This is the tweet that has gone viral in the last 24 hours.

Basically WB pulled the plug on the show Final Space by treating it as a tax write-off.

The Good Old Times and $NFLX

I remember that I never really had any issues torrenting stuff when I was a little boy already diving into the net for movies/tv-series/games legal Linux distros 👀.

At some point, Netflix became available in most of Europe and suddenly a very nice UX with a growing catalogue of contents was available on major platforms for an affordable monthly price. I noticed that a lot of my friends back then, stopped downloading or streaming movies and started using Netflix.

Did Netflix reduced content pirating? I don’t have data to support this, but I can imagine that who did before Netflix came along, probably kept on doing it afterwards as well. Perhaps the numbers would be in favour of Netflix in terms of traffic share, just because of the sheer low barrier to entry for platform adoption, especially with respect to mobile traffic.

The thing that kept me using Netflix, is the UX of the mobile application. There’s no other service, to which I can legally obtain access, that remotely comes close in terms of user experience, in my opinion. Amazon Prime is aberrant, the app sucks, the search functionality is, God’s knows why, still broken and has items that can only be bought with a separate transaction. Haven’t used Disney+ too much, it seemed ok but the library content wasn’t enough for me to justify the subscription. AppleTV+ has had amazing shows lately and the experience is good, if you’re already into the 🍎 ecosystem.

Already the fact that we have all these applications (in the US the phenomena is even more striking) is basically calling for the end users to pirate stuff, most of the times you don’t even know where to watch something, you just want to watch it.

Final Space

Final Space has been removed from the face of the earth and has kind woke some people up regarding digital ownership of items, this is not something new, of course. Think about your Spotify library, if at some point Spotify kills your account, you’d loose everything in a heartbeat. Same with Netflix and all of the other services.

Five years of my life.s Three seasons. Blood, sweat, and tears… ….became a tax write-off for the network that owns Final Space. Yup. That’s it. That’s why it’s disappeared everywhere in the USA. Five years of work vanished.
When the license is up internationally, Netflix will take it down, and then it will be gone forever. There are no more physical copies of S1 and S2, and no physical copies of Season 3 were ever made. Your memory of Final Space will be the only proof it ever existed

So?

I remember the usual short video shown at the beginning of movies

You wouldn’t steal a car

But what if you bought a car and then, at some point, the car maker or the car salesman took it from you (moreover, without a refund)? I know, I’m exaggerating here but you get the gist.

On Prime the button clearly states “Buy Item” but then in the ToS in some obscure point, it reads

[..] revocable licensing [..]

our society is driven by legalese bs 🙈.

I don’t have a solution, but things like this certainly don’t help stopping people from using other ways to consume mediums.

The company Sandvine published a 2022 report and it’s interesting to notice the global traffic share per medium/service, FYI.