The insistence on obsolete practices in the content distribution industry can take us back to the times of open TV.
Someone said that man is the only animal that stumbles twice over the same stone. Or, as Quino put it very well in the Mafalda cartoon, more than an animal of habit, man is, as usual, an animal. The audiovisual content production industry had found with streaming an excellent way to reduce the practices of sharing content in unauthorized ways. But, they had to screw it up.
The downloads are back (It's true, they had never completely disappeared, but they had decreased quite a bit) yeIn this post I am going to explain the causes and list some programs to do them in Linux
A clarification, in no way am I recommending the use of these programs for downloading copyrighted content. Already in Another item I have listed some sites where public domain material can be obtained. In fact, I strongly recommend against it. Not for legal reasons but in the hope that once and for all they learn the lesson that no one wants business as usual anymore.
Why are downloads back?
iCarly was a show on the children's channel Nickelodeon. It recounted the adventures of three teenagers who produced a program for the web. In the episode iCarly saves TV, he is narrated as a traditional television executive, desperate because not even his own daughter sees the children's program that she produces, so he hires them.
The problem is that instead of letting them do what they know, it forces them to do the same things that were done in the program that nobody saw. And, with the same result. In the end the three boys end up fired and return to the web.
And, that is a good description of how traditional audiovisual content producers act. I'm leaving out the record companies and publishers who for the moment seem to have understood the rules of the game.
The rise and fall of streaming
Netflix was born as the evolution of a DVD rental service. It came as if it had fallen from heaven for those of us who were fed up with Google translate subtitles, mirror images or poorly recorded images of the cinema screen.. Not to mention the download time. With a catalog of traditional movies, popular series and some in-house production, it also allowed us to discover material from non-traditional sources.
Then Amazon Prime, owned by the most popular online store, was added. With a lot of its own content, it was adding a lot of material that was impossible to see on Netflix. YouTube had a brief flirtation with original content, but its strong point was renting and selling, but its attempt at a subscription service did not end up being successful.
Seeing the success of the first two, content producers they decided to emulate the owner of the goose that lays the golden eggs and each one launch their own streaming service, atomizing the market and forcing the user to pay several platforms to see the tiny percentage of the catalog of each one that really interests them.
The user did what was expected, he stayed with the platform that he already paid for and gets the content of the others. by direct download or P2P.
There was an obvious solution, sell wholesale subscriptions to allow the emergence of intermediaries that could market flexible subscription systems. But, they chose to go back to the past.
Netflix and its competitors are going to start experimenting with free, ad-supported subscriptions. Forgetting that advertisers are abandoning traditional advertising because it no longer sells.
It is a matter of time before they offer us a "new streaming service that does not require an Internet connection." Any resemblance to broadcast television in our parents' day is not coincidental.
Some download programs to use on Linux
- Amulet: P2P client for the eD2K and Kademlia networks. It has the most complete catalog, but not as current. I recommend reading the comments of readers to my article.
- WebTorrent: It allows you to download and view content from the Torrent network. It is available as a client for the desk or as a plugin from a browser. It is integrated into Brave browser.
- Megatools: Profit Share for the terminal that allows downloading and viewing of files stored in Mega.nz. It is in the repository of some Linux distributions.
- youtube-dl: Tool for the terminal that allows the download of videos from Youtube and Many others video hosting sites. It's in the repositories.