As in Russia they missed the global flourishing of the DVD, but caught up with the West with the advent of broadband Internet
"The Russian man is a freak for free." "The Russian man is a thief." "The Russian man wants to solve things without getting up from the oven." And, of course, “the Russian person is poor”. In general, the psychological portrait of an online pirate, bypassing all prohibitions, but getting his free - and even proud of it - is ready. But I would not be in a hurry to merge so swiftly and unanimously to a nation of thieves, when the right holders themselves made an enormous contribution to the history of Russian piracy - and there is no reason to take upon themselves and their guilt.
And as an example of my turbulent zeros, as I remember them, I will show two big moments when Western right holders flew past the main trend and real market demand at that moment with a loud whistle.
Probably the oldest of my flash drives that I could remember was exactly the same.
I first encountered pirate treasure in 2005, starting to walk on the "grid" of my hostel. However, then it was not perceived by piracy - just a reality in which I would pay for what I listened and watched there, and that I would have money for it in general - if it existed, then somewhere in the noosphere, beyond my head. At the same time, everything was brutally simple: a scholarship is needed only once a month to turn from a hungry student into a fun one, and the first salary, after paying a removable angle, will always be a bit lacking to make it up to the advance. In such realities, “watching movies” is not a question of morality, but of opportunity. There is an opportunity - we look and rejoice, no - we are looking for.
For 13 years I have gone from full pirate to almost full legit, but, surprisingly, even completely lazy, willing to pay, just to decide anything - I still sometimes feel the pressure, like pushing it to “get it, take it for free”. And this, by the way, is one of the reasons why I completely disagree with the generalizations of Russians and pirates, pirates and freeloaders - etc.
Right holders have contributed to the formation of the counterfeit market since its inception. First, by its demonstrative absence. From the late 80s to the end of the 90s, pirates were our distributors of Western hits, filling the attention deficit from Hollywood as best they could.
In zero, Hollywood, finally, drew attention to the Russian rental - and the Russian counterfeit. And just in those years, there was a big process of changing formats in the world: from 1998 in Europe, and further, DVD-format was gaining in popularity everywhere, from 1998 to 2008 it surpassed VHS coverage, went beyond the film industry, becoming almost worldwide main format external media. Of course, it could have been more logical than putting Russia on this upgrade, especially since after the chimes that had broken through the Millennium, the VHS players seemed like an ever more ancient artifact every day in the fairy tale about Cinderella.
However, triumphant around the world, the DVD in Russia simply “didn’t take off,” getting into antiphase with the more important trend of our market for 1999–2004. For me, the very end of the 90s - the first half of the zero was the time when almost all my friends and classmates bought computers.
More developed countries had the opportunity and met their demand for PC since the 80s, and now they have updated their multimedia devices to the new gem of the collection - DVD. In Russia, this was a quantum leap: a large number of people were finally able to afford their first PC at that historical moment when it had already begun to turn into a necessity. Therefore, while the world was getting used to the new toy - DVD, in Russia the most important of the toys was in priority.
At the same time, the country was still not rich, therefore, for most families, buying one excluded the acquisition of another in the foreseeable future - besides, the ability to watch movies on a PC, too, albeit from CDs, finally ousted DVD players from the realm of Fashionable things for the rich. (Probably, there was no curse for mass goods in Russia worse than to fall into the category “it is for the rich”). And the rich got their heads up, no longer simply buying a player, but by organizing a medical center, home theaters - and, of course, they had a lot of space to start and develop a film library from licensed DVDs.
Of course, DVD remained an interesting technology - as a bulk external media, for example. But here, too, a hungry market and a ripe niche were taken away from the DVD from under the nose. Russians, who were late with the development of this format, were late just enough to catch the dawn of USB flash drives. It was the second and final DVD skip of my window on the Russian market - flash drives were so much easier and more convenient than any disks that many who had not really mastered the science of burning discs, recording and rewriting (including me) somewhere in those years, realized that you can no longer learn.
As a result, when the main carrier, including for film copies, became the DVD in the world - in Russia, most of the films recorded on CD were copied immediately to flash drives and hard drives. For a couple of years, until the complete victory of the Internet, Russia was not so easily compatible with the rest of the world due to the preferred formats. Well, the spectators didn’t have any choice at all - in the absence of any alternatives from copyright holders at all (except for the VHS releases that were still released), piracy almost again continued its cultural and educational mission, which came to new frontiers thanks to torrents.
A fully completed DVD transition cycle, except for Russia, which has dodged it, the format no longer needed promotion. And the right holders have already been promoting the next big thing - the Blu-Ray format, the mega-quality of which was supposed to save the sales of the disks. Having emerged as the winner of a two-year standoff with HD DVD, the new champion in 2008 became the carrier of the first Blu-Ray movie versions for 50 gigs! Flash drives against it even theoretically, with the standard USB 2.0 could not oppose anything to it. It was King Kong among external carriers - though it didn’t matter anymore. This time, Blu-Ray has flown past not only the Russian market, but also a generally global trend.
The era of broadband unlimited Internet has begun. The external arms race is not that complete, it has ceased to make sense. The capacity of fiber in almost every apartment was enough to download Blu-Ray in minutes, instead of weeks of waiting by mail. No need for disk storage, no need to buy a Blu-ray player. And in the long term, the rejection of disks as carriers also saved on the upgrade of computers: instead of the initial plans of the vendors to build Blu-Ray players into the more expensive versions of laptops, there was a tendency to refuse disk drives in laptops in general.
As for Blu-Ray - even Hollywood majors had to say that their attempts to reject the course of history in the desired direction were always new and new discs - were meaningless.
About any total replacement of DVD to Blu-Ray in the same way that recently captured the world of DVD, it was already out of the question - as a result, both formats remained on the market.
Blu-ray releases were a toy for collectors - and fans of the warm tube, for whom the movie with a flash drive - a terrible sin.
But still, the idea of saving the disk as the main data carrier and sales format had to be finally buried. Most viewers have already become users - no return.
And the majors were finally forced to move towards progress.
In general, this was supposed to be an article about modern streaming services, which I use the longer, the more often I am disappointed. Thinking about why everything is so bad, I delved into the history, of course, the topic of piracy surfaced, got to the history of carriers - and cut out this huge piece to post it separately. And I posted my frustration about streaming services on Dzen .
What binds all these stories? Rightholders The further, the more it seems to me that they have not learned to be interested in markets outside the United States. They do not really care about them - yes, even piracy. If you were concerned, 21st Century Fox would not restrict access to its streaming service, which was opened as a global project, only to the United States and Canada. And without offering any alternative exits, even for animated series with a planetary scope, a fan base.
Yes, we remember the tense years of a full-scale war of right holders against the whole world. But they can be understood - left without their ten-year plan just before 2018 (just imagine that we would have rolled out a new generation of records already gigov 300), the studio panicked.
They, like the Brotherhood of the Ring through the mines of Moria, had to go on the streaming road, from which they fought back more violently than Gandalf from Balrog - and absolutely everything in this story looked completely counter-intuitive to them, despite all the chuyk that had been developed in the business.
And finally, they simply had to support their own and partner streaming, turning the life of pirate portals into as much as they could - intolerable. By the way, lawyers of Warner Bros., who did not make any intelligible rates on the streaming market, were most zealous. In general, in the aggregate of 5–8 years, it is lawyers who look the most successful and satisfied with the direction of the studio.
But now, it seems to me, the intensity will decrease. First, the horror stories about pirates who are ruining studios have clearly gone down in history. And they were not particularly close to the truth - if the situation were such, the studios would run much farther, getting out to live. And so, all the horrors of piracy was not enough even to wash off the raid of this smug assholeness.
Secondly, Warner Bros. with the entire household under the roof of Time Warner was bought by AT & T for a monstrous $ 85 billion. And Disney bought all the Fox film production from Rupert Murdoch, leaving him a news empire. Although not to say that Fox experienced some difficulties (although we do not know what budgets all of Cameron’s new Avatars put together have achieved), on the whole, these gigantic mergers and purchases demonstrate confidence in tomorrow’s monumental power.
So, they will again be able to return to their beloved business: squabbling with each other. The beginning of the big streaming war is already scheduled for the end of 2019, when contracts for Disney and Marvel films in Netflix expire. Which “Disney”, of course, will take, and, along with Pixar, Star Wars and the whole fox host will put in the catalog of their streaming, which will be launched at this point.
So, yes - I am waiting for increasing isolationism on the part of Hollywood, growing pofigism towards their users outside the US - and a relatively quiet period for pirates. Unless, of course, lawyers Warner Bros. again do not want premiums. But, I hope, will do without it.
Yes, I personally have finally switched to the paradigm of paid software, paid content, etc. But in the process of working on this retrospective, for the first time I saw all this not from a personal, but from a historical point of view. All memories associated with the written were reworked, and moved to a new state of aggregation - not as a private story, but just part of the story. During this process, naturally, any emotional living creature is sterilized so as not to drag along old emotions, prejudices and delusions.
What I didn’t expect was the emergence of a new emotion that had arisen and accumulated in the process of work: and turned into a completely new-found respect for the entire pirate movement. To whom I wish to breathe more freely and earn more creativity.
Yo-ho-ho and pirate flag!
And as an example of my turbulent zeros, as I remember them, I will show two big moments when Western right holders flew past the main trend and real market demand at that moment with a loud whistle.
Probably the oldest of my flash drives that I could remember was exactly the same.
I first encountered pirate treasure in 2005, starting to walk on the "grid" of my hostel. However, then it was not perceived by piracy - just a reality in which I would pay for what I listened and watched there, and that I would have money for it in general - if it existed, then somewhere in the noosphere, beyond my head. At the same time, everything was brutally simple: a scholarship is needed only once a month to turn from a hungry student into a fun one, and the first salary, after paying a removable angle, will always be a bit lacking to make it up to the advance. In such realities, “watching movies” is not a question of morality, but of opportunity. There is an opportunity - we look and rejoice, no - we are looking for.
For 13 years I have gone from full pirate to almost full legit, but, surprisingly, even completely lazy, willing to pay, just to decide anything - I still sometimes feel the pressure, like pushing it to “get it, take it for free”. And this, by the way, is one of the reasons why I completely disagree with the generalizations of Russians and pirates, pirates and freeloaders - etc.
Ancient history: 90s
Right holders have contributed to the formation of the counterfeit market since its inception. First, by its demonstrative absence. From the late 80s to the end of the 90s, pirates were our distributors of Western hits, filling the attention deficit from Hollywood as best they could.
In zero, Hollywood, finally, drew attention to the Russian rental - and the Russian counterfeit. And just in those years, there was a big process of changing formats in the world: from 1998 in Europe, and further, DVD-format was gaining in popularity everywhere, from 1998 to 2008 it surpassed VHS coverage, went beyond the film industry, becoming almost worldwide main format external media. Of course, it could have been more logical than putting Russia on this upgrade, especially since after the chimes that had broken through the Millennium, the VHS players seemed like an ever more ancient artifact every day in the fairy tale about Cinderella.
As a DVD in Russia did not go completely for a more than good reason
However, triumphant around the world, the DVD in Russia simply “didn’t take off,” getting into antiphase with the more important trend of our market for 1999–2004. For me, the very end of the 90s - the first half of the zero was the time when almost all my friends and classmates bought computers.
More developed countries had the opportunity and met their demand for PC since the 80s, and now they have updated their multimedia devices to the new gem of the collection - DVD. In Russia, this was a quantum leap: a large number of people were finally able to afford their first PC at that historical moment when it had already begun to turn into a necessity. Therefore, while the world was getting used to the new toy - DVD, in Russia the most important of the toys was in priority.
At the same time, the country was still not rich, therefore, for most families, buying one excluded the acquisition of another in the foreseeable future - besides, the ability to watch movies on a PC, too, albeit from CDs, finally ousted DVD players from the realm of Fashionable things for the rich. (Probably, there was no curse for mass goods in Russia worse than to fall into the category “it is for the rich”). And the rich got their heads up, no longer simply buying a player, but by organizing a medical center, home theaters - and, of course, they had a lot of space to start and develop a film library from licensed DVDs.
Second and final beak click
Of course, DVD remained an interesting technology - as a bulk external media, for example. But here, too, a hungry market and a ripe niche were taken away from the DVD from under the nose. Russians, who were late with the development of this format, were late just enough to catch the dawn of USB flash drives. It was the second and final DVD skip of my window on the Russian market - flash drives were so much easier and more convenient than any disks that many who had not really mastered the science of burning discs, recording and rewriting (including me) somewhere in those years, realized that you can no longer learn.
As a result, when the main carrier, including for film copies, became the DVD in the world - in Russia, most of the films recorded on CD were copied immediately to flash drives and hard drives. For a couple of years, until the complete victory of the Internet, Russia was not so easily compatible with the rest of the world due to the preferred formats. Well, the spectators didn’t have any choice at all - in the absence of any alternatives from copyright holders at all (except for the VHS releases that were still released), piracy almost again continued its cultural and educational mission, which came to new frontiers thanks to torrents.
Blu-ray, which has reached everyone
A fully completed DVD transition cycle, except for Russia, which has dodged it, the format no longer needed promotion. And the right holders have already been promoting the next big thing - the Blu-Ray format, the mega-quality of which was supposed to save the sales of the disks. Having emerged as the winner of a two-year standoff with HD DVD, the new champion in 2008 became the carrier of the first Blu-Ray movie versions for 50 gigs! Flash drives against it even theoretically, with the standard USB 2.0 could not oppose anything to it. It was King Kong among external carriers - though it didn’t matter anymore. This time, Blu-Ray has flown past not only the Russian market, but also a generally global trend.
The era of broadband unlimited Internet has begun. The external arms race is not that complete, it has ceased to make sense. The capacity of fiber in almost every apartment was enough to download Blu-Ray in minutes, instead of weeks of waiting by mail. No need for disk storage, no need to buy a Blu-ray player. And in the long term, the rejection of disks as carriers also saved on the upgrade of computers: instead of the initial plans of the vendors to build Blu-Ray players into the more expensive versions of laptops, there was a tendency to refuse disk drives in laptops in general.
As for Blu-Ray - even Hollywood majors had to say that their attempts to reject the course of history in the desired direction were always new and new discs - were meaningless.
About any total replacement of DVD to Blu-Ray in the same way that recently captured the world of DVD, it was already out of the question - as a result, both formats remained on the market.
Blu-ray releases were a toy for collectors - and fans of the warm tube, for whom the movie with a flash drive - a terrible sin.
But still, the idea of saving the disk as the main data carrier and sales format had to be finally buried. Most viewers have already become users - no return.
And the majors were finally forced to move towards progress.
PS About right holders
In general, this was supposed to be an article about modern streaming services, which I use the longer, the more often I am disappointed. Thinking about why everything is so bad, I delved into the history, of course, the topic of piracy surfaced, got to the history of carriers - and cut out this huge piece to post it separately. And I posted my frustration about streaming services on Dzen .
What binds all these stories? Rightholders The further, the more it seems to me that they have not learned to be interested in markets outside the United States. They do not really care about them - yes, even piracy. If you were concerned, 21st Century Fox would not restrict access to its streaming service, which was opened as a global project, only to the United States and Canada. And without offering any alternative exits, even for animated series with a planetary scope, a fan base.
Yes, we remember the tense years of a full-scale war of right holders against the whole world. But they can be understood - left without their ten-year plan just before 2018 (just imagine that we would have rolled out a new generation of records already gigov 300), the studio panicked.
They, like the Brotherhood of the Ring through the mines of Moria, had to go on the streaming road, from which they fought back more violently than Gandalf from Balrog - and absolutely everything in this story looked completely counter-intuitive to them, despite all the chuyk that had been developed in the business.
And finally, they simply had to support their own and partner streaming, turning the life of pirate portals into as much as they could - intolerable. By the way, lawyers of Warner Bros., who did not make any intelligible rates on the streaming market, were most zealous. In general, in the aggregate of 5–8 years, it is lawyers who look the most successful and satisfied with the direction of the studio.
But now, it seems to me, the intensity will decrease. First, the horror stories about pirates who are ruining studios have clearly gone down in history. And they were not particularly close to the truth - if the situation were such, the studios would run much farther, getting out to live. And so, all the horrors of piracy was not enough even to wash off the raid of this smug assholeness.
Secondly, Warner Bros. with the entire household under the roof of Time Warner was bought by AT & T for a monstrous $ 85 billion. And Disney bought all the Fox film production from Rupert Murdoch, leaving him a news empire. Although not to say that Fox experienced some difficulties (although we do not know what budgets all of Cameron’s new Avatars put together have achieved), on the whole, these gigantic mergers and purchases demonstrate confidence in tomorrow’s monumental power.
So, they will again be able to return to their beloved business: squabbling with each other. The beginning of the big streaming war is already scheduled for the end of 2019, when contracts for Disney and Marvel films in Netflix expire. Which “Disney”, of course, will take, and, along with Pixar, Star Wars and the whole fox host will put in the catalog of their streaming, which will be launched at this point.
Netflix's CEO Reed Hastings responded to these plans, “ It’s no more dangerous for us than it was the Hulu threat” - and allocated $ 8 billion this year to create unique content.
So, yes - I am waiting for increasing isolationism on the part of Hollywood, growing pofigism towards their users outside the US - and a relatively quiet period for pirates. Unless, of course, lawyers Warner Bros. again do not want premiums. But, I hope, will do without it.
Yes, I personally have finally switched to the paradigm of paid software, paid content, etc. But in the process of working on this retrospective, for the first time I saw all this not from a personal, but from a historical point of view. All memories associated with the written were reworked, and moved to a new state of aggregation - not as a private story, but just part of the story. During this process, naturally, any emotional living creature is sterilized so as not to drag along old emotions, prejudices and delusions.
What I didn’t expect was the emergence of a new emotion that had arisen and accumulated in the process of work: and turned into a completely new-found respect for the entire pirate movement. To whom I wish to breathe more freely and earn more creativity.
Yo-ho-ho and pirate flag!
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