A new stunt shows perfectly how a broken streaming system encourages piracy

We have all been there: you have a sudden itch to watch a specific movie and after a brief search on Netflix you realize that it is not there. Next step: Google. Type a search query for where that particular movie is streamed. It is not on Hulu or Amazon Prime Video. However, it is available through HBO Now, and this is where the decision paralysis strikes. Sign up for the free seven-day trial, rent it for $ 3.99, torrent it or give up and just find something on Netflix to fill your time?

This scenario – immediately available to us more than ever – is where streaming exhaustion strikes. It is also what tackles the latest installation of internet art collective MSCHF. All flows is a streaming version of pirate radio stations. People who access the site can choose from six different popular streaming services – Netflix, Hulu, Disney Plus, Showtime, Amazon Prime Video and HBO Now – and tune into a live feed with exactly one program of the service, already playing, just like traditional TV. There were just under 275,000 users at the moment.

The website looks like an old-school radio unit with a TV monitor in the middle. With a tuner you can click on the different services to open a specific stream of each stream. If you click on Hulu, a may appear Keeping up with the Kardashians episode, while HBO Now might educate Game of Thrones, and Showtime can play something Right. MSCHF has subscriptions to all six streaming services, but it is not really legal to make the content behind subscriber paywalls available to everyone. The team knows this and they are already preparing for the removal requests.

“When media becomes inaccessible, piracy thrives again,” says Kevin Wiesner, creative director at MSCHF. “From the BBC from one to sixty hours on pop music to the iTunes store MP3 tyranny of the ’00s. ‘All The Streams’ is a response to the fragmentation and walled garden paradigm that has become known for online video streaming services. ”

MSCHF focused on six major streaming services, but there are a dozen in the United States alone – and more are coming. The launches of WarnerMedia’s HBO Max, NBCUniversal’s Peacock and Quibi will be launched in the coming months. HBO Max will be the exclusive home base for Friends, while The office will only exist on Peacock from 2021. All eight Harry Potter films are currently locked up at NBCUniversal, despite the fact that WarnerMedia has the technical rights. Warner bros. holds the rights to the Lord of the Rings franchise, but The Fellowship of the Ring now does not stream on HBO; instead it’s on Amazon Prime Video.

Fragmentation leads to frustration and frustration leads to piracy. There are entire TikTok accounts dedicated to recommending new free streaming sites that collect everything in one place, because consolidation is an advantage when it comes to home entertainment. The Intelligencer “Brian Feldman wrote about the problem with splintering in June 2019and noted that the problem would not even be resolved by maintaining an expensive cable subscription. “The best central place to find media is, again, through piracy,” Feldman wrote. “Now the legal options for media consumption are again becoming too burdensome, both financially and logistically,” he said.

(Disclosure: the Intelligencer is a division of New York Magazine, a division of Vox Media.)

Downloading and illegally streaming content is not the only way that irritated consumers subscribe to a dozen services. Top analyst group MoffettNathanson discovered that last summer 14 percent of Netflix viewers in the United States used a password that does not belong to their household account. That is quite a bit of looking – and it is expensive for the company.

Netflix CEO Reed Hastings said in 2016 that sharing passwords was a good thing because it meant that more people found Netflix Originals, but things have changed a lot of in a very short time. In October 2019, chief product officer Greg Peters said the company will continue to monitor the situation and add that it is thinking of ‘consumer-friendly ways to push that to the edges. “(Although Peters clarified, Netflix currently has no plans to do that.)

Sharing passwords is a growing problem and belongs to the same family as piracy. Part of the issue is that streaming promoted the idea of ​​a cheaper way to view everything and, as things shatter, the promise disappears. When Netflix licensed everything, people could spend $ 10 a month to get 90 percent of what they wanted.

Which was the promise. Then companies decided that they wanted to generate their own income by streaming the shows and movies they owned – the IP address that made them successful as TV networks or film studios. It made sense for the studios and it made sense for the streamers that rent IP such as Netflix. The only person for whom it increasingly makes no sense was the consumer. And that is what All The Streams exists to remind people when they visit.

“We’re going to play everything we want,” said Wiesner. “We’re going to create a Frankenstein playlist of media that none of these streaming platforms could ever recommend to you, because it would cost them the profit of their exclusive ownership.”