Published in El Pais, 24 March 2020.
In June 1999 Shawn Fanning created Napster and the world has never been the same. People were allowed access to almost any song for free. Understandably, the music industry took exception to this and eventually shut it down two years later. Though Napster lost their legal battle the music industry certainly lost the war. Different Peer to Peer (P2P) software continued to pop up doing effectively the same thing that Napster did. It even expanded the media available, providing access to many kinds of copywritten material including TV shows, movies and video games. Though the technology is still around, its use has damped a bit thanks large in part to legal streaming services providing an affordable and convenient platform for users to acquire their desired content. All was good for copyright holders, but we may start to see a rise in piracy again.
Before I go into this further let me ask you a question. What do the Mandalorian, Narcos, the Hunters and the Morning Show have in common? Nothing, as each show is available on a different streaming platform, meaning you must subscribe to 4 different providers to watch all of them. Those are some of the more popular ones and does not even count the several others that are on the market.
The reality is that few will subscribe to all of them as individually they may be cheap but collectively, they are quite expensive. So, what are we to do if we want to watch a show on a platform we do not have yet do not want to subscribe to? It will not be long before many revert to piracy to access this “exclusive” content.
I am not condoning this behaviour, but I do think streaming companies are to blame for this. Common sense would dictate that most would pick one or two services and then be tempted to find other ways to watch the other shows. Eventually I believe we will see some of these services fail as they fall victim to piracy, and we will go back to just a select few services. Only time will tell.
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