.
Filed Under: piracy, transparency, video quality
Companies: amazon
Comments on “It's Thanks To The Pirate Community That Amazon's Attempt To Degrade Its Streaming Service Is Now Public”
Duh! End of Net Neutrality!
Netflix is already starting to be charged by the ISP’s, or is about to be charged more by the ISP’s, so they have to save bandwidth charges.
After looking at the comparison images provided, I literally can’t see a difference in them on my 19″ CRT monitor when viewed at their actual size (which means the image is bigger than my current screen size). With the comparison between existing settings and the what-could-be images, I only see minute differences when I put my face about 6″ away from the monitor.
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Thor!?!
Re: Re: Back in 2013, "Nurlip" was "Brent". What's up with that?
Also once, “Not a cow ward”. Just odd. Name changes are part of the pattern here…
By the way, though no long gaps, “Brent” or “Nurlip” go back to 2014 first page (20 comments ago), and delivers of only a feeble one-liner here (WHY SIGN IN? Want that brief but deathless wit attributed for all time?), showing again that rare commenters are at best ODD.
Re: Re: Re: Back in 2013, "Nurlip" was "Brent". What's up with that?
Register and post under your own account or stfu about others’ accounts. Don’t bitch about other people’s habits when you hide behind your shield of anonymity.
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And you, who keeps track of the history of every commenter here in the vein of a 9/11 truther with a corkboard the size of Frank’s 2000-inch TV—you classify yourself as “normal”?
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Are . . . are you from the past?
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He’s not, but apparently he’d ordered a 38″ 4k monitor from Amazon and got that instead.
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It’s sitting on my desk and I’m only about a foot away from it, so 19" is plenty big enough for daily usage. Plus, I don’t really like LCD displays.
Using any resolution other than the LCD’s native resolution introduces ugly scaling errors, they can lag during fast motion and the viewing angle is limited.
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Ditto:)
Cant wait till honest OLED monitors & Nvidia P100’s reach my Goodwill store.
The ‘internet’ is a vertical scroll, so my 20″ is up on end, but the narrow LCD (cholesterol) viewing angle is a pain.
PV-solar can’t handle my CRT anymore.
P.S. on ‘StarTrec The Movie’ we used an Evans&Sutherland vector display cause a raster took weeks to render!
Meddling Pirates
And they would have gotten away with it too, if it weren’t for those meddling ~~kids~~ pirates
This makes me wonder about the music side of things; I use Amazon’s Music Unlimited service, and despite me having it set to highest quality I swear what I’m hearing sounds like low bandwidth codecs. I honestly feel that when I had Apple Music the sound quality was better.
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Maybe but the economic costs of streaming music are much smaller so the savings from compression are smaller too. Also music nerds hate low quality and tend to be vocal.
It makes me wonder: did Amazon do an A:B stream test here? Were customers getting the video at different bitrates and encodings so that they could isolate who was (and wasn’t) pirating?
It’d seem like a pretty easy thing to do.
I saw some oddities last week, but they went away pretty quickly for me. Maybe Amazon has now figured out which accounts are associated with DEFLATE?
"we've discussed the potential benefits" But NEVER ANY ACTUAL!
That’s whatcha call a Freudian reveal. Yes, Techdirt has claimed literally a thousand times that are "benefits" of piracy to creators, and yet every lost sale is still a lost sale!
mantra = n. Hinduism a hymn or portion of text, esp. from the Veda, chanted or intoned as an incantation or prayer — Explain how what you had just termed an "axiom" became a "mantra" and anything even mantra-ish (by the definition) could even vaguely be "applied to the pirating community"? … Of course can’t. You are as usual sozzled and use "mantra" wrongly as if means a saying or rule. — Your careless attitude is cultural misappropriation! You’re lucky so few read Techdirt, or would be a swarm of protest.
Anyhoo, so pirates who are STEALING whine that what they stole isn’t top quality! SHEESH. That overweening entitlement is good cause for MPAA to start getting info from Google and charging top pirates criminally, not just civilly. (That IS coming SOON. I’ll be hooting then, heh, heh!)
You end up carelessly stealing from Scooby Doo: "Without the [meddling] pirate hobbyists, they would have gotten away with it!"
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Die angry about it.
Re: "we've discussed the potential benefits" But NEVER ANY ACTUAL!
[Happy Merchant Intensifies]
Re: "we've discussed the potential benefits" But NEVER ANY ACTUAL!
You can’t "lose" a sale you would never have had anyway. A vanishingly small number of those who download pirated content have the means and the will to go pay for that product (citation needed, I know. There are studies, google it). Some studies even identified piracy promoting purchases of content.
Call it theft of product, theft of access, whatever you will. The fact remains that piracy isn’t actually harming any industry. There is zero money lost and a very high likelihood that money is gained through the process. Get yourself an objective education instead of drumming the party line and you’ll see for yourself.
Re: Re: "we've discussed the potential benefits" But NEVER ANY ACTUAL!
I just read a new book…. checked it out at the library. Now EVERY OTHER READER of that copy is a lost sale?
Last week I watched a TV series … a used copy that had been donated by some local citizen to the Friends of the Library to be resold. Another lost sale!
And this week a friend gave me a book to read AND PASS ON. TWO LOST SALES, the universe is imploding….
Well, enough of this, I’m getting ready to move. It takes time to pack 9 cubic feet of music, 5 cubic feet of video, 60 cubic feet of books…not to mention other household items.
How many composers are there that I’ve bought 10-30 hours of music by … that I first listened to from cassettes recorded off the radio, or LP’s checked out from the local library? How many genres–or even authors–that I’ve bought ten or more books after sampling a friend’s copy?
Look, I defer to nobody in my contempt for the MBA personality. I’m on record as telling a fellow-employee with an MBA that it was “a scheme for inducing sociopathic behavior in susceptible individuals.” In private I’d have added “with sufficiently low IQ.” But even an MBA knows to subtract expenses from receipts to calculate income. And even an MBA is not so stupid as to look only at expenses on the balance sheet.
And even most MBAs can be trained to do the arithmetic: maximize the value of gained_sales minus lost_sales.
There is nothing “potential” about all those packed book-boxes–with nary a one containing books or disks stolen from author, publisher, or bookseller.
But, the truth is, it’s the other side of the balance sheet that has the falsely-alleged potential. There are no “lost sales” among those books that were purchased from libraries or used-book-stores. The publisher-provided versions were mostly not available at all–do you know how many million books are out of print! Many of them that were in print were too expensive to be worthwhile for me to own. Yes, I look at books and say, –I’d pay a dollar for this, five dollars for that, 20 for the other–more than that they’re not worth to me. The only lost sale was the publisher’s fault.
On the other hand, some people are willing to buy books because they can sell them later (thus reducing the true cost to themselves). In effect, the original purchaser and I work together to pay the publisher for single copy. That is not two lost sales: that is one gained sale where there would otherwise have been no sale at all (because of the high price.)
So far as I can tell, anyone who uses the word “lost sale” is lying with both forks of their tongue. There is no such thing. There is only “speculation about the potential for lost sales.” But the gains are not “speculative”–they are real and accurately measurable. Publishers like Baen have found that giving away copies of one book in a series increases the sales of the whole series. Not “potential” sales. Real sales.
We can debate the honesty of taking a virtuous act like “sharing” and calling it a pejorative name like “piracy” even though it no theft, violence, kidnapping, or nautical arson is involved. But there is no evidence at all that copyright infringement has any but positive economic effects.
Re: Re: "we've discussed the potential benefits" But NEVER ANY ACTUAL!
Copyright isn’t just about profit, but control over distribution. I don’t see Techdirt allowing me to republish their site on my own.
If the product is worthless, don’t steal it. If you don’t like copyright law, write to Congress. Many great books are now never written because there is no incentive to write them. Those who are cut off from what they’d learn in those books will never know what they lost. The world will go on just not as it did before. Ad-supported writing is now replacing books, as are youtube videos because Google protects that IP.
Copyright law was deisgned to allow publishers not to have to make their own contracts protecting their work. Without it there is no incentive to produce. It’s not just the big comanpies who suffer, or the people who lose jobs to piracy, but many indies who otherwise would make decent livings have to hold day jobs instead. Entertainment which enriches the lives of teachers, first responders, etc. is valuable to society.
Re: Re: Re: "we've discussed the potential benefits" But NEVER ANY ACTUAL!
Writing a book has always been a high risk activity, as there is no guarantee that it will be taken up by a publisher.
Until self publishing on the Internet came along, many a writing career dies after several attempts to get books published because they never gained the attention of a publisher, and which just became one more in the pile of manuscripts that nobody at any publisher looked at.
As to making a full time living from writing books, that is and always was a rare win in the lottery gaining an audience. The few that win that lottery are household names, but the bulk of authors have always had to rely on the day job.
it is also worth noting that the major reason writing books, or creating music or videos is to tell a story. Finding an audience will inspire continued creativity, even if it never becomes a full time occupation.
you are wrong
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How can you know those books are great if they are never written? I mean, sure, any book has the potential to achieve greatness. But a book left unwritten is a book that does not exist and thus cannot be judged by any set of standards for quality.
And as far as incentive goes…well, I know of an entire website devoted to sharing stories for free. Most people who create art do it for reasons other than money. For them, using that work to put a few dollars in their pocket is a bonus instead of a goal.
This entire paragraph relies on the assumption that no one would ever make another creative work ever again without the existence of copyright. Nothing you have said backs up that assumption, so I ask you: What makes you believe everyone would just give up on creating art if copyright ended tomorrow?
Re: Re: Re: "we've discussed the potential benefits" But NEVER ANY ACTUAL!
Then you are not looking very hard. Techdirt has never had a problem with people republishing their articles and consider their content to be public domain. There were even a few sites who republished Techdirt in toto over the years. They quietly fell to the wayside when their users realized that they were not the originals and that they lacked the community that has developed around Techdirt.
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110828/22065915716/you-can-copy-our-articles-all-you-want-please-dont-claim-copyright-belongs-to-you.shtml
Re: Re: Re: "we've discussed the potential benefits" But NEVER ANY ACTUAL!
Bullshit! Copyright is relativity new in the course of human history (300 years or so). Are you saying there was no incentive to create anything in all the human history before that?
What about creative industries where there is no copyright? Like the fashion or culinary industries? Is there no incentive to produce there?
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And if the farmer had kept the eggs instead of selling them, why, he could have hatched them into chickens who would lay him more eggs, therefore eggs need to cost several thousand dollars.
I don’t “steal” the damn product but apparently that’s not enough to convince you to stop getting anti-piracy enforcement to harass me for money.
Never mind waiting for all the products that were supposed to be made by allowing corpses to hold onto copyright, which is still getting extended for all the good that does…
Re: "we've discussed the potential benefits" But NEVER ANY ACTUAL!
You know what is worse than piracy? People like me who rely on legal free content. No lost sales, but also no hope of future sales.
Re: I thought I smelled a failed artist, and here you are.
Re: A Lost Sale Is A Lost Sale
Because a lost sale is a lost sale is a lost sale is a lost sale is a lost sale.
Keep repeating it. It’ll come true eventually.
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Still waiting for the part where pirates have “lost”.
It turns out the “real” customers who pay for shit are the ones who were losing all along. Because what they paid for turned out to be shit.
But keep defending these scummy practices, it convinces more people to look for cheaper alternatives.
Re: "we've discussed the potential benefits" But NEVER ANY ACTUAL!
No. The correct term is "Freudian slip".
Mantra – n. an often repeated word, formula, or phrase, often a truism
That explain it enough for you, genius? All you had to do was read the second definition down from the one you quoted.
Yeah, you know what else? The people who paid to get that content in top quality didn’t it either. Way to completely overlook the whole point.
So what you’re saying is you’re really glad that eventually all these big publishers are going to completely screw over their loyal paying customers by giving them craptastic quality content and streams, just to "show those damn pirates". You’re a moron.
Is that not what point of the article said? If not for pirates pointing out the crap quality and telling everyone about it, it would have taken much longer for paying customers to complain loud enough to make Amazon stop.
Wondering...
If their intention is to release a shit-quality for the first 24 hours, to both thwart release groups (where speed to release generally matters more than quality), while at the same time saving bandwidth resources for the big “rush” when people want to go watch it immediately…
And then release a better quality version a day or two later when the rush dies down, so people will have a high quality view if they’re willing to wait for the immediate rush to die down.
From what I gathered in the TF update, the quality improved the next day.
Re: Wondering...
Re: Re: Wondering...
Until Amazon explains the cause of that degrade in quality, we are free and welcome to speculate on said cause. If’n you don’t like it, go whine about it on Twitter.
Re: Re: Wondering...
Being one of those 100 million prime subscribers, i would appreciate knowing more about the situation… unlike you.
Re: Re: Wondering...
“Stop speculating about things because I speculated something different!”
Re: Wondering...
That would be a decent theory, but it seemed to be that all new streams were lower quality and staying so, and then abruptly all of those streams released since the change went back to the previous quality level:
I suppose we won’t know for sure until more new streams are posted, but it seems to me more like they were testing out going over to a lower quality simply for bandwidth/cost/etc reasons and they’ve walked that back a bit.
s/pirate community/Scene
Amazon Streaming Sucks
Tried to watch a movie on Amazon last night. Kept getting pauses and stuttering.
Re: Amazon Streaming Sucks
Do you get cable over the same wires? If so, it is more likely that your ISP sucks at delivering streaming to you.
And it’s this type of deed that companies, industries, courts, law enforcement, govts and individuals want stopped! It’s never been about money, it’s always been about stopping the public from finding out, from knowing what all these fuckers are up to, what they want/expect to be able to get away with and how they are screwing ordinary people! Hence the desire to stop the greatest invention man has ever made, the Internet, from remains so, with the everything, for everyone, everywhere, becomming just another way for the public to be spied on and have access restricted!
There are still many left in the rain of bad quality, but for an entirely different reason: Amazon engages in the nefarious behavior of telling me that my device wouldn’t support streaming Full HD. I wrote them that it’s B.S. and that they should just push over the bytes, but they wouldn’t listen. One customer less and I can imagine there are others annoyed by this.
Ill answer this
Sorry thought we mght get away with it….
thanks and keep paying!!!
‘Without the pirate hobbyists, they would have gotten away with it.’
this is exactly the sort of thing that companies like this, industries like the entertainment industries and ALL GOVTS AND LAW ENFORCEMENT continuously want to right to spy on us! if they can watch us 24/7, including what we say, read, write, where we go, how, who with, what we do etc, etc, etc, they will know when we are pissed at something they are up to and put blocks in place to prevent whatever we’re pissed at from becoming public!