Streaming content providers in Ireland

wolf99

Hi Folks!

As far as I know we have nearly no music or video streaming services available. So I am wondering if companies that provide such services all have similar reasons for not providing the service to some countries. Is it a licensing issue? If it is is, is licensing required via the rights associations in each country or is it done via the record labels?

With the news that Irish ISPs are being forced to block sites like the pirate bay by what is essentially the same group of companies that run the US's MPAA the need for DECENT streaming content providers is starting to become more critical, the reasons for it not already happening becoming more pertinent... E.G. I cant understand why the likes of EMI, warner etc would fight so strenuously in little old Ireland for illegal ways of obtaining online content to be stopped, while at the same time *also* seemingly preventing any legal ways from being presented -*other* than to try to drive "traditional" hard sales - which IMHO is a lost cause and a bigger waste of money


As far as I know in Ireland the following are the available legal ways to stream (or even download) content:

iTunes - only good if you have apple stuff.

Google Music - only launched last month and with so many other google services not available here there's not really much incentive to buy into the google ecosystem.

Netflix - what can I say, its just sh*t! The catalogue they present here is so poor I had all the movies that I wanted to watch from it, watched within the free trial month - so I closed my account.

.... I know the likes of Vodafone and Eircom have their own content platforms but who actually uses them? They are even sh**tier and pretty much unusable.

We dont have anything available to us here that is the equivalent of the likes of Songza, Pandora, Spotify, Netflix' US catalogue (which is quite a bit better), HULU, or even those provided by the likes of Warner themselves - Or is there some secret website I'm missing?

28064212

Spotify has been available in Ireland for 6 months.

But yeah, even if streaming services upped their game by quite a lot, the "unofficial" ecosystem is so much more efficient. I get a far better service from them than I do from official sources

wolf99

So it has - they also have ads every two songs on the free version - the very reason I haven't listened to the normal radio for over 4 yrs.

Exactly, if Netflix catalogue was any bit decent I would be perfectly willing to pay €7/mnth for it, as it is it's not worth it and non-official sources are easier to access, better quality, and not so dependent upon the good internet infrastructure that most of the country is lacking.

In other countries service providers and content providers have worked - sometimes together - to fix such issues, but it seems that for some countries, including Ireland, the content providers seem to actually be working to *prevent* solutions from being brought forward. Very frustrating.

Mrs OBumble

wolf99 wrote: »

iTunes - only good if you have apple stuff.

I've purchased music off iTunes, even though I don't ahve any Apple stuff these days. (And haven't since the mid 1990s!)

biko

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