Hesitated a lot about this, and finally thought "fuck it, let's do it".
I think it's like people working in porn: they don't necessarily enjoy the industry, but at one point they thought "man, there's really something that needs to be done".
I'd much prefer a legal solution. I'd much prefer content owners to expose APIs for the licensing of their content, and have them let us create the front-ends.
EDIT: Read below before downvoting, in USA the situation might be better. We're (Europe) still waiting.
Because they so clearly suck at both UI and content distribution.
I don't want to jump through hoops to watch a movie. And no I don't want to wait for the release window to clear.
I want you to give me the rights to get it by my owns mean, because I know how to do it better than you. Just let me pay for the damn thing: I got money, I'll pay for all I want to watch.
On most of these stores, if you linked directly to the movie page, it'd be a one- or two-click experience between arriving and watching the video.
On Amazon for example, you click the "Buy Movie" button, and it turns into a play button, which launches the movie player. As long as you're signed in, there are no intermediate steps, the purchase just goes to your default credit card or bank account and you get an e-mail receipt while you're already watching the movie.
It's not that different anywhere else if you're already signed in, which many people will be.
You haven't really answered the question of why you don't "let me pay for the damn thing" by linking to these stores for the movies available there. If you're only interested in helping people pirate movies even if they're cheaply and easily available to them online already, just come out and say it.
It isn't just streaming either. A month or so ago my housemates and I tried to purchase S1 of Game Of Thrones. It has been on TV here, shown a day after it was aired in the US. However it wasn't available on Netflix, Lovefilm, iTunes or any other digital service we could find. In the end we gasp went to a shop (!!!) and bought it a few days later (mainly due to our shoddy internet connection, and Amazon not having an Ireland presence so shipping takes a while).
Yep and no; it doesn't suck; everyone just downloads them illegally as there is no other viable choice. Waiting for them to come out in EU is not viable; we live in a global, continues contact world; on Facebook people will be talking about the 'latest Game of Thrones' ep and you didn't see it.
Well, but here's the problem: If I want to watch a movie right the hell now, torrents aren't a good solution, because the pieces you get are random. You can't start watching the movie immediately, you have to wait until it's loaded completely. There are some experimental p2p streaming protocols, but there isn't anything really good on the market just yet.
Sure, I'm on an awesome tracker, and I can download an HD movie to my seedbox within 5 minutes. No problem. Then I just stream it over my home connection (which is rather slow.) So there's a 5-10 minute delay, which I can live with. But, if somebody would offer me an insta-HD-streaming feature (Netflix doesn't count, I'm in Europe,) I'd pay for that.
Vuze (Azureus) has a 'Media Server' plug-in which works very nicely, even with 1080p movies.
They intentionally bury it, though, because 'play now' is their premium offering (a shady business model imho). You have to go to the torrent's files, right click the .avi/.mkv/.mp4, go to 'Media server' -> 'Copy stream URI to clipboard', and then you can use that stream URI in any self-respecting player (VLC, mplayer).
That's terrible UX though :)
(Small note: in-order download is generally frowned upon in the torrent world, becaues it's bad for a torrent's health. However, Vuze manages this nicely by both prioritizing the pieces in order and still downloading/seeding random pieces at the same time. I think it's a very good compromise.)
Hesitated a lot about this, and finally thought "fuck it, let's do it".
I think it's like people working in porn: they don't necessarily enjoy the industry, but at one point they thought "man, there's really something that needs to be done".
I'd much prefer a legal solution. I'd much prefer content owners to expose APIs for the licensing of their content, and have them let us create the front-ends.