Let's not delude ourselves into thinking the people who are in group (b) are the ones who have enough money to afford a high-bandwidth internet connection, a modern computer, and the knowledge to know what torrents and the accompanying technology are.
The vast majority of people will be using this to watch movies they don't feel like paying for. There might be a handful who genuinely can't access it, who have no way to legally pay for it outside of handing over a substantial amount of their small wealth, and they paradoxically also have access to an internet connection strong enough and a computer powerful enough that can handle streaming these movies. However, they do not represent the vast, vast, vast majority of users.
In my part of the world (Eastern Europe) 25 mbps no-quota costs about $20/mo (~2% avg income) in the urban areas. Outside of cities the price stays the same but usually only (A)DSL is available, with bandwidth ranging from 512kbps to ~15mbps.
Accidentally, an average price of a DVD movie is also around $20. So yes, there are places where fast internet is affordable, yet movies are not. Unless you want to watch only one per month and give up your internet instead.
There is also a matter of TV series, which you have to wait 1-2 years for (poorly dubbed) in TV or on DVD.
Of course we are probably in something like the top 10% of wealthy places to live in. I can only imagine that situation in poorer countries resembles the one we had when internet was just kicking off and hardly anyone had connection. There was (illegal) business model of downloading movies (from Kazaa or weird warez forums), burning them on CDs and selling for the locally acceptable price.
Guess what - unless the price of virtual goods is adjusted to the local standards, and the availability increases, piracy will be there.
If a $20 DVD isn't affordable, $20/mo internet isn't. (I'm also fairly skeptical that your average DVD movie is $20, as though that's the absolute lowest you'll ever pay.) Movies aren't a God-given right, so it's not like you deserve a set amount of movies per month.
Even then, while that situation is certainly more excusable, you're still the minority. That site isn't made for the Eastern European lower class who can't afford to buy a DVD. It's made for folks who have the money (which means they can purchase and maintain a computer as well as a monthly internet connection) but who don't feel like spending it.
Plus, I'm fairly sure iTunes has movie rentals in most Eastern European countries.[0]
I have a cheap internet connection (16Mbit, ~$13/month), and I'm not a minority. In my country, having an internet connection that's speedy enough for video streaming is not a luxury. And yet, I can't even buy anything off iTunes, Google Play Store, not to mention Netflix and other similar services. In fact, we even got PayPal only in mid 2013 (and not even the full service - we can only send money and can't receive anything), that's how "open" the internet is to our market.
Also, my country is in southern Europe, not part of the EU yet.
> The vast majority of people will be using this to watch movies they don't feel like paying for.
I think this is highly biased towards your own ideas of how someone could use such service. You are, in fact, projecting[0] your own probable scenarios to large group of people you have never met, living in countries you've only heard of in the news. That, sir, is unfair. You should not stick with generalized opinions and prejudice, mkay?
Actually, I'm not a minority, I know hardly anyone who behaves differently in my country. I also certainly am not in lower class. I hardly ever watch movies and when I do, I go to the cinema, because I don't like storing use-once junk in my apartment. Try to put it in perspective of 2% of income - in US most people can accept $85 broadband but hardly a $85 DVD, even if they are earning much more than average. I would be considered an idiot with too much money to spend if I bought them for myself. The only DVDs I have seen anywhere were gifts, as they are easy to pick and fit in boxes well.
The only reason why broadband may cost that much is because it's localized and one can't simply buy EU broadband in US. There are actually good reasons for broadband prices to be affected by local economy, since labour and materials may have different cost there. That's not the case with DVDs, which cost the same (pennies) to manufacture.
But maybe I should have put more emphasis on the problems with availability rather than money. Having a choice of spending my $20 on cinema tickets or a DVD, sometimes I would choose latter to watch something at home. But here DVDs are released only when the dubbing is ready, often after a year from the original release. I could get to this content earlier online, but I don't have Netflix here, nor Play Movies, Pandora and many others. There were problems with DVD releases that were solved in two ways: by VOD with reasonable monthly fee or by torrents. Saying torrents are for the greedy is just a good excuse to prosecute piracy instead of improving the market.
Your first sentence doesn't make any sense -- There is so much more that you can do with a $20/mo internet connection than a $20 DVD. I would go as far as to say that today, in the developed world, an internet connection is a necessity; DVDs on the other hand are not.
> The vast majority of people will be using this to watch movies they don't feel like paying for.
There's also a huge population of people around the world who get access to movies, TV shows and other media only after a significant delay and use this kind of services to get access to that media on the day it is released. Those living in the US may not realize it but there's no amount of money you can pay to get the hit TV shows on the day they are released in Europe and other parts of the world.
There's a pretty penny to be gained out of these would-be customers if the media distribution companies can figure out how to monetize zero day world wide distribution. It is not a technical problem to solve. Every day that this problem goes unsolved, the content industry loses money.
A little anecdotal evidence: out of the two american tv shows I watch, the other one can not be viewed from my home country at all, the other one will be available with a delay 6-12 months and a horrible dubbed soundtrack. Would I pay a reasonable price to get them on the day they are released instead of the clumsy torrent service I am using at the moment? Yes I would.
Torrents are always going to be more clumsy for media consumption than Netflix, etc. put.io is trying to bridge that gap, but it won't close it completely.
Real, legitimate streaming services are really good. they adjust quality based on available bandwidth. they have clients for every device you own. They provide all kinds of helpful metadata like cover art, actors, content classification, playlist recommendations, watch lists, etc etc etc etc
Torrents are terrible. half the stuff is malware, the quality is all over the map, languages and subtitles are a crap shoot, you use a ton of band width, you have to manage huge files locally, etc etc etc etc
Now, if you like you can work out the intersection with countries that have access to a similarly complete selection of movies at comparable cost to what Netflix offers in the U.S.
You will quickly find out that your "handful" of people is in fact hundereds of millions of people.
That really does nothing to disprove my point that people who can't afford movies (either purchasing, or importing, or renting in iTunes) are also extremely unlikely to be able to afford broadband internet and a modern computer and be knowledgeable enough to handle a cloud-based torrent client.
I've lived in part of the poorest region of Brazil in 2004. Most people I knew in middle class could afford at least a computer good enough to download things on emule or kazaa (BT was just starting to get popular but was still more geeky by then, where I lived) ... And I was impressed by the pirating knowledge... People who barely knew how to use Word and Excel, could download, or had a son who knew how to do it. Yet they couldn't afford to consume movies and music at the normal price. Because of extremly High tariffs, cultural goods where more expensive than in the US or Europe. And yet salary was much lower...
Broadband was expensive too, but 512k was something like 60$... And because internet access had so much more use than just consuming cultural information, people would prefer to get it and save on something else. Like the dvds that they would get by pirating.
Before 2002 when Broadband access was excessively rare... Most people would just buy pirated dvds from the flea market... For 5 $ or less. They where ready to pay for them... but at a lower price than what official goods where... You never bought dvd for youself except if you were wealthy or to give them as gifts.
The cost of providing an internet connection tends to adjust to the market. There's countless testimonies on this thread to that effect. The different regulatory environment, lower cost of labour and less entrenched monopolies in less developed countries mean that connections are cheaper.
Knowledge is basically free. Anyone with an internet connection and a PC made in the last 10 years (not particularly hard to come by, even with very little money) can be knowledgeable enough. Equating wealth with knowledge is foolish.
That's a terribly first-world-centric view to take. I live in Lebanon, definitely a country that does not qualify as "developed" by any standards and people here are in group (b).
Your options here for watching movies are (a) cinema(which doesn't work for TV shows), (b) wait for them to show up on crappy cable services, (c) buy pirated DVDs for 1~2$ a pop and (d) torrent. Buying legal DVDs is possible but extremely hard, not simply due to the cost but also the availability. If I wanted to buy a pirated DVD there are at least 3 different shops within 2min of my home in an eastern Beirut suburb whereas if I wanted to go the legal option I'd need to drive down to Virgin in downtown Beirut(15min drive) and pick from an extremely limited selection.
The only viable solutions if you want timely and not incredibly inconvenient access to movies or shows are (c) and (d). Internet connections are incredibly expensive relative to Europe or the US(50$/mo for 4mb and a 25GB cap) and yet I know a lot of people who go with option (d), mainly because traffic at night isn't subject to the cap. People will simply cue up their torrents and download them between 12am and 7am and watch them the next day. If you keep a buffer of unwatched movies/shows this can work quite well. My personal approach is to torrent to a digital ocean droplet and then download over regular HTTP overnight. Most people are not technically savvy enough to do that but they would be able to use put.io. I happen to use my droplet for other things, but if I didn't put.io would be cheaper as well.
How we treat minority groups is important in part because they are so easily ignored. There are real people around the world who yes, have reliable fast internet (something much more common outside the US) and yet are denied legal access to the media they would happily pay for. Now, you can suggest that they should just not consume content that is not available to them, but that is like saying just don't participate in modern society.
Yes, it is important, which is why affluent first worlders shouldn't hold them up as poster children for their pet cause of not wanting to purchase things.
The vast majority of people will be using this to watch movies they don't feel like paying for. There might be a handful who genuinely can't access it, who have no way to legally pay for it outside of handing over a substantial amount of their small wealth, and they paradoxically also have access to an internet connection strong enough and a computer powerful enough that can handle streaming these movies. However, they do not represent the vast, vast, vast majority of users.