This might sound radical, but I think a system of compulsory licensing should be instituted.
It worked for radio and it worked for physical video rental (in fact that's the reason netflix's physical rental catalog has almost every movie while their digital catalog has few and keeps shrinking)
Indeed. Otherwise within 5 years Disney may end-up buying both HBO and Netflix, because those two can't compete without content (especially after Disney pulls Marvel's IP from Netflix, which will wipe out the large majority of Netflix's own successful shows).
And let's not forget who keeps fighting for draconian copyright laws every 20 years -- Disney. I don't think we want Disney to become any larger/more powerful.
What do you mean by "compulsory licensing"? I skimmed the Wikipedia article but I'm missing how it worked specifically for video rental but not streaming services.
The parent comment is conflating two different things.
Commercial radio stations and others can get a blanket license for playing songs, e.g. https://www.ascap.com/music-users/types/radio. Furthermore, if you want to cover a song you can automatically get a license to perform that song. The artist can't typically withhold that right the way a playwright, say, can.
Physical video rental, like the sales of used books, is allowed under first sale doctrine. You can't make copies and sell but, so long as you're lending or selling a physical copy that you bought, you're good.
My understanding is based on my brief time doing college radio, so I may be wrong and welcome corrections.
Basically, it means there doesn't need to be any formal agreement between the broadcaster and the IP owner. If you own a radio station, you can play whatever song you want (provided it doesn't violate things like obscenity rules), and the IP owner can't say boo. The IP owner gets compensation, but they don't get to dictate what radio stations get to play their songs.
Unfortunately, Netflix' physical rental catalog is shrinking significantly as well. I assume they've just stopped refreshing much of their back catalog.
I generally agree that the fragmentation is a PITA. It would be nice to have an all-you-can-eat subscription for any content that's available digitally. Of course, then people will complain that their now bundled subscription offering costs $100/month and they can't just consume a la carte.
The analogy to cable bundles isn't perfect but it's similar in some respects. People don't really mind that they have maximum choice. They just want a cheaper price because they don't personally consume all the options on offer.
That middle ground is pretty much Amazon with Amazon Prime Video today. Netflix presumably wants to remain an all-you-can-eat subscription service--which has the advantage that I know anything available on Netflix is "free."
Yup, no transaction costs to have to deal with, no thoughts about should you go somewhere else. Netflix is all about one thing. Giving the best video experience they can at the cheapest price. Amazon is all about getting you into the ecosystem. Most of the time they don't have anything compelling.
Fortunately now that net neutrality has been eliminated, that's literally impossible. Comcast can and will prioritize their own streaming services to the detriment of their competitors.
I agree for rentals/purchases, e.g., I should be able to rent any movie from Vudu, Apple or Google Play. The real problem though, is that people just want to pay Netflix $10/month, and that obviously can't support anything more than it's very limited catalog.
What is the economic rationale behind such a scheme? There are almost no barriers to entry in either the content-creation market or the content-distribution market. Indeed, the barriers are lower than ever thanks to digital media workflows.
It's kind of like saying we should have a law to force car manufacturers to sell to any dealership, so Toyota can't have Toyota dealerships versus Ford having Ford dealerships. Maybe there is a hand-wavy argument that it would make car shopping more convenient, but is there an actual market failure that would justify regulatory intervention?
Lower barriers to entry aren't a bad thing though - I'm perfectly happy having a lot of competition in the content distribution or content creation markets. It drives innovation and ultimately results in a healthier market and more consumer choice.
I think the possible danger that compulsory licensing would prevent is that companies can use their market power in one area to starve out competition in another. For example, once Disney launches their streaming service, they could easily capture a large portion of the market due to their dominance in content creation
If the worry is that Disney will use market dominance in one market to capture another (ala Microsoft and browsers), the solution is antitrust action against Disney, not forcing compulsory licensing on all content creators whether they have market power or not.
I guess my point is, if this is a natural consequence of vertical integration between content creation and content distribution, a more general approach could make sense (you could make the same argument to a lesser degree about HBO or even Netflix).
But what you're positing is a consequence only where vertical integration is combined with horizontal dominance. If I don't have market dominance in content, there is little risk that I'll be able to translate that into dominance of the streaming market.
At the same time, there are huge downsides. You take all the negotiating leverage away from the content creators and give it to the distribution middlemen.
I didn't realize that music was more or less unique in this regard until a few years ago. I assumed that, for example, if I wanted to put on a play I could pay some royalties to someone and that was that.
But then I ran across a story about how some theatre in Boston had to get into a negotiation with a playwright because he didn't want to give them the rights to perform his play. (Don't know the whole story but it was a smallish theatre company that puts on good but not normally outstanding productions.)
It's not even all of music but just a subset of music that has compulsory licensing. If you want to use a band's song in a commercial for your product you can't if they won't let you.
You also see this flare up in politics from time to time generally when a GOP candidate plays a song from a liberal leaning band at events and the band demands that this stop.
This is just going to lead to another massive wave of ~privacy~ piracy (thanks for the correction), and it’s harder to win people back from free than hold them to begin with.
Rentals would be more appealing if the prices on the main services weren't so sky-high. Why is it that you can buy a 2-year-old AAA game (equivalent to a summer blockbuster) indefinitely for somewhere between $5-20 when it's on sale, but it costs at least $4 to rent an old movie for just a day in HD and sometimes more like $8? Instead of pricing taking digital into account movie studios keep trying to protect their DVD/bluray pricing.
In the end for a popular movie it's often a better experience to just pirate it. Netflix churns through movies so frequently that actually finding something that's not sub-Kangaroo Jack in quality takes longer than just torrenting.
Also Netflix's quality is just shit. I have a good connection. Fast.com (which measures bandwidth to Netflix servers) shows a solid 100Mbps (which is what I pay for). Then why does my movie start off worse than a 10 year old DVD? Even youtube is better.
I've been very disappointed by this as well - I pay for a 4k Netflix subscription, but can't actually use it on any devices. Linux is restricted to 720p due to copyright protections, and my older tv is restricted to 1080p since it doesn't have new enough HDMI ports (again due to copyright restrictions).
It was only recently that Windows got 4k Netflix, and that comes with a big bag of caveats. It's gotta be one of a handful of Nvidia GPUs, using a recent driver, only on monitors that support the right version of HDCP, and only through the Netflix app (ie: no web streaming).
The downside is that you don’t get to support the media you enjoy through purchase or Netflix metrics, that kind of thing. It probably skews the ability of streaming services et al to learn what people who know how to pirate watch. Given that pirates skew to a very desirable youth demographic, that’s no good at all.
Exactly, I switched from streaming services and rentals to Bittorrent because I couldn't rent the original Alien film for less than $5 from any service. At the time it was a 34 year old movie that I rented from Blockbuster for $1 in the 90s.
In general, a lot of digital back catalog pricing doesn't make a lot of sense. It's true with Kindle books as well. A lot of the time I can get a used paperback for the cost of S&H while the Kindle version is still $9.99. I assume it comes down to a general reluctance to put potentially downward pressure on overall pricing by discounting things that aren't ever going to be significant moneymakers in the grand scheme of things.
It's sad that sometimes it's cheaper to buy the physical DVD used on eBay/Amazon, wait for it to get to you, watch it, and sell the physical DVD than it is to rent for 48 hours.
sounds like we need some sort of subscription service that bundles most of them together for one price. Premium channels I mean services like HBO could be add for a separate charge.
Maybe the now there will be an effort to aggregate and make deals with the streaming services since net neutrality has been repealed. They could bundle up all the services into a single package. Why does this sound so familiar... /s
EDIT: Does it really need to be stated that the context here is using bittorrent to illegally download copyrighted works, and that the protocol itself is not illegal?
Yeah, that was very likely what f2n was advocating. However I wanted to make it clear to eridius that it is not the protocol itself that is illegal. Downloading copies of copyrighted works is indeed illegal.
BitTorrent is not only used for illegally downloading copies of copyrighted content, just like encryption is not exclusively used for terrorism.
I would like to make it clear that I am perfectly aware the protocol is not illegal, and I'm rather flabbergasted that anyone thought that actually needed to be said. The context was very clearly advocating for using bittorrent to illegally download copyrighted works.
Seriously. I have Netflix, YouTube Red, HBO, Hulu, Amazon Prime, and yet I often have to end up paying (or pirating) for very well-known movies. What's the fricking point.
The promise of new technology was to provide simplicity and better prices for the consumer, not for content providers to try to run around maintaining legacy profit margins.
Used to be I made an item for sale, sold it to an expert in retail sales, and they sold it to a customer. Now content creators want to own the store, too. Problem is, if the ice cream makers want their own store, and the meat growers have their own store, well I’ll be damned if I’m driving all over town, so I’m skipping the ice cream.
In this analogy, I dust off my copy of a bittorrent client that I thought I’d retired after HBO wised up. Because HBO Go, Netflix, and iTunes to fill in the gaps is as far as I’m willing to drive.
Netflix and Hulu basically cover everything for me. Also looking forward to Moviepass for seeing a lot of new movies in theaters. Anything else gets downloaded.
Netflix has been winning the war on proxies recently according to my friends - all VPS and VPN blocks are either already blacklisted or get blacklisted a couple of weeks after going live
Linode in the U. S., then ssh tunnel? I did that for the London Olympics with a London node, worked a treat. Seems to my ignorant mind to harder to detect.
I did that, not with Linode, but IIRC it stopped working around July/August 2015 and I stopped trying. They first completely stopped streaming to IPv6 addresses (people at that time were using Hurricane Electric as IPv6 tunneling) and when I enabled IPv4 on my VPS they banned the IP.
Don't forget other countries. In Canada, there's no Hulu or any HBO online offering. There's a streaming service operated by Bell that has some HBO content, but they intentionally leave out the most popular shows in an attempt to avoid hurting their cable subscription numbers.
There's also the technical analog of this, too. Which services work well on my smart TV, my Chromecast, my Roku, my Amazon Firestick, my XBox 360, my PS3, my Android tablets, or my Windows machine is a total crapshoot. Even before we consider the yipping chihuahuas like Google and Amazon refusing to play with each other or questions of effective DRM or region locking, making something work on all those platforms is really hard.
It also works the other way around.. Example, some content is licensed to Netflix for all regions except the US. Most annoying for me was Star Trek Discovery. CBS wanted to use it to promote their own $6/month most-ads or $10/month least-ads streaming service in the US.
I lived in Holland for a year as a poor student and IRL shopping was very much like this... no one store had anything (or even more than a few categories of goods) so I'd have to run around half of Amsterdam trying to buy stuff. What I would have given to have a Wal-Mart nearby...
The vast majority of content goes on iTunes and Amazon pay-per-title service. It's the all-you-can-eat services that content creators are worried about.
Because they don't Netflix to monopolize the market. If that happens, Netflix will capture more than its fair share of the profits.
Netflix already has the outsized source of the profits. Disney and the like better hope theaters still exist in 10 years or their business model is toast. A home television screen is already better and if Netflix has good enough television and movies, there's no reason Disney needs to exist.
> Problem is, if the ice cream makers want their own store
But we have tons of stores that sell their own ice cream (and coffee, computers, etc.). Should Apple be required, by law, to sell Macs through Best Buy, Target, etc.?
If it weren't possible to buy a Mac at Best Buy, you might begin to have a coherent point. Beside, I'm not asking for laws to be made, Captain Strawman, I said I'm not driving across town for ice cream.
> Used to be I made an item for sale, sold it to an expert in retail sales, and they sold it to a customer
My dad had a company about twenty years ago, that helped solve an important problem in getting cell phone coverage deep into buildings. They achieved this via a little hardware widget.
He'd frequently complain about various business issues, so one day I asked him: why are you guys having all these problems? Why are you leasing these widgets, why are there all these contracts in place? You guys make widgets; why not sell them?
So he explained it - if you make widgets and sell them, once every building has enough widgets, your company is done and you gotta go out and find some new way of making money. But if you're leasing these widgets, on a yearly basis, with a warranty plan, etc., etc., you can actually continue making money.
There hasn't been a "used to be" in forever. People have figured out that selling widgets isn't the best way to have a continuous revenue stream.
I think businesses even prefer to lease with a support contract because its easier to account for the steady cost. But as an individual, I absolutley loath leasing.
People have figured out that selling widgets isn't the best way to have a continuous revenue stream.
I'll make note of that should I ever find myself selling widgets. Should I ever buy said widget, I'm sure I won't need another one until this one breaks. Seems to me one could make money selling widgets that are a little different than the last ones sold, so the customer keeps coming back for more. Starting to see where I'm going with this?
However, Disney isn't selling widgets. Disney is selling a product I've purchased hundreds of times over. I mean, I've seen a movie. I own bits of plastic should I ever care to reuse that product. Yet I keep buying more of them. Just like no one leases me ice cream, either.
But I'm not here to argue. I'm here to say, "should Outcome A come to pass, here's what you can expect from me." Disney can do whatever the hell they please.
> Seems to me one could make money selling widgets that are a little different than the last ones sold, so the customer keeps coming back for more
The Apple/Samsung model.
> Disney is selling a product I've purchased hundreds of times over.
Disney is extending copyright terms with heavy lobbying and cronyism, and then every few decades opens their "vault" for the new and younger generation of parents to buy the same product. As long as they can keep successfully lobbying for longer copyright this is a sustainable business model because quantity will be limited, and who owns a VHS player any more? Guess you should buy that DVD player after all, and the new DVD copy of Snow White. DVD? What's that?
> Now content creators want to own the store, too.
They don't want to let any company do what Apple did to the music industry. If another company owns the platform with all the customers, then they can dictate prices to everyone else.
> I’ll be damned if I’m driving all over town, so I’m skipping the ice cream.
Except in VR/internet there is no distance so “driving all over town” is the same as “walking all over the grocery store aisles” is the same as “flipping through galaxies with your fingers.”
And once you live in self driving rooms, for many intents and purpose driving all over town isn’t something you’d even notice happening.
At what point would it just be cheaper to buy an old desktop/server, put a FOSS OS on there, install Plex/Kodi, and purchase all of your media legally?
I currently won't buy video content unless I know I will want to watch it again, or unless I have a reasonable expectation that multiple people will enjoy it once. That's because the current price point for most DVDs is too high for me. At $5 for a package with 4 different movies in it, I can take a chance on something out of the bargain bin, but $15-$25 for one movie is not reasonable unless I have already seen at least a portion of it and liked it.
So we have a problem. I won't buy something of unknown quality, and content producers don't want to show me something new unless I pay first. My dollars therefore don't go to them until after one of the following happens: I see it at the $2 second-run theater, I see it on television, I see someone else's licensed copy (incl. Redbox, Netflix, or public library), or I see a pirated copy. Nobody wants to buy a pig in a poke.
(Yes, that's right, the latter means that piracy can result in additional sales.)
Once I have assessed the quality of the work, I can decide how much I am then willing to pay to watch it again, on demand. If that's more than the current price of a disk copy, I might buy it. If not, there's only so long I am willing to wait for the price to drop, before my disposable income is already disposed of, and my available library storage space is filled. I might save it to a gift wish list, but it's more likely I'll simply forget it exists.
And it's not lost sales that kills you in a creative business, and it's not even people hating your stuff, it's people not knowing your work exists. So in my view, the burden is upon the content distributors to get my attention that first time, to signal a level of quality that will make me feel comfortable spending my money.
So here's the model I think will work:
- Establish a basic service for streaming permanently licensed content. For this, charge the marginal cost of hosting and outgoing bandwidth. Allow customers to suspend and reactivate their accounts at will, without hassle. Allow customers to download those titles and their licenses to local storage whenever they want. Make sure your application makes local versus streamed content seamless, so customers won't be tempted to use a different player.
- Allow customers to pay an additional $X to get $X in non-refundable service credit. For each purchase of service credit, give the customer N discovery tokens. Allow purchase of additional tokens with store credit. For example, $10 might get you $10 of store credit and 40 tokens, and spending $5 of that credit might give 20 more tokens.
- Allow customers to subscribe by automatically repeating a specific purchase package on a schedule they determine. Subscribers get bonus rentals and juicier discounts to encourage that option over pay-as-you-go.
- Customers may spend discovery tokens to temporarily license and stream content. One token should probably be roughly equal to one entire feature-length movie, or three hours of a television show. While temporarily licensed, purchase of a permanent license is discounted by $X/N for each token used.
- Allow some content to be streamed without tokens, and auction off a number of permanent licenses by allowing customers to secretly bid for them with their store credit.
- Use purchase/non-purchase and auction bid/price information to fuel the recommendations engine.
The bet here is that customers will never be content to just download their permanent catalog and use your application as a media player. They will always be paying you to discover new content, and paying more for you to recommend better reasons for them to pay you. During the time when someone is in maintenance mode, you are still putting your brand in their face and cultivating goodwill every time they watch. You are also offering a value-add over Netflix in that customers build up a sort of loyalty equity in your servi...
Maybe it’s cheaper, but more importantly it’s simpler and there’s no need to wonder whether something you want to watch has disappeared because of some contractual gyrations.
Thanks to Movies Anywhere I've started just buying movies instead. iTunes regularly has tons of movies on sale for $5-10 and you can almost always get iTunes gift cards for 15% off. And you can stream them from any service since the license transfers.
HBO Now has the shows I care about most.
All in all, I'm watching less stuff now but enjoying what I do watch more.
Frankly, I'm fine with the current situation. I can buy ala carte stuff on iTunes, Amazon, and a few other services. I can subscribe to a few "networks" or whatever you want to call them, that consistently provide good original shows (like Netflix and HBO).
On the rare occasion that a show that I would like to watch is on a service I don't have, I can either, wait a year for it to become available ala carte (like GoT on iTunes, for example), I can watch at a friend's house, or I can just find something else to watch because there's so much good stuff on.
I can't think of any compelling reason to subscribe to either services with ads, or to dozens of streaming services. I won't get to watch everything, but honestly, I don't have time to watch everything. It's still cheaper and way less annoying than cable TV. Even if it weren't cheaper, I'd still do it because it's that much less annoying than cable TV.
I'm pretty much in the same boat. I admittedly don't watch a huge amount of video but a few purchases (physical and digital) and a few streaming services and I'm pretty good. I haven't quite pulled the plug on cable TV yet but I will sooner or later. I certainly get a lot more value out my non-cable TV spending.
There's very little that I just must see and even less that I must see right now. There's frankly far more really good content available than I'm ever going to get around to watching anyway.
Agreed. Although, my only major gripe with the current system is that "buy" !== "own." It means license and vendor lockin.
Other than that, yeah, HBO Now and Amazon are enough for me. I'll wait for everything else. Netflix used to be enough for everything, but they seem determined to become a repository of garbage these days, so services had to be swapped around :(
So let's bring back piracy! Show these content holders who is boss... let's make them feel beholden to us for once! So many "entrepreneurs" think that slapping supply-and-demand on data (something for which there is literally an infinite supply of) is something they can do, let's show them otherwise.
Of course lots of people will be like, "that's stealing" and "if creators don't make money shows don't get made," which is fine, as there is too much garbage for sale anyway. This way we kill two birds with one stone: the culling of shitty media AND greedy creators.
One solution is to use Netflix's DVD service. In my experience it has the largest catalogue of any service and in many instances is the only way to legally view a movie without actually purchasing a copy.
It also switches from a passive "watch what is available" model to an active "watch what you have sought out" model.
In spite of the fact that the DVD service has declined in availability, it still IMO makes a lot of sense to keep a steady stream of content coming into the house that I've deliberately chosen to watch. It's a good way, for example, to watch Oscar winners and other movies I know I want to see when they're available. I have a minimal grandfathered plan and it works for me to have two DVDs a month arrive in my mailbox.
It’s strange how his has happened with video, while the opposite has happened with music. There are a bunch of music streaming services with really similar catalogs. Most people can just subscribe to one and be done. Why has video ended up with such a mess? Or, how did music avoid it?
I'm fine with this arrangement. Between Netflix, HBO & Amazon I have more than enough content to fill my viewing habits. I rarely pirate content because usually there is something good to watch.
Customers were frustrated by highly integrated cable companies who charged for channels they didn't want. Now customers are frustrated by highly module content creators creating their own distribution channels, at the end of the day I do not think there will be a middle ground. Content has become segmented and you'd better pick your providers wisely.
There very easily could be a middle ground. If there was one source to stream data from and have a single login/payment where you selected your content sources and they were added to your single bill, I don't think any consumer would be unhappy. Paying for the content you consume isn't the problem is either paying for extra content you don't use with cable, or keeping track of numerous providers and having to authenticate all of them whenever I get a new device or change cards.
The content creating companies don't want this however as they would lose power in this arrangement and probably make less money. That'll just lead to rampant piracy again. As we've seen with every type of digital good where consuming it legally was difficult/frustratinf
Just another reason to consume less media. I enjoyed netflix, and then everything good left netflix. I enjoyed youtube, and then it started shafting creators. I enjoyed a lot of modern video games, but now they all require you to pay extra money for what used to be standard functionality. Meanwhile TV has never been good, seeing as in America you see a commercial every ten minutes, and the same exact 4 commercials all day.
Sorry creators, I can't support you, your owners are being dicks.
> ... VRV is the only bundle of other streaming-only services that I’m aware of. This is shocking. If consumers are reluctant to have 3 or more streaming services, bundle packages are an obvious alternative.
I'm not sure if the author realizes the irony in pining for a return to the equivalent of cable bundles.
Not to mention that there is nothing shocking about Netflix, Hulu or Amazon having less than zero interest in allowing their services to be bundled. It would undermine their very business model while also devaluing the service in consumers' minds.
It concludes with several disjointed, contradictory conclusions:
> We have seen these streaming services do little to distinguish themselves through technology, payment models or branding. There is a lot more that could be explored in the underlying system of how video is delivered over the internet, and this is an area many smaller services should begin to investigate, while the giants fight it out over who has the next Game of Thrones/Stranger Things hit.
Who cares how innovatively the video gets transmitted if all the shows you want to watch are on a different streaming service? Quite the fool's errand to throw money at tech innovation without great content as a foundation.
> Streaming video over the internet is hard. The underlying technology is complex and fickle, and to do it right is expensive. Perhaps as expensive as buying or creating content.
Spoiler: this is a lead-in to the sales pitch. And also why the current payments models are well-suited to the product: they ensure a higher degree of revenue to pay the high overhead.
> To be sustainable, a streaming service needs several pieces. It needs to handle high loads and deliver high quality streams. It needs great exclusive IP or popular original content. And it also needs to be innovative and to develop a strong brand to stand out in the crowd.
> It’s a big ask, but it is doable.
This statement undermines advocating for smaller services to take on the giants without all these necessary ingredients.
And the pitch (my critique is clearly not of their product or company):
> If you’d like to hear more about Peer5 and the advantages of P2P video streaming, you can reach out to us for a demo!
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The bottom line is this: this is a winner-take-all market that will consolidate down to 2-3 major players. Netflix, Amazon and probably Disney/Hulu (depending on Hulu's fate post DisneyFox merger). I am very doubtful we'll see HBO be able to replicate GoT and it will quickly fall to niche status. There will always be niche players, but we are already well past the point of seeing a challenger to Netflix. And the consolidation is most definitely in the average consumer's best interest to alleviate the very frustration that was the point of the article. Even more odd that the article advocates the creation of more streaming services (bundled or not) while starting with the premise of consumers' frustration over just such issues.
It looks like the movie industry is finally gaining a little sanity with Movies Anywhere (https://moviesanywhere.com/welcome), I really want something similar for TV and the other streaming services.
Does anyone know how the stakeholders managed to come up with Movies Anywhere? _Someone_ managed to get everyone talking. Could such an approach work for TV and VOD as well?
It's based on Disney Movies Anywhere. If you've bought a Disney movie in the last few years that comes with a digital copy, you'll have gotten a code to redeem on DMA. Movies Anywhere seems to be an expansion of that to drop the Disney-exclusive branding and include content from other studios.
The endless amount of content versus the lack of time for it has made me incredibly selective about entertainment. It has to be extremely good, super easy to access and have an insane low price. Streaming services do not qualify... yet.
We need a standard streaming API. I like Netflix's interface, and I would pay for HBO for example, but I want the shows to show using the Netflix interface, not another crappy client.
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[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 64.2 ms ] threadIt worked for radio and it worked for physical video rental (in fact that's the reason netflix's physical rental catalog has almost every movie while their digital catalog has few and keeps shrinking)
And let's not forget who keeps fighting for draconian copyright laws every 20 years -- Disney. I don't think we want Disney to become any larger/more powerful.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/alishagrauso/2017/08/09/disney-...
Commercial radio stations and others can get a blanket license for playing songs, e.g. https://www.ascap.com/music-users/types/radio. Furthermore, if you want to cover a song you can automatically get a license to perform that song. The artist can't typically withhold that right the way a playwright, say, can.
Physical video rental, like the sales of used books, is allowed under first sale doctrine. You can't make copies and sell but, so long as you're lending or selling a physical copy that you bought, you're good.
Basically, it means there doesn't need to be any formal agreement between the broadcaster and the IP owner. If you own a radio station, you can play whatever song you want (provided it doesn't violate things like obscenity rules), and the IP owner can't say boo. The IP owner gets compensation, but they don't get to dictate what radio stations get to play their songs.
I generally agree that the fragmentation is a PITA. It would be nice to have an all-you-can-eat subscription for any content that's available digitally. Of course, then people will complain that their now bundled subscription offering costs $100/month and they can't just consume a la carte.
The analogy to cable bundles isn't perfect but it's similar in some respects. People don't really mind that they have maximum choice. They just want a cheaper price because they don't personally consume all the options on offer.
It's kind of like saying we should have a law to force car manufacturers to sell to any dealership, so Toyota can't have Toyota dealerships versus Ford having Ford dealerships. Maybe there is a hand-wavy argument that it would make car shopping more convenient, but is there an actual market failure that would justify regulatory intervention?
It should be noted that compulsory licensing for music is just an accident of history with no sensible economic foundation: http://digitalcommons.law.wne.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?articl....
I think the possible danger that compulsory licensing would prevent is that companies can use their market power in one area to starve out competition in another. For example, once Disney launches their streaming service, they could easily capture a large portion of the market due to their dominance in content creation
At the same time, there are huge downsides. You take all the negotiating leverage away from the content creators and give it to the distribution middlemen.
But then I ran across a story about how some theatre in Boston had to get into a negotiation with a playwright because he didn't want to give them the rights to perform his play. (Don't know the whole story but it was a smallish theatre company that puts on good but not normally outstanding productions.)
You also see this flare up in politics from time to time generally when a GOP candidate plays a song from a liberal leaning band at events and the band demands that this stop.
I'm also not sure if everyone is part of the royalty umbrella organizations and fall under that regime.
Sell your TV show to all the streaming services instead of one.
In the end for a popular movie it's often a better experience to just pirate it. Netflix churns through movies so frequently that actually finding something that's not sub-Kangaroo Jack in quality takes longer than just torrenting.
Still, they’re giving us few good choices.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Apple_Inc.
EDIT: Does it really need to be stated that the context here is using bittorrent to illegally download copyrighted works, and that the protocol itself is not illegal?
BitTorrent is not only used for illegally downloading copies of copyrighted content, just like encryption is not exclusively used for terrorism.
In this analogy, I dust off my copy of a bittorrent client that I thought I’d retired after HBO wised up. Because HBO Go, Netflix, and iTunes to fill in the gaps is as far as I’m willing to drive.
Not if you live (for example) in Germany. Every time I compare German Netflix to US Netflix I want to cry a little.
(If only they could have seen this coming... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5639076#5639327 oh right. This is pretty obvious stuff.)
Because they don't Netflix to monopolize the market. If that happens, Netflix will capture more than its fair share of the profits.
No real reason to think they won't be. Unit ticket sales have been declining some but overall box office is flat to a bit up.
But we have tons of stores that sell their own ice cream (and coffee, computers, etc.). Should Apple be required, by law, to sell Macs through Best Buy, Target, etc.?
My dad had a company about twenty years ago, that helped solve an important problem in getting cell phone coverage deep into buildings. They achieved this via a little hardware widget.
He'd frequently complain about various business issues, so one day I asked him: why are you guys having all these problems? Why are you leasing these widgets, why are there all these contracts in place? You guys make widgets; why not sell them?
So he explained it - if you make widgets and sell them, once every building has enough widgets, your company is done and you gotta go out and find some new way of making money. But if you're leasing these widgets, on a yearly basis, with a warranty plan, etc., etc., you can actually continue making money.
There hasn't been a "used to be" in forever. People have figured out that selling widgets isn't the best way to have a continuous revenue stream.
I'll make note of that should I ever find myself selling widgets. Should I ever buy said widget, I'm sure I won't need another one until this one breaks. Seems to me one could make money selling widgets that are a little different than the last ones sold, so the customer keeps coming back for more. Starting to see where I'm going with this?
However, Disney isn't selling widgets. Disney is selling a product I've purchased hundreds of times over. I mean, I've seen a movie. I own bits of plastic should I ever care to reuse that product. Yet I keep buying more of them. Just like no one leases me ice cream, either.
But I'm not here to argue. I'm here to say, "should Outcome A come to pass, here's what you can expect from me." Disney can do whatever the hell they please.
The Apple/Samsung model.
> Disney is selling a product I've purchased hundreds of times over.
Disney is extending copyright terms with heavy lobbying and cronyism, and then every few decades opens their "vault" for the new and younger generation of parents to buy the same product. As long as they can keep successfully lobbying for longer copyright this is a sustainable business model because quantity will be limited, and who owns a VHS player any more? Guess you should buy that DVD player after all, and the new DVD copy of Snow White. DVD? What's that?
There should be two choices you make as a consumer, for two separate things:
One, your streaming platform marketplace of choice. Amazon, Hulu, etc.
Two, the specific media you want to watch. You pay for that.
If you want to watch Stranger Things for example, it'll cost around $15, and you can purchase that on Hulu, Amazon, whatever.
Streaming services can get good at streaming, and compete with each other for the best platform.
Media creators can be good at media, and compete with every other media there is.
They don't want to let any company do what Apple did to the music industry. If another company owns the platform with all the customers, then they can dictate prices to everyone else.
Except in VR/internet there is no distance so “driving all over town” is the same as “walking all over the grocery store aisles” is the same as “flipping through galaxies with your fingers.”
And once you live in self driving rooms, for many intents and purpose driving all over town isn’t something you’d even notice happening.
I currently won't buy video content unless I know I will want to watch it again, or unless I have a reasonable expectation that multiple people will enjoy it once. That's because the current price point for most DVDs is too high for me. At $5 for a package with 4 different movies in it, I can take a chance on something out of the bargain bin, but $15-$25 for one movie is not reasonable unless I have already seen at least a portion of it and liked it.
So we have a problem. I won't buy something of unknown quality, and content producers don't want to show me something new unless I pay first. My dollars therefore don't go to them until after one of the following happens: I see it at the $2 second-run theater, I see it on television, I see someone else's licensed copy (incl. Redbox, Netflix, or public library), or I see a pirated copy. Nobody wants to buy a pig in a poke.
(Yes, that's right, the latter means that piracy can result in additional sales.)
Once I have assessed the quality of the work, I can decide how much I am then willing to pay to watch it again, on demand. If that's more than the current price of a disk copy, I might buy it. If not, there's only so long I am willing to wait for the price to drop, before my disposable income is already disposed of, and my available library storage space is filled. I might save it to a gift wish list, but it's more likely I'll simply forget it exists.
And it's not lost sales that kills you in a creative business, and it's not even people hating your stuff, it's people not knowing your work exists. So in my view, the burden is upon the content distributors to get my attention that first time, to signal a level of quality that will make me feel comfortable spending my money.
So here's the model I think will work:
- Establish a basic service for streaming permanently licensed content. For this, charge the marginal cost of hosting and outgoing bandwidth. Allow customers to suspend and reactivate their accounts at will, without hassle. Allow customers to download those titles and their licenses to local storage whenever they want. Make sure your application makes local versus streamed content seamless, so customers won't be tempted to use a different player.
- Allow customers to pay an additional $X to get $X in non-refundable service credit. For each purchase of service credit, give the customer N discovery tokens. Allow purchase of additional tokens with store credit. For example, $10 might get you $10 of store credit and 40 tokens, and spending $5 of that credit might give 20 more tokens.
- Allow customers to subscribe by automatically repeating a specific purchase package on a schedule they determine. Subscribers get bonus rentals and juicier discounts to encourage that option over pay-as-you-go.
- Customers may spend discovery tokens to temporarily license and stream content. One token should probably be roughly equal to one entire feature-length movie, or three hours of a television show. While temporarily licensed, purchase of a permanent license is discounted by $X/N for each token used.
- Allow some content to be streamed without tokens, and auction off a number of permanent licenses by allowing customers to secretly bid for them with their store credit.
- Use purchase/non-purchase and auction bid/price information to fuel the recommendations engine.
The bet here is that customers will never be content to just download their permanent catalog and use your application as a media player. They will always be paying you to discover new content, and paying more for you to recommend better reasons for them to pay you. During the time when someone is in maintenance mode, you are still putting your brand in their face and cultivating goodwill every time they watch. You are also offering a value-add over Netflix in that customers build up a sort of loyalty equity in your servi...
HBO Now has the shows I care about most.
All in all, I'm watching less stuff now but enjoying what I do watch more.
On the rare occasion that a show that I would like to watch is on a service I don't have, I can either, wait a year for it to become available ala carte (like GoT on iTunes, for example), I can watch at a friend's house, or I can just find something else to watch because there's so much good stuff on.
I can't think of any compelling reason to subscribe to either services with ads, or to dozens of streaming services. I won't get to watch everything, but honestly, I don't have time to watch everything. It's still cheaper and way less annoying than cable TV. Even if it weren't cheaper, I'd still do it because it's that much less annoying than cable TV.
There's very little that I just must see and even less that I must see right now. There's frankly far more really good content available than I'm ever going to get around to watching anyway.
Other than that, yeah, HBO Now and Amazon are enough for me. I'll wait for everything else. Netflix used to be enough for everything, but they seem determined to become a repository of garbage these days, so services had to be swapped around :(
Of course lots of people will be like, "that's stealing" and "if creators don't make money shows don't get made," which is fine, as there is too much garbage for sale anyway. This way we kill two birds with one stone: the culling of shitty media AND greedy creators.
It also switches from a passive "watch what is available" model to an active "watch what you have sought out" model.
Customers were frustrated by highly integrated cable companies who charged for channels they didn't want. Now customers are frustrated by highly module content creators creating their own distribution channels, at the end of the day I do not think there will be a middle ground. Content has become segmented and you'd better pick your providers wisely.
The content creating companies don't want this however as they would lose power in this arrangement and probably make less money. That'll just lead to rampant piracy again. As we've seen with every type of digital good where consuming it legally was difficult/frustratinf
Sorry creators, I can't support you, your owners are being dicks.
I'm not sure if the author realizes the irony in pining for a return to the equivalent of cable bundles.
Not to mention that there is nothing shocking about Netflix, Hulu or Amazon having less than zero interest in allowing their services to be bundled. It would undermine their very business model while also devaluing the service in consumers' minds.
It concludes with several disjointed, contradictory conclusions:
> We have seen these streaming services do little to distinguish themselves through technology, payment models or branding. There is a lot more that could be explored in the underlying system of how video is delivered over the internet, and this is an area many smaller services should begin to investigate, while the giants fight it out over who has the next Game of Thrones/Stranger Things hit.
Who cares how innovatively the video gets transmitted if all the shows you want to watch are on a different streaming service? Quite the fool's errand to throw money at tech innovation without great content as a foundation.
> Streaming video over the internet is hard. The underlying technology is complex and fickle, and to do it right is expensive. Perhaps as expensive as buying or creating content.
Spoiler: this is a lead-in to the sales pitch. And also why the current payments models are well-suited to the product: they ensure a higher degree of revenue to pay the high overhead.
> To be sustainable, a streaming service needs several pieces. It needs to handle high loads and deliver high quality streams. It needs great exclusive IP or popular original content. And it also needs to be innovative and to develop a strong brand to stand out in the crowd.
> It’s a big ask, but it is doable.
This statement undermines advocating for smaller services to take on the giants without all these necessary ingredients.
And the pitch (my critique is clearly not of their product or company):
> If you’d like to hear more about Peer5 and the advantages of P2P video streaming, you can reach out to us for a demo!
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The bottom line is this: this is a winner-take-all market that will consolidate down to 2-3 major players. Netflix, Amazon and probably Disney/Hulu (depending on Hulu's fate post DisneyFox merger). I am very doubtful we'll see HBO be able to replicate GoT and it will quickly fall to niche status. There will always be niche players, but we are already well past the point of seeing a challenger to Netflix. And the consolidation is most definitely in the average consumer's best interest to alleviate the very frustration that was the point of the article. Even more odd that the article advocates the creation of more streaming services (bundled or not) while starting with the premise of consumers' frustration over just such issues.
It isn't that complex to build out a CDN. Rent out unmetered server, slap together nginx, gluster, and openresty modules.
Does anyone know how the stakeholders managed to come up with Movies Anywhere? _Someone_ managed to get everyone talking. Could such an approach work for TV and VOD as well?
https://www.theverge.com/2017/10/12/16462824/movies-anywhere...