Netflix thwarts TheDarkOverlord

or, especially in Europe, with the law — to see a season a little earlier?

Certainly, no one will cancel their Netflix subscription because one series is suddenly available for free download with an increasingly unpopular, inconvenient technology that doesn’t allow instant streaming. People would only consider that if all the content available on Netflix could suddenly be streamed free of charge.

“Subscription” is the key word here. This business model is a piracy killer.

For 15 years, Adobe Systems tried to sell its image manipulation software for thousands of dollars per box to professional photographers and designers — and everyone I knew in that community used pirated copies at home. Now that the software is sold as a service, for a monthly subscription fee, everyone I know pays more or less happily.

Adobe managed to switch to the subscription model without losing revenue.

For companies in the content industry, however, it’s been a scarier transition.

Record companies, for example, lost massive amounts of money in the shift to streaming, not least because the music streaming industry pioneers initially gave a lot of music away for free, hoping to build advertising-based business models. Now that this illusion is gone, streaming revenue is quickly growing, and music catalogue owners and artists are more willing to cooperate with streaming services.

According to Muso, the digital content protection firm, 2016 saw a 6 per cent decline in visits to music piracy sites, including “stream ripping” services that offer illegal streaming.

Eventually, movie studios and streaming services should work out a reasonable, perhaps tiered, subscription price system to make more content available online. It would drive down piracy, as the subscription model did in the software and music businesses, and it would make theft as nearly pointless as it has been in The DarkOverlord’s case.