The order is a bit off. Production companies starting pulling their content from Netflix after they saw how profitable streaming services could be.
This forced Netflix to start producing their own content.
this post was submitted on 05 Sep 2026
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same story with spotify, except that spotify itself started as a piracy service…
Same with Crunchyroll.
never paid for netflix or other services, some people never had the money for it and continued buying some films (DVDs were still sold until 2019 pretty widely here) or renting a film every X time and pirating others until the first became impossible and piracy was the only thing.
then the streaming services go to shit with subscription fees, not getting all the content and such, and you see people who showed off being able to pay for those services before or still keep one struggling to get content and slightly becoming pirates again.
this is the other side of the situation. you warned them, they trusted the corpos, and corpos gave them shit.
While VALVe somehow made piracy obsolete for video games then after that they decide to make gaming on linux easier jumpstart the pc handheld market AND making one of the best first party controllers
I forgot about the controller! I want one.
OP must be a 2000s kid, because we were definitely pirating stuff over the Internet long before that.
They also didn't mention Netflix's DVD service, nor that it was really Steam that did what they described.
I remember me being 14 and distributing stacks of 3,5" 1,44Mb floppies filled with copies of Doom to whoever wanted one, as long as i got the disks back later on
ahhh, the halcyon days of downloading Utada mp3s via dialup cuz no store outside of Japan, neither online nor brick mortar, even sold them.
and bragging about it on AIM!
I would argue that what Steam did for video games is what Netflix did for movies and tv shows. They made the legal option way more convenient and affordable it wasn't worth the hassle to pirate. That has changed now (at least in Netflix's case).
OP says ~2007 internet (asumming bandwidth and avail content) got good enough to become mainstem, not that I started around then.
It wasn't that though. High speed internet was available before that time. What really affected things in 2006 was that peer exchange was introduced to bittorrent, giving it a massive advantage over other file sharing services at the time.
I remember paying $30 USD for a DVD with 3-4 episodes at most of an anime series. 26 episode Cowboy Bebop season? ~$120 USD.
Sure I downloaded that episode of Excel Saga once (❤️). It was 320x240 and took more than a day on my 56k dialup.
At some point I remember going on ebay and buying the entirety of Witch Hunter Robin (which at the time, I chose over Naruto that had just started airing as well, this would turn out to be an important tone setting point in my life ...) and getting it for ~$20 USD. Basically just the cost of someone else to download it and burn it to CD for me. Did the same thing with Wolf's Rain.
Good memories. Of the anime. This shit always sucked.
It's not fully accurate to lay the blame at the feet of Netflix. At the time, they just saw the writing on the wall and did what they had to do to survive. Their catalog was massive because, early on, no one thought streaming would work. They had a massive collection of shows and movies that didn't pull enough of an audience to air on TV for ad revenue. Netflix was able to get a TON of long-term deals that they used to grow, but when those contracts were coming due, the rights holders pulled out and started trying to make their own services. At that point, Netflix basically had to become a studio and pivot to original content, or else they wouldn't have content at all.
The long and the short of it is that because Netflix was first, it got to set the stage for the golden age of streaming, but because it worked, it was inevitable that streaming would become cable.
It's not Netflix's fault. It's just the course of the entertainment business. They suck now, but back then, I couldn't think of a single bad thing to say about them... well, maybe that they got rid of the 5-star rating system. That system was definitely used to get metrics for their early programming.
It’s just the course of the entertainment business.
And it works like that for every medium. Guy invents printing bibles and before you know it there are pamphlet and advertisement. Radio wanted to educate and bring peace and soon enough you got propaganda and advertisement.
For me, there was never any move to netflix or any streaming. Piracy has always been cheap and convenient, and I don't want to deal with big corps
Also, piracy not popular before 2007? Pirate dvd/cd/vhs/etc stands were a very popular thing, at least around here. There was already a lot of piracy before the internet became popular
Yeah piracy was everywhere during the cassette tape and floppy disk era, I don't think it just was called piracy yet back then
Bootlegging is what we called it as kids
It was also called piracy back then too. It was incredibly common on the Commodore 64 starting in the 80s . They'd often call themselves crackers, because you needed to crack the piracy protection to be able to copy disks.
Those disks and even cassettes would then be shared from person to person or sold in shops or on second hand markets. AFAIK this is also when 1337/leet became popularised, to avoid censorship on BBSes, where file sharing was also possible.
For example, a magazine from 1991:
Note the group is called Elite productions and they call themselves pirates. There's also mention of crackers, specific events, and I especially enjoy that a piracy/cracking group felt it necessary to add a copyright logo next to the name of their piracy group which was called Elite Productions.
I never used netflix either. Their DRM won't let me watch in 1080p because I'm not using a spyware infested browser and OS. Back when they had a good selection, my internet was too slow to stream HD video anyways.
Fun fact: Linux has that "certification" to watch DRM content while Windows does not, which means you can use whatever browser you want on Linux but not on Windows to watch DRM content
There was plenty of it going on around here. Even after Napster was taken down, there was Kazaa, Limewire, and your choice of Gnutella client. It was mostly us downloading stuff to listen to on the bus because high speed internet was rare unless you were in a city.
Anyone who had a dual cassette deck back in the 80's didn't have much issue copying music or game cassettes. Floppy disks were easy to copy too.
The order here is a little wrong, but it's mostly correct.
Production houses started to see Netflix raking in cash hand over fist and decided that they could do that too and started pulling their shows.
This made Netflix need to pivot hard into in-house content in order to not look like a barren wasteland.
I watched so much scifi on Netflix back in the day. It was really an end of an era moment when they lost Star Trek and Stargate.
Yeah I was about 5 seasons into stargate when it left. Later added it to Jellyfin, ezpz. You can go pretty far with a library card, or a vpn, or Usenet, or…
History? That's cute.
I was downloading cracked video games from BBSes in the early '80s.
C64?
Atari 800.
Almost 50 years ago...
When's your next prostate check?
That's between me and your dad's penis
Piracy didn't start in 2006, before that there was limewire and Napster, and before that bootleg DVDs, and before that the MPAA spent billions lobbying to ban VHSs with a record function and get draconian punishments for recording movies.
I was downloading episodes of Jackass back in about 2001, using I think it would have been eMule.
You'd get a 240p MPEG-1 file, and you were happy with that.
Hilariously, for people who didn't own computers that could handle playing videos from CD-Rs, as my PC's video card had composite output I used to make VHS tapes from those files. And then put the adhesive label sheet for the tape cassette through the printer.
Y'know, normal stuff.
It was so widespread that around 2004-2005 you could buy dvd players that supported avi/mp4 files with external subtitles. They don't create products like that for niche markets.
Can confirm we definitely did not pirate anything before 2007.
BCE? Yes, correct, most probably.
