We want an on-demand nexus. A single hub. Just the other day I had the urge to watch ghost in the shell. Not available on any of the major streaming sites (Netflix, Hulu, Prime) but available on stars via prime. So I have to pay an addition $7/month to watch a single show? No thanks. Off to a torrent site or asking around to see if someone has rips or a box set. I have better things to do with $7 like buy dinner.

I associate CBS with bland procedural crime dramas and awful three-camera sitcoms. CBS All Access would have been doomed without Star Trek: Discovery. Admittedly, the show isn't particularly good, but I'm a trekkie so it doesn't matter. On the plus side, I discovered The Good Fight (a surprising smart, entertaining and well written show) so I now I have a legitimate reason to give a damn about All Access.

And then Apple will offer their own gateway drug (Lord of the Rings?) and Disney (...well they could just offer their back catalogue alone and still be a major player) and so on.

In the absence of alternatives, it seemed like what entertainment cost. The alternatives for free or cheap are enough that many, many, many people are opting out.

> ...and continue to do so.

Evidence[0] suggests otherwise.

Leaving evidence aside, I think that each service will likely have something to attract some number of subscribers, yes. Amazon is doing LotR, Disney wants a piece, CBS has Star Trek, etc. I don't think it follows that a large number of people are going to subscribe to more than one or two on an ongoing basis. People subscribe to CBS All-Access for one month, perhaps a trial month, and binge all of ST:D, then cancel. They already have a subscription to Amazon Prime for non-TV reasons. Maybe they share subscriptions with friends, or maybe they turn to piracy, or maybe they just shrug and go back to watching Netflix and YouTube, which is enough. Most people never had all the available channels, including premium channels, anyway. Going without a show or two isn't a problem for most people when the marginal cost is so high.

[0] https://variety.com/2018/biz/news/cord-cutting-2017-high-cos...

Comedy Central doesn't have a streaming service, so I have to pay for shows individually on Amazon. That also ends up being a lot cheaper than CBS All Access, and it cuts me off from learning about their other shows. I think all the Comedy Central shows I used to watch have been cancelled, so they won't be getting any of my money going forward unless I somehow learn about their new shows. That's a lot easier to do if my existing services start recommending Comedy Central shows to me.

What are the numbers on that? My impression was that cable is declining fast.

Amazon/Netflix/Hulu/HBO are worth it. thats what, about 50 a month? not bad. Even so I still end up on youtube a lot of the time.

The Good Fight is really good, now I'm going back to watch the predecessor.

That is close to existing, it'd be nice if the top players agreed to open their APIs so you could integrate it into a unified TV external like Chromecast or Firestick. Or, to go further, a unified platform that can process subscriptions and PPV across each library.

> $100/month for a dozen streaming "channels" with one or two good shows and a the same crap the rest of the other "channels" have.

Amen, we cut the cord officially on Friday. We went to $67 (including modem rental) per month plus about $25 dollars in streaming services and $40 for YT TV per month. That's still $35 dollars cheaper than what we were paying for Comcast TV and once we buy a compatible modem then we'll drop our internet to about $55 per month. We also have renters, so we loop them into YTTV for them to watch to their heart's desire for an extra $5 on their rent per month.

> Ghost in the Shell

Respect just got done rewatching an episode of the TV show.

Now if only it existed on other platforms.

The parent comment was actually talking about paying for one service that has everything I think not just a shortcut to each disparate service.

The "one hub nexus" we are clamoring for requires either a) preferably, a single monthly fee to access everything; or b) less ideally, assuming reasonable prices, on-demand pay-per-view pricing.

A nexus that simplifies signing up for a dozen different streaming service subscriptions from one UI is not good enough. All that does is improve the frontend experience, while doing nothing to resolve the subscription hell that expects consumers to shell out $80+/month across many services to watch maybe 1% of the content.

and has everyone's original content.

Overall, I think a lot of people go far as to look at the prices then balk and back out or just don't even want to deal with it. Comcast also have a strict list of modems and gateways they will approve to use their network.

On my Android TV device (Mi Box $60 at WalMart) if I search a show it aggregates results from all my apps so it doesn't even matter which app it's on I just click from the results and it opens what I want.

Disclaimer: Not affiliated with anything I just mentioned just a happy customer.

I otherwise would of had to use a Raspberry Pi with Kodi (and yes, the Android TV can run Kodi, much smoother).

Works pretty damn well, actually.

If you don't have either, I have no idea. Read the user manual, maybe?

Edit: It's surprisingly hard to find images online of what the search screen looks like, I'm having absolutely no luck finding any, I only get screenshots of their older smarthub crap.

The other option is to just not watch it.

Companies have already taken multiple sustained attacks against consumers rights so why would consumers care about the companies rights?

Why are a series of 1s and 0s this companies property or that person's property other than because society declares them to be so? If they can declare who owns what then that declaration can change

Edit: For example, if steam boat Willie was still under the copyright laws that existed when it was created, it would be society property now. Because the rules were changed, it's Disney's property. If "property" can be taken from society by companies, then the reverse can happen as well

But for your information, I can and do run userscripts, custom ROMs, jailbroken firmware etc to change the exact sort of thing you spent the second half of your post talking about. You sound like you have a very boring consumerist relationship to technology and the opposite of a hacker ethos.

The entitlement here is the elites, who don't have anything to fear from antitrust legislation and can fundamentally undermine the free market, which allegedly is important to the underlying Ayn Rand undercurrent of this site.

In that context, rebellion/revolt/resistance is a somewhat legitimate choice by some points of view.

Seriously, we just had an election directly related to the over-concentration of media in a few powers, and now we're allowing them to vertically monopolize the delivery of that content.

Which would be a bit... ok... if it was just Mickey Mouse, but the news is fully controlled by oligarchs.

By vertically integrating the internet access, they can censor the only uncontrolled news outlet: the internet.

Either way, it doesn't take an 'entitlement mentality' to prefer paying less for something. That's just good sense. And lots of people do pay for entertainment with the expectation that they can share it with people. Humanity has spent its entire history freely sharing things that grab our social fancy and percolate through our cultural attentions. Just because a business wants to make money doesn't mean they have a right to deny the basic workings of the human brain.

>If you don’t like the terms on which they’re selling the fruits of their labor, don’t buy it.

I'm pretty sure finding someone else who has access to it involves not buying it. Next thing you'll be telling me I have a moral obligation to not watch my sister's Breaking Bad DVD's with her. Or worse: a legal obligation.

If you produce digital music, for instance, it has almost no value if nobody shares it. The decentralization of distribution is exactly the mechanisms one uses to make money off of these things. Your hope is that things go "viral" and that they are shared so prolifically that you'll be able to extract value out of your importance to the network overall, not due to some analogous 'artificial' manufacturing bottleneck like you would with concrete goods.

The argument that it is ok to consume media for free hinges on the fact that it is both efficient and natural human behavior, and that it doesn't undermine the whole-network of value. If the latest Avenger movie makes $1Bn in one week, then it's pretty clear that plenty of value is being extracted from the network, regardless of how many people have not paid to see it. People have no moral obligation to allow a content producer to monopolize all distribution, especially when the rational basis for such level of profit is simply not there. And you can't have it both ways anyway: you can't expect to have "viral" information that people also have to pay to exchange. (Or rather, you can't expect them to be Ok with that.)

The appropriate analogy for that situation would be more like Toyota trying to make it illegal to sell cars that they manufacture without their consent. It would destroy the second-hand market and be highly inefficient for people. If my sister streams her DVDs over the internet to me, all we're doing there is avoiding the coordination costs and being economically efficient. In either case, I pay for my internet access, so I would, in fact, be paying for media that I torrent or share online.

Plenty of people do work which is not properly compensated. I don't get to set the terms of the sale of my intellectual property, as I work in an industry where this has little worth.. and I am an employee.

This is all about power. The power to set prices, the power to use propaganda to change peoples morals, the power to change the law to criminalise minor contract infringements. And as such I get to say, whenever and wherever i can get away with it, fuck their power.

For the very, very minimal amount that's about the sale of the fruits of labour of the creatives and workers producing this entertainment.. Well I wish there was an easier way to compensate them that didn't involve also paying off the distributors.

For example, suppose where you live there is a monopoly ISP-cable conglomerate, you cannot afford to move away, and you are literally unable to consume from any other ISP / cable level provider.

For some content, like watching European soccer in the US, this situation can mean that you are literally prevented from properly paying money to see that content, even though providers exist who can take your money and give you the content. It might even come down to your specific zip code, street, or even apartment building in some cities, where a content provider is case-by-case prevented from selling their content to certain residents purely based on whether a certain ISP has a monopoly on that location.

Telling the consumer to just not watch seems morally hollow in that specific case (which is a really common case). The customer wants to pay, and a third-party wants to give the content, but a rent-seeking middleman that the consumer has no control over (ISP) can limit the customer’s choices. The customer cannot do what the market would suggest and take their business elsewhere to incentivize the services they want, and because of the ubiquitous need for internet connectivity to conduct basic life duties, totally boycotting the monopoly ISP is functionally not an option. (Really, it would not be reasonable to suggest such a drastic option.)

I don’t see any ethical reason why the consumer should just accept being worse off (in terms of planned consumption), since it’s pure rent-seeking and value destruction on the part of the ISP, which the consumer is literally prevented from rejecting.

Many other ISP behaviors are likewise just artificial rent-seeking attempts, to construct artificial tiering, bundling, etc., which the consumer is prevented from “not buying” because the service provider is often literally a monopoly.

I’m just curious if you take an extreme view of this, that the ISPs or monopoly providers “are right” to use their monopoly position to introduce artificial rent-seeking opportunities? And that if a customer must choose between either paying the rent-seeking premium, stealing the content, or not consuming at all, that the customer should accept that the ISP / content provider’s ability to inflict this situation (through what are unequivocally antitrust violations that are just not punished solely because of regulatory capture) does indees mean the consumer just should opt to not consume at all?

Essentially, “because ISPs spend money on regulatory capture, I should accept living a worse life by not consuming at all rather than watching illegally.”

Seems like big word for something which is not food, water, life saving drug or some such. Now people are free to consider entertainment as basic human right. But similarly other powerful people/institution feel free to take away more fundamental things from helpless people.

From where I am, government is more than happy to offer free entertainment produced by private parties while feel no obligation to clean up almost sewer quality water running through taps of millions of homes.

I am not convinced by your reply because it tries to flip it around and blame the consumer (the victim of regulatory capture and ISP monopolies or oligopolies) just because the thing they are being deprived of “is not food.”

No part of this is related to whether something is a human right — that’s completely unrelated.

The problem is why should I, as a consumer, agree to accept a worse life in any way, even a minor way based on what is convenient for a corporation acting to ensure regulatory capture and ensure monopolistic or oligopolistic conditions within which it can unilaterally control what a consumer is allowed to consume.

I see this as a limiting factor on freedom of speech that will only continue to get worse if the market is further fragmented.

Think about it like this: a comedian tells a joke that offends someone. But the people who get offended aren't the audience of that comedian, and wouldn't have seen the comedian's show anyway. Should the comedian worry at all about these people boycotting the show if they never have and never will buy tickets anyway?

Ending the devil's advocate, if these companies want to completely control popular culture and change the definition of society, they have to understand that memes (not the Internet kind, the real life kind) spread until they are pervasive. There's a limit to how much Disney can force Avengers into our cultural identity then demand payment for it. Either Avengers becomes a cultural meme and spreads virally, or you can keep people from seeing it unless you control the experience end-to-end and only have it become a moderate success and only make a moderate amount of money.

Entitled to money for services rendered is differnet than just being entitled to money. They don't think they deserve your money if you don't want to pay. They just don't think you should also get the product.

I seriously doubt the people spending time pirating and watching media would just suddenly take up reading books from the library or maybe sewing. They'd probably spend some money on media.

Not every pirated media is a lost sale. But some of them are.

I know when I sailed the high seas I just ended up forking down money for stuff I couldn't successfully pirate (multiplayer games and movies in theatres).

That analysis maybe works in the context of an individual piece of content from a single company, but it is a lot more shaky when applied to multiple pieces of content from multiple companies.

For instance, suppose someone wants to watch a movie tonight. Their first choice is not yet available on any streaming platform they subscribe to, nor is it available on any of the rental platforms they have reasonable access to. It's only available for purchase at $25.

If they cannot pirate it they aren't likely to cancel their movie night. They are likely to move on to their second or third choice that is available on one of their streaming services or is rentable.

If they pirate their first choice, then the company that provides that movie loses nothing because, as you note, they were not going to get the money anyway. The company providing their second choice however does lose out on the sale they would have made if there was no piracy.

(Well, actually, the company that makes their first choice loses nothing that night. If they could not have pirated it, they probably would not have given up on watching it. They would more likely have postponed it to a later movie night after it does become available for rental or streaming).

Continuing with the epidemiological metaphor, there are several possible vectors for the content to spread, and the prevalence of each depends on the particular circumstances of specific hosts or communities of hosts. For example, if the vector of "Alice advising Bob to consume it on subscription service X" is effective in a particular community (and this effectiveness obviously depends on several different parameters), then piracy wouldn't be an issue there. But if all such legal vectors are ineffective in that community, while the content is still very potent in its memetic properties, then it will still spread out, in one of several forms of alternative less legal vectors.

To paraphrase John Gilmore's famous quote about the internet, society treats inconvenient content providers as if they weren't there and routes around them, creating alternative distribution methods.

He made no such claim. You have to foundation from which to argue he believes this.

> OP is the textbook definition of a sociopath.

Blatantly lying about what someone else believes to paint them in a negative light is much more sociopathic than pirating something.

There is no single truth here and I think that you are being overly offensive in saying that, by advocating for a different set of social rights, the OP is a sociopath. By the same token, any civil disobedience should be treated as sociopathy, no?

What a ridiculous stretch of logic.

On the contrary the idea that people's lives/property should be threatened (e.g. Kim Dotcom, ThePirateBay, etc.) for interfering, vaguely, in multinational conglomerates attempts to prevent the copying of 1s and 0s is entirely sociopathic. Something that most corporations end up behaving as.

He's not buying it. He just got it for free. Problem solved.

Why wouldn't I take advantage of every possible opportunity and technology to participate in our shared culture?

up until a point ... HBO has been all about the entire pipeline from its inception because it feels (and has proven) that its content alone is good enough for it to be purchased a la carte.

Netflix and all others see this and say ... theres a business model here.

Fastforward 20 years, creating good content is cheaper. There are more film grad students to make the supply cheaper. Add to that the internet which allows you to be your own distributor. Basically its easier to be HBO today than when HBO started and you still get the added profits that HBO gets vs not generating your own content.

We want a hub but well take what we can get as long as the content is good. And we will get custom content because we have shown it pays. I guess we dont want the hub enough.

I'm not sure. Convenience seems to trump content in a lot of markets. If you have a solid baseline level of content, the best experience wins.

In that regard, a fragmented market could cause the entire streaming model to-- well perhaps not collapse, but fail to flower fully.

Cable says "Yeah, you're spending $80 per month, but there's one consistent UI, one login, one bill."

Streaming with one service like pre-fragmentation Netflix, says "You're spending $10 per month, getting a modest content pool, and it's all still pretty easy to use."

But how will people respond to "You're spending $50 per month, get a fairly broad selection of content, but it's all scattered across a bunch of services which behave subtly differently and have to be managed independently?"

They might well respond by going back to the less-hassle cable option, or just shed services til they get to something that feels manageable-- one or two services, maybe paying for a month of something else to binge its signature show once a year. Netflix and HBO might kick out enough big draws to justify subscribing year-round, but will a low-budget or niche player?

Disney with Fox’s media would be a pretty big streaming provider and many people would likely get onto it. Good chance of it becoming a standard streaming service. So I don’t see how that specific merger is a bad idea in a battle against Netflix.

I am a Comcast subscriber, and like many Comcast subscribers I'm sure, I have one of their boxes in my house, with the most basic Cable TV package, because if I don't take it my cost goes up (I mean the overall price of the monthly billed amount from Comcast/Xfinity).

We get crappy quality SD letterbox channels including some local OTA channels that we can watch Jeopardy on, at lower quality than OTA whenever the antenna isn't doing the job.

Oh, and HBO/On-Demand is also included. That includes HBO Go (but not HBO Now.) I don't use either HBO service and I don't know how they are different, at the risk of adding anecdata to an otherwise solid argument...

Whether or not any of this works out to be a favorable deal for HBO, I can't say, but I hope this explains why I would say to take their digital subscriber numbers with a grain of salt. (On the other hand, I will actually pay for Showtime standalone when they have put out a new season of Homeland.)

0. https://www.marketwatch.com/story/hbo-had-its-largest-subscr...

> HBO’s direct-to-consumer subscriptions, which include HBO Now sign-ups through internet-based distributors like Amazon and DirecTV Now, have topped five million in the U.S.

> 5,000,000 * 12mo * $15

> $900,000,000

I'm sure not saying that is a sign they are not successful, but unless I'm missing something, $7.5B of those revenue are probably not related to their direct-to-customer subscriptions or internet streaming products. (I'm not sure what kind of gatekeeping I am engaging in here, but it would be interesting to know what HBO's actual sales numbers are wrt every particular mode of distribution channel.)

Yeah they're getting something from every Comcast subscriber that ostensibly pays $10 for the cheapest TV package or better that bundles HBO, I just know that I'm not using my cable TV service at all, or HBO Go enough to warrant paying ${netflix_subscription} many dollars direct to them and I'd probably cancel it today, if it wouldn't ultimately end up costing me something for the trouble in the long run.

This seems to vary region to region. Where I am (western Washington, west of Seattle) all the internet-only packages are cheaper than all the internet + TV packages at the same internet speed, as far as I can tell.

When comparing the price with and without TV, are your taking into account the fees and equipment charges that go away if you don't have TV? Although here internet only is cheaper than internet + TV, it isn't much cheaper. I've got 400 Mb/s internet, Preferred TV (220+ channels + Starz), and Phone, and dropping down to just 400 Mb/s internet would only knock $20 off the base price. That's a small enough change that it is probably less than I'd end up spending on streaming subscription and rental services to make up for the lost TV.

However, dropping TV and phone would also drop $11/month for the DVR service, $8/month for the broadcast TV fee, $6.30/month for the regional sports fee, and $4.60 for the franchise fee (and maybe some sales tax, if any of those fees are taxable). That's another $30/month, so we are talking $50/month less on my total bill. Now I would come out ahead even if I have to subscribe to multiple streaming services for my TV.

These threats are credible when they know you have the crappiest TV service they offer and you probably aren't even using it but 30 minutes a day when Jeopardy comes on, but for some reason the sales reps seem to be pretty heavily incentivized to make sure you have some kind of TV service, even if you don't get any addons bundled with it. (Probably getting a kickback from the government, that's how they get their listening devices into your living room... /s)

I've declined as many services as I can otherwise, I don't have DVR service, HD channels (I get about 10 channels, all SD), extra super-premium internet package (mine claims up to 150Mbit, while it is not the lowest they offer, it's also not the highest...) I don't get a paper bill in the mail, or manual payments for billing (all of those things also cost ~$10 extra each); still my cable internet service is good, and it does come with HBO as I mentioned.

(I'm pretty sure it's standard def HBO over the wire, and that's another good reason to register for and use the bundled HBO Go service at least once...)

I think that $8/mo broadcast TV fee is the only one you mentioned that I can actually identify on my bill. And as I've had it explained to me, I would not be able to qualify for any promotional pricing after my first year of service without that.

No thanks. It doesn't cost you anything extra to allow me to decrypt the commercials. I'll take my chances with OTA signals if I'm still going to be stuck watching commercials.

That seems like a terrible deal, compared with just paying for that "same thing" once and watching it over and over for free.

Also, you can buy it and they watch it half a time and never think about it again.

$10-$15 is cheaper.

Of course, it doesn't really matter if they control all the distribution anyway. They can just make "buying" a non-option, which I believe Disney has tried for certain titles already.

Just another FYI: If you buy DRMd movies by Disney or three of the other four major movie studios, from either iTunes, Vudu, Google Play or Amazon and link your accounts with Movies Anywhere, they will show up as purchased movies in your other libraries as if you purchased them from the other services.

The other services available in the Nordics are not even close with some "not working at all" and some have shitty/exclusive device support. Subtitle/language options tend to be abysmal and Netflix, which isn't very good on this front, seems to be the winner there too.

I'm more or less still waiting for Steam for films and TV series where I could just download the video file with whatever audio/language track I want. Providing a Netflix quality streaming service seems to be ridiculously non-trivial so it would be great if less complex and better working solutions were offered until the streaming platforms are figured out. Until that happens torrents offer a vastly superior way to watch content that is not on Netflix.

If creators would have been independent of distributors, this wouldn't have been a problem to begin with. Each creator would distribute in each store. But all this integration causes exclusivity that only inconveniences the end user. Netflix isn't any better in this sense, since they have tons of exclusives too. Competition on exclusivity is not good in the end and only benefits the distributor.

In this sense, the idea above is spot on. How are these fragmented services (with DRM to boot) going to compete with torrents that offer everything without DRM through unified hubs? Film makers need to pull stuff together and fix it.

When you subscribe to streaming services you aren’t paying for ownership, you are paying for access. As far as convenience, the major streaming services are all on the web for computers and they all have apps for everything imaginable. Netflix, Hulu, et. al. are much more convenient that piracy. Besides they said the same thing about iTunes back in 2003. I stopped pirating music when the iTunes Misic Store was introduced. I definitely wouldn’t worry about pirating now over paying $15/month for the family Apple Music plan.

I personally prefer to avoid DRMed services and buy DRM-free. It's reasonably good with music and games for example, but with films you barely can find anything that way.

The reason for renting digital goods is usually presented as an option to get it for lower prices, even though there is no scarcity like with physical goods. That's fine, people might want to rent something and pay less. But why does it mean there should be no option to buy (for higher price)? That is already not right, i.e. forcing renting only approach. That's why I quite dislike DRM attached to renting services as well.

Renting for physical goods has scarcity involved. To make a new item, you have constant expenses, thus when you rent it, avoiding that expense allows lower price.

With digital goods, you have fixed expense, which after it's paid off has no constant expense involved. So the above renting logic isn't applicable. The remaining reason for renting to be cheaper is artificial, i.e. its limited nature, that prevents you from making backups and etc. That crippling of the product makes it cheaper, but the whole crippling is artificial to begin with.

> How much would you be willing to pay for all the content you can get on Netflix, Hulu, etc.

Depending on the film, may be different prices. Definitely more for something I'd watch more than once.

I'm OK with someone offering digital renting, if there is an option to buy the same thing (though I wouldn't use it if it has DRM). I'm not OK with it, if renting only is mandated.

Software as a service isn't exactly the same case as buying books, films, music, games and etc. For instance Web search is software as a service and I'm OK with it running remotely (though decentralized search is a way to improve it in theory). But when I listen to music and the like, I want to have a backup of it and run and use it on any device I want, and not on what some DRM authorized it for on condition of some existing account.

> What device that you own can’t play Spotify music?

Anything they didn't think about? DRM-free formats can be accessed anywhere, you can re-encode them in any codec and etc. For example I can take my audio files and play them in RockBox on my portable Sansa player. How would Spotify help for that? Benefits of DRM-free are quite self explanatory.

I pay $10.99 for Netflix. That doesn’t pay for one movie, let alone a dvd box set.

Netflix says we watched about 60 hours last month and my son watched 5 seasons of "Everybody Hates Chris" on Hulu - combined price of both services was $23 a month. How much would that cost to buy?

Price usually depends on many factors of the market. But if it's not available at all, it doesn't matter how much you would be willing to pay - you can't buy it, period.

> All purchased digital music has been DRM free for a decade.

So if music can be sold DRM-free in parallel to renting services, what problem is there with video that prevents it?

From a historical reason, the only reason we have DRM free music sells is because of Apple. In 2008, the music industry was trying to pressure Apple into licensing its DRM scheme so that competitors could sell music compatible with iPods. Steve Jobs countered saying that if the music industry would sell all of their music DRM free, there would be cross platform compatibility [1]. The movie industry didn’t make the same mistake the music industry did. They allowed multiple companies to buy and rent movies so Apple wouldn’t have the same power they had over music over movies.

As far as the cost to buy movies, you don’t have to guess. Most popular movies cost $14.99 to own and the less popular movies are $9.99.

The box set for “Everybody Hates Chris” is $110.00 on Amazon. So to buy all of the content we watched between Hulu and Netflix would be at least $700 - as opposed to $24.

[1] Thoughts on Music (http://macdailynews.com/2007/02/06/apple_ceo_steve_jobs_post...)

And there is no valid reason for them lacking, all reasons are invalid and crooked. The last major push for that was from GOG, and it didn't go far because of backwards thinking lawyers:

https://www.gog.com/forum/general/introducing_gogcom_drmfree...

Why do you think that making them DRM free would cost less? Today the cost of digital movies is between $9.99 and $14.99 and the cost of a season of Everybody Hates Chris is $20 on iTunes.

The cost of manufacturing a disc is less than a buck in volume (http://www.dvdreplication.com/blu-raydiscmanufacturing.htm). The cost of a movie is in mostly in creating the content.

The argument is that differentiation (and then exclusive content) is the reason why content distributors are willing to take risks.

Content distributors don't need to take risks. Theaters do a bit, because screens are limited. Stores do a tiny bit, because shelf space is limited. Online services don't have to at all. The producers take the big risks, but I don't see why that should imply that streaming services have to involve exclusivity agreements.

I shouldn't have to pay for 5 additional instances of Netflix to get one instance of Netflix worth of quality content. You were late to market and lost, deal with it and list your content on Netflix or Amazon, band together to form a joint competitor, or service a niche market like what Crunchyroll did with anime.

B. If I have to pay for a live sports package and 5 streaming networks to watch what I want, then I'm not really saving much money (if any). A move to a la carte content should result in a substantial cost savings, not a marginal cost savings. Netflix has set the bar at $10 per month for access to a massive catalog of content across networks. By default, this means no one (except maybe HBO) should be charging anywhere near this amount of money for access to their content library which is not nearly as deep or as high quality.

If this keeps going $100 will seem like a bargain, and piracy will surge.

I also think it’s rude and out of line to tell someone that arguing with them is pointless. Do the mature thing and just stop responding, or the even more useful thing and actually try to have the conversation.

And why are you subscribed to every single streaming platform? Do you actually need to watch every single show you might possibly like?

The point is that it seems media companies, in their greed, have forgotten that streaming only works when it offers something better than piracy. A dozen subscriptions that cost more than a cable package did is offering less, with more impediments to use than a Kodi box. The model will, as a previous poster said, fail. The attempt turn everything from software to hardware into a subscription service, because it’s the easiest way to milk money isn’t some god-given right of corporations either.

Now you can yell about entitlement and whatever else, and I’m not wading into that mess, just explaining how it is based on past precedent.

No. That's not the correct way to think about this. You are dreaming if you think media and production companies are going to leave $90/mo on the table. You will see prices rise. You will see multiple streaming services. You will see bills in the same ballpark as those of cable/satellite ... because that's about the sweet spot for people willing to spend monthly for media content.

>We want an on-demand nexus. A single hub.

You won't get it. Nobody is going to let anyone control all media distribution.

>So I have to pay an addition $7/month to watch a single show?

Yeah. Or you can just pass on that single show.

>Off to a torrent site or asking around to see if someone has rips or a box set. I have better things to do with $7 like buy dinner.

Age of piracy is going to end as well. And by the way, you are free to go and buy dinner and read a book. Nobody needs to watch the latest season of GoT - its not a human right. Talk about entitled!

I honestly no longer care about copyright or piracy. I simply will do whatever is easiest. The greed of the entertainment industry has made me not give a shit.

> I will pay for some cheap streaming services and pirate the rest.

I'm still trying to wrap my head around the hypocrisy here.

I don't know how to break this to you but as long as there are more than one country there's going to be one that will not hunt down the privateers of the other.

>You are dreaming if you think media and production companies are going to leave $90/mo on the table. You will see prices rise.

Then so do my sails

>Talk about entitled!

Not really, I'm willing to pay you something for it, just not the scalpers price you want me to pay to test the waters. If a show is really good I buy it on blueray because I value the show and want more of it/want to reward the quality of the show. If studios weren't greedy and produced objectively garbage content I would buy a product on faith but in a world where there are how many Pirates of the Caribbean movies, I'll be more skeptical.

Ok. Piracy will be made harder and harder, to the point where it will be inaccessible to mainstream. This also means that the tech savvy pirates will be more exposed.

>If studios weren't greedy and produced objectively garbage content I would buy a product on faith but in a world where there are how many Pirates of the Caribbean movies, I'll be more skeptical.

That entire paragraph is weirdly nonsensical. You don't have an ineliable right to watch movies, you aren't the universal judge of movie quality (lots of people like the Pirates of the Caribbean movies), and you aren't entitled to dictate how you want the business of media to operate (i.e. you get to pick how much or how little you pay). It's one thing to pirate, it's another to think you're a 'good guy'.

> You don't have an inalienable right to watch movies

If you include news and documentaries, I kinda do. Though not quite as righteous, I get a little indignant that some company gets to dictate how much I'll have to pay to remain informed of our shared (though purely-entertainment) culture.

> universal judge of movie quality

The word "objectively" here is used like "literally", a in a meaningless sentence enhancer.

> you aren't entitled to dictate how you want the business of media to operate

I think I should be, it's my money I'm giving them after all, I'd like to have a vote in the content, how I access it, and even how much it's worth.

>(i.e. you get to pick how much or how little you pay)

Demand and supply: if you want to charge more than I want to see your service I guess I can unsubscribe; I wish we could barter about it. However, if I have to pay $39.99/month for who knows how long to watch one documentary, which I know was dirt cheap to make, I'm going to feel so morally justified while I pirate it that I will indeed think I'm the 'good guy'.

See the new DRM features in Windows 10 and the way the Windows Store version of Netflix interacts with perfectly legitimate screenshot tools, or the way Netflix simply refuses to provide 4k content to any other platform.

People are pirating music. Off youtube. ACCIDENTALLY. To the point where there's an elaborate automated filtering system. It's not even viewed as piracy!

With each passing Year Netflix and Hulu are adding more and more original content which is becoming part of pop-culture. Within 5 years most of the cool things we want to watch would be from Netflix and Hulu and everything else would come from torrents or youtube.

Dinosaurs are dying and we should cheer.

Personally, I'll start reading books more but I imagine 90% of my country won't. They'll go through the service that has a deal with their ISP.

The scarier part being that regardless of whether I go through the recommended source or disregard the content altogether, it's an impact on the information and ideas I consume.

Or you could have rented the Blu-ray at Redbox for $2 (or streamed it from Redbox for $5).

[1]: With BD+, the disc maker adds artifacts into the bitstream, and then includes executable code for a VM that can look around, see if it is satisfied with its environment, and correct the artifacts. Seriously. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/BD%2B

You might expect some people to take an extremely principled stance but it would be unreasonable to expect the majority of society to do so when the companies themselves are operating as unprincipled entities.

Many of these companies, and Disney especially,have done their best to prevent works from falling into the public domain when they make a lot of money off of deriviations of public domain works

TV and the film industry have decided they'll make more money by making a worse product and doing everything they can to prevent users from finding alternatives

If this was a natural state of affairs there might be considerations about morals, but the current rules and laws came about through direct intervention by these same companies

A poor businessman. A good businessman sees the black market and determines if they can provide a similar service in the white market. Clearly there are consumers and they want something that they aren't getting already.

And in this case, things like popcorn time have a great interface and are easier than most streaming services.

People want to see new movies in their homes (and I always laugh at the "no movie should be reduced to this shrinks from theater screen to computer screen, because clearly people like it that way).

And people want to see population and good movies at the top of their lists, not problem garbage. There's a lot of people that complain about even Netflix because of this. Their recommendation engine isn't what it used to be.

There's a lot more reasons too. People pirate for many more reasons than because it's free, though that definitely is a big component. But people seem to be ignoring these other reasons.

There's a market, or two, here that aren't being served. A good businessman would serve them.

Ah right, the utopia of extreme centralization I keep hearing HNers rave about.

I'd much rather a very very fragmented space with lots of diverse productions and perspectives.

So you want one company to control all media? Seems like a poor plan longterm.

I can probably count the number of exclusive artists to each music provider on my hand.

If you make twenty shows and you want to sell subscriptions a la carte, how much do you charge per show? If you charge $10/month per show then you lose the business of everyone who might have paid you anything even slightly less than that. If you charge $.50/month per show to get those customers, you lose $9.50/month from everyone who would have paid $10/month per show. But if you put all twenty shows together in a bundle and sell them collectively for $10/month, you get $10/month from everyone who values the collection of shows at $10/month or more, regardless of the value they place on each individual show. Which can turn out to be more money.

But that is less likely to work in a more competitive market. People only have so many hours to watch television. It may be worth $10/month for a package of shows to get the one you really want when that's the only option, but when someone else is offering an equivalently good show a la carte for $10/year and you don't have time to watch both, people will choose the one that saves them $90/year worth of shows they weren't actually interested in.

The broader problem is that without a distribution monopoly to use as a chokepoint, content creation is a highly competitive market, and highly competitive markets have low margins. So the incumbents are flailing around trying to find something that looks like the model they're used to, even though that model is now defunct.

The model which is likely to out-compete a la carte is the one where content producers make non-exclusive licenses to multiple aggregation companies that sell flat rate plans to their customers. Because $10/month for twenty shows can't out-compete $10/year for the one show you actually want anymore, but $20/month for every show can.

Exclusivity works. Most of the population don't torrent. Exclusivity drives subscriptions.

Ironically, when you ask for one big hub, you're asking for a traditional cable subscription: Comcast will give you most of the channels out there (often, throwing HBO in for free), and due to the APIs the major ISPs and channels are on board with, you can either watch them on Comcast's site or the individual channel websites. Oh, and Comcast boxes now integrate your Netflix subscription too.

Cable packages when bundled with Internet service are often pretty price-competitive for what they offer. I recently left Comcast, but picked up their competitors' cable package for the same reasons: It's a pretty inclusive streaming package for a good price.

Reminds me of at&t. They made boatloads of money at one time until they didn't. I'm sure they didn't like it when suddenly their main product, long distance calls, became dirt cheap. I still remember paying huge amounts of money in late 1990s to make calls from NYC to Buffalo. The whole thing was such a big racket.

I for one will not shed a single tear if these companies go out of business. Some other companies will take their place.

Prices go down when demand is low. Demand for TV is not low, ergo, prices are not going to go down.

Also, when it does, the first casualty isn't going to be the companies: It's going to be the shows you love. People on HN were thrilled when Amazon saved The Expanse. But if The Expanse doesn't drive X number of new Prime subscribers, it won't be around much longer than that.

Netflix doesn’t shove ads in your face, works on every platform and almost never has mysterious transmission failures. And now they have excellent content too. They have figured out so much more than some of the last-century providers.

Prime is also very much a superficial copy of the Netflix interface.

It's a mess for that reason alone.

https://www.barrons.com/articles/netflix-will-be-cash-flow-p...

“We expect the steady subscriber growth, together with gradual price increases will outpace the increasing investment in content and the upfront working capital spending on self-produced and owned programming, resulting in steadily improving margins. We believe that those margins will need to grow from the 7% range of 2017, to the low to mid 20% range to generate positive cash flows. As a result, we forecast the company becoming cash-flow positive in approximately five years.”

Yeah that increases as in plural.

I don't want to manage and pay for dozens of services. I use iTunes/Spotify, Netflix/Prime, and Steam/GoG. Any new service is going to need to displace one of those. This probably means being 10x better at 1/10th of the price.

All those companies think: we own a lot of media, we can just build a streaming media platform. And I think they’re way underestimating how hard it is to build the technology stack and processes that Netflix has.

Netflix has an engineering team and a development and deployment process that has some production studios attached to it.

Disney can probably copy what Netflix has today, but by the time they’ve done that, Netflix will have updated their platform hundreds of time, and I don’t think they’re going to be able to build an engineering team that can keep up.

Last year Disney acquired BAMTech (a spun of MLB Media) - though less known, their technical chops when it comes to video streaming are already in Netflix territory.

https://www.theverge.com/2015/8/4/9090897/mlb-bam-live-strea...

People subscribe for the content, not the technology. HBO isn't a tech first company but is probably doing a disproportionate amount of subscriptions thanks to Game of Thrones.

As long as your platform meets some bare minimum standard of reliability (and every service I use seems to be able to) then content is the only thing that matters.

>And I think they’re way underestimating how hard it is to build the technology stack and processes that Netflix has.

I think you are way overestimating the complexity. Sure, it's not something two guys are going to produce in their bedroom, but video delivery is a solved problem.

Netflix says it uses about 3GB of bandwidth per hour for streaming HD-quality video. CloudFront for one will charge you $0.26 for that 3GB-hour. It's pretty easy to see how binge watchers will rack up pretty high CDN/bandwidth bills.

I agree with your conclusion but it's not the technology that will kill Disney and the likes. It's the myriad compromises they'll make about the content.

Edit: the question was obviously in the context of the parent comment talking about “the technology stack and processes“. Regarding the market share advantage, it’s debatable if each user is worth over $1000.

People are happy to pay a single Netflix subscription, and many people already have one.

People would be less happy to shell out for yet another subscription, especially for a single kind of content (unless you watch Disney all day, it doesn't make sense to subscribe).

I'd compare this to Hollywood in the late '60s - early '70s, when it needed the breeze of fresh air brought by La Nouvelle Vague or by Kurasawa's and Jean-Pierre Melville's movies. Right now Hollywood (and the media companies behind it) is stuck in making movies for late-teenager geeks (the comic-book-based endless series, the Star Wars soap opera etc), movies which have almost no interest for the general public.

Disney and Netflix are going to go head to head because, anecdotally speaking, my kids and all their friends watch these two sources primarily (some overlap ie, Moana on Netflix will likely vanish once Disney's streaming solution goes mainstream).

The key here is that Netflix is essentially free due to it's low overall cost, and parents like the non-kid content so the kid content being free (and no upsell) is a big deal - and unlike YT kids, is relatively trustworthy.

Disney will have to compete to either make a generally good Netflix replacement, or somehow dovetail into that model as a "high cost/high value" seperate subscription and edge out all other such services.

There are multiple market reports (not a public one that I can find) that show the vast majority of Netflix subscribers already do shell out for another subscription (and that's true internationally, including in non-Prime Amazon territories, so it's not about Amazon delivery).

Most people will very much happily shell out for multiple subscriptions.

Aside from stack, whatelse does Netflix have going for it? Pre-internet Blockbuster had an overpowering / dominate "stack" and that was their downfall.

If VR is the next progression in home entertainment, who is best poised for that? Who has the tech + creativity DNA?

That is because the internet replaced them. Streaming is a direct replacement for video rentals. It's the exact same movie but you don't have to drive to the video store to get it. The industry itself doesn't go away. There isn't any apparent new distribution method that will do to the internet what the internet did to brick and mortar stores.

VR is a completely different industry, more related to video games than film, and from a distribution standpoint is nothing new. VR isn't going to cause people to download games from some hypothetical new non-internet distribution network.

I see it differently. Entertainment is entertainment. In addition there is a finite amount of disposable income and disposable time.

For example, the myth is that the internet was what killed the music industry. Sure, maybe it was the death blow, but what brought music to its knees was video games. It changed the habits of plenty of kids. The only reason it didn't show was due to CD sales. Not only where ppl paying $15 for a single (since CD singles were almost nonexistent), but they were also rebuying music they already own in other formats. The music industry was a zombie propped up on inflated revenue.

As entertainment goes, Netflix is not in the next market.

… only to find that all the copies are rented for the weekend.

But after the initial raving success, the big studios have been clamping down on giving blanket access to their back catalog of obscurities. Looking for those extra percentages of leaving out the middle man.

Is this profitable in the age of The Pirate Bay or illegal streaming?

I'd argue easy legal access & better discoverability would more than make up for the cut taken by middlemen like Netflix.

In the games industry a few big exclusives can shift fortunes significantly. The Playstation 4's significant success has come at the expense of the Xbox, and a driving factor of this success has been a superior exclusive content library.

They say "we have to get more vertically integrated like Netflix to survive", but Time Warner Cable is already as vertical as Netflix! They have their own production and distribution already, and Netflix isn't an ISP.

Now that Netflix or other streaming services threaten this business model, the old guard is scrambling to get back to the same business model.

It's possible they did know but couldn't replicate what Netflix has done with any reliability or profitability. Innovators dilemma.

I spend a lot less on pay-by-the-drink services than I do on recurring subscriptions. Cognitively, every time I initiate a purchase, I pause, and decide whether I want to spend the money. With a subscription service, I only have to make that choice once.

What about a recurring 'credit' service? e.g. sign up for a $30/month recurring service, and you get 50 credits to watch content from a variety of providers?

Seems like Netflix needs to buy an ISP.