The business model is so simple it makes me want to cry. Get together with the other major networks, and charge people $8 a month for unlimited DRM-free downloads. Now you get $8 a month that people were going to use to pay for pirated copies. Put an ad or two in there, if you must. (But really, do the annoyance ads cause make up for the revenue they generate? Who pauses their TV show to go buy what you just advertised?)
If $8 a month isn't enough money, then skip the part where you get together with the other networks, and make your own site. Let's say you're AMC. Everyone wants to watch Breaking Bad, and you charge $1 an episode everywhere else. So make your own site that is $8 a month, and most people will get $4 (one episode a week) worth of content, and maybe check out your less popular shows and tell their friends. What's not to like?
(I think what's not to like is that sales people always want the big deals. It's much easier to get Time Warner Cable to pay you XX million than to appeal to each and every consumer. But the problem is, the people you're not serving are not going to subscribe to cable to get your show, they're going to pirate it, going further and further underground each time you try to stop it.)
Perhaps a deeper issue is that it's easier to find sales people to negotiate deals than it is to find engineers to code up a website that handles video downloads. If only there were already video download sites! If only there was some sort of "mega upload". If only there was some sort of "net flix". SIGH.
Personally, I'm resigned to just buying the season at the end on something like Google Play. It works on my tablet and TV, and I'm only going to watch it once. But really, the DRM leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Why am I punished for being a paying customer, when the pirates can play it on whatever device they want? It boggles my mind.
This is fundamentally the problem. It redefines and limits what a piece of video is "worth" going forward. That is where the push back is coming from. Disney can pull a film made in the 70's out of the vault, dust it off, and re-show it a few times to pull in a few million$ to the bottom line. But they can't do that if the movie has been available that whole time on a video streaming service. Looking at the two scenarios.
a) You have a movie that has not been available to buy or watch of 10 years, but was popular at the time, you bring it out again and poof get a bit of a revenue kick.
b) You have a movie that has been available on streaming services for the last 10 years, you re-issue the buyable version and get no uptake at all. Certainly not enough to justify a couple hundred thousand on a advertising it.
The issue here is information economics, you can only 'add' value to a movie by making it unavailable.
If $8 a month isn't enough money, then skip the part where you get together with the other networks, and make your own site. Let's say you're AMC. Everyone wants to watch Breaking Bad, and you charge $1 an episode everywhere else. So make your own site that is $8 a month, and most people will get $4 (one episode a week) worth of content, and maybe check out your less popular shows and tell their friends. What's not to like?
(I think what's not to like is that sales people always want the big deals. It's much easier to get Time Warner Cable to pay you XX million than to appeal to each and every consumer. But the problem is, the people you're not serving are not going to subscribe to cable to get your show, they're going to pirate it, going further and further underground each time you try to stop it.)
Perhaps a deeper issue is that it's easier to find sales people to negotiate deals than it is to find engineers to code up a website that handles video downloads. If only there were already video download sites! If only there was some sort of "mega upload". If only there was some sort of "net flix". SIGH.
Personally, I'm resigned to just buying the season at the end on something like Google Play. It works on my tablet and TV, and I'm only going to watch it once. But really, the DRM leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Why am I punished for being a paying customer, when the pirates can play it on whatever device they want? It boggles my mind.
</rant>