
One Million page views on movies.io - FredericJ
http://fredericjacobs.com/one-million
======
obiterdictum
OK, so, it's _that_ post.

Consider the following cases:

1\. a company violates a FOSS license by incorporating GPL code and not
releasing source code.

2\. a company takes an image produced by an artist and sells T-shirts of it
without the artist getting compensated.

3\. a website/mobile app/elements of branding get replicated (or very closely
reproduced) in a new website/app (think Zynga, Chinese/Russian clones of
Facebook/Groupon and whatnot).

4\. site content gets scraped wholesale, and fed into another AdSense-infested
site.

In all these cases, noone _lost_ any money when bits got copied (in fact,
sometimes the offending party would produce original work to mimic the product
in question), yet doing above things is a no-no, but downloading movies is OK.
I don't mean to take a high moral ground here, but it's baffling for me to see
the cognitive dissonance.

~~~
marquis
Perhaps a more relevant analogy would a hypothetical popular newspaper
example: you can buy it at the local store of some countries on the day of
release, or if you live in those country where you can access them online for
free or included with your TV subscription, you're fine. But if you don't live
in said country and the newspaper doesn't distribute to you, or it gets to you
some months late and it's old news by then, you might go looking for other
access avenues. You'd very much like to get todays news so you can participate
in the global discussion.

Have we not already come to the agreement that the problem is not piracy, but
the lack of access in our new global arena? None of us here would be so naive
as to believe that piracy will end when each of us have access regardless of
our geographical location, but at least then we will be able to have a real
conversation about it.

~~~
token78
Nobody in my household has pirated even one track since the advent of Spotify
in our lives. I know it's not the best sample size, and it's only anecdotal,
but I suspect that would be the pattern across the board if similar models
became adopted for other forms of media.

~~~
TylerE
While technically true, frankly spotify might as well be.

While exact numbers aren't disclosed, I've seen a $0.004 per play royalty
thrown around enough that it's probably at least ballpark.

~~~
token78
But their payout is based per stream, not per track, isn't it? At amounts that
still exceed that of radio?

"For a 99c sale of a track on iTunes an indie artist gets 70c. At the time you
need 140 Spotify streams to make the same 70c." (Source:
<http://www.spotidj.com/spotifyroyalties.htm>)

These figures are hardly comparable with piracy, and for an artist with a
reasonable audience, should more than exceed the $.918 average royalty for a
song per unit sold that record companies provided in the era of CD sales.

------
nchuhoai
I do tend to disagree with the sentiment on HN regarding some aspects of the
"pirating issue".

Common arguments are (as quoted from the text)and my symbolic translation to
the HN world:

> "Movie theater incomes are in most cases enough to cover the production
> costs. Their business remains viable even if people continue downloading
> their movies"

in HN-speak: "Developer salaries are the highest in the economy, so their
careers remain viable if people start copying their code"

> "Isn’t the main goal of content producers that their content is seen ? Well.
> If you would charge less for a movie I would be glad to pay for it. But
> prices for buying movies online are just abusively high."

in HN-speak: "The main goal of a developer should be to get the product/code
in front of many people. If the price would be lower, I would buy it. Ergo,
the price should be lower and if not, im just gonna take it"

> "If I buy a DVD I have the right to do what I want with it"

in HN-speak: "I know the terms and licenses of the code I am using. However, i
dont like it, so im just gonna do whatever I want anyways."

My view is that this is just like any other market: If you don't like the
product or the way its sold under specific conditions, you always have the
freedom of not buying it. No one is forcing you to anything.

Also, before this whole downvoting madness starts, please consider that I'm
just trying to voice my opinion and argument for my stance.

~~~
obiterdictum
This is exactly what I am thinking. If we expect others to respect our
software licenses, why don't we respect others' license on creative content
they produce, no matter how outlandishly priced or badly delivered we believe
it to be?

What baffles me is the amount of rationalisation. I come from Russia, where
piracy is a social norm, and if you pay full official price for entertainment
products, you are either a sucker, or a rich person asserting your wealth
status (I don't imagine much has changed). But Russians never attribute
themselves downloading movies and cracking games to some higher purpose: we
just like free stuff, and gaming the system for personal gain is a national
pastime.

~~~
shellox
I don't think it's bad. I grow up in a time where it's normal that all
information are free. I already have to pay fee's on electronic devices like
printers, hard drives, DVDs etc. so this should be enough.

~~~
sukuriant
I'm sorry, but I still don't live in that time. I have to pay to get to
academic journals to read that information. I have to pay to watch television
live. What sort of world are you living in where information is already all
free?

~~~
shellox
File sharing is normal for people today. I grew up with it and all people in
my class exchanged games, music, movies etc. each other. Now I started working
and it's nearly the same. I understand your point, of course. Music, Movies
etc. are still protected by copyright, but I don't want to pay for a crappy
service e.g DVD, which includes copyright violation warnings, previews of
other movies and copy protection if I can get a better service for free. But
I'll probably purchase the Tom Lowe movie, because he is a cool guy and offer
the movie TimeScapes in various formats.

------
Mrtierne
Avengers made money so piracy is OK in this case? Why don't you want to pay
for the movie? Is the price too high? You don't like theaters? Piracy is not a
good solution to this problem. Movies cost money to make and a lot of it,
production through distribution. Yeah some make a lot money back but many
don't make any. Working with movies I know that when you put little money into
a project your chances of getting something good out of it are slim.

It's clear there is a problem with the business model and someone needs to
start coming up with a better solution, other than piracy. The solution needs
one goal ... to make money for those that create the movies.

~~~
MichaelGG
I think the sentiment he is expressing is that studios complain that piracy is
killing their industry. Yet, both piracy and profits are way up. Thus, the
argument that "we have to do something about piracy!" and asking for more
anti-piracy enforcement, is obviously incorrect.

Note: The goal is _NOT_ to make money for those creating movies. Copyright
exists to make sure the public gets more works created. Granting a temporary
monopoly on the content produced is only done _so that the public ends up
better off_. Please keep the actual goal in mind.

If works are being produced and being made available, then we're doing just
fine. Copyright needs revisiting if we see signs that content production is
going down. These days, we're seeing quite the opposite, with more things
being produced by even more people.

------
mmanfrin
I'm sorry for being cynical, but getting a million pageviews as a piracy site
with a fancy interface is not really spectacular. You're giving away content
that is normally sold -- of course people are going to use it.

Not really impressed.

~~~
MichaelGG
Which sites sell torrent files or magnet URIs?

------
PaulJoslin
One of the trends I've noticed more and more over the last few years, is that
Design is now a USP in itself.

Take anything that already exists and execute it with better design / user
experience and watch it become popular / successful.

That said, it once again highlights that as developers, we shouldn't ignore
design or think that just getting the basic functionality working is all that
matters. Design in a consumer market is a major influencer, often more so than
the functionality itself.

~~~
mtgx
Torrent sites and programs definitely need better UI and UX if they want them
to become mainstream.

------
PaulHoule
Right or wrong, this site looks like it exists to facilitate illegal movie
sharing -- it's just a matter of time before the takedown notice comes.

It's too bad because it's such a pretty site. It could use a better knowledge
base (ranking and relevance are so-so) but it's really pretty good.

~~~
MasterScrat
Coda.fm does just that for music, and has been online for years.

------
jasonlotito
I still prefer the look of TorrentBulter.eu. It's default view is browsing the
top movies, and displays them in a much more enjoyable manner. The details
page on TB is also more feature filled, including a trailer as well (granted,
these can sometimes be wrong).

Movies.io, honestly, doesn't offer anything more, other than being newer.
Maybe I missed something.

~~~
mtgx
TorrentButler is especially good for "discovering" movies. Both are good for
torrent newbies. I like Movies.io search a lot, but I agree it would best if
one of them combined both features into one. Also, both should have their own
commenting systems, to make it easier to find the fakes. Movies.io has
something called "Verified" now, but not sure how that works. Are they just
verifying them manually? That seems like a lot of work.

~~~
FredericJ
We are using the Fenopy API to get the verified status of torrents.

We still want to keep a lot of features out of the interface. Power users will
still prefer searching manually for their torrents to see information we don't
provide (such like codecs).

We want to keep our interface as clean as possible.

~~~
mtgx
To me both Movies.io and torrentbuttler address the "torrent newbie" market,
as people who already know how to use torrents, can use TPB or other similar
sites just fine.

But right now I'd probably have to recommend both of the sites to newbies, one
for searching and one for discovery. But I'm sure you'll have a lot of success
just keeping it simple the way it is, too. It may actually be the main reason
why it got so popular right now. So don't fix what isn't broken I guess.

But since I think this is more for newbies, you better make sure there are no
fakes in those 5 listings, either through a technical solution or by allowing
others to make comments on the page, or at least use ratings for the torrent's
quality or something (but make sure they understand it's not about the quality
of the movie).

------
krakensden
You know what would be nice? If they added links to Amazon Streaming and
Netflix when available. Some sort of nod towards paying for content.

------
iuguy
I think the thing for me that movies.io has that others don't is the top 50.
It's a beautifully designed site that gives me access to a whole load of well
presented information. I don't even torrent, but I've used movies.io to look
for films that I haven't seen that might be worth looking into, and I can see
the torrent element almost as secondary to some users.

I hope movies.io succeeds, but not so much as to put it on the MPAA radar for
a takedown.

~~~
laacz
Rest assured, MPAA or alike won't leave them up for long. They should be smart
as to where to host, and how to evade.

Still, even if someone shuts them down, the idea of visually and functionally
all-web-two-point-whatever torrent sites will live on. I believe, that early
success of movies.io will be enough for others to try to follow the lead.

------
jameswyse
Thank you for this, love movies.io, though how do you add movies to 'watch
lists'? I signed up and found I could change a lists name but could never find
any way to add movies to this list.

The trailer feature is cool, but in order to close the trailer requires
clicking the link again. It'd be cool if we could also press escape or click
on the backdrop area to close it.

------
ya3r
So, whats the tech stack behind movies.io?

~~~
pooriaazimi
""It's a typical Rails 3 apps, Nokogiri used for scraping, PostgreSQL db
(migrated from SQLite originally), jQuery+ui for the aucomplete (lazy, yay!),
and that's about it :) ""

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4054755>

------
CJefferson
Hope we will hear when your first user gets their internet disconnected, or
has to pay a large fine.

------
stef25
The look & design is great. I'd love it if you'd let me filter on rotten
tomatoes ratings, discover movies in certain genres, especially more
underground / art house type movies. Most of TOP50 is just cheap hollywood
action movies that don't appeal very much.

------
user24
I still want to know how you do the background images.

Congrats on building a beautiful product too.

~~~
FredericJ
The backdrops are coming from TMDb.

We were asked several times to write a blog post about the technology that's
behind it. We are working on it.

Hint: All Ruby on Rails, no NodeJS. Sorry guys

~~~
waterlesscloud
TMDb's TOS states that you can't "Use TMDb APIs in any manner or for any
purpose that violates any law or regulation, any right of any person,
including but not limited to intellectual property rights, rights of privacy,
or rights of personality."

How does this reconcile with your use for a torrent search engine?

~~~
FredericJ
We contacted them. They said they didn't had any issue with us using their
backdrops and information.

~~~
waterlesscloud
Thanks for the response. It's quite surprising.

~~~
Turbots
Well, I hadn't even heard of TMDB before, and now I do, thanks to movies.io,
so they must be doing something good!

