if the top 100 agreed to switch tomorrow there would be another 100 that would add downloads to their tubes overnight to take over that market. An unfortunate truth.

No it will not. Streamed videos can be downloaded easily, very easoly.

Because Hulu and Netflix are ripped all over the place... oh yeah, you can rip them, but like netflix, it still takes away viewing hours from your account, even across platforms. So yeah, rip away... upload it, and good luck watching anything on your account.

Hmmm, i don't think i get it...

Would that stop rippers?

Yes, your account information is encoded into the video within a finger print.

Well then. Sponsors have a weapon to fight piracy.
Good ideas start to pop up. They should implement it asap!

Aye, it's been around for like 15 years now, been several adult companies that have done it, I think ccbill offers a service for this as well.

But most piracy doesn't happen through our real members. So do you go through all that, spend the money, etc... or learn to combat it through cheaper methods that stop the core rips of your sites?

Anything viewed can be copied. It's a fact of life. People won't care if they have to rip in realtime, a background process can do the job.

I guess it depends on the site. My main client has many sites which are more like fan sites. The guys love the girls and want to collect everything she's done.

I don't think it would have any impact whatsoever on content being stolen though. Do you?

Well, i guess they should weight their choices and what's better for their business and their affiliates...

Well, ask yourself this... if they went to streaming, could the members get that content from someone else? If the answer is no, then it's not like they're going to leave and get satisfied some place else.

Yes, it greatly impacts the amount of piracy you have to deal with, but no, it does not fully stop piracy.

Well, if you set it to one stream at a time, then they're only ripping one at a time, instead of a mass download of your entire member areas in 5 minutes.

Now... start stacking sites together, do you really think pirates are going to sit and wait for a screen record across a 100 sites?

That, plus getting files deleted from filelockers ans uploaders accounts cancelled would be a nice combo.

Yeppers... some think piracy is the end all death, while others figured out how to profit from it long ago.

I will say, ignoring it does not solve anything or make anyone more money, and the fact is, almost everyone is ignoring it, or rather taking the bitching route, which solves nothing.

100percent agreed.

Some content owners just seem to don't fucking care.

Interesting. I would have thought if, say, twistys went streaming only tomorrow, some little dweeb would sit there all week/month/quarter screen recording all of it to get the kudos for doing it. Repeat that by 100 dweebs.

But you'll have access to more data than me, so I bow to your superior knowledge on this one.

Sure I don't think anyone is saying ignoring it does solve anything or make money. But if you took the time people are wasting on getting accounts closed (for them to be reopened two minutes later), and sending DMCAs etc and spent that on making your site better, split testing a new tour, improving the UI, anything, then you WOULD make more money. Heck if you took the 1000 bucks a month paid to a content removal company and put it on adwords you'd make more money!

That's a slow down either way... this has nothing to do with knowledge or stats.

If you can auto rip an entire site in minutes vs. having to wait for a stream, that's going to slow things down.

Stopping piracy 100% isn't possible, but slowing it down to a crawl is.

Agreed. Slowing it down is very possible. Just have to want to do it.

True, however it doesn't have to be GUI based, remember a stream is just data, it's not hard to write an app which will crawl and stream videos while copying them in a multi-threaded fashion, a decent box probably could handle a number of streams at a time just saving them to video files.

Bump for real biz thread...

Some great arguments - and def a ton to think about as a program owner -

More and more it seems like the Hulu/Netlfix route is the best route to go with

Well, 99.9% of the planet can't write html, so chances are it's a bit harder to write an app than you think.

Killing multi streams and downloads kills multi-threads, nobody can watch two movies at once anyway, so allowing more than one at a time, is asking to be pirated.

Ripping takes processing power, just like it does on your pc. Start stacking them together and see how many you can do at once, even on a unix box, it has limits. Now times that by a few 100,000 porn sites.... it's not just a download anymore, it's a rip, download and trans-code.

Right. I don't feel alone in this planet anymore. :thumbsup

To further this... IF you were to stream only, what bitrates and stream-types would you offer?

Why not just offer mp4 and stream in 2 diff bitrates..

514Kbps - for mobile and low connections
2000Kbps+ - for higher bandwidth and future compatibility

?

users can screen capture streaming video and download it. Wont make a bit of difference

2c

That depends on how technical you want to get.... Today the technology is here to do variable bit rates & bw rate control, on the fly, even switch streaming technology based on the device, which can done via trans-coding or layered compression, while slightly different, both produces almost the same results.

Outside of the crazy stuff, which goes way the heck past what I just explained... I would go with h.263 and your own encoded player to stream them. However, I know very little about that and leave it to the real experts, like Konrad.

Biterates on it's own, "personally" I believe the smallest you can get, yet keeping it clear.. my focus is buffer times over super quality. If it takes more than a few seconds to buffer, it's too damn big. :2 cents:

A user can download an entire members area of non-streaming content in a few minutes with software. A screen capture requires you to play the video, each one...

That alone makes a difference.

Bumping for good info

I have nothing to add, except that this is a great thread! We may even be working toward a workable solution in this VERY thread. Awesome.

If my aunt had balls she'd be my uncle.

Yes, the industry is desperate. A lot of people are trying to hang on and are hoping for a miracle solution to piracy - one that may never exist. Smart companies are circumventing piracy as best they can and working it into their business plans which TheDoc hinted at in one of his latest posts.