I feel like piracy is going to continue to be an issue until we get a spotify/tidal/apple music-type service for video content. Netflix seemed a lot closer to that several years ago, but it feels like we're moving backwards.
Netflix is so cheap compared to cable, though. I wouldn't mind paying for a few streaming bundles as long as the coverage is wide enough.
I don't know if the industry will move towards consolidation like we've seen in music streaming services, but if prices stay similar to cable but I can watch whatever I want whenever I want, I'd consider that a win.
EDIT: my point doesn't refute that piracy will continue, just that more streaming services isn't too large a regression
Amazon Prime Video is even cheaper. If Amazon manages to increase content while leveraging costs because of their scale and vertical integration, it could be huge.
Amazon is also a good example of a content provider offering "streaming bundles" - you can get add-on subscriptions for HBO and other premium television providers.
I have prime video. It really is such a pain in the butt to watch it though. They lock themselves out of chrome cast, Kodi, basically everything I currently use to stream to my TV.
I'm really frustrated with it and don't feel like I'm getting value.
I've never quite gotten why Chromecast is this Rubicon for them. Kindle content is available on pretty much anything that you'd expect, and even Amazon Video itself has officially been on Android for quite some time.
I can't imagine it's some play to increase the all-important value of the Fire Stick, so what's the deal?
Personally, I don't feel like paying for multiple subscription services, and I suspect I'm not alone. Cable still enables me with options, and includes ESPN and Disney Channel. Sadly, this means I still cannot "cut the cord".
The cord-cutters never had it right in the first place. They thought internet bandwidth was unlimited and free compared to broadcast/cablecast television (not counting OTA in this discussion)
> Didn't they just recently (past year) sign this deal?
Netflix's deal with Disney dates all the way back to 2012, although it only ramped up last year with current theatrical releases. Given they're still providing films to Netflix until 2019 I think they probably had a standard break clause.
More interesting to me is how this impacts the Marvel deals Netflix has. They're covered by separate deals, but will Disney be looking to slowly consolidate all their Marvel TV content under their own streaming platform?
ESPN content but not the main ESPN channels. You can stream those, but only if you pay for a cable subscription.
It's more like they opened up access to ESPN3 and added a streamable back catalog of programming. It stems the tide of their massive losses due to cord-cutting while also allowing them to charge sports fans even more money.
They were able to buy BAMTech outright, and BAMTech has better live event streaming. I don't think this is an investment play for Disney. I think it's about what gives them the best streaming platform that's completely under their control.
Wow it's 2017 and they still haven't understood this. Nobody will pay for a Disney service, a HBO service, a Netflix Originals service, an Amazon Originals service, ..
Not because people can't afford it, Americans happily paid $120 for cable, but simply because the balkanization throws convenience out of the window and nobody wants to deal with that.
People said the same thing about HBO and Hulu and Amazon. Add Netflix and ESPN/Disney and we are still talking less than the average cable bill.
Addendum: I think you updated your comment as I replied with the note on balkanization, but subscriptions are "set it and forget it"--it's why paper magazines still exist.
There are so many subscription providers now on Amazon it's ridiculous, although it seems we're moving much closer to true ala carte options than with traditional cable.
> Time Warner (NYSE:TWX) CEO Jeff Bewkes announced that the company surpassed 2 million domestic HBO Now subscribers during the company's fourth-quarter earnings call. He later added that subscriptions tripled in 2016 compared to the end of 2015, which implies closer to 2.4 million subscribers.
That's a fraction of Netflix's US subscriber base, but it's not nobody.
People absolutely are paying for separate services. There's a limit to how many, but many, many people are paying for Netflix + HBO, or Amazon + HBO, because they believe HBO delivers value for the money. In contrast, I suspect very few people are likely to sign up for the CBS service, Star Trek or not, because I don't think many people believe CBS delivers value for the money.
Disney is banking on people believing they deliver value for the money. For parents of young children, maybe they do. Certainly more than "nobody" will agree.
I'm glad to see someone bring up Star Trek and CBS's streaming service. They seem to think the new Trek series will save CBS All Access; I would contend that CBS All Access will kill their Trek series. I've heard from people who tried it, they said the stream quality is terrible from both an audio and video perspective. If you're going to bet on your own streaming platform, you really shouldn't cheap out on the tech.
My thoughts on best strategies given this ongoing fragmentation:
1) Subscribe to only one or two services at a time. Binge the stuff you missed while you weren't subscribed, then drop it and switch. Works if you don't care about discussing stuff with people as it airs. Less good if many of the services penalize short-term subscriptions.
2) Abandon digital-delivery TV/Movies. Use the friggin' library, and spend what you would have on streaming buying discs instead. Downside: storing stuff sucks, library less convenient than streaming but honestly we're talking about giant wasteful time sinks to begin with so oh well.
3) Just pirate. If there's stuff not commercially available that you want you'll be doing this anyway, and it's barely more effort/expense to maintain the hard drives, backups, and playback infra for a handful of your shows/movies than it is to do so for all your shows/movies.
#1 is my current method of dealing with all the content out there. I keep a list of movies/shows on each platform that I'm interested in watching. When the size of the list grows to a critical mass for a given platform, I'll subscribe for a month or two and binge them all.
I wonder if companies like HBO plan for this type of usage and schedule their shows to start and end at times that would necessitate paying for an extra month of service.
I feel like the title might be jumping to conclusions. From the article, emphasis mine:
> With this strategic shift, Disney will end its distribution agreement with Netflix for subscription streaming of new releases, beginning with the 2019 calendar year theatrical slate.
I don't read this as "Disney will pull content currently on Netflix from the platform", and I can't see anything else in the article that would suggest this.
> CEO Bob Iger told CNBC's Julia Boorstin Disney had a "good relationship" with Netflix, but decided to exercise an option to move its content off the platform. Movies to be removed include Disney as well as Pixar's titles, according to Iger. Netflix said Disney movies will be available through the end of 2018 on its platform. Marvel TV shows will remain.
Someone more clever than me could graph out the intersection of cost, convenience and the average consumer's willingness to pirate content for digital media.
I expect moving all Disney's non-live-sports content off the world's most popular streaming platform and on to an exclusive platform with its own monthly fee is going to push a lot of consumers over that line.
We're looking at a future where you have to purchase access to content and delivery of that content piecewise. Prices will definitely increase largely for the same content and convenience. And at some point society's probably going to crack down on piracy as though it were a logical extension of hacking.
Society has been trying and failing to crack down on piracy since data could be transmitted.
I don't think it will ever be possible. Phones cameras are only getting better, how can you ever stop someone from recording something in the theater and passing it around in meatspace?
Good quality torrents might become harder to get, but piracy is going nowhere.
I'm not sure, I see there are a lot of people who would pick the file sharing side over copyright enforcement according to their moral compass. The piracy is theft argument does not really fly (like the adblocking is theft) despite suits can threaten people over it.
From the producers pov fencing off is inherently harmful to their garden's brand/reach/discoverability battling for consumer attention.
I think title could be more clear. Disney bought a majority stake in bamtech aka MLB advanced media aka MLB baseball streaming arm. They also happen to stream HBO, WWE, and NHL. I wonder what will happen to those relationships.
Spotify also doesn't pay the artists enough for most of them to survive. Studios know this. They know that $10/month isn't enough to support the creation of all the original content that has been supported in the past by $100/month.
I have a hunch that studios will find a way to pocket about the same amount of money that Spotify already does. Just based on the reports of how they treat non-superstar artists already with hollywood acounting [0].
They want more money for the studio to survive, not artists. Artists are probably "a dime a dozen", and possible to manufacture from a studios perspective.
Maybe one day we'll get to the point where the content is mostly commoditized, and we'll simple be paying for whichever aggregating service provides the best usability (such as searching, recommendation, shared watching with remote friends, etc) will be leading instead. I don't think it will be anytime soon though.
One big difference is the production costs. Much cheaper to procedure two hour record that a block buster movie. And people are happy to consume the same music content over and over again. With movies and series most people won't do that.
I'm happy to pay extra for content from Disney or HBO, but I just want a consistent user experience. I was a single app that will let me access all of this content.
I just subscribed to HBO through Amazon for this reason. It's really great. Amazon user experience and streaming capabilities seem better than HBO. But HBO is the only place you can get Game of Thrones. Win-win :)
Except every channel on Roku is a different app with a different experience - Netflix, Amazon, Google Play, YouTube, ... all provide similar functionality, bit with differences in UI.
Just give me a best-of-breed UI that lets me watch all the things.
I think Kodi has a decent shot at getting there - there is now a fledgling Netflix plugin. A big step towards providing content to the major streaming services (and local content) through a customisable UI.
People pay 10-20 times that for cable. It surprises me when people commenting think no one will pay for multiple services. Sure you will, but which ones will make the cut?
Collusion of content ownership and distribution causes such mess. It should really be prevented by anti-trust, and if it doesn't prevent it, something is seriously broken and not working as it should.
actually, it's distribution decoupled from actual value creation that has given us things like 4 hour football games with 10 minutes of live play.
I would prefer that content is sold without need for a middle man. Seems easy when spotify does it and there are no commercials but they aren't doing 4k streams. I think top quality spotify is 240 or 320kBPS.
Netflix needs 4x that for their lowest, "wouldn't watch it on my phone" quality stream. It's just going to cost more for these products in a non-broadcast world.
> I would prefer that content is sold without need for a middle man.
Not everyone can afford a CDN and a lot of other things in between the source and the user, especially creators. Sure, in theory they can just sell video from their sites, but in practice infrastructure costs a lot of money.
Unless video will move to decentralized distribution (pirated one did already, so why can't legal one too), distributors will have their piece of the pie.
I don't doubt it. Pirated distribution has nothing in the way of hosting cost so I don't see how that would work with decentralized distribution.
What is the set up you are advocating for? People automatically upload content from their streaming apps? How are you going to police amazon/netflix/hulu/whatever service I have to do the uploading in a fair way?
My fire TV has 8GB hdd. I don't know what my chrome cast has but it's less. You need real hardware to store the catalog. Torrenting works because it has a bar to entry.
Sure, we've had access to distributed internet for the whole life of the network and people have chosen over and over to use centralized, convenient systems. That's not going to change for TV.
Right, so if people want the convenience, they are going to have to get off their wallets. Broadcast was so cheap because we had central distributions with set times and they just shot it out there and you could watch if you want.
I'd rather providers compete on content and service so I can drop people who shove commercials in my face.
People have spent years complaining about all the channels and nothing to watch and this trend starts to reverse that because the providers are going to have to compete in content.
I don't know about that, distribution decoupled from actual value creation sounds a lot like division of labor, ie the way we've been doing things since the industrial revolution to generally great success. What's the alternative besides inefficiency and duplicated effort?
Middlemen are great, they connect buyers and sellers at scale. Without the broadcasters the NFL wouldn't expect to get paid any less, they'd just squeeze the money out of you directly. Or show you ads. Or both!
I remember reading a long article about a tech company built from the sporting world that has major technical chops when it comes to streaming digital media. Was that BAMtech?
More likely its progenitor, MLB Advanced Media (MLBAM). They often get that weird 'giant company you've never heard of' coverage, well past the point after many people have heard of them.
> The ESPN-branded multi-sport service [...] including Major League Baseball, National Hockey League [...]
Missing NBA and NFL and subject to regional restrictions and Fox Sports ownership. Any non-cable package that doesn't offer regional broadcasts of ANY of the major 4 is a weak one.
Until the leagues stop with regional restrictions, these sports packages will be hamstrung and never sell on their own. But why would the leagues do this when they can double dip: charge some customers for all-but-local (i.e. blacked out) online (e.g. mlb.tv) and charge others via their cable package for their local teams (i.e. there is no Fox Sports Go w/out cable subscription).
These companies (ESPN and Fox) really need to use their weight to make these leagues and teams stop w/ arbitrary restrictions based on location. But it goes the other direction these days, see the exorbitant prices cable networks pay leagues/teams for exclusive regional broadcast rights (on cable + their online package) and still don't get the right to serve it to someone out-of-region.
Until they use this weight, they will continue to falter because consumers are using their weight.
I am very curious how much money the broadcasters are making with this strategy, and how much money the leagues or ESPN are letting on the table by just allowing this to happen.
Football(soccer for Americans) is definitely the worst offender here, I know it is much more difficult to package and sell these streams because leagues are so fragmented, but if FIFA could use their weight to pull it off it would be gigantic(hell, even if it's just UEFA).
As an expat, I find it absurd it is impossible to get a legal stream to watch my home league, even UEFA champions league streaming is hard enough to get.
If you have a decent cable package in the states, you can stream EPL (NBC sports app), Bundesliga, UEFA, (Fox Sports 2 Go for last 2), English Championship, La Liga, Serie A, and Ligue 1 (last 4 Bein Sports). Granted I haven't confirmed whether they carry all games.
But those are perfect examples of regional restrictions because that's US only.
Far from that. I am a Brazilian in Europe, cable packages here are terrible, can't get any of the bigger European leagues(and of course, nothing from South America), I have relegated myself to just catch up with the news and watch bigger matches in a bar every now and then.
If every studio thinks I'm going to pay them $10+ a month to stream their content, they are going to be very mistaken.
I can't imagine that a lot of people want to spend the collective hundreds of dollars to sign up for all the streaming services. It's almost asking to drive people to torrents.
Now, if Disney does something like $30/year or something really affordable - sure. I might do that on a whim. I guess it's all about volume vs. price.
Netflix, however, I'll keep paying for gladly because of the library size. For the streaming price, it is well worth the value.
I would pay $20 a month if it had every disney movie ever, and every new release after a certain time period. I imagine there are a lot of parents that would as well.
Yes. I think a lot of people commenting here are mid-20s adults without children who devour Disney content. I'd gladly pay a monthly subscription for access to all Disney content. Currently Netflix is already missing so many Disney titles that you already need to use something besides Netflix to watch Disney content, so this isn't actually adding a new service for core Disney viewers.
How long would it take you to break even with installing Plex, buying the worthwhile Disney movies on DVD, and ripping them at $20/mo? 2 years? They have the same problem with ESPN. I want 15-30 minutes a day of MLB scores and highlights and don't want to pay $30/mo for it, even if it includes a channel for every college sport, the ESPPies, and original programming.
Well ripping DVDs was made illegal (again) in the UK in 2015; so perhaps if Disney managed to do that in enough jurisdictions they'd increase their market.
For real, btw.
iTunes creators should basically be imprisoned in the UK for contributory copyright infringement.
I strongly suspect this sort of crazy, luddite, anachronistic attitude to magnify when the Tory's get their "sovereignty" back and don't have Europe to check their anti-democratic attitudes.
Which is why the internet in its current form is such a wonderful thing that needs to be protected as part of the common heritage of mankind. It's the closest thing we'll ever get to a living memory.
In a capitalist system piracy is seen as "illegal", but in a culture with better ways to support and fund their arts it'd be the pinnacle of immutability and access. Instead of wasting all this energy figuring out how to charge through the nose for huge undertakings after they are created to recoup costs and make future efforts seem lucrative and a "worthwhile investment" we could just create and fund what we want to see and have it be accessible to everyone (almost like a public good? Definitely an artifact of a nation's culture and works) and go along with information flow rather than stifle it.
Or maybe capitalism will grind on, and in 200 years Disney will still be kicking their Mickey copyright can down the road and rebranding their 'vault' the Disney Time Machine, making the biggest lens through cultural history toy glasses with mouse ears on them. shudders
That's 12 blu-rays a year. Do your kids really watch THAT much Disney? You could buy every new Disney movie each year and have extra slots to fill out the backlog for that price, plus de-facto ownership of the data.
The size of Disney's catalogue may be underestimated by some. Having instant access to all their movies[1] and television shows[2] has quite a bit of value, and would consist of hundreds upon hundreds of blu-rays. I am not one who would sign up, but certainly if I had children I would much rather have streaming access to all of this than stacks of discs.
I am assuming a catalog "filled" with live action Disney films would mostly have those one-off concept movies they created for their channel than pages upon pages of movies standing peer to Pirates of the Carribean.
Still interesting enough to kids but let's not pretend like it's not padding; those movies were often very formulaic, "relatable kid with a weird life or circumstances goes on a journey" - not really worth the price tag for a subscription.
I would never want to own the physical discs (minimalism), but if the price is right this will still be better than buying the individual movies on Vudu for some people.
Im guessing you don’t have kids? Disney Jr, Disney Channel, and Disney XD put out more content than you could possibly imagine - some of it very good, and most of the rest at least tolerable.
Disney movies are a very small portion of their catalog, although to someone in a household without kids I can see how it would appear that marvel and Star Wars were all Disney did.
Kids handling Blu-Ray disk and constantly swapping them out would easily triple the blu-ray disk cost and also probably add on the cost of atleast one new blu-ray player a year.
Disney already artificially creates scarcity with the physical supply of their movies; I doubt they would provide the entire catalog online when I can neither buy some physically nor watch it on Disney Movies Anywhere.
Offline playback would be the killer feature for parents for long road trips and flights. Won't need to buy Bluray + digital copy of Disney movies if you can even find them for older releases like "Little Mermaid".
As a parent, I would do this too. Imagine if they includes Studio Ghibli movies.
There's a certain standard for Disney movie that makes it easier for you to watch or recommend young kids to watch, comparing to Netflix that you might have to weed out content a bit. Sort of similar to Whole Foods vs Safeway. This doesn't imply which one is better than the other, just that it's easier to set expectations for something with more niche.
I for damn sure won't be subscribed to more than 1 at the same time. I would alternate every month. It makes no sense to be subscribed to all the things.
This. And I also don't want to switch between various different and poorly designed UI's to navigate from the content of one provider to that of another. This problem needs to be solved, fast. We were promised a steaming tv revolution but I enjoy flipping channels and keeping track of broadcast times more than switching apps.
Agreed. I only pay for netflix and HBO (and amazon, but that's a bonus for paying for prime). HBO doesn't feel like "extra" because it's always been an optional add-on that costs more.
First all the "major" studios will split and start charing $10/month. Then adds will start creeping back in. Before you know it everyone will be paying for an ad-hoc cable subscription.
I think a better option would be to do what Amazon is doing for HBO - offer a small portion of the studio (in this case Disney) included with the platform (Netflix) with the option to pay additional fees for the entire catalog.
The biggest deterrent, for me at least, is not the price but the need to switch platforms. I'm already annoyed when I have to go from Netflix to Amazon to find a movie/show I want to see but can't remember where it is. No chance I'll add a third, forth, or fifth platform to the mix.
> I'm already annoyed when I have to go from Netflix to Amazon to find a movie/show I want to see but can't remember where it is.
This problem was solved for me by Roku search on my roku device. It still is something I'd rather not need to do, but the search interface is just as good as the dedicated ones for amazon or netflix and shows you the results across all services.
yup. same for me. Having a search that centralizes all subscriptions you currently have really makes it easy to access that content. I remember the Wii U was supposed to have something similar, it never worked for me. The roku search on the other hand, works just fine. Even the voice search is not that bad.
Long term, we'll probably wind up with a couple of major marketplaces that provide a UI that ties together content bundles that you've purchased from different distributors (who will actually serve up their catalogs).
It's a bit depressing how similar that sounds to how cable networks work. Or platform specific app stores.
I don't know why all these people behind these decisions don't just look at Gabe Newell and his simple statement - "Piracy is a service problem."
Steam is a rampant success. You'd think people would catch on. Have the content, make it easy to access, make it easy to pay, and people will give you money hand over fist.
That's only partly true.
There are countries where average wage is $300/month. They are NOT going to buy legal software and media for $40/thing no matter how easy it is.
Brazil checking in. People still pay for steam games despite the cost. It is often cheaper than the currency-converted USD price, and otherwise you don't have multiplayer. Piracy is down by orders of magnitude from 10 years ago.
It's hard to convince someone of something when their income depends on them believing the opposite.
Steam was successful because it combined advantages for producers and consumers with minimal changes to the business model. The old business model is people buy games that come on a CD or DVD in a small cardboard box for $30-50; the new business model is people buy games that finish downloading in a few hours for $30-50. Not really much of a change in revenue stream.
Cable TV, however, relies on splitting up the channels people want into different packages, that each come with lots of channels they don't want. They also need to overcharge you so they can afford to cut the prices for the "package deal" (TV/Phone/Internet bundles). What people want instead is more à la carte options, with a discount from package deals because they're asking for fewer channels.
So moving to a service that would cut piracy would still hurt financially. Another advantage of piracy is that they can blame their financial troubles on "filthy criminals" and use that to extract some benefits from compliant government allies. Offering a less profitable service that reduces piracy robs them of that as well.
Steam does more than that. It combines social elements (What are my friends playing now? Do they want to join me? What games do they recommend?) and lower price points as well (Summer Sale etc). I know lots of people that stopped pirating games because Steam was reliable (pirated games rarely are), took away the pain (mostly) of patching games and because if you are willing to wait, games are actually pretty cheap.
For me, it's not about the price (within reason). If it's reliable, easy, and centralised, along with an (albeit weak) guarantee that I will have content access if steam goes belly up, I'm in.
And you're forgetting download speeds. When steam started being successful it would take me a full day to download a game, while in steam I could get it in a couple hours maximum.
Maybe that's not true anymore. But I'm sure contributed to steam's success.
I think there's another point that is very important: Steam was the original cloud.
Back in the day where GMail was heralded as being amazing, and offering 1GB of storage for your mails, Steam came out and said "don't worry about how to install Half-Life/CS, or which patch to apply, I'm automating all of it."
"You don't need to worry about your CDs any more. I'll give you the content, for free, anytime you change PCs."
"Just log in with your Steam account on the cybercafé computer. All the games you own are already installed."
Steam was made mandatory to install the new version of CS (was it the 1.6 release?). That was Valve's best move ever (even though I hated it back in the day).
Stream uses DRM, has famously bad customer service, geofilters content and uses differential pricing, keeps content it produces itself exclusively to the platform and withholds it from others, bars some content based on arbitrary criteria, maintains a singular store that doesn't play especially nice with third party indexing tools etc etc etc.
Even Valve doesn't believe in Gabe's statement, and never did. Dozens of media companies have much larger market caps than Valve's estimated value.
The statement conforms to the prejudices of a lot of Hacker News, but there is significant evidence that it's not empirically true.
So DRM, geofiltering, and differential pricing are all requested by publishers and distributors. If you want something more equitable then try GoG, but as you'll notice that not all new or big games are on that platform.
As for third party indexing tools, I read that to mean scraping the site for various reasons. Which I can understand they might not want due to the extra load it generates.
I said make it easy, steam did make it easy. It is easy to use steam to buy and play games. Maybe it's not easy to use steam to buy a game, and then play it without steam... but then that wouldn't fit into my argument.
The only way the Steam model would work for media is if content owners would agree that if someone on the platform purchased a digital copy of something that the ownership couldn't be rescinded.
Nobody will purchase, for instance, all the seasons of M.A.S.H. if they know that there is a risk that the rights owners will pull their content off of the platform in a few years and the person loses the ability to watch what they paid for.
The platform should also have the ability to "import" previously purchased rights. If someone buys a TV show on iTunes, they should be able to import that purchase into the platform so they can consolidate all of their purchases into a single platform.
Lastly, the other thing that made Steam a huge success is the sales. Daily sales of some content, quarterly sales of large swaths of content, etc. That would have to occur for a media platform to have the same kind of success.
I'm an unabashed pirate because it's easy... but if I could use a platform like this that didn't have a recurring monthly cost I would use it.
If Pixar put their upcoming movie available for pre-purchase (like Steam Greenlight) at 40% off, I would likely pre-purchase it. If Disney wanted to drum up interest in their new Duck Tales reboot by putting the original series up for sale for $20, I would be all over that. A TV series in its 4th season with struggling ratings could put up a flash sale of previous seasons in order to get new viewers to binge watch before the new season starts. A TV series could also sell a season pass BEFORE the new season starts for an infusion of cash and release the episodes on the regular schedule.
A steam-like platform could work wonders for media consumption, but it'll be hard to get companies to do it.
Steam took off because it was required for an awesome video game that Valve released. Eventually Steam was more valuable than the game.
That's the only way something like this happen for media. A small studio with a hot property could build the platform for their own offerings but invite other media owners to participate. Adult Swim or SyFy or FX could probably pull it off.
My steam library is full of games I'll never play, never would have bothered to pirate. Why? because steam sales.
I'm sure the same could be achieved for Hollywood. Not only could they make sure people are paying for the content they watch, they could have saps like me paying for content they never watch.
I view many of these streaming services as one-time purchases.
I'll look to see if something I want to watch is on Netflix. If I find something looks interesting, great! I'll sign up for one month of the service and then cancel it immediately.
I also do this for football season. I signed up for Sling TV + Red Zone and paid for a few months. When football season was over, I canceled it.
I do the same, but I think that's harder with a family. Right now my wife and I don't have time to watch much, so we usually pick a single show together and watch it start to finish, but if we both had our own watching habits or kids I don't know what we'd do. I dont imagine anyone else would have the patience to start/stop service no matter how easy it is (I can't even get them to turn off the lights when they leave the room).
Or to summarize, every studio thinks they're better than their competitors. And thus deserving of a larger portion of streaming revenue than their competitors.
People will definitely turn to piracy if it becomes too difficult/fragmented to watch the content they want to watch.
As a result, for these services to be successful, we'll probably see some renewed fighting against piracy and some work toward increasing regulation on the internet. Unfortunately, the political climate is probably pretty good in the US right now for Disney and other big content creators to start pushing for these.
Or just not watch. It's just TV. If it's too hard I'll go and do something else and not even miss it. That doesn't help the content creators long term if I'm no longer even interested in their product.
FireTV and AppleTV already do this some degree. On FireTV when you search for a movie/show it will give you options where to play it based on which apps you have installed (netflix, hulu, or via amazon/prime)
The Apple TV's "TV app" is great for this... but for some reason, it only functions in the US. I get that it has a "live cable" Single-Sign-On component that cable providers need to sign up with–but all I want from it is the unified interface for searching/browsing and watch-tracking of content within streaming services!
I'd wager that's because (aside from Apple generally being US-based) international distribution rights are an even bigger minefield than US distribution rights.
It's alright but clearly dependent on the content providers and platform operators to be honest and accurate. Recently I tried to watch the new season of Archer. My Fire TV told me that show is available on Netflix and Hulu but didn't seem to know which seasons. I opened Netflix first and found they had old seasons but not the latest. I switched to Hulu and the thumbnail for the show mentioned Archer Dreamland, the latest season. I opened that up and found that the latest season was not available and Hulu had the same offering as Netflix.
FXX themselves do not seem interested in my money and require that I have cable so I continue not consuming their content.
Yes -- just like how the copies of 8-bit computer games that we can run today on emulators are generally the cracked copies rather than the copy-protected (old-school DRM) originals.
I briefly worked for a company that wanted to do this (Fanhattan/FanTV). It was more an aggregator than a marketplace, but similar concept. But that was back in 2011, so they were a bit ahead of their time (and also seemed allergic to actually shipping things, but that's unrelated, I suppose).
That's like saying Google "just" aggregates indexed websites. I use justwatch on a weekly basis to find out whether a movie is on any of the services I use (instead of checking all three of them individually), and browse new releases on each service.
Sure. But OP was responding to the below excerpt. At least from the way I've interpreted the request, they are looking for a single interface to watch their content from multiple providers. justwatch does not do this.
px1999 1 hour ago [-]
Long term, we'll probably wind up with a couple of major marketplaces that provide a UI that ties together content bundles that you've purchased from different distributors (who will actually serve up their catalogs).
I just got paid $6784 working off my laptop this month. And if you think that's cool, my divorced friend has twin toddlers and made over $9k her first month. It feels so good making so much money when other people have to work for so much less. This is what I do,
====http://www.financemedianews.com/?682
Has anyone had luck with canistream.it? I've never once had success with it and tried at least half a dozen times over months.
Just now I did a search for "all the presidents men." Top hit was "All The King's Men" but the right movie did show up second. It says "Not available for streaming, rental, or purchase. Click below to set reminders."
Agreed. I've probably tried using that site about 5-6 times over the past year, and it has never told me anything was streaming. Never. And yes, about half of the things I checked were indeed streaming upon further review.
canistream.it seems to have better SEO because I've never heard of gowatchit.com and I swear I've googled some variant of "where movies are streaming" multiple times.
Roku and AppleTV seem to do a decent job of aggregating this information, but that UI isn't always handy and I'm usually more flexible about my viewing options than just those devices.
> Long term, we'll probably wind up with a couple of major marketplaces that provide a UI that ties together content bundles that you've purchased from different distributors (who will actually serve up their catalogs).
If you actually had something like that, it could know that you watched Cosmos on Netflix and then suggest physics lecture videos from Open Courseware. It could suggest YouTube videos alongside Hollywood movies.
Which is exactly what the studios don't want, because they want you watching only their content. That is the real reason they're so obsessed with DRM -- they want creating that to be prohibited by law, because it would allow a free market for content curation instead of allowing the major studios to control it.
It's the same reason they don't like Netflix. Netflix is producing their own content and is happy to accept content from small players. It's not a fully open market but it's still too much like real competition.
But fragmentation isn't going to save them. People aren't going to subscribe to a dozen separate streaming services each with their own incompatible interface.
Hopefully they'll realize that sooner rather than later and decide that it's better to have open interfaces and protocols than let someone else (i.e. Netflix) have market power.
I think your comments about the power are largely spot on - and bigger players can make a move for their own streaming services, but smaller ones will need to band together (not necessarily via an all-in-one subscription service like Netflix, but via some sort of content platform/store/whatever).
That said, I think that the curation aspect is something that studios aren't overly concerned about - they just hate that a direct competitor is stealing their profit and making their own content. If Netflix wasn't being as aggressive (or wasn't being so damn profitable; or wasn't negotiating prices with the studios), I don't think that the content creators would be trying to run away so quickly.
I hope that open protocols win out, that's the best solution here for everyone (and would be the ideal "major marketplace" in my parent comment). That said, it may just wind up being an organisation owned by a consortium/cartel of studios (or even some other third party) that's contractually obligated to "fairness".
Officially there is no such service, but unofficially you can do a lot of stuff :-)
You pay $12 to Netflix and you can watch it officially on 4 devices, which means it's $3 for any of your 4 friends, but you can "oversell" it actually more if you've some friends in different timezones. Many services work this way just fine. Streamwarez(tm) is here for a long time already.
That's not how cable works, they bundle content you don't want with the tiny amount you do. What you are describing allows me to make much finer grained choices about my content.
I'm suggesting that if you add eg "Miramax" to your library by paying their subscription you gain access to their back catalogue. I may only want one or two movies from them, but thanks to the bundling I have access to way more. Or Disney might divide subscriptions up by its studios or labels. I don't see them offering individual shows in a subscription, as that has limited appeal (has been done already and doesn't _really_ require its own platform)
Overall, it's not so different from cable channels, except that it's on-demand.
My Mi Box (Android TV) lets me search accross apps so I just usually search for movies and shows that way unless I know it's already on Netflix. The weird part for me is Disney coulda just made themselves exclusive to Hulu instead. Just means I wont be watching any Disney movies or shows ever again since I won't bother paying for just Disney or even having regular cable (no more Disney channel for me). Sadly for others it may mean torrenting because the convenience is taken away for the sake of profit.
With HBO I simply do one month subs when a season will complete during it so I can get the whole season in. Once a site passes the $10 mark I quickly lose interest and then I start determining how I can maximize my sub time.
Now what will be interesting is seeing which studios cannot float their own streaming service and combine either with another studio or group of them under an all inclusive banner. I figure we will go nearly full circle and end up with an aggregator like cable was but this time without too much junk.
my beef with some of these "premium" sites is they think that ever after they get $15 from me that I have to watch THEIR ads. Really? I paid for the shows, not 30 to 60 seconds of your ads.
I will never pay for YouTube Red. When an unskippable ad starts playing, I just look away. Most of the time, I realize that I'm wasting time watching idiotic YouTube content, and I quit the app. In this, they're actually lessening my addiction to their platform in that they're giving me a break to consider if I should keep watching or not.
> When an unskippable ad starts playing, I just look away.
Does uBlock Origin block YouTube ads?
I'm asking because it's been years since I saw/was forced to watch a video ad on YouTube. Sure, there are occasionally the banner ads at specific times in the videos, but no video ads.
So either the channels I watch have somehow opte out of video ads, or uBlock is taking care of them?
Or maybe this is a geographic thing and YouTube in Germany doesn't show video ads?
Anyway, if you have Android and want to watch on mobile, I highly recommend NewPipe (F-Droid). Lets you: watch, listen, download, repeat YouTube videos and I've never seen an ad in it. Really awesome app!
Well we've gotten the bifurcation we have because thats what people have always wanted.
An ad-hoc cable subscription. Few people really wanted all the channels they were getting and would gladly have paid less to get only what they wanted.
Another thing we might see here though has happened to me a lot with music because of Spotify.
If you music isn't on Spotify or Soundclound... I'm just going to listen to it less. Its too much trouble to go download/buy from so many different sources.
Plus Pixar and ABC (with Shonda Rhimes' shows) and every movie and show they've ever released since they stopped being a premium channel. Disney has managed to get a lock on a lot of very hot property.
>> Before you know it everyone will be paying for an ad-hoc cable subscription.
Still better than a cable subscription. That's my biggest beef. I want 2 channels and I can't get them for less than $150 a month. So they get nothing and neither do I.
If we move fully into that model, how long do you think it will be before they realize merging with smaller networks to start hiking prices is more lucrative than letting people pick and choose?
Do I really have to go over econ 101 with you? The past distro channels look to "not work" while there's a better alternative; once the latter have a monopoly - oh fuck it, just sit back and pay attention.
...and for those who are paying $150, $130 of it goes to lawyers and people trying to get laws passed to allow them to sabotage any real competition before it even becomes a problem. facepalm
> The biggest deterrent, for me at least, is not the price but the need to switch platforms.
Agree, especially when most doesn't work nearly as well as Netflix. I prefer to use the TV app and the horrible user experience I had with HBO (for instance) made me quickly stop using it.
For a streaming company user engagement should be taken very seriously, but it seems that most studio-turn-streaming-company miss this. They think content is everything because that's what a studio is about. But content doesn't matter if I can't stream it easily and many studios are so over-protective of their content that they forget about usability.
Unfortunately, Amazon is a large part of the problem too.
People who want to watch Japanese cartoons get to pay for yet another streaming service, and for years there was a split where we had to pay for both Crunchyroll and Funimation. We finally saw light at the end of the tunnel with the advent of a partnership to share content. Only it turned out to be an Amazon freight train in the form of Anime Strike, which not only requires a $99/yr Prime account, but an additional $5/mo surcharge.
And now once again, we have a service cannibalizing half the important shows each season. And I'm just ... out. Amazon is not getting more money from me. I'm not supporting this balkanization of media content. And I will likely drop Crunchyroll because it doesn't have half of what I want to watch anymore.
These companies are never going to learn. I am happy to pay for content, but I'm not going to sign up for one streaming service per show I want to watch. Like most people, I simply can't afford that.
I buy DVDs. My data cap is too low to stream, and I can't get a higher one. (I've tried.) Netflix and whoever licensing shows for streaming only really pisses me off because then there's no way for me to watch those shows.
| The biggest deterrent, for me at least, is not the price but the need to switch platforms. I'm already annoyed when I have to go from Netflix to Amazon to find a movie/show I want to see but can't remember where it is. No chance I'll add a third, forth, or fifth platform to the mix.
That's my biggest pain point as well. I already have to switch between Netflix / Hulu / Amazon to figure out who has the content I want. I've always been a huge Stargate fan; Netflix and Amazon used to have it, now only Hulu has it. Amazon is the only one that has the latest episodes for shows that I like, (although I have to pay extra, I'm willing to bite the bullet for my favorite show).
IMO, one of the biggest design goals of Apple TV is precisely exposing content on a provider-agnostic interface, to avoid this pain. As services get more and more fragmented, Apple could become more and more competitive in that space.
Using Prime and Netflix with the FireTV Stick, if I search for a movie in Amazon's interface and Netflix has it, Amazon will tell me so and provide a button to click directly to that movie in the Netflix app. Same with the Showtime app (not sure about Hulu as I don't subscribe to it currently)
what about Roku? I thought they have a central search where you can enter a movie or show name and then it shows you the results from your connected services like HBO, AmazonVideo, Netflix etc.
>I think a better option would be to do what Amazon is doing for HBO - offer a small portion of the studio (in this case Disney) included with the platform (Netflix) with the option to pay additional fees for the entire catalog.
Just a heads up - HBO is pulling their shows from Amazon in mid-2018[1]. They essentially view it as competition with HBO Now.
If you use an Amazon Fire, you can use Alexa to find titles whether they're on Prime, Netflix, or Hulu, at least, and probably others. Unfortunately the Nextflix integration is problematic if you're not in the US, because it still uses the US catalog.
Pretty much what I would do. Netflix has such a large catalog, that I don't bother cancelling during periods when I'm not even using the service. If the content I'm interested in is spread through various services, I'll simply sign up, watch what I wanted to watch, then cancel. One month's subscription is enough for me to catch up on a season's worth of some series I like.
This however creates the incentive for providers to start enforcing long term contracts for the regular price, or a much higher price for a monthly plan, in which case DVDs will be relevant again for me.
That's what I do with HBO right now. Only thing I'm interested in is Silicon Valley and Game of Thrones. Once GoT is done for the season, my account will get closed just like I did last year.
Sadly, cable bundling is what allowed small channels like AMC and TNT to develop programming and reach an audience that wouldn't have been possible otherwise.
That's all going to consolidate into the hands of a couple of major producers (Disney, HBO, Amazon, Netflix, maybe Hulu) and that's about it.
How is this "a la carte"? I don't care about channels; I'd be willing to pay a couple bucks to watch some specific movie or TV show, but "you have to sign up for a monthly subscription to some corporation's arbitrary bundle of media offerings in order to get access to the one or two things you actually want to see" is pretty much the opposite of "a la carte TV".
The problem tends to be the pricing. The per-episode and seasonal purchase rates often seem higher than going and buying a DVD, probably due to the store taking a cut. The streaming services, or even cable TV, are much cheaper if you make a lot of use of them.
The hope always seems to be to operate like a gym, where there are people paying but almost never showing up.
That may be true for traditional TV. Game of Thrones is currently airing season 7. Unless you subscribe to HBO you can only get season 6. Season 5 of House of Cards was released in May and still only available through Netflix.
To me, a debate about pricing is totally separate from the arguments about the availability of options to buy content. You can
1) Buy individual episodes
2) Buy individual season
3) Buy individual channels (FX, HBO, with ESPN and Disney coming soon and more and more networks offering this option)
4) Buy bundles of content (cable, Netflix, Hulu, etc.)
Availability windows also seem to be designed to match consumers demands, you'll pay more to get copies of episodes right away vs waiting a season or two to buy them.
Again, I think it's fair to find the prices to be greater than what each individual is willing to pay, but I don't think the actual options are lacking in the same way they were 3 years ago.
If they were separate arguments, then album sales wouldn't have dropped after iTunes started selling $0.99 a song. CD Singles have been around forever but everyone paid the extra couple dollars to get the rest of the album even though in many cases very little effort was made producing the rest of the album.
To clarify, I don't mean that the delivery options won't have an impact on price. People often seem to frame the arguments around videos services as them not providing the unit of content they want (like marssaxman above), when more often than not they do. The real complaint is usually just what your saying, they don't offer it at the desired price, despite a ton of unbundling from the old model. That's a fair critique to make, although I'm hopeful the market is able to sort it out
It's a la carte because for decades you had to buy bundles of schlock from your cable company to get the one thing you wanted (typically ESPN).
Presumably you want finer-grained a la carte, like individual shows and movies. You can get that today via iTunes but it is insanely expensive, and it doesn't really make economic sense because not enough consumers watch little enough TV for that to make sense, therefore the price remains high and companies offering it are not doing well.
Right now the market forces are pushing everyone to try to be either Netflix (streaming service become producer) or HBO (producer becoming streaming service). As the technologies commoditize this trend will continue, and consumers will just have to deal with the abominable UX that this balkanization of services creates. It'd be nice if someone could wrap a nice UX around this, whether it be a la carte or whatever, but I don't see that market forces would allow that, and least not until the balkanization gets a lot worse and rights holders get an incentive to play nice with aggregators.
When you say "market forces", it is important to understand we are operating within the confines of the completely arbitrary market dictated by copyright law. The natural market for "intellectual goods" like music, movies, and TV is very weak (which is why copyright was created in the first place).
Cable companies and centralized distributors are the natural conclusion of our copyright mechanisms. Online video has already been coalescing on Netflix and Amazon as the next-gen cable cos instead of Comcast and AT&T.
If we don't want to be stuck with the same thing over and over again, we need to change the way that we've constructed the artificial market for intellectual goods, so that subscription bundles a la cable is no longer the only feasible economic model.
Yes, I understand that. I spent a decade of my life building a startup in this space. If you have an angle on how to change copyright law then I'm all ears.
I like this approach, not shying away from reexamining the fundamental problem. What do you define as a "weak market"?
Seeing as that's the problem, affording agents in the space more or better control to try and strengthen the market could be an approach - so I want to understand where/what the current weaknesses are.
It's not quite a la carte. We've gone from 1 provider, with bundles to N providers. I don't mind paying for each content provider. What I personally mind is the content being spread across a bunch of different sites.
I don't want to have an HBO account, and a Disney account, and a Hulu account, and a Netflix account, and an Amazon account, etc etc. I wish they'd play nicely and let one provider bill me, and take care of restricting my access to their HBO portion of their library unless I pay an addition $X/month.
I've heard a friend complain about having to subscribe to Amazon Prime, Apple Music and some other service because each had their own "exclusive artist"...
>If every studio thinks I'm going to pay them $10+ a month to stream their content, they are going to be very mistaken
One of the biggest misconceptions about the post-tv-cable world is that people actually thought they could cut their TV bill from $50-$100/mo to $10/mo.
>I could see a family buying a plethora of bundles, but I strongly suspect it will continue to be cheaper than the equivalent cable package.
You may be right but I just don't think the industry can go from taking in $50-100/mo to $10/mo - they will figure out a way. And people didn't mind paying that amount. What people disliked was the forced bundles and less flexibility compared to what pirating gave you.
>I can't speak at all for sports; i imagine that alone could be hundreds a month to watch a local game.
NBA is about $200/season - which isn't bad given that's for every game. When local telecoms that bought rights for local games wise up it won't even be that much.
That is what Media companies like Disney want. People always blamed the Cable companies for it but in reality it was the big Media companies pushing Cable and Cable not caring. :\
> Netflix, however, I'll keep paying for gladly because of the library size. For the streaming price, it is well worth the value.
To a point yes. However, the balkanizing of streaming services is growing at an alarming rate.
Fortunately there is enough competition in the space that maybe the prices for each channel will go down. I've already switched to watching free content on youtube for my primary source of video entertainment.
If all major studios pull their content from Netflix, then it will not have the large library size anymore.
Also Disney is currently in a strong position for this right now. They released ~10 movies in 2016 and had the 4 highest grossing films of 2016. This, of course, assumes that Marvel and Lucasfilm properties are put on the Disney streaming service (I would expect that Touchstone label will not be included in this, as it's always been distinctly branded).
Either way, $10 per month is a bit steep up until the point that they stop selling discs; right now it's not much more than $10 per month to buy every single new release on bluray, and it's less than $10 per month to buy them on dvd, if you shop around.
The thing that scares me is that this puts them in a position where they could stop selling media altogether, and it's no longer possible to pay a flat fee to watch a movie any time you want. At that point the only competition with the streaming service would be piracy.
Netflix already doesn't have that big of a library, and it's been steadily shrinking. But if it comes down to it, i'm willing to pay for $10/mo to netflix purely for their original content. I'd also pay for HBO Now if they would let me (I'm in canada). I don't think there's any other company putting out enough quality first-party content that i'd be willing to pay a monthly fee for their service. maybe a couple bucks here and there for a one-off movie rental, but if i have to think about money before i watch something - even a completely insignificant amount - i'm probably going to find other options.
And as you say, there's always piracy to fill the gaps in any streaming catalogue.
In 2004, my cable budget was $160/mo in a bundle. Now it is $100/mo for a half-gigabit internet connection.
I'd have to sign up for 6 different services in order to add up to my previous budget. So far... its' not come to that point, but if it does I'll be happy to cut out some services.
After all do I really need Netflix? I don't watch if for months at a time, and only keep it out of laziness. I'll happily cut it and swap in Disney for that time period of budget constraints become an issue.
> After all do I really need Netflix? I don't watch if for months at a time, and only keep it out of laziness.
I put my elderly mother on my netflix account with her own profile and she couldn't be happier. I saved her a bunch of money that she'd otherwise be spending on cable and as a bonus she's not watching 24hr news that's making her afraid all day. For something that I occasionally will use but she always uses, $10/mo is _cheap_.
Now if I could only nudge her towards some of the Korean soap operas that they have now...
Heh. My elderly father watches 100x more Netflix than I do. It makes him happy, particularly for the price. I'm glad he enjoys it, even if I also wish I could nudge him towards a wider variety of shows.
In 2017, I paid for 100/40 VDSL 30€/month and for all TV channels I could ever need 5€/month (Satellite dish and HD+ decoder card).
I'm currently paying 2€/month for Amazon Prime for Students, and I'm not willing to pay more than 10€/month overall for access to streaming platforms (as long as I'm a student, after that maybe 20-30€ overall). That simple. In my family we have Amazon Prime and Netflix, if stuff isn't on there it gets pirated, no discussion.
>I'd have to sign up for 6 different services in order to add up to my previous budget.
that's a good point. but for comparison, in 2004 my cable budget was zero because i was in high school and living with my parents. In college we shared hard drives full of movies around the dorms, and ever since i've lived on my own my tv/movie budget has been some combination of netflix and piracy that added up to less than $10/month. The ship may have sailed on people being willing to spend $60-100 per month on TV.
More broadly, Netflix has had 3 distinct business models in its lifetime: disk rental, streaming other peoples' content, and now, streaming its own first-party content.
Never seen a pay/subscription site with an anti-adblocker. It wouldn't load until I let it connect to facebook, twitter, scorecardresearch and load a 1st party tracking script included in two tracker lists (Fanboy's and another). It was so tenacious it piqued my curiosity.
Really hard to fathom the thinking behind that. At first I thought it must be a pirate site that depended on ad revenue, but nope it's $8 / month.
MotorTrend on demand have the same, but is only a white overlay over the whole page. So it is enough to set the overlay to display none to get the site to work without allowing a bunch of tracking scripts
relative to their immediate competitors, yes they have a fairly big library. but in absolute terms, the chances that a random movie i want to watch is available on netflix is already pretty low. losing the disney catalogue isn't going to significantly change that.
my favourite movie piracy website claims to have 32 times as many movies as US netflix does.
Ya, this isn't really about Disney content. It is whether you want to be able to stream Star Wars, and get access to exclusive Star Wars content. Marvel too. But Star Wars.
star wars is 2 hours of content a year. maybe you can stretch that to 60 if you push out a bunch of 'star wars universe' content. and you can just pay $15 to see that in a theatre
netflix added 600 hours of content in 2016 and will surely dwarf that in 2017 and beyond
disney is in a for a rude awakening if they think they can go it alone in this marketplace
Netflix may have added 600 hours but have you plumbed what Netflix adds? Most of the content is crap. Content is not a numbers game it is a hits game.
"Star Wars is worth more than harry potter and james bond combined."[1]
Just the first 6 episodes of Star Wars is 17 hours of footage. This does not include special features, cartoons and other offshoots in this franchise.
Access to this on a whim, along with immediate access to exclusive preview-type content every year prior to the theatrical release is seriously valuable on its own.
I'd venture many people are HBO Go subscribers simply for Game of Thrones right now. And that more than enough do not bother to unsubscribe in the off season.
I think people on HN underestimate how people value content. They don't realize people pay huge sums for complete garbage cable content plans already. A commercial free experience of Disney content, particularly Star Wars / Marvel powered with exclusives priced the same as HBO or Netflix would probably do great.
Content is hits+depth. You do the 30 day trial to watch star wars, then stay on because you find other stuff you like. Unless you're going to watch a different star wars movie every week[1], you can just rent or buy the star wars movies for cheap.
1: By 2019 there should be about a dozen feature-length star wars movies, counting the 3 2-hour television specials, so you're right that just star wars movies is not that great.
Truly, I think you're underestimating what people will pay for to get exclusive content in their core interest. Star Wars film releases are rapidly becoming an annual, family tradition for movie goers.
When you can drip out production updates and use electronic marketing channels to hype them or include fan AMA type stuff, there is big potential here to keep people around.
But to your point, if you take Star Wars out of the picture, you still get the entire Disney film collection. Just about every middle class family in America in the 90s had some portion of the Disney VHS collection on their shelves.
I don't see this desire for easy access to familiar, high quality, family-friendly content going away. I see it increasing.
The various incarnations of the Disney Channel currently have 33 ongoing series and 6 upcoming series. There are hundreds of completed series. Their back-catalog will probably be smaller than netflix in 2019, but they have more new content than you would think.
Star Wars is already the movies, plus two animated series (Clone Wars and Rebels). You can look at the Marvel strategy to see where it could go, with multiple movies a year plus multiple tv/streaming series (Agents of Shield, Daredevil, Jessica Jones, Luke Cage, Iron Fist, Legion, Defenders, Gifted, Inhumans, Punisher, Runaways). If all that Marvel content moves to Disney streaming, plus new Star Wars content, plus their kids TV shows, plus Pixar, ABC, and ESPN, then you have a package that is really strong.
Atleast 50% of the marvel content on your list are Netflix Owned Orginals, they can not pulled to Disney's new service. This would be Daredevil, Jessica Jones, Luke Cage, Iron Fist, Defenders, Punisher. It is highly unlikely Netflix would be stupid enough not to have those locked down.
Agents of Shield I believe a ABC owned production, and would be governed under what ever terms Netflix and ABC have, Same with Inhumans I would image but it is a newer property so it might have to stings attached it to
Movies, yes those will likely be pulled. I can see the Non-Netflix Originals being pulled.. maybe.
Based on both an article from the announcement time [1] and the wiki page [2] the Defenders are jointly produced by Marvel TV and ABC Studios, merely distributed by Netflix. If that is true[3], then Disney (which owns Marvel and ABC) owns the rights to them, and once the current contract expires Netflix will no longer be able to distribute (stream) any of the Defenders series.
That would apply to Agents of Shield as well, which is also part of the Disney family.
Even if Netflix retains streaming rights to some of the existing episodes they co-produced, Disney owns the properties and future seasons will show up on Disney's streaming service.
> If all major studios pull their content from Netflix, then it will not have the large library size anymore.
Exactly! It is obvious that Netflix and Amazon are pivoting to be more like HBO and Showtime. Apparently, as they reach out to a global audience they need to rely on original content to avoid costly licensing disputes [1].
> The only competition with the streaming service would be piracy.
Piracy is the only thing that will lead to a consumer friendly streaming option. If it weren't for music piracy, a service like Spotify might not exist. For video, Bit Torrent was popular for years.
Now people are flocking to things like Kodi, which can be installed on a Firestick [3] and, with add-ons, can stream anything for free [1]. In order to fight piracy, the studios will need to make it more convenient for consumers to pay [2].
We know what will happen, though: studios will spend $ on content and $ on their streaming service, and $$$ trying to stifle competition and consumer rights. If they had instead spent $$$ on content and $$ on their service, people would pirate much much less, but somehow they don't see that or can't / won't run the real numbers.
Another thing I bet they'll do is arbitrarily pull movies from the streaming service for a period of time so people will flock to the service when they announce its return in a 2 minute commercial you can only see in the theater before their latest movies. They are the kings of artificial scarcity.
Dividing content by movie studio cuts against the grain. In most cases a single studio produces an arbitrary subset of the stuff I might want to watch. This is unlike, say, ESPN, where I can add it to my cable subscription if I like watching sports. ESPN is a semantically coherent unit of content. Disney isn't.
If the Disney move represents a trend, it's going to be particularly frustrating for end users, as there will be no legal solution for watching what we want to watch when we want to watch it, unless we subscribe to all services. Guess how many users will do that, and how many will just click the magnet link.
> If all major studios pull their content from Netflix, then it will not have the large library size anymore.
It already is a bit like that if you leave the cushy confines of the USA, where the rights to even stream some of their own Originals (e.g. Orange is the New Black, Arrested Development, Lilyhammer) have not been secured and thus us poor souls must resort to pirating or waiting, potentially for years.
To quote Netflix[0]:
> Depending on the region, Netflix may not get the licensing rights for an original series for many years.
The funny thing is, I don't think executives think this way. One example is Bezos where he says he imagines theres enough demand that people will subscribe to netflix and prime and hulu and hbo and ...
I'd drop 90% of the crap Amazon is shoveling under the Prime umbrella if I got 2 day shipping at a lower rate and didn't have to subsidize all their media ventures.
When they inevitably raise rates again I might actually have to reconsider if it's worth the cost any longer
I've been wanting to build a PC to host my home media, and I wonder if there would be a market for a device like this:
I'd like to have a small computer where I can insert a DVD and press one button and walk away (and latter remove the disk), and then the movie is available to stream from my small media computer to my home network. It could look up the right metadata online, or you might pay a very small amount for a service that maintains accurate metadata.
For as much as I watch TV I could probably buy the few shows I'm interested in on DVD for cheaper than what I pay for Netflix. Until I get a media server like I described though, it's just more convenient to pay for Netflix.
I suspect that no such products exist because copying the DVDs would almost certainly get the creators of the device sued into oblivion.
You could also just buy* seasons on Amazon/iTunes/Google/whatever of only the shows you want and stream them to the store app on whatever devices you have. If you're only interested in a few shows a year than that gets you potentially price-competitive with Netflix+whatever else, and you don't have to worry about when Netflix loses the rights.
* the common complaint here is DRM, long-term-ownership compared to DVD, but the flip side is much better resolution than DVD and if the competition is streaming services, it puts you in much more control than that.
My problem is where to buy them to ensure 1) that I can access them for a long time, and 2) that I can access them on any device I need to. If the iPhone starts sucking and I switch to Android, can I watch my iTunes purchases there or did I just lose all that money? Can I shop the Google Play video store and stream on my iPad? Will Microsoft pull another PlaysForSure and invalidate all of my purchases at some random point?
Right now I'm buying from Amazon because even though they have the worst UI, they're the most vendor-neutral.
You pretty much need something other then a PC due to DRM. For example google movies will not give you 5.1 audio or 1080p on a PC but will on the Chromecast. An xbox one S will play most things, but not google content. Functionality may be restricted by country.
DVDs are only 480p, you really need something higher quality on a new TV. I have noticed that HBO streaming looks better to me then cable.
I can't imagine it was anything other than Disney looking at the numbers and saying "we're generating this revenue for the streaming companies, but only taking this much in profit; if we run or own distribution we can overcharge more, give shorter rentals, block content when we want to push things in other distribution channels .. and the only cost will be more money for the customer paying for redundant distribution means, more money from the customer to pay for our increased profit, and more inconvenience".
I imagine at that point the meeting chairman said "fuck the customers, show me the money" whilst chugging a glass of bolli and sucking on a fat cigar.
... But I may be getting a little imaginative there.
If anyone can do it, Disney can. They have an absurd amount of high-quality content. In addition to their own branded content, they own Pixar, Marvel Studios and Lucasfilm.
Agreed and for "cord cutters", subscribing to each of the different content providers a la carte will eventually just recreate the exorbitant monthly price points of regular cable.
> If every studio thinks I'm going to pay them $10+ a month to stream their content, they are going to be very mistaken.
I agree. But taking a step back, Disney is probably the one company that can justify this the most by owning so many properties:
the traditional Disney stuff, Star Wars/Lucasfilm, the Marvel movies, Pixar, The Muppets, Touchstone, ESPN, ABC, A&E, Lifetime, History channel. They even have a 30% stake in Hulu.
Every studio... nah. But they don't care about being available to everyone, just the people that would choose them above another studio in the family budget.
You'll end up with people who subscribe to Amazon + Disney, or Amazon + Netflix, and some who do HBO + Disney + Hulu.
Studios want to compete with one another directly for customers, not go through some middleman.
Is it less convenient, sure, but customers (like me) used to go out to video stores and physically purchase DVDs, so its obvious what we're willing to accept a whole lot more inconvenience than what Netflix offers.
Isn't it so sad that the rich capitalists response to greater convenience is "well now we have breathing room to make things much worse, they sucked in comparison before, let's see if we can make it as horrible as that again".
Replacing technological limitations with unnecessary, arbitrary financial limitations doesn't seem like progress.
Still, at least they're helping to inch us closer to a popular 'uprising' against Disney's perversion of copyright legislation.
I feel similarly. The success of HBO Now has been a challenge because it holds out the hope that if you are "good enough" you too can get $10 - $15 a month per subscriber. This is easily 10x the revenue share from a cable bundle deal according to NAB publications.
But does anyone think I'll pay $10 per month per 'network' for entertainment? It would rapidly cost more than cable or satellite.
What I find curious is how difficult it appears to be to sell advertising on streaming channels. If you've streamed one of the 'minor' brands like SyFy or Discovery you can see a 2 minute commercial break with three identical 30 second commercials back to back.
It is hard to imagine that the people who put these things together are so clueless in terms of how their product is perceived.
>The success of HBO Now has been a challenge because it holds out the hope that if you are "good enough" you too can get $10 - $15 a month per subscriber.
it'll be interesting to see how this changes when the Game of Thrones ends.
HBO is in an interesting place. I actually did sign up just to watch Game of Thrones, and also to finally watch Westworld and maybe they're betting that they have enough for people to watch to actually continue their subscriptions. I mean, I decided to keep the service for about 3 or 4 months including the 2 that it'll take for Game of Thrones to finish up, but there's not denying that HBO actually does have quite a catalog.
That said, after 4 months, I doubt there will be much to interest me anymore, and even if there were, I could always just watch it next year when the next season of Game of Thrones comes out.
That said, if they offered $60/year, I would probably keep it around for a few years rather than paying between $20-$40 once a year.
I mean no offense, but I found amusement in this post. It used to be that people hated cable bundles so much that they would say they would rather pay $10/month a channel for the few they watch rather than the $80/month for a bundle of hundreds of channels with only a few worth watching.
Now that we have that, are we living the dream? No, we want it for a tenth of the cost.
I don't think it's about paying that high a cost, I think it's about having to chase it all over the place. I'd pay double or maybe triple for Netflix, as long as it meant I could get most or all of the streaming content I wanted in one place. This is one reason why Steam is so popular.
So then your issue isn't the cost, and if someone came with an app that would "merge" all service into a single app where you can stream for all of them from a single place, you'd be happy?
I don't think that's what others are complaining about though. Price was definitely the issue of the top commenter as they mention 10$/month and 30$/year. But it makes no sense because back in the cable days, people paid 50-100$ if not more for packages. Now, even with all 4 big services, you're still only at 40$, and imo, having an ondemand service where you can stream anything you want at any time (not only that, but with most of them, with multiple people watching in parallel) is a far superior service.
I think people are just getting more entitled for content that has had billions of dollars poured into it. 10$ a month is nothing. It's literally two coffee. If you watch one episode per week and don't even share your account, you're already getting value out of it.
>10$ a month is nothing. It's literally two coffee.
This is, has been, and always will be a ridiculous argument. $10/mo is nothing, it's the price of two coffees. But I need four services, so it's $40/mo, which is eight coffees. So now to afford the same content that was 1/4 of the price last month, I need to give up drinking coffee on Monday and Tuesday, every week.
"It's the price of a cup of coffee" is a terrible argument because I don't want to give up drinking coffee just to watch Disney movies. I want to drink my coffee and watch my movies like I did last month before Disney decided they needed to make more money.
You can still for relatively cheap buy shows on Amazon or Google play. Unless you watch a ton of TV it's still cheaper and you actually own it. Works for many shows except Netflix or HBO originals. For these I just only subscribed every few months, watch what I want and then unsubscribe.
Used to work in a café. It's not the coffee people are paying for, it's all the milk and sugar added on top. Unless you go to Philz*. Sometimes you're also paying for quality, but even then that only comes out to about a dollar premium, but a latte is literally just a crapton of steamed milk poured over some coffee, plus whatever syrups and other crap (chocolate and maybe whipped cream if you want a mocha) thrown in.
Then it's the labor and time you're paying for because a pour-over takes 4 minutes per cup if you do it right, and each employee can only do so many of those at one station. 4 minutes of an employee's time at minimum wage in San Francisco is almost a dollar, about 93.33¢ give or take, and that's assuming the employee is being paid minimum wage and not more.
Plus the costs of running the cafe! Plenty of HNers know how crazy Bay Area rent is. Business rent is just as much of a rip. It's $6 for a 12oz mocha because they have to pay a ton for space, taxes, labor, supplies, equipment, power, water, etc.
Actually I would say $6 for a 12oz mocha is (presently) still a rip-off. It might not just be you that's getting ripped off though, I talked to some guys who opened up a Boba joint and they were getting taken for a ride on their lease for a space they were subleasing from another restaurant, which was the main reason they went out of business. From the amount they quoted, they were probably paying the entire restaurant's lease, which is to say, some small business owners are unable to successfully negotiate a good lease.
Okay, but then you're not talking about a coffee any more. I typically pay ~$1.50 for a coffee, and it takes only a few seconds of labor (often just giving me a cup so I can fill it myself).
Edit: Missed the pour over part, yes if you want to pay and wait for that. I'm not convinced that there's any discernable difference from a regular drip coffee that would stand up to a blind taste test (cf wine tasting).
I agree, but when people are talking about coffee in general, it is important to know what they are actually referring to, in this case, coffee-based drinks. I am unaware of any establishment that would actually charge $4 for a self-serve drip coffee.
the economics of bundling is fairly straightforward.
you pay $80 a month for let's say 100 channels. most people think they are paying $0.80 per channel. the cable providers know you don't want around 90 of those channels, but they're giving them to you anyway. what consumers are actually paying is $70 for their most watched channel, $5 for their 2nd most watched channel, $3 for the 3rd, $2 for their 4th, and every other channel is given to them free by the cable provider.
if cable companies were to allow consumers to pick and choose, they'd more transparently charge it like this. you could pick just 5 channels you reduce all the crap that they're giving you, and you'd probably still pay the same amount.
As far as pricing goes, steam has the benefit of games being much less excludable than media. If you want a racing game or shooter and can'tafford the biggest titles, there're always other alternatices that're cheaper. This keeps the biggest titles' pricing in check or at least anchor them around value marks people tend to like (40 or etc)
Media by contrast is very steep. Either you're at the top of your genre or you're not worth it for those looking for the former. If you want an epic fantasy story GoT still beats out other shows cropping up around the same theme (even if you think the latter have better story or so on, that's not what drives dollars). If you want space operas you're not going to settle for less than Star Wars.
These "staples" and their exclusivity create a high value proposition greedy execs can't ignore, and one that they don't worry as much will give their competition an opening.
Very true, but I'd rather spend $40 on the shows I like than $80 on the shows I like plus a crapton of garbage.
If the producers get more money out of the deal, I have no problem with that. I'd rather they be the ones getting the money.
As it is now, I buy my stuff ala carte. I do subscribe to netflix, but I've pretty much seen what I want there. Every once in a while they get someting new I want to see, but not often enough for it to be my go-to for entertainment.
So I pay per show rather than channel. My wife and I consistently pay less than cable and just get the shows we want to see.
I wasn't sure it would work out that way, but a month or so ago I asked my wife how the cost was working out (she does the finances), and it's less than cable. I can't remember how much at the moment, but less than half I think.
Personally, the part I don't like about paying multiple providers isn't the paying multiple part. It's not having a single interface to get to them.
First, consider the experience then and the experience now. Before, only a single person could watch pre-scheduled content (unless you have an extra device to record). Now, multiple people can watch any show they want in parallel.
And your way of splitting the money is silly. At the end of the day, you were paying 80$ but were only interested in a very small portion of the content. Now you're getting that same content you cared about, but for a far smaller cost.
The idea being conveyed here is that unless you're a sports buff or reality tv buff, the content that you consume probably costs <$2/mo of your cable bill. And that might be from a few networks.
Slight hyperbole. Figures you'll find are on average as the deals are negotiated individually with each cable company.
Most are actually paying $20-25. At the cable company that I worked for, the regional incumbent provider for an area that served golf resorts and the surrounding community, I think it was roughly $36.
Comcast in my area was charging me around $130 a month for HD cable with a primary box and a secondary box with a DVR. I could subscribe to 13 premium channels @10$ a month before I started paying the same amount. I don't have 13 channels I like. I could buy 6 entire seasons @$20 a piece and that lasts longer than a month.
ABC, CBS, NBC, FOX, PBS, all free with an antenna I just ordered.
Would I like the same thing I had with Comcast @13$ a month? Sure, but that's not realistic. At least not yet. Cable in the US is a huge ripoff because they cornered the market through lobbying and deals with local municipalities. It's time for them to get their "come-upins." Next is internet service.
And yes, next is internet service. But the unfortunate side-effect of the cable monopolies is that they're currently the best positioned with infrastructure to reach homes with high-bandwidth connections over the same lines which previously served cable TV. I don't want to see these same companies becoming ISPs and continue shoveling the same crap in the future.
Agreed. For around £8/month I would probably get Disney's streaming service but only if it actually has all of Disney's content available to watch. If they do something stupid like only 5 Disney classics at a time then sorry but they can fuck off.
> I can't imagine that a lot of people want to spend the collective hundreds of dollars to sign up for all the streaming services.
Don't you like to have many options to choose from? You don't "have to" sign up for all of them, it's your choice.
> It's almost asking to drive people to torrents.
I am a Netflix subscriber but there are a couple of shows that I watch and are on competing streaming services, however I didn't want to subscribe to all of them. So I rented them on Google Play and/or iTunes.
I know it sounds incredible but there are ways to consume content without breaking the law.
in the end "cord cutting" is going to be paying the same price as before for cable, but only getting internet, plus paying ala-carte licensing fees that are higher than what the content companies previously charge on cable because now they are selling to individuals instead of a collective.
already cable companies and fios price internet so that you pay only a little more for a full cable package. even if you drop cable you still have to pay extra to subsidize it.
I think Netflix have been very smart for producing their own original content for the past few years. While losing Disney and maybe others is a blow, it doesn't leave a void in their library for quality content.
I should have clarified: there's no sampling bias. These are incredibly popular movies. Here are some movies not on Netflix streaming that I've wanted to watch this year: Gladiator. Star Wars IV. Shawshank Redemption. The Wizard of Oz. When Harry Met Sally. The Princess Bride. All Star Trek movies. Goodfellas. Lord of the Rings. Gone with the Wind. All Godfather movies. Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Airplane. American Graffiti. The Usual Suspects. All Jim Carrey movies except a bad one (the Grinch) and one I've never heard of (the Number 23). Toy Story. There's Something About Mary. All Austin Powers movies.
The last time I tried searching for a good movie to watch on Netflix streaming, I gave up after 10 minutes. I'd think of one movie after another after another. Nothing was there. All it could suggest was "related titles," as if that's what I would want.
Most people pay north of $100/mo for cable TV [1]. Depending on your bundle you may pay as high as $150 (anecdotal from friends who have Comcast). If you pay $50/mo for your internet connection you could afford 5 or so $10/mo services on the same budget.
Arguably, right now Comcast Xfinity has the most/best streamable content if you pay for HBO. This will likely change soon; this has been a long time coming. Cord-cutting is increasingly popular [2] and the studios are adapting.
Disney is gambling that they own enough content to make your top 5 list of streaming subscriptions.
It is worth noting though that those figures are American, but Netflix and the Disney decision are global. The US is a bit of an outlier in terms of both the cost and popularity of cable TV. For example in Australia, a country very similar to the US in terms of pop culture and entertainment, only around 25% of homes have cable TV and the most popular package is US$39. In the US the cost can be looked at as '5 services to replace cable TV' but in most countries it does instead look like broadcast-TV content being moved behind new paywalls, with increasing costs to watch the same shows.
High-quality public television tends to make cable and satellite TV less attractive. SkyTV has been far less popular in its primary markets than DirecTV has been in the US.
In the US, Comcast and Verizon are more analogous to the BBC in England -- TV is less expensive (as an individual monthly cost) when it is publicly funded.
Interestingly, the BBC is investing heavily to compete with Netflix [1]. If you live in an area that the BBC serves, you will likely need fewer streaming services to get the content you want.
That only holds if the content providers decide to continue providing Netflix with an attractive catalog. Netflix is the streaming equivalent of Comcast, it's not an attractive model to me. I would much rather I subscribed to the content separately from the display of that content. My Fire TV or Apple TV or whatever device should just show any content that I subscribe to (with all the benefits of a unified library) and I will pay the creators directly for access.
There is a lot more to it than the monthly rate. There are also those terms of service.
To give you an example of what I mean: Netflix lets me subscribe and unsubscribe at whim. If they looked at my profile, they would also understand that changing that would result im my abandoing them altogether. I watch a low volume for a while, my viewing drops off for a while, then I unsubscribe for a while. Keeping track of the terms that allow me to do this is easy because it is one company. Now imagine that there were multiple companies that I subscribed to. Keeping track of those terms of service would change from an inconvenience to a pain. Seeming as most of them are traditional media companies, I also have far less trust in them. Adding 'activation fees', 'deactivation fees', and 'annual contracts' is in their blood. My apologies for the paranoia, but I have dealt with unilaterally changing agreements before.
My response to them would be: thanks but no thanks. Their services/content are not important enough for me to deal with the headache of entering into an agreement with each studio.
Isn’t this kind of what we all wanted? Split up the monolithic cable package?
The idea of getting almost everything we could ever want through one $10 a month subscription with Netflix is almost too good to be true, I would expect in the long term the average person will end up paying about the same as they used to with a cable bill, ideally spread among multiple providers.
Disney is the one studio with the brand recognition, loyalty, wide customer base across a variety of demographics, worldwide range, wide variety of content (including sports), and essential franchises to have a shot at pulling this off.
There are endless free programming, math, and other educational videos on YouTube. It just requires a small change in one's perspective on what is "entertainment". :)
Netflix's library is pretty weak at this point unless you really like their own productions. It's mostly lionsgate which any studio can add to their service for next to nothing.
A large part why Spotify, Netflix and Steam are so successful is because they are more convenient than piracy, and they have most of the content you would want.
When you again have the choice to either check half a dozen services to see who has the show you want, or to go one-stop shopping at the pirate bay, guess what a lot of people will do.
Speaking of that, it's curious that there isn't a piracy version of Steam that integrates with tor, torrents and such.
How bizarre and awesome (in the way stuxnet was awesome tech but not exactly well meant one) of a concept would that be? And the outcry of the triple A industry, wow.
There is LaunchBox for emulators and DOSBox but that's it.. and it just downloads the metadata, not the emulators and ROMs themselves.
But there is piracy version for streaming content. In CIS region there is an app for android(incl. TV) that allow You to watch literally any tv/show/movie/animation. Quality is shitty sometimes, but free is free
Does Disney have more off-brand subsidies like ESPN and Pixar?
Without more of that, Disney's amazing brand recognition could turn into a problem for them: because everybody thinks that they know exactly what to expect when they hear "Disney", a Disney-only subscription might feel much more like a monoculuture than one Amazon-only or Netflix-only (assuming those two even go that far towards exclusivity, which might be inevitable if more licensed content leaves)
"They" are going to eventually realize that one of the primary draws and reasons for the early success of Netflix was the single-source-access to (at the time) pretty much everything.
Nobody wants to maintain a dozen different accounts with a dozen different services who have a dozen different content catalogs with a dozen different payments and have to bounce between them all to find what they want to watch.
It's much easier to just pirate or pick a different form of entertainment at that point.
“This acquisition and the launch of our direct-to-consumer services mark an entirely new growth strategy for the Company, one that takes advantage of the incredible opportunity that changing technology provides us to leverage the strength of our great brands.”
Any guess who the audience is? Ah yes - shareholders. "We can make money hand over fist by taking our content away from Netflix users, and giving them the choice to pay us on our service, or do without content."
Who wins? Only shareholders. Certainly not consumers.
Piracy shifted power towards consumers. If content creators were going to see any money, they needed to offer consumer-friendly services that were better than piracy. The orgs that did this (Steam, Spotify, Netflix) dominated their markets.
As the web becomes more controlled, regulated and tracked, this power shifts back to the hands of the content creators. If there's no (legal or illegal) alternative people will go back to paying $120/mo for tv+movies. Mass media is how people bond, relate to others and fit in; and that's worth a lot. The studios know how valuable the culture they generate is, but over the past few years have been unable to successfully control their consumers.
I think that we'll see more studios shifting over to their own platforms. We'll also probably start to see renewed anti-piracy enforcement.
I figured we'd get a to point where Netflix[1] is the home of small studio and indie content while the mega-studios would have their own service. Disney has a current and back catalog that would make $20 a month golden.
As an exercise, let's say BBC America started a service with the entire BBC / BBC American catalog. I get the feeling a lot of people would be fine with subscribing. WB would probably do ok, but I'm iffy on CBS / Paramount.
1) I don't think Hulu quite has the chance but it still might
Netflix's original business model was to ship DVDs in the mail which was great because they did not need any special deal with Hollywood to do it. In the meantime they built a strong brand.
After the first pivot, they streamed online, which required writing deals with the studios. Back then they were happy enough that somebody was paying them more money that they gave Netflix easy terms, in particular letting Netflix keep usage analytics so as to keep the studios in as much of the dark as possible as to what value Netflix got from it.
Pivot 2 was producing their own content. Any contract they are likely to get for studios is going to be on a per subscription basis, but if they produce their own content, the cost is constant but the value goes up as you add subs.
Owning their own IP scales better as they get bigger, and also as they've gotten bigger, studios are striking harder bargains. Thus the Netflix catalog has been shrinking. The real "Netflix optimization problem" is about buying a catalog of economical content then presenting it to users in a way that they feel they get enough value to pay for the subscription.
Disney is completely right to go direct to consumer because of the strength of the Disney and ESPN brands. The cable business will be eroded, but many sports fans are fanatics and will spend a lot for content if they want it. (Think of the market for AAA video games.)
Similarly, cable is not that enteraining to children, so many parents get Netflix for their kids, a package of Disney content without the crap you find on cable could be a hit.
The day that it was clear that streaming was netflix's future, I said they were going to go out of business because there was nothing stopping the content owners from buying white-label streaming services (or just building their own in-house).
2 or 3 years later they started developing original content, which can save them, but will be a race against time (will they have a sufficiently compelling original portfolio to justify a high enough subscription to continue to develop new content before all the major studios pull their content).
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[ 4.2 ms ] story [ 357 ms ] threadI don't know if the industry will move towards consolidation like we've seen in music streaming services, but if prices stay similar to cable but I can watch whatever I want whenever I want, I'd consider that a win.
EDIT: my point doesn't refute that piracy will continue, just that more streaming services isn't too large a regression
I'm really frustrated with it and don't feel like I'm getting value.
I can't imagine it's some play to increase the all-important value of the Fire Stick, so what's the deal?
If you want to stop piracy, you need it on one service at a reasonable price, and that service needs to be global.
no one has that yet.
The reality is really the opposite.
Netflix's deal with Disney dates all the way back to 2012, although it only ramped up last year with current theatrical releases. Given they're still providing films to Netflix until 2019 I think they probably had a standard break clause.
More interesting to me is how this impacts the Marvel deals Netflix has. They're covered by separate deals, but will Disney be looking to slowly consolidate all their Marvel TV content under their own streaming platform?
This is an earth shaker for sports properties, cable companies, and subscription VODs. NFLX was quickly down 5%, but is rebounding.
It's more like they opened up access to ESPN3 and added a streamable back catalog of programming. It stems the tide of their massive losses due to cord-cutting while also allowing them to charge sports fans even more money.
Nobody wins.
They also see benifit from cutting the cost of a middle man on streaming.
Not because people can't afford it, Americans happily paid $120 for cable, but simply because the balkanization throws convenience out of the window and nobody wants to deal with that.
Addendum: I think you updated your comment as I replied with the note on balkanization, but subscriptions are "set it and forget it"--it's why paper magazines still exist.
> Time Warner (NYSE:TWX) CEO Jeff Bewkes announced that the company surpassed 2 million domestic HBO Now subscribers during the company's fourth-quarter earnings call. He later added that subscriptions tripled in 2016 compared to the end of 2015, which implies closer to 2.4 million subscribers.
That's a fraction of Netflix's US subscriber base, but it's not nobody.
Disney is banking on people believing they deliver value for the money. For parents of young children, maybe they do. Certainly more than "nobody" will agree.
1) Subscribe to only one or two services at a time. Binge the stuff you missed while you weren't subscribed, then drop it and switch. Works if you don't care about discussing stuff with people as it airs. Less good if many of the services penalize short-term subscriptions.
2) Abandon digital-delivery TV/Movies. Use the friggin' library, and spend what you would have on streaming buying discs instead. Downside: storing stuff sucks, library less convenient than streaming but honestly we're talking about giant wasteful time sinks to begin with so oh well.
3) Just pirate. If there's stuff not commercially available that you want you'll be doing this anyway, and it's barely more effort/expense to maintain the hard drives, backups, and playback infra for a handful of your shows/movies than it is to do so for all your shows/movies.
I wonder if companies like HBO plan for this type of usage and schedule their shows to start and end at times that would necessitate paying for an extra month of service.
People did deal with it. Which is why they're expanding it.
> With this strategic shift, Disney will end its distribution agreement with Netflix for subscription streaming of new releases, beginning with the 2019 calendar year theatrical slate.
I don't read this as "Disney will pull content currently on Netflix from the platform", and I can't see anything else in the article that would suggest this.
> CEO Bob Iger told CNBC's Julia Boorstin Disney had a "good relationship" with Netflix, but decided to exercise an option to move its content off the platform. Movies to be removed include Disney as well as Pixar's titles, according to Iger. Netflix said Disney movies will be available through the end of 2018 on its platform. Marvel TV shows will remain.
I expect moving all Disney's non-live-sports content off the world's most popular streaming platform and on to an exclusive platform with its own monthly fee is going to push a lot of consumers over that line.
I don't think it will ever be possible. Phones cameras are only getting better, how can you ever stop someone from recording something in the theater and passing it around in meatspace?
Good quality torrents might become harder to get, but piracy is going nowhere.
Do you really think it's society [at large] that's pushing this?
From the producers pov fencing off is inherently harmful to their garden's brand/reach/discoverability battling for consumer attention.
It is more than I ever spent on music before though (not a pirate, just didn't buy much music.)
Same with netflix.
I'll not be happy with paying monthly for n different channels to watch a film.
I want to pay. But either one service with all I need like Spotify or paying for the stiff I actually watch.
Did you really think everyone was gonna let you cut that down to $10 a month?
Now I'd probably just stop watching movies. Others will start pirating again.
They want more money for the studio to survive, not artists. Artists are probably "a dime a dozen", and possible to manufacture from a studios perspective.
[0]: https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100712/23482610186.shtml
The music industry has been able to work with aggregators, movies can, too.
$15/month is still a lot though.
Just give me a best-of-breed UI that lets me watch all the things.
I pay for the basic tv package as well.
My point is I don’t watch enough on-demand video to justify another 2 Netflixes on top of that.
you (or the statistical significant you :) started paying for music because you aged. not because Spotify changed the game.
before and after Spotify and such, older demographics are the ones buying vinyls, cds, subscriptions, etc.
the business model is to bombard you with free exposure during your teens, and hopefully sell you concert tickets, to later cash in you buying media.
I would prefer that content is sold without need for a middle man. Seems easy when spotify does it and there are no commercials but they aren't doing 4k streams. I think top quality spotify is 240 or 320kBPS.
Netflix needs 4x that for their lowest, "wouldn't watch it on my phone" quality stream. It's just going to cost more for these products in a non-broadcast world.
Not everyone can afford a CDN and a lot of other things in between the source and the user, especially creators. Sure, in theory they can just sell video from their sites, but in practice infrastructure costs a lot of money.
Unless video will move to decentralized distribution (pirated one did already, so why can't legal one too), distributors will have their piece of the pie.
What is the set up you are advocating for? People automatically upload content from their streaming apps? How are you going to police amazon/netflix/hulu/whatever service I have to do the uploading in a fair way?
My fire TV has 8GB hdd. I don't know what my chrome cast has but it's less. You need real hardware to store the catalog. Torrenting works because it has a bar to entry.
I'd rather providers compete on content and service so I can drop people who shove commercials in my face.
People have spent years complaining about all the channels and nothing to watch and this trend starts to reverse that because the providers are going to have to compete in content.
Middlemen are great, they connect buyers and sellers at scale. Without the broadcasters the NFL wouldn't expect to get paid any less, they'd just squeeze the money out of you directly. Or show you ads. Or both!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MLB_Advanced_Media
Missing NBA and NFL and subject to regional restrictions and Fox Sports ownership. Any non-cable package that doesn't offer regional broadcasts of ANY of the major 4 is a weak one.
Until the leagues stop with regional restrictions, these sports packages will be hamstrung and never sell on their own. But why would the leagues do this when they can double dip: charge some customers for all-but-local (i.e. blacked out) online (e.g. mlb.tv) and charge others via their cable package for their local teams (i.e. there is no Fox Sports Go w/out cable subscription).
These companies (ESPN and Fox) really need to use their weight to make these leagues and teams stop w/ arbitrary restrictions based on location. But it goes the other direction these days, see the exorbitant prices cable networks pay leagues/teams for exclusive regional broadcast rights (on cable + their online package) and still don't get the right to serve it to someone out-of-region.
Until they use this weight, they will continue to falter because consumers are using their weight.
Football(soccer for Americans) is definitely the worst offender here, I know it is much more difficult to package and sell these streams because leagues are so fragmented, but if FIFA could use their weight to pull it off it would be gigantic(hell, even if it's just UEFA).
As an expat, I find it absurd it is impossible to get a legal stream to watch my home league, even UEFA champions league streaming is hard enough to get.
But those are perfect examples of regional restrictions because that's US only.
I can't imagine that a lot of people want to spend the collective hundreds of dollars to sign up for all the streaming services. It's almost asking to drive people to torrents.
Now, if Disney does something like $30/year or something really affordable - sure. I might do that on a whim. I guess it's all about volume vs. price.
Netflix, however, I'll keep paying for gladly because of the library size. For the streaming price, it is well worth the value.
For real, btw.
iTunes creators should basically be imprisoned in the UK for contributory copyright infringement.
I strongly suspect this sort of crazy, luddite, anachronistic attitude to magnify when the Tory's get their "sovereignty" back and don't have Europe to check their anti-democratic attitudes.
In a capitalist system piracy is seen as "illegal", but in a culture with better ways to support and fund their arts it'd be the pinnacle of immutability and access. Instead of wasting all this energy figuring out how to charge through the nose for huge undertakings after they are created to recoup costs and make future efforts seem lucrative and a "worthwhile investment" we could just create and fund what we want to see and have it be accessible to everyone (almost like a public good? Definitely an artifact of a nation's culture and works) and go along with information flow rather than stifle it.
Or maybe capitalism will grind on, and in 200 years Disney will still be kicking their Mickey copyright can down the road and rebranding their 'vault' the Disney Time Machine, making the biggest lens through cultural history toy glasses with mouse ears on them. shudders
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Walt_Disney_Pictures_f... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Disney_television_seri...
Still interesting enough to kids but let's not pretend like it's not padding; those movies were often very formulaic, "relatable kid with a weird life or circumstances goes on a journey" - not really worth the price tag for a subscription.
That sums up a large % of the Netflix viewing in my house.
Disney movies are a very small portion of their catalog, although to someone in a household without kids I can see how it would appear that marvel and Star Wars were all Disney did.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disney_Vault
There's a certain standard for Disney movie that makes it easier for you to watch or recommend young kids to watch, comparing to Netflix that you might have to weed out content a bit. Sort of similar to Whole Foods vs Safeway. This doesn't imply which one is better than the other, just that it's easier to set expectations for something with more niche.
Anyway, can confirm, I won't be signing to Disney as Netflix still has quite a bit more good content than I can watch.
First all the "major" studios will split and start charing $10/month. Then adds will start creeping back in. Before you know it everyone will be paying for an ad-hoc cable subscription.
I think a better option would be to do what Amazon is doing for HBO - offer a small portion of the studio (in this case Disney) included with the platform (Netflix) with the option to pay additional fees for the entire catalog.
The biggest deterrent, for me at least, is not the price but the need to switch platforms. I'm already annoyed when I have to go from Netflix to Amazon to find a movie/show I want to see but can't remember where it is. No chance I'll add a third, forth, or fifth platform to the mix.
This problem was solved for me by Roku search on my roku device. It still is something I'd rather not need to do, but the search interface is just as good as the dedicated ones for amazon or netflix and shows you the results across all services.
It's a bit depressing how similar that sounds to how cable networks work. Or platform specific app stores.
In reality, they are likely to trigger a backlash that increases piracy instead.
Steam is a rampant success. You'd think people would catch on. Have the content, make it easy to access, make it easy to pay, and people will give you money hand over fist.
Steam was successful because it combined advantages for producers and consumers with minimal changes to the business model. The old business model is people buy games that come on a CD or DVD in a small cardboard box for $30-50; the new business model is people buy games that finish downloading in a few hours for $30-50. Not really much of a change in revenue stream.
Cable TV, however, relies on splitting up the channels people want into different packages, that each come with lots of channels they don't want. They also need to overcharge you so they can afford to cut the prices for the "package deal" (TV/Phone/Internet bundles). What people want instead is more à la carte options, with a discount from package deals because they're asking for fewer channels.
So moving to a service that would cut piracy would still hurt financially. Another advantage of piracy is that they can blame their financial troubles on "filthy criminals" and use that to extract some benefits from compliant government allies. Offering a less profitable service that reduces piracy robs them of that as well.
Maybe that's not true anymore. But I'm sure contributed to steam's success.
Back in the day where GMail was heralded as being amazing, and offering 1GB of storage for your mails, Steam came out and said "don't worry about how to install Half-Life/CS, or which patch to apply, I'm automating all of it."
"You don't need to worry about your CDs any more. I'll give you the content, for free, anytime you change PCs."
"Just log in with your Steam account on the cybercafé computer. All the games you own are already installed."
Steam was made mandatory to install the new version of CS (was it the 1.6 release?). That was Valve's best move ever (even though I hated it back in the day).
Even Valve doesn't believe in Gabe's statement, and never did. Dozens of media companies have much larger market caps than Valve's estimated value.
The statement conforms to the prejudices of a lot of Hacker News, but there is significant evidence that it's not empirically true.
As for third party indexing tools, I read that to mean scraping the site for various reasons. Which I can understand they might not want due to the extra load it generates.
Nobody will purchase, for instance, all the seasons of M.A.S.H. if they know that there is a risk that the rights owners will pull their content off of the platform in a few years and the person loses the ability to watch what they paid for.
The platform should also have the ability to "import" previously purchased rights. If someone buys a TV show on iTunes, they should be able to import that purchase into the platform so they can consolidate all of their purchases into a single platform.
Lastly, the other thing that made Steam a huge success is the sales. Daily sales of some content, quarterly sales of large swaths of content, etc. That would have to occur for a media platform to have the same kind of success.
I'm an unabashed pirate because it's easy... but if I could use a platform like this that didn't have a recurring monthly cost I would use it.
If Pixar put their upcoming movie available for pre-purchase (like Steam Greenlight) at 40% off, I would likely pre-purchase it. If Disney wanted to drum up interest in their new Duck Tales reboot by putting the original series up for sale for $20, I would be all over that. A TV series in its 4th season with struggling ratings could put up a flash sale of previous seasons in order to get new viewers to binge watch before the new season starts. A TV series could also sell a season pass BEFORE the new season starts for an infusion of cash and release the episodes on the regular schedule.
A steam-like platform could work wonders for media consumption, but it'll be hard to get companies to do it.
Steam took off because it was required for an awesome video game that Valve released. Eventually Steam was more valuable than the game.
That's the only way something like this happen for media. A small studio with a hot property could build the platform for their own offerings but invite other media owners to participate. Adult Swim or SyFy or FX could probably pull it off.
My steam library is full of games I'll never play, never would have bothered to pirate. Why? because steam sales.
I'm sure the same could be achieved for Hollywood. Not only could they make sure people are paying for the content they watch, they could have saps like me paying for content they never watch.
I'll look to see if something I want to watch is on Netflix. If I find something looks interesting, great! I'll sign up for one month of the service and then cancel it immediately.
I also do this for football season. I signed up for Sling TV + Red Zone and paid for a few months. When football season was over, I canceled it.
As a result, for these services to be successful, we'll probably see some renewed fighting against piracy and some work toward increasing regulation on the internet. Unfortunately, the political climate is probably pretty good in the US right now for Disney and other big content creators to start pushing for these.
FXX themselves do not seem interested in my money and require that I have cable so I continue not consuming their content.
"largest streaming search engine in the world [...] with around 12 million unique visits per month" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14842083
--
http://www.canistream.it/ by former HN user SeyelentEco
px1999 1 hour ago [-]
Long term, we'll probably wind up with a couple of major marketplaces that provide a UI that ties together content bundles that you've purchased from different distributors (who will actually serve up their catalogs).
Just now I did a search for "all the presidents men." Top hit was "All The King's Men" but the right movie did show up second. It says "Not available for streaming, rental, or purchase. Click below to set reminders."
So I hopped around and did a few quick searches:
streaming on Netflix (i think) https://www.netflix.com/watch/243547
streaming on amazon (with Cinemax) http://a.co/605SHmD
for rent or sale on iTunes https://itunes.apple.com/us/movie/all-the-presidents-men/id5...
for rent or sale on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZAGNFnI7mZ4
The page also says it's not for sale on DVD or Blu-Ray (showing an Amazon logo): http://a.co/aoa6bG8
Click "Watch the Movie" and it will show you several ways you can watch it (including all you've listed above and more).
Roku and AppleTV seem to do a decent job of aggregating this information, but that UI isn't always handy and I'm usually more flexible about my viewing options than just those devices.
https://www.cinesift.com/ by reddit user yombato (not sure of their hn alias)
If you actually had something like that, it could know that you watched Cosmos on Netflix and then suggest physics lecture videos from Open Courseware. It could suggest YouTube videos alongside Hollywood movies.
Which is exactly what the studios don't want, because they want you watching only their content. That is the real reason they're so obsessed with DRM -- they want creating that to be prohibited by law, because it would allow a free market for content curation instead of allowing the major studios to control it.
It's the same reason they don't like Netflix. Netflix is producing their own content and is happy to accept content from small players. It's not a fully open market but it's still too much like real competition.
But fragmentation isn't going to save them. People aren't going to subscribe to a dozen separate streaming services each with their own incompatible interface.
Hopefully they'll realize that sooner rather than later and decide that it's better to have open interfaces and protocols than let someone else (i.e. Netflix) have market power.
That said, I think that the curation aspect is something that studios aren't overly concerned about - they just hate that a direct competitor is stealing their profit and making their own content. If Netflix wasn't being as aggressive (or wasn't being so damn profitable; or wasn't negotiating prices with the studios), I don't think that the content creators would be trying to run away so quickly.
I hope that open protocols win out, that's the best solution here for everyone (and would be the ideal "major marketplace" in my parent comment). That said, it may just wind up being an organisation owned by a consortium/cartel of studios (or even some other third party) that's contractually obligated to "fairness".
https://hbr.org/2014/06/how-to-succeed-in-business-by-bundli...
That's not really a marketplace, which would have individual vendors selling their own subscription bundles.
You pay $12 to Netflix and you can watch it officially on 4 devices, which means it's $3 for any of your 4 friends, but you can "oversell" it actually more if you've some friends in different timezones. Many services work this way just fine. Streamwarez(tm) is here for a long time already.
Overall, it's not so different from cable channels, except that it's on-demand.
Now what will be interesting is seeing which studios cannot float their own streaming service and combine either with another studio or group of them under an all inclusive banner. I figure we will go nearly full circle and end up with an aggregator like cable was but this time without too much junk.
my beef with some of these "premium" sites is they think that ever after they get $15 from me that I have to watch THEIR ads. Really? I paid for the shows, not 30 to 60 seconds of your ads.
Does uBlock Origin block YouTube ads?
I'm asking because it's been years since I saw/was forced to watch a video ad on YouTube. Sure, there are occasionally the banner ads at specific times in the videos, but no video ads.
So either the channels I watch have somehow opte out of video ads, or uBlock is taking care of them?
Or maybe this is a geographic thing and YouTube in Germany doesn't show video ads?
Anyway, if you have Android and want to watch on mobile, I highly recommend NewPipe (F-Droid). Lets you: watch, listen, download, repeat YouTube videos and I've never seen an ad in it. Really awesome app!
I guess greed?
(derp.)
An ad-hoc cable subscription. Few people really wanted all the channels they were getting and would gladly have paid less to get only what they wanted.
Another thing we might see here though has happened to me a lot with music because of Spotify.
If you music isn't on Spotify or Soundclound... I'm just going to listen to it less. Its too much trouble to go download/buy from so many different sources.
I can't be bothered to spend the time anymore.
If more of your favorite artists were not available on streaming services you'd probably be ok with spending the time.
Disney Channel used to be a premium, ad-free channel.
Maybe on demand Disney movies are valuable enough to enough parents to justify this?
Still better than a cable subscription. That's my biggest beef. I want 2 channels and I can't get them for less than $150 a month. So they get nothing and neither do I.
Do I really have to go over econ 101 with you? The past distro channels look to "not work" while there's a better alternative; once the latter have a monopoly - oh fuck it, just sit back and pay attention.
Agree, especially when most doesn't work nearly as well as Netflix. I prefer to use the TV app and the horrible user experience I had with HBO (for instance) made me quickly stop using it.
For a streaming company user engagement should be taken very seriously, but it seems that most studio-turn-streaming-company miss this. They think content is everything because that's what a studio is about. But content doesn't matter if I can't stream it easily and many studios are so over-protective of their content that they forget about usability.
$150/month on top of your cable bill. And let's bundle it.
Actually, I'd love to be able to pay BBC even $20/month for iplayer access in the USA.
People who want to watch Japanese cartoons get to pay for yet another streaming service, and for years there was a split where we had to pay for both Crunchyroll and Funimation. We finally saw light at the end of the tunnel with the advent of a partnership to share content. Only it turned out to be an Amazon freight train in the form of Anime Strike, which not only requires a $99/yr Prime account, but an additional $5/mo surcharge.
And now once again, we have a service cannibalizing half the important shows each season. And I'm just ... out. Amazon is not getting more money from me. I'm not supporting this balkanization of media content. And I will likely drop Crunchyroll because it doesn't have half of what I want to watch anymore.
These companies are never going to learn. I am happy to pay for content, but I'm not going to sign up for one streaming service per show I want to watch. Like most people, I simply can't afford that.
They're not trying to learn, they already know. If you continue to think they are optimizing for your happiness you're the one who'll never learn.
That's my biggest pain point as well. I already have to switch between Netflix / Hulu / Amazon to figure out who has the content I want. I've always been a huge Stargate fan; Netflix and Amazon used to have it, now only Hulu has it. Amazon is the only one that has the latest episodes for shows that I like, (although I have to pay extra, I'm willing to bite the bullet for my favorite show).
Just a heads up - HBO is pulling their shows from Amazon in mid-2018[1]. They essentially view it as competition with HBO Now.
[1]http://variety.com/2017/tv/news/hbo-amazon-shows-leaving-str...
When this happens, I will drop that service, full stop. I don't pay to be advertised to.
This however creates the incentive for providers to start enforcing long term contracts for the regular price, or a much higher price for a monthly plan, in which case DVDs will be relevant again for me.
That's all going to consolidate into the hands of a couple of major producers (Disney, HBO, Amazon, Netflix, maybe Hulu) and that's about it.
NBC/Universal/Comcast Viacom Fox Sony Time Warner BBC
Plus some other deep pockets who are slowly getting in the game (Verizon, AT&T, Apple)
I think there'll be enough competition even among the oligopolies to make it palatable for consumers.
The hope always seems to be to operate like a gym, where there are people paying but almost never showing up.
1) Buy individual episodes
2) Buy individual season
3) Buy individual channels (FX, HBO, with ESPN and Disney coming soon and more and more networks offering this option)
4) Buy bundles of content (cable, Netflix, Hulu, etc.)
Availability windows also seem to be designed to match consumers demands, you'll pay more to get copies of episodes right away vs waiting a season or two to buy them.
Again, I think it's fair to find the prices to be greater than what each individual is willing to pay, but I don't think the actual options are lacking in the same way they were 3 years ago.
Presumably you want finer-grained a la carte, like individual shows and movies. You can get that today via iTunes but it is insanely expensive, and it doesn't really make economic sense because not enough consumers watch little enough TV for that to make sense, therefore the price remains high and companies offering it are not doing well.
Right now the market forces are pushing everyone to try to be either Netflix (streaming service become producer) or HBO (producer becoming streaming service). As the technologies commoditize this trend will continue, and consumers will just have to deal with the abominable UX that this balkanization of services creates. It'd be nice if someone could wrap a nice UX around this, whether it be a la carte or whatever, but I don't see that market forces would allow that, and least not until the balkanization gets a lot worse and rights holders get an incentive to play nice with aggregators.
Cable companies and centralized distributors are the natural conclusion of our copyright mechanisms. Online video has already been coalescing on Netflix and Amazon as the next-gen cable cos instead of Comcast and AT&T.
If we don't want to be stuck with the same thing over and over again, we need to change the way that we've constructed the artificial market for intellectual goods, so that subscription bundles a la cable is no longer the only feasible economic model.
Seeing as that's the problem, affording agents in the space more or better control to try and strengthen the market could be an approach - so I want to understand where/what the current weaknesses are.
I don't want to have an HBO account, and a Disney account, and a Hulu account, and a Netflix account, and an Amazon account, etc etc. I wish they'd play nicely and let one provider bill me, and take care of restricting my access to their HBO portion of their library unless I pay an addition $X/month.
It just all sucks for the consumer.
One of the biggest misconceptions about the post-tv-cable world is that people actually thought they could cut their TV bill from $50-$100/mo to $10/mo.
I could see a family buying a plethora of bundles, but I strongly suspect it will continue to be cheaper than the equivalent cable package.
I can't speak at all for sports; i imagine that alone could be hundreds a month to watch a local game.
You may be right but I just don't think the industry can go from taking in $50-100/mo to $10/mo - they will figure out a way. And people didn't mind paying that amount. What people disliked was the forced bundles and less flexibility compared to what pirating gave you.
>I can't speak at all for sports; i imagine that alone could be hundreds a month to watch a local game.
NBA is about $200/season - which isn't bad given that's for every game. When local telecoms that bought rights for local games wise up it won't even be that much.
https://geekalabama.files.wordpress.com/2014/09/500x1000px-l...
That is what Media companies like Disney want. People always blamed the Cable companies for it but in reality it was the big Media companies pushing Cable and Cable not caring. :\
> Netflix, however, I'll keep paying for gladly because of the library size. For the streaming price, it is well worth the value.
To a point yes. However, the balkanizing of streaming services is growing at an alarming rate.
Compare that with the amount of binge watching that you can do with a $10 Netflix subscription.
Things are infinitely better online than what I was getting with my cable subscription.
Also Disney is currently in a strong position for this right now. They released ~10 movies in 2016 and had the 4 highest grossing films of 2016. This, of course, assumes that Marvel and Lucasfilm properties are put on the Disney streaming service (I would expect that Touchstone label will not be included in this, as it's always been distinctly branded).
Either way, $10 per month is a bit steep up until the point that they stop selling discs; right now it's not much more than $10 per month to buy every single new release on bluray, and it's less than $10 per month to buy them on dvd, if you shop around.
The thing that scares me is that this puts them in a position where they could stop selling media altogether, and it's no longer possible to pay a flat fee to watch a movie any time you want. At that point the only competition with the streaming service would be piracy.
And as you say, there's always piracy to fill the gaps in any streaming catalogue.
I'd have to sign up for 6 different services in order to add up to my previous budget. So far... its' not come to that point, but if it does I'll be happy to cut out some services.
After all do I really need Netflix? I don't watch if for months at a time, and only keep it out of laziness. I'll happily cut it and swap in Disney for that time period of budget constraints become an issue.
I put my elderly mother on my netflix account with her own profile and she couldn't be happier. I saved her a bunch of money that she'd otherwise be spending on cable and as a bonus she's not watching 24hr news that's making her afraid all day. For something that I occasionally will use but she always uses, $10/mo is _cheap_.
Now if I could only nudge her towards some of the Korean soap operas that they have now...
In all honesty though, it keeps her from calling me constantly every day. Netflix is great for my sanity.
I'm currently paying 2€/month for Amazon Prime for Students, and I'm not willing to pay more than 10€/month overall for access to streaming platforms (as long as I'm a student, after that maybe 20-30€ overall). That simple. In my family we have Amazon Prime and Netflix, if stuff isn't on there it gets pirated, no discussion.
that's a good point. but for comparison, in 2004 my cable budget was zero because i was in high school and living with my parents. In college we shared hard drives full of movies around the dorms, and ever since i've lived on my own my tv/movie budget has been some combination of netflix and piracy that added up to less than $10/month. The ship may have sailed on people being willing to spend $60-100 per month on TV.
Really hard to fathom the thinking behind that. At first I thought it must be a pirate site that depended on ad revenue, but nope it's $8 / month.
my favourite movie piracy website claims to have 32 times as many movies as US netflix does.
I think think that happened when they parted ways with Starz.
netflix added 600 hours of content in 2016 and will surely dwarf that in 2017 and beyond
disney is in a for a rude awakening if they think they can go it alone in this marketplace
"Star Wars is worth more than harry potter and james bond combined."[1]
Just the first 6 episodes of Star Wars is 17 hours of footage. This does not include special features, cartoons and other offshoots in this franchise.
Access to this on a whim, along with immediate access to exclusive preview-type content every year prior to the theatrical release is seriously valuable on its own.
I'd venture many people are HBO Go subscribers simply for Game of Thrones right now. And that more than enough do not bother to unsubscribe in the off season.
I think people on HN underestimate how people value content. They don't realize people pay huge sums for complete garbage cable content plans already. A commercial free experience of Disney content, particularly Star Wars / Marvel powered with exclusives priced the same as HBO or Netflix would probably do great.
[1] http://fortune.com/2015/12/24/star-wars-value-worth/
1: By 2019 there should be about a dozen feature-length star wars movies, counting the 3 2-hour television specials, so you're right that just star wars movies is not that great.
When you can drip out production updates and use electronic marketing channels to hype them or include fan AMA type stuff, there is big potential here to keep people around.
But to your point, if you take Star Wars out of the picture, you still get the entire Disney film collection. Just about every middle class family in America in the 90s had some portion of the Disney VHS collection on their shelves.
I don't see this desire for easy access to familiar, high quality, family-friendly content going away. I see it increasing.
Agents of Shield I believe a ABC owned production, and would be governed under what ever terms Netflix and ABC have, Same with Inhumans I would image but it is a newer property so it might have to stings attached it to
Movies, yes those will likely be pulled. I can see the Non-Netflix Originals being pulled.. maybe.
and ABC is owned by Disney.
That would apply to Agents of Shield as well, which is also part of the Disney family.
[1]:http://deadline.com/2013/11/disney-netflix-marvel-series-629... [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jessica_Jones_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luke_Cage_(TV_series) [3]: You would need a lawyer to examine contract language to be 100% sure, but Disney has armies of really good lawyers and understands the importance of IP better than anyone else on the planet, so it is extremely plausible.
Both Netflix and Disney already produce a lot of content, so they don't have to bootstrap a pipeline anymore.
Exactly! It is obvious that Netflix and Amazon are pivoting to be more like HBO and Showtime. Apparently, as they reach out to a global audience they need to rely on original content to avoid costly licensing disputes [1].
[1] https://www.wired.com/2016/12/amazon-netflix-look-shows-key-...
Piracy is the only thing that will lead to a consumer friendly streaming option. If it weren't for music piracy, a service like Spotify might not exist. For video, Bit Torrent was popular for years.
Now people are flocking to things like Kodi, which can be installed on a Firestick [3] and, with add-ons, can stream anything for free [1]. In order to fight piracy, the studios will need to make it more convenient for consumers to pay [2].
[1] http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/new...
[2] http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/liz-bales/online-piracy-netf...
[3] https://kodifiretvstick.com/best-kodi-addons/
If the Disney move represents a trend, it's going to be particularly frustrating for end users, as there will be no legal solution for watching what we want to watch when we want to watch it, unless we subscribe to all services. Guess how many users will do that, and how many will just click the magnet link.
It already is a bit like that if you leave the cushy confines of the USA, where the rights to even stream some of their own Originals (e.g. Orange is the New Black, Arrested Development, Lilyhammer) have not been secured and thus us poor souls must resort to pirating or waiting, potentially for years.
To quote Netflix[0]:
> Depending on the region, Netflix may not get the licensing rights for an original series for many years.
[0] https://help.netflix.com/en/node/4976#why-are-some-netflix-o...
https://youtu.be/guVxubbQQKE?t=42m41s
When they inevitably raise rates again I might actually have to reconsider if it's worth the cost any longer
Well sure, assuming you only want to watch content created by Netflix itself. That's the direction it's going with Netflix.
I'd like to have a small computer where I can insert a DVD and press one button and walk away (and latter remove the disk), and then the movie is available to stream from my small media computer to my home network. It could look up the right metadata online, or you might pay a very small amount for a service that maintains accurate metadata.
For as much as I watch TV I could probably buy the few shows I'm interested in on DVD for cheaper than what I pay for Netflix. Until I get a media server like I described though, it's just more convenient to pay for Netflix.
I suspect that no such products exist because copying the DVDs would almost certainly get the creators of the device sued into oblivion.
* the common complaint here is DRM, long-term-ownership compared to DVD, but the flip side is much better resolution than DVD and if the competition is streaming services, it puts you in much more control than that.
Right now I'm buying from Amazon because even though they have the worst UI, they're the most vendor-neutral.
DVDs are only 480p, you really need something higher quality on a new TV. I have noticed that HBO streaming looks better to me then cable.
Disney has no choice but to stream direct. That is they way all video content is all going.
I imagine at that point the meeting chairman said "fuck the customers, show me the money" whilst chugging a glass of bolli and sucking on a fat cigar.
... But I may be getting a little imaginative there.
I agree. But taking a step back, Disney is probably the one company that can justify this the most by owning so many properties:
the traditional Disney stuff, Star Wars/Lucasfilm, the Marvel movies, Pixar, The Muppets, Touchstone, ESPN, ABC, A&E, Lifetime, History channel. They even have a 30% stake in Hulu.
You'll end up with people who subscribe to Amazon + Disney, or Amazon + Netflix, and some who do HBO + Disney + Hulu.
Studios want to compete with one another directly for customers, not go through some middleman.
Is it less convenient, sure, but customers (like me) used to go out to video stores and physically purchase DVDs, so its obvious what we're willing to accept a whole lot more inconvenience than what Netflix offers.
Replacing technological limitations with unnecessary, arbitrary financial limitations doesn't seem like progress.
Still, at least they're helping to inch us closer to a popular 'uprising' against Disney's perversion of copyright legislation.
But does anyone think I'll pay $10 per month per 'network' for entertainment? It would rapidly cost more than cable or satellite.
What I find curious is how difficult it appears to be to sell advertising on streaming channels. If you've streamed one of the 'minor' brands like SyFy or Discovery you can see a 2 minute commercial break with three identical 30 second commercials back to back.
It is hard to imagine that the people who put these things together are so clueless in terms of how their product is perceived.
it'll be interesting to see how this changes when the Game of Thrones ends.
That said, after 4 months, I doubt there will be much to interest me anymore, and even if there were, I could always just watch it next year when the next season of Game of Thrones comes out.
That said, if they offered $60/year, I would probably keep it around for a few years rather than paying between $20-$40 once a year.
Now that we have that, are we living the dream? No, we want it for a tenth of the cost.
I don't think that's what others are complaining about though. Price was definitely the issue of the top commenter as they mention 10$/month and 30$/year. But it makes no sense because back in the cable days, people paid 50-100$ if not more for packages. Now, even with all 4 big services, you're still only at 40$, and imo, having an ondemand service where you can stream anything you want at any time (not only that, but with most of them, with multiple people watching in parallel) is a far superior service.
I think people are just getting more entitled for content that has had billions of dollars poured into it. 10$ a month is nothing. It's literally two coffee. If you watch one episode per week and don't even share your account, you're already getting value out of it.
This is, has been, and always will be a ridiculous argument. $10/mo is nothing, it's the price of two coffees. But I need four services, so it's $40/mo, which is eight coffees. So now to afford the same content that was 1/4 of the price last month, I need to give up drinking coffee on Monday and Tuesday, every week.
"It's the price of a cup of coffee" is a terrible argument because I don't want to give up drinking coffee just to watch Disney movies. I want to drink my coffee and watch my movies like I did last month before Disney decided they needed to make more money.
What I want is to pay for access to the things that I want, which happen to be spread across more and more bundles the way things are going.
What they want is for me to only consume things from their bundle, to ensure that I'm a permanent customer.
Then it's the labor and time you're paying for because a pour-over takes 4 minutes per cup if you do it right, and each employee can only do so many of those at one station. 4 minutes of an employee's time at minimum wage in San Francisco is almost a dollar, about 93.33¢ give or take, and that's assuming the employee is being paid minimum wage and not more.
Edit: Missed the pour over part, yes if you want to pay and wait for that. I'm not convinced that there's any discernable difference from a regular drip coffee that would stand up to a blind taste test (cf wine tasting).
you pay $80 a month for let's say 100 channels. most people think they are paying $0.80 per channel. the cable providers know you don't want around 90 of those channels, but they're giving them to you anyway. what consumers are actually paying is $70 for their most watched channel, $5 for their 2nd most watched channel, $3 for the 3rd, $2 for their 4th, and every other channel is given to them free by the cable provider.
if cable companies were to allow consumers to pick and choose, they'd more transparently charge it like this. you could pick just 5 channels you reduce all the crap that they're giving you, and you'd probably still pay the same amount.
Media by contrast is very steep. Either you're at the top of your genre or you're not worth it for those looking for the former. If you want an epic fantasy story GoT still beats out other shows cropping up around the same theme (even if you think the latter have better story or so on, that's not what drives dollars). If you want space operas you're not going to settle for less than Star Wars.
These "staples" and their exclusivity create a high value proposition greedy execs can't ignore, and one that they don't worry as much will give their competition an opening.
Your $80/mo cable bundle is split something like: $12 taxes, $43 ESPN, $9 Viacom and the rest split by everyone else. $10 buys a lot.
If the producers get more money out of the deal, I have no problem with that. I'd rather they be the ones getting the money.
As it is now, I buy my stuff ala carte. I do subscribe to netflix, but I've pretty much seen what I want there. Every once in a while they get someting new I want to see, but not often enough for it to be my go-to for entertainment.
So I pay per show rather than channel. My wife and I consistently pay less than cable and just get the shows we want to see.
I wasn't sure it would work out that way, but a month or so ago I asked my wife how the cost was working out (she does the finances), and it's less than cable. I can't remember how much at the moment, but less than half I think.
Personally, the part I don't like about paying multiple providers isn't the paying multiple part. It's not having a single interface to get to them.
First, consider the experience then and the experience now. Before, only a single person could watch pre-scheduled content (unless you have an extra device to record). Now, multiple people can watch any show they want in parallel.
And your way of splitting the money is silly. At the end of the day, you were paying 80$ but were only interested in a very small portion of the content. Now you're getting that same content you cared about, but for a far smaller cost.
Now you're paying $10/mo for each network.
Most are actually paying $20-25. At the cable company that I worked for, the regional incumbent provider for an area that served golf resorts and the surrounding community, I think it was roughly $36.
ABC, CBS, NBC, FOX, PBS, all free with an antenna I just ordered.
Would I like the same thing I had with Comcast @13$ a month? Sure, but that's not realistic. At least not yet. Cable in the US is a huge ripoff because they cornered the market through lobbying and deals with local municipalities. It's time for them to get their "come-upins." Next is internet service.
And yes, next is internet service. But the unfortunate side-effect of the cable monopolies is that they're currently the best positioned with infrastructure to reach homes with high-bandwidth connections over the same lines which previously served cable TV. I don't want to see these same companies becoming ISPs and continue shoveling the same crap in the future.
But that's only if the catalog actually has that content. If they do the digital equivalent of the Disney DVD vault then yes screw that.
Don't you like to have many options to choose from? You don't "have to" sign up for all of them, it's your choice.
> It's almost asking to drive people to torrents.
I am a Netflix subscriber but there are a couple of shows that I watch and are on competing streaming services, however I didn't want to subscribe to all of them. So I rented them on Google Play and/or iTunes.
I know it sounds incredible but there are ways to consume content without breaking the law.
already cable companies and fios price internet so that you pay only a little more for a full cable package. even if you drop cable you still have to pay extra to subsidize it.
Marvel Disney Animation Pixar Touchstone Pictures ABC ESPN LucasArts
If they have a whole streaming platform with all the content from each of these, no way its $30/year, more like $30/month.
Given that online movie rentals are ~$2, that's watching a full length movie every other day. There's a limit to how much TV you can watch.
(And if your goal is to binge watch, it's competing with Netflix at $10/month -- which even with it's limited library is a great value.)
- Want to stream movies (not TV) - Want general movies as opposed to Netflix content
Earlier this year, Netflix' DVD division released their Top 10 most popular movie rentals. Only one of the 10 was available on Netflix streaming.
I do however agree that their streaming movie collection is bad.
The last time I tried searching for a good movie to watch on Netflix streaming, I gave up after 10 minutes. I'd think of one movie after another after another. Nothing was there. All it could suggest was "related titles," as if that's what I would want.
Arguably, right now Comcast Xfinity has the most/best streamable content if you pay for HBO. This will likely change soon; this has been a long time coming. Cord-cutting is increasingly popular [2] and the studios are adapting.
Disney is gambling that they own enough content to make your top 5 list of streaming subscriptions.
[1] http://fortune.com/2016/09/23/average-cable-tv-bill/
[2] https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20170531/05304937480/rate-...
In the US, Comcast and Verizon are more analogous to the BBC in England -- TV is less expensive (as an individual monthly cost) when it is publicly funded.
Interestingly, the BBC is investing heavily to compete with Netflix [1]. If you live in an area that the BBC serves, you will likely need fewer streaming services to get the content you want.
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2017/07/04/uk-broadcaster-bbc-invests-4...
oh and plex.
yeah, it's getting to be too much.
To give you an example of what I mean: Netflix lets me subscribe and unsubscribe at whim. If they looked at my profile, they would also understand that changing that would result im my abandoing them altogether. I watch a low volume for a while, my viewing drops off for a while, then I unsubscribe for a while. Keeping track of the terms that allow me to do this is easy because it is one company. Now imagine that there were multiple companies that I subscribed to. Keeping track of those terms of service would change from an inconvenience to a pain. Seeming as most of them are traditional media companies, I also have far less trust in them. Adding 'activation fees', 'deactivation fees', and 'annual contracts' is in their blood. My apologies for the paranoia, but I have dealt with unilaterally changing agreements before.
My response to them would be: thanks but no thanks. Their services/content are not important enough for me to deal with the headache of entering into an agreement with each studio.
The idea of getting almost everything we could ever want through one $10 a month subscription with Netflix is almost too good to be true, I would expect in the long term the average person will end up paying about the same as they used to with a cable bill, ideally spread among multiple providers.
When you again have the choice to either check half a dozen services to see who has the show you want, or to go one-stop shopping at the pirate bay, guess what a lot of people will do.
How bizarre and awesome (in the way stuxnet was awesome tech but not exactly well meant one) of a concept would that be? And the outcry of the triple A industry, wow.
There is LaunchBox for emulators and DOSBox but that's it.. and it just downloads the metadata, not the emulators and ROMs themselves.
It allows Disney leverage not just over Netflix but others like Time Warner.
Without more of that, Disney's amazing brand recognition could turn into a problem for them: because everybody thinks that they know exactly what to expect when they hear "Disney", a Disney-only subscription might feel much more like a monoculuture than one Amazon-only or Netflix-only (assuming those two even go that far towards exclusivity, which might be inevitable if more licensed content leaves)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_assets_owned_by_Disney
Nobody wants to maintain a dozen different accounts with a dozen different services who have a dozen different content catalogs with a dozen different payments and have to bounce between them all to find what they want to watch.
It's much easier to just pirate or pick a different form of entertainment at that point.
Any guess who the audience is? Ah yes - shareholders. "We can make money hand over fist by taking our content away from Netflix users, and giving them the choice to pay us on our service, or do without content."
Who wins? Only shareholders. Certainly not consumers.
As the web becomes more controlled, regulated and tracked, this power shifts back to the hands of the content creators. If there's no (legal or illegal) alternative people will go back to paying $120/mo for tv+movies. Mass media is how people bond, relate to others and fit in; and that's worth a lot. The studios know how valuable the culture they generate is, but over the past few years have been unable to successfully control their consumers.
I think that we'll see more studios shifting over to their own platforms. We'll also probably start to see renewed anti-piracy enforcement.
As an exercise, let's say BBC America started a service with the entire BBC / BBC American catalog. I get the feeling a lot of people would be fine with subscribing. WB would probably do ok, but I'm iffy on CBS / Paramount.
1) I don't think Hulu quite has the chance but it still might
Netflix's original business model was to ship DVDs in the mail which was great because they did not need any special deal with Hollywood to do it. In the meantime they built a strong brand.
After the first pivot, they streamed online, which required writing deals with the studios. Back then they were happy enough that somebody was paying them more money that they gave Netflix easy terms, in particular letting Netflix keep usage analytics so as to keep the studios in as much of the dark as possible as to what value Netflix got from it.
Pivot 2 was producing their own content. Any contract they are likely to get for studios is going to be on a per subscription basis, but if they produce their own content, the cost is constant but the value goes up as you add subs.
Owning their own IP scales better as they get bigger, and also as they've gotten bigger, studios are striking harder bargains. Thus the Netflix catalog has been shrinking. The real "Netflix optimization problem" is about buying a catalog of economical content then presenting it to users in a way that they feel they get enough value to pay for the subscription.
Disney is completely right to go direct to consumer because of the strength of the Disney and ESPN brands. The cable business will be eroded, but many sports fans are fanatics and will spend a lot for content if they want it. (Think of the market for AAA video games.)
Similarly, cable is not that enteraining to children, so many parents get Netflix for their kids, a package of Disney content without the crap you find on cable could be a hit.
2 or 3 years later they started developing original content, which can save them, but will be a race against time (will they have a sufficiently compelling original portfolio to justify a high enough subscription to continue to develop new content before all the major studios pull their content).