Rent a cheap VPS with a provider in the US and install openvpn on it. You can actually get one of those for 5 USD/month. Find them here: http://www.lowendbox.com/.

Actually, I own a server in the US and have the means to set up a VPS.

The point I am trying to make is that I shouldn't have to take 10 steps to watch my favourite shows. It should be a two step process. Pay -> Watch. Easy.

Oh yes. I agree. And I have suffered to set up an american PayPal account just so I could pay for media services which restrict access based on where your PayPal account is (IMHO, they should not even be able to get this information, but I digress). Then PayPal found out and basically blocked my account, along with the little amount of funds it had.

It is just crazy how many conditions they impose instead of just taking my money, then complain when people who are less patient than me just go ahead and pirate the damn thing.

Pay -> Watch replaces hundreds of network heads getting tremendous managerial salaries with a few web developers. Not easy, because the people who make the calls are the ones who no longer have purpose in the business, and thus they are trying to bring everyone else down on their sinking ship.

The only real solution is for companies like Netflix to fund the development of shows themselves. Until the IP is in Netflix's hands, things will never change. But once the people actually making the shows see that Netflix is a viable avenue for their content, a sea change will begin.

Well, I'm excited about the upcoming Netflix-exclusive Arrested Development season. There's a huge fanbase and it should be a good indicator for how successful an approach like this can be. On the other hand, I'm from germany and that, of course, means that I'll will have to get the show from somewhere else.

Lilyhammer was actually pretty decent. I think a second season is already in the works too.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lilyhammer

If actors could organize, we could easily see a transition to kick-starter like funding of film and television productions (fund per episode?) that when funded is just publicly distributed via torrents. Absolutely 0 middle men, no costs of distribution at all (unless you count the guy who pays for an internet connection to do the first bout of seeding the episode) and it properly fits into how the pay per unit model fails in digital media.

If you want it to be that easy, iTunes works well (I live in Canada).

Purchasing a single tv show or movie is the same price as a few months of Netflix, though.

I don't buy bread. I have sandwiches that I would like to make, but I can't eat a whole loaf before it goes bad, so I don't buy it. I would gladly buy half a loaf, but my grocery store doesn't sell half loaves. If they won't make a half loaf to suit my needs and what I want to pay, I should just be able to steal whole loaves?

The analogy is ...

The grocery store will not sell half a loaf because they cannot figure out how to keep them fresh enough to sell them. They don't try hard to sell half a loaf and they basically tell the public to accept whole loaves as a fait accompli.

A the growing demand for half loaves meets a innovative group of people who found a way to deliver fresh half loaves to people. They sell them on the city streets -- without a license -- near the grocery store. Customers are happy again.

The grocery store finds out they have been losing revenues to the street dealers and the engineering efforts they developed for delivery are based on knowledge in the public domain. Instead of using this knowledge to serve their customers the fresh half loaves they want, they try to stop the street dealers from selling because they operate without a business license.

Yes, this is a much better analogy.

Literally comparing apples and oranges.

More like; I buy a loaf of bread and I am never around to eat it. The whole loaf goes mouldy so I don't buy it. My friend gives me a piece of bread when I want it at 12 am, I would GLADLY pay for it but he doesn't accept money and he only complains.

Actually he is literally comparing bread to piracy. It would be a literal comparison to apples and oranges if he had, literally, compared apples and oranges. "Literal" means "just as the text says it", not "definitely". "Literal" means it is exactly as it is written, it is not an exaggeration, expression, allegory, or analogy; it LITERALLY happened, meaning it happened EXACTLY AS WRITTEN.

You probably meant "definitely" or "certainly" comparing "apples to oranges". It's an expression, it's not literal unless he LITERALLY was comparing apples and oranges, where an apple is a fruit from an apple tree, and an orange is a fruit from an orange tree. Such a comparison may sound like "most apples are red and fat around the middle, most oranges are orange and evenly round".

Or he meant, "this is a literally perfect example of what the phrase "comparing apples to oranges" represents."

You know, I think that's what he actually meant. In fact, you knew that to and so did everyone else.

That analogy doesn't hold. You could always freeze half the loaf when you get it. It's not the same with cable TV.

A better analogy would be that you wanted to buy a loaf of bread, but the grocery store forced you to also buy hot dog and hamburger buns with it along with some bagels. Say you're a vegetarian or don't like hot dogs or hamburgers, and you'll never use them, but you have to buy them anyway.

I don't buy books. I like to read, but I never finish a book before I get bored of it, so I don't buy books.

I would gladly pay for half a book after I'm done reading the half that i read, but stores don't sell me half a book, for half the price.

So instead, I borrow the book from my friend, read half of it, and then return it. The store doesn't get any income from me at all.

No you shouldn't steal a whole loaf, but you shouldn't be prevented from seeing a loaf and then going home and making your own loaf.

That's even worse than the original analogy. No one is stopping you from going home and "making your own loaf" (I guess that would be shooting your own version of Game of Thrones? Ok, so actually someone would stop you, at least if you tried to share it.)

Something that often annoys me about the "piracy" debate is that the debate is very difficult to have, since there is very little to compare it to. No, it's not like stealing a car, but it's also not like making bread from scratch, and it's also not quite like sharing a (physical) copy with your friend, or like making a physical copy and handing that around (it's also not really like piracy, which is why I put that word in scare quotes)

I enter all the grocery stores in town to buy a loaf. Every grocer asks to see my passport, i am not american, they say no can do. I ask to pay them extra, they say not an option, i have to wait till the summer to buy my loaf when it's stale. An american customer hands me a loaf, i take it without paying and leave. Nothing is right in this situation.

Except for virtual products this analogy always falls down.

Ultimately, the issue here is that content producers don't have simultaneous releases of this content online (for a worldwide standardised fee) because they don't want to.

Selling and delivering a virtual product in Australia doesn't cost significantly more than it does in the USA.

Exactly the same situation here. I can't consume media "legitimately" in many circumstances even if I wanted to thanks to arbitrary restrictions regarding regions and DRM.

The problem in Canada is that Bell Media owns the Canadian distribution rights to many of the popular programs that aren't already available via services like Netflix.

Even if everyone in the USA agrees with you, Bell won't. They have far too much money invested in TV broadcasting technologies, and too little tied up in Internet infrastructure. There's no real upside to them providing you the content online, because not only will they'll lose their broadcasting revenue, but you'll fill up their oversubscribed tubes, making their internet services more costly to operate. A token fee for the program isn't going to offset that.

And basically, people who would've otherwise paid that "token fee" instead pirates. The tubes get clogged up either way (after all, if they oversubscribe capacity, it will come back to bite them one way or another).

All i m saying, and i think most people agree, is that their cost/benefit/profit analysis of the situation hinges on the false assumption that consumers have no way of obtaining the content in their own way (via piracy or waht not). and this is increasingly not the case.

Very true, but they can get away with tricks like throttling and caps for illegitimate activities. There will always be some pirates no matter what, but most people are way too busy to concern themselves with jumping through all the hoops. It doesn't matter if the pirate would have given you $10 for content when you made $30 off the person who didn't pirate your content.

I do agree that the time will eventually come, but it is wholly up to the consumers. So long as we continue to fund the TV infrastructure in a big way, there is no incentive for the business to change.