Yes, if you want what you had before, then streaming isn't going to save you money. However, with the current system, I can pay $50/month for cable and then get whatever else I actually want when I want it. I get YouTube TV but only during the football season. I enjoy and pay for Netflix. I rent movies occasionally on Amazon, which I have Prime for, but I'd be paying for that anyway for package deliveries. If I had a kid at the right age, I'd probably shell out for Disney.
Overall, I pay a lot less than I would for cable and I get 90% of what I'd use anyway. So I pay a medium amount, but use everything I pay for. Compare this with cable where you pay a lot and use very little of what you pay for.
I think cell phones, not streaming, replaced cable, as far as monthly bills. Home Internet replaced the home phone bill, cell phones replaced the cable bill.
I bet lots of households are north of $200/mo between the two, which is probably close to (somewhat higher than—inflation, after all, plus we may just be spending a little more on this stuff) what phone + cable/satellite used to run for the some sorts of households.
A streaming subscription or two's nothing next to those, though tack a couple on top and we are probably paying more, inflation adjusted, for this stuff than we used to. It's cell phones that're really soaking up the dollars, though. We've got about the worst you can get and still have any data (very low data limit) and it's still almost $100 for two lines, and we own both our phones outright so aren't paying the monthly add-on for a phone payment.
> I think cell phones eliminated the home phone line for most people, not the internet.
Right, in functionality, but if you think in terms of a kind of slot for bills, I think home Internet fits close into where the phone bill used to (think back when phone bills were kinda high, especially if you wanted caller ID and voicemail and such, once those came around, or long distance) while cell phones tend to be a little higher and fit roughly where cable/satellite used to, as far as proportion of telecom bill goes.
> Edit: I recommend US mobile or Ting for cheap phone plans. My wife and I pay ~$55 combined monthly on Ting.
Yeah, probably time for us to shop around again. We're on T-Mobile, which was easily the cheapest option from the big carriers at the time we picked it. We like that we still get (much slower) Internet service if we hit our tiny cap, which we can do by accidentally watching youtube for a few minutes with the wifi off. But maybe we should look at re-sellers. Seems crazy that they could be cheaper than going first-party, but I guess maybe they are, somehow.
[EDIT] is that $55 with taxes and fees and such? I remember last time I looked into this, maybe a year ago, what I kept running into was that it looked like I'd save a lot looking at sales' version of the figures, but when it came time to get serious about paying and those things got added in it was no savings, or maybe just single digit $/mo so not really worth a switch.
Looking at my bank account statements, it looks like it was $42 for the last two months, and $52 for the two months before that, so that's after taxes/fees.
It varies based on usage, and we're fairly light on data, so you might see higher numbers. (No cap, but if you use more you get billed more.)
It can be argued very easily that the combination of home internet and cell phones is 2-3x more valuable to any houseold today than cable + phone was decades ago.
people have been paying for cell phones for a while though. We used to pay about 30 a line for just a certain amount of talk minutes, but now we have cricket, and its only 20 a line with 5 gb of 4g. Granted with tmobile I had enough discounts for unlimited data for around 30 a line.
YouTube TV will raise rates to 50$/month in May, this imo is overpriced for what they offer. I have been with the service from the beginning, and was happy with it. Unfortunately I now need to find a replacement.
But they seem to offer pretty much all the major cable TV channels yea? Isn't that going to cost $50/month if you go for a traditional cable company? Why would the price of the content decrease?
I just went through this for my in-laws (their cable bill is pushing $200/mo) and settled on Sling because it seemed to be the only service that offered Motortrend, Golf Channel, and History Channel for any price. Lots of other services had two of those three channels. So they're going from that $200/mo through Charter to a $65 Charter internet-only package, $40 for Sling, and a $40 Roku Express+.
Not having to skim through already-watched or downvoted shows is a gain of time, which is probably valuable if one takes the time to (un)subscribe regularly.
You don't with most of them. I do the same as OP. With most of them (Hulu, Prime, and Netflix) you are just "deactivating" it so they don't charge you. All your watchlists, settings, etc. are still saved, so once you resume the service you still have all that setup. It's really not a hassle at all.
I think this is becoming the new normal. Especially when each provider has one or two massive and expensive "hit" shows. But once enough people do this, they'll just change the structure to something that doesn't really allow it, e.g. $50 for the fist month, $20/mo after that or $200 for the year.
I’ve gone a similar route, partly because I want to own the content and partly because of availability. There are 20/30/40-year-old shows and movies that I enjoy, and few of them are on any streaming service. Those that are often have periods of unavailability due to licensing contracts expiring.
I’m currently operating on an 8 TB archive, of which I have two copies. One is installed in a desktop computer, and the other is in a single drive Synology. I take the Synology when traveling with our RV.
Have you found a good way to streamline bringing content into your archive after purchase? I've tried to start archiving my collection of movies/TV on physical discs, but have never managed to get very far because the whole process of ripping/transcoding Blu-rays is a PITA and takes forever (ignoring the legal issues with Blu-ray and DVD ripping, as well).
Sadly, this is generally faster, better quality and easier. Getting the right encoding settings, audio formats, video codecs etc is a surprisingly complicated dance. I've often downloaded a bluray I bought just because I know the release groups will get the job done better than I can.
Basically what the sibling reply said. Getting a digital copy is way, way easier than trying to get an archive copy from a disc you have, unfortunately.
I have had very good luck using mkmkv. It runs under linux/mac/windows and has a very no fuss interface that generates a un-encrypted but otherwise bit-for-bit accurate copy of dvd/blueray disks. Nominally it costs $50 but a free 'beta' key is posted on the forums once a month that allows it to be used for free indefinitely.
After a marked decrease, piracy appears to be on the rise again [1]. The timing coincides with the peak content availability of Netflix, and then the fragmentation as every studio decided they needed to build their own streaming service.
It's kind of frustrating to see how close things came to actually getting to the ideal (imho, anyway): any show, streamed on demand, on any device, for a reasonable fee. Instead, the studios are going to try to compete on content - which is not really competition. I don't care what studio makes funny_show (either when deciding what to subscribe to, or when trying to figure out what app to launch to watch it), I just want to watch it. I don't want to watch similar_but_not_as_good_knock_off on another service.
What's crazy is the seemingly unstoppable train wreck the industry is currently involved in. It's bad enough to not only see what the music industry was forced into (which is basically ideal for consumers, at least without dismantling the entire way music is produced), but the movie industry already went through this a half century ago, when theaters used to be owned by the studios and only show their own exclusive movies [2].
One big difference between the film and music industries is that film content is much much more expensive to produce. So I don't think we're going to see a comprehensive $10/month service any time soon. Even as cheap as music is to produce now it doesn't seem possible to make a profit with prices that low.
There is only so much content one can watch so it makes the point a bit moot. This is about greed. This is about wanting to squeeze every last penny. There is no reason for regional or even non-standard inter-company licensing apart from trying to squeeze the market dry.
There's definitely more music produced in the world than films. This is due to the fact that music is so much more accessible, cheaper and easier to produce. Just look at the electronic music genre: today it takes one musician, a computer and a few days to weeks to make a professional sounding track. There are of course slightly more expensive genres like indie rock, ethno, then there's classical that require a whole band of musicians and a studio. Still nowhere near what a typical full-feature film production process involves.
The thing with tracks made "in a morning" (and that's exactly what low-effort means) is that most of the time it's a variation of something that worked well once in the past, and you can sell more of the same. There's little innovation in this type of art.
That's not necessarily how composition and creation works after you master your tools. In fact often the faster a song is completed the better it is as it's about capturing the original idea as purely as possible. Did you ever have a dream you wish you could remember? It's a bit like this. The composition and production are fully formed in an instant and it is a race against the shortcomings of the human memory/mind to capture them as quickly as possible.
FWIW I used to produce music, also professionally for a time (including one major label release), and what I described above was always the holy grail that I was chasing. Quality deteriorates the further you get from the initial energy of the spark. Also I don't mean to say the above is the only way to create. The same artist likes to spend months listening to records to get inspiration the perfect sound for each instrument for other projects (which is ironically closer to the derivative works you described).
I've been making music as an amateur for a long time now. I can't claim any of my work is amazing but the tracks I'm the most happy with were all composed pretty quickly in a moment of inspiration.
Piracy is also fueled by availability. As long as licensing agreements prohibit a uniform release schedule for movies and TV series Worldwide people will try to pirate.
If I am not living in the US and want to watch a hulu series I have zero choice but to pirate it or use a shady vpn.
What would you call it then? Otherwise it's just entitlement to something because you can't buy it - "oh look, this movie is not available to purchase in my country, I guess I'm getting it for free!". It's not anyone's god-given right to be able to get every media ever released - if it's not available in your market then either import it, or....don't get it?
If you create a culturally relevant work then prohibit people from legally participating, you probably deserve disparagement and the forfeiture of your rights.
Culture isn't always local to your geographic location, there's people around the world discussing tech culture right here, there's people living abroad but still connected too and part of the local culture. One of the common analogies for China's lack of respect for intellectual property is the US doing the same (copying books) when it was young and poor yet still culturally English.
in an increasingly globalized world, literary media has become culturally relevant anywhere in the world.
In the past, when localized media is the only option, locking out regions from purchases wouldn't have been an issue (since nobody would've known about it).
But now the internet exists, and information being global means that literary media must also be global. To be denied an opportunity to participate in its consumption is to deny the right to participate in cultural exchange and communication. I think that's wrong, and therefore, this justifies piracy for those individuals who would otherwise be denied due to cost/availablity reasons.
This is such an English-speaking-centric view it's incredible. There are great works of art - movies, books, music, games that exist outside of the anglosphere, they never appear outside of their respective countries and are never translated, yet I don't see people complaining that the lack of their translations is " is to deny the right to participate in cultural exchange and communication". You just....can't consume them. It's not the end of the world, no one is being done some great injustice, that creative work is just not available to you right now. How is that different? Perhaps only in that it's much better? If I want to watch a Russian TV show and there is no translation, either I have to wait for the translation or....learn Russian. If I can't legally buy Game of Thrones in my country I can always pay for a copy in a country where it is available and have it sent to me. It's not as convenient, but it is possible. To say that there is some harm being done by not making it available and the only solution is piracy sounds like self justification.
> [art] outside of the anglosphere... never appear outside of their respective countries and are never translated, yet I don't see people complaining
i m sure the complaints exist. I m also sure that english works is more popular than non-english works (due to english simply being the international language). My view isn't anglo-centric at all - you can make the same argument about anime.
I watch anime on crunchyroll, but i used to use torrents. The illegal method is the only option as a high-schooler who cannot afford the prices required to get a DVD set. I m glad that crunchyroll has worked to a legal means for this media.
The argument here is that streaming companies (esp. disney) is attempting to restrict their works, which has significant cultural impact, by making _their_ streaming service the only way to consume this work. This mechanism makes the price of the media higher, and people would need to pay multiple services to get the full coverage of all media they need to consume.
How is it anglocentric? To me it seems the opposite.
This is be being unable to buy the show in Russian, in the united states. Region locking doesn't just prohibit US content from being played elsewhere, it prevents Americans from seeing a lot of amazing things produced around the world just as readily.
Remember that anime exists as a concept in the West because of stubborn pirates in the 1970s who pirated it when the Japanese themselves didn't even consider publishing it outside of Japan. You don't hear complaints, because people just take what they want anyway and then subtitle it and make it available for a bigger audience.
It used to be quite common for people to learn Russian (or German earlier) for the purpose of accessing content (mostly scientific works) that they otherwise wouldn't have access to. There is also a huge community of people that translate pirated foreign works into English which wouldn't otherwise be available to a US audience. Hell, in my past I pirated a significant number of foreign works and their translations but they are much more readily available these days in the States so I don't have to.
There is a big difference between failing to facilitate (not making a translation) and actively preventing participation. Your import example to avoid piracy is not a great example because they DRM and or geolock those physical copies as well to prevent exactly what your solution is. The only legal recourse to access that media would be to travel to the country of origin and consume it "on site."
I agree with you, but I can't help but think of the case of the Wu Tang album they sold to Martin Shkreli. Part of the terms of sale was that it couldn't be copied. I do believe a company shouldn't be able to hold a piece of culture hostage. I also believe in a creator's right to decide how their work is consumed. I'm not sure how to reconcile these two things.
> It's not anyone's god-given right to be able to get every media ever released
People used to say exactly that about music, and then Spotify came around - along with multiple DRM-free download stores. Now these things are very much seen as "God-given rights" by many.
Yes, video is especially complicated because of how costly it is to create in the first place - this is why the closest thing to a plausible solution is going to come in the form of disruption from below. Some sort of "Netflix 2.0", focusing on a somewhat more heavily-curated experience than YT does today, and skimping on challenging technical details - maybe not even providing full-HD content of any sort! Vimeo could easily enter that space.
> It's not anyone's god-given right to be able to get every media ever released
It's also not media producers god given right to gouge customers and have the government enforce a monopoly on their products, or to even exist. Ideally we can reach a compromise that suits everyone, but at the moment it's media companies that are over reaching, they'll even happily gimp their own products so that pirated versions are better.
> if it's not available in your market then either import it,
You're saying this is the moral and legal option, but the copyright holders lobbied hard to make this illegal. That's why there are no stores in my country offering imported DVDs for sale. It's illegal to import these if you're a business. I have to go to a foreign company and import the disc strictly for personal use.
So, I get a DVD / BluRay from a different region. How do I play this? The shop where I bought the player is forbidden, by law, from telling me how to convert my player into a multi-region player.
People aren't saying "I want this for free". They're saying "allow me to pay for it". They're also saying "the easier it is to pay for something the more people will pay for it".
The whole point of copyright (originally) was to encourage content holders to make the content available to the public by providing protection if they did so.
If the content holder is not making their content available in a reasonable way, they should have no such protections.
I find it difficult to accept a copyright claim on commercial content never sold in a country. In my views, if you cared about getting paid for the content, then you would have sold it legally in that country. IMHO, refusing to distribute content is essentially forfeiting any commercial claims to its distribution.
Game of Thrones is notable due to the use of VPN-blocking, and credit card blocking.
There are people who pay for HBOgo, do so through some forwarder which makes their credit card appear to come from a US bank, and then have to find a VPN service to actually watch it with.
Multiple steps in this transaction - completely unncessarily due to the nature of the underlying technologies - cost the consumer money, to circumvent protections implemented by HBO (or more likely whatever BS contract their parent company signed), for the express purpose of preventing the consumer paying HBO to lawfully watch their content.
So, something is sold exclusively in Target, but isn't sold in, say, Best Buy. You only have a best buy near you, therefore you're... justified in stating they have no commercial claims to the content they own and chose to distribute through Target? I'm not sure I follow your argument.
>It's not anyone's god-given right to be able to get every media ever released
Or maybe it is? Different people have different views on what counts as rights and I've yet to hear of a case of God clarifying which group of people is right. Some people believe it is their God given right to keep others from modifying their own equipment in certain patterns by sharing information. Others disagree.
Consider libraries. If I built a file sharing system that allowed only one person to watch the movie at a time, but allowed as many people as wanted to watch it if they were willing to wait their turn, how is this any different than what a library does? Yet that would also be considered a form of piracy. Is running a library not a God given right.
I did plan for it, I just didn't call out that the original copy of the movie was purchased because I didn't think that would be the defining factor on if my plan was acceptable or not. So as long as I pay for the original copy and only allow one person to view it at a time, my plan is acceptable?
It's a real stretch to equate civil disobedience over equal rights with access to mere entertainment content. No one really needs to watch Game of Thrones or whatever.
I think people, in general, don't care too much about whether something is legal or not when it comes to deciding whether it's actually moral or not. Things are moral or immoral whether they're legal or not.
If some corporation isn't selling the rights to view a file in your country, and it's a pain to get them the 'legal way', I think a lot of people would look at the situation and think-
"well, nobody's going to prosecute me for this. Even if I think piracy is immoral in general, this entity has made it a pain for me to get their product without pirating- they obviously aren't counting on my money. They've waived their moral right to complain about me not paying to look at their tv show- and in the lack of enforcement of the law, that moral right is all that matters to me. I'll just pirate it. If they don't want my money, they won't get it."
The piracy part is that despite it not being available, you still feel entitled to it and go around the availability to get it.
I mean piracy is not that big a crime especially if there's no legal alternative (and the legal / convenient alternatives to piracy have been the biggest deterrent), but if you replace "media" with idk, "consumer electronics" it becomes a different matter. I know, physical goods vs virtual ones is a big difference, but is it, from a legal standpoint?
It's the subtext for a lot of the justifications in this thread, tho.
[Thing] isn't for sale in their area, they want [thing], therefore they're justified in stealing [thing] rather than just not having it.
Is entitlement not involved in that reasoning? What is the motivation for illegally obtaining something if not feeling that you deserve to have it? The owners of the content and the distributors are wrong?
So, to be clear, because it isn't available in your location, morally you aren't stealing, because you couldn't buy it easily, and you have an inherent right to consume the content?
If it's not available in my location, and I'm willing to pay money for it, and will pay money if it is made available in my location at some future date, then the rights holders can't be too sniffy about my attempts to consume the content even if that includes unauthorised downloading.
I'm not discussing morality. I'm just stating the fact that you can't deprive someone of profit by consuming content you can't otherwise purchase. You could theoretically indirectly affect sales though if your internet buzz is capable of moving the scale in whatever market the content is available.
I think not being able to purchase it should resolve moral/ethical issues.
But a lot of pirates like to complain they cannot purchase it according to their specific demands.
People used to complain that they had to buy cable to watch game of thrones. They wanted a solo steaming service. Go look at old reddit posts, pirates would proclaim that they would subscribe to that instead of pirate.
HBO made exactly that. And now the complaint is that it costs too much. Or they don’t want to pay for Barry or Veep episodes they don’t want. But they’ll stop pirating if they could just buy GoT!
I think the vast majority of piracy is just because they can get it for free.
Additionally, if the content is just not available in your country yet, then at best, you would be morally/ethically justified in pirating now and then paying later when it’s allowed.
Agree. One series I've enjoyed, "You're the Worst", is not even legally available in the UK in any medium as far as I can find other than S1 and S2 - Both shown on one UK TV channel and available on DVD, the rest, forget it, out of luck, hence torrent.
Then, under the system we have today, you still don’t have a right to view it. Whether that’s right or wrong, it’s disingenuous to say there’s no option other than going through unlicensed channels.
You obviously don't have a right to view it, that's correct.
But publishers, studios, whatever you want to call them, don't get tired to tell us that users are not willing to pay for the content etc., but that's simply not true.
Most often it's about the hurdles to access the content. Be it scattering over half a dozen platforms, restricted access to specific markets or whatever.
They are the ones creating the problems that people find (more or less legal) solutions for.
Of course. But people's respect for customs and laws isn't infinite. They'll put some effort in, but they're less likely to if it's less convenient and doesn't really seem like a matter of great moral weight.
I don't steal playstations out of shops, regardless of how fun it could be, because it's illegal and I'm likely to be punished for it, and because I have some moral qualms about it.
Piracy? You're not going to be punished for it, and it's qualitatively different from taking a thing away from someone. With no enforcement, all that stops people from pirating all the time is the comparative inconvenience and moral qualms.
When the entity involved is some big, faceless company, and it's a lot more convenient to pirate than buy (even disregarding the money you'd have to spend to buy!)- you could imagine not having any more moral qualms about piracy.
> There isn't a natural right to consume content produced by companies who seem hell bent on making it difficult to access that content.
There's also no natural right for them to prohibit me from consuming, or to gouge me, or to push for horrible legislation with their unfair amount of influence.
And if it is a popular series that the rest of those around you are pirating, there is a significant cost to not watching it, at least compared to the cost of pirating it.
The cost of not being able to participate in pop culture is magnitudes higher than the cost of piracy in a country where the original isn't even sold. Relative measurements matters when measuring two choices, even if both are small in effect to the cost of something unrelated.
Yes, but FOMO [1] is a common thing. Let's use Game of Thrones as an example. If you are a fan of the series, you keep up on all the latest discussion. Right now Reddit is chatting about S8E3, which aired 12 hours ago.
If someone is forced to wait another week, or in the case of films, another few months, the movie could very well be spoiled by reading some online discussion. Fan-based communities move very fast. While they do try to censor spoilers immediately after a new release, the censoring dwindles down rather quickly.
By the time a new film is available in your region, you may have already stumbled across some very severe spoilers which would inhibit your experience.
The better solution, IMO, is to make content available globally at the same time - eliminate regional distribution for online content.
In other words: HBO is leaving potential income behind by not having their service available worldwide. Netflix, in contrast, did a really aggressive expansion worldwide a while ago, making their service available all over the world. They're still expanding, while also producing their own content - which they don't need to have expensive licensing fees for when they want to publish it internationally. They only need to deal with local laws.
But the cost of not doing so, especially when others aren't waiting, is being considered a moral busy body and missing out on the culture it creates. Compare that to the cost of piracy, which for most people is exceedingly close to nil.
We could ask people to behave per our moral expectations just because they should, but generally you'll find most people who make such a request themselves disregard morals when the cost benefit analysis approaches a similar analysis.
> But the cost of not doing so, especially when others aren't waiting, is being considered a moral busy body and missing out on the culture it creates.
A similar thing is happening in PC gaming. Tons of new stores making exclusivity deals to try to take from Steam which I don't think has ever had an exclusive title.
It's quickly ruining PC gaming for me. Thanks DRM.
Yeah, I just no longer play EA games, even when I receive free keys, because it would require that I download Origin. And it seems like Ubi is starting to try to do the same thing.
Same here. I can play South Park: Stick of Truth on Steam, but to play South Park: Fractured But Whole, it has to be on Uplay. I wasn't going to buy it because of that, but then I got it as a gift anyway. I could handle Steam and GOG Galaxy as game aggregation programs, and sometimes check out Humble for bargain bin stuff, but after being forced to install Uplay to access the content, it would appear that three stores is my limit. Uplay, Origin, et al, with their platform-exclusive titles, can all suck it. If I need a library to manage my games libraries, I might as well put all the games in the top-level library in the first place.
They are removing themselves from even the possibility that I might think about buying. I just don't shop there. If I can't find something that interests me on Steam, GOG, or Humble, I stop looking. And I also didn't really appreciate the constant upsell for SP:FBW DRM, and other Ubisoft titles, while I was still playing. They pulled out from Steam to not pay the "Steam tax", but they didn't lower their prices to compensate; they just made the "Steam tax" into the "Ubi tax". If consumers still have to pay it no matter where they go, they don't really have any incentive to shop at a different store.
> Steam which I don't think has ever had an exclusive title
Aren't all of Valve's titles exclusive to Steam? I remember being annoyed that I had to install steam for some version of Counter Strike in the early 00s, and didn't think the situation had changed.
There are definitely steam exclusive titles. Just like how people get upset now when they buy a physical copy of a game and it's just a license to download from the eshop, Steam did this first. I have a bunch of physical pc games that just include the steam installer.
To boil it down: Valve doesn't pay anybody to make their content available exclusively on Steam and doesn't advertise "exclusives". People did that for free.
IMHO, exclusives are obnoxious and I'm glad Steam doesn't do that. The physical retail market is full of crap like that, or pre-order bonuses that are tied to particular retailers. All of that garbage is a cancer on the gaming market.
As crappy as many of the proprietary storefronts are, I don't think that a Steam monoculture, with Valve taking a 30 percent cut off the sale price of every PC game sold in the known universe was exactly healthy.
A mono-culture is not good, but most alternatives aren't competition to steam but monopolies on their own content, their own little fiefdoms.
This is the same problem with video streaming, we don't have competition on who can create the best UI, the highest bitrate, the best recommendation algorithm, just multiple monopolies.
I think that Steam monoculture was quite healthy. Probably a bit stagnant, but definitively not as bad as it could have been. Valve had/has considerable power but didn't go evil. I'll give them a lot of respect for that.
Epic on the other hand scares me. They spend heavily on exclusives and will have to make that money back. I doubt this will be possible on just their share in a highly competitive market. Thus I doubt their long term plan coming to fruition will be in us cumstomers best interest.
> I think that Steam monoculture was quite healthy.
It wasn't healthy if you were a developer, and were forking over a monopolistic 'PC game tax' to Valve.
Or if you cared about discovery.
Or if you cared about curation (Steam is full of crap!), or approval of games (Steam won't approve my game!). (These are two extremes of the same problem, and many people have issue with Steam's handling of it - they either want it to be stricter, or less strict.)
Mind you, it's entirely possible that you were perfectly content with all of Steam's positions on this (As well as how capriciously they changed, year, over year... But if you claim that, you stretch my credulity.) However, if you were not 100% satisfied with the state of that storefront, its searchability, discoverability, recommendation engine, curation policies, and refund policies, then it would have been in your best interests, as a consumer, to have multiple competing storefronts.
GoG gave Steam a kick in the ass about a number of its consumer-unfriendly policies. Epic is giving Steam a kick in the ass about its market-gouging 30% tax. The Satan-spawn of Origin, UPlay, GFWL are giving Steam an example of how not to run a storefront. I don't even know what Twitch and Discord are doing.
> It wasn't healthy if you were a developer, and were forking over a monopolistic 'PC game tax' to Valve.
You can sell directly though your own channel and give steam keys. Afaik without paying the 30% steam tax. Those keys don't count for stuff like reviews, to prevent abuse. But this seems like a reasonable trade-off for all parties involved. I'm happy to use the launcher of my choice, dev is happy to avoid the tax, steam is happy to make more likely to use their storefront.
I mostly agree with you and would welcome competition. But I don't see benefits for me if stores compete based on their library of exclusive titles.
While I agree that all these PC storefronts are a complete PITA, none of them charge a subscription fee like these streaming TV services do. The added cost is in terms CPU, RAM and convenience.
The multitude of stores is proving very difficult for independent developers that would ideally release on every store, because each one comes with different APIs, DRM and community features that require bespoke integrations in both the game and game server (if you have one). The documentation for this stuff is rarely great due in part to the secrecy surrounding the industry, and the speed at which publishers are knocking their own stores together.
With some caveats today: You get them later than those with the subscriptions. Sometimes up to a week later.
I'd also point out that on the Nintendo Switch subscription program, there are a number of games (such as Tetris 99) that you can't buy or play without being a subscriber.
And so, I'd argue that the change is underway, today.
These subscription services are a great way to try out games without paying full price. I spent 10 bucks on EA access to try out Anthem and it saved me 50 bucks in the end since it wasn't worth buying.
But, afaik, there's no store with a subscription fee or a regional lock. So yeah, it's annoying to install multiple stores, but it's possible, and it's not a cost.
Depends on what you mean by Steam exclusive. Most of the AAA games released in the last 10 years or so uses Steamworks. Steamworks is a Valve provided library that offers support for achievements in the Steam client, DRM, multiplayer etc. It also means that if you have a Steamworks game, you have to activate and play it through Steam client, even if you buy it in a different store. So technically, it's not an exclusive, because you can buy games in different stores. But even if you buy your game in a box, most of the time what you get inside is a Steam key and instructions on how to download and activate the game.
"Most of the AAA games"? There's quite a few AAA games that, if bought / launched from Steam, will open up their own Steam-like application (notably, Ubisoft games).
>Depends on what you mean by Steam exclusive. [...] So technically, it's not an exclusive, because you can buy games in different stores.
Sounds like an exclusive to me. You could buy Days Gone (a "ps4 exclusive") from walmart and gamestop (so there's competition at the retail level), but you're still locked to the PS4 platform. It's slightly different for PC because you could conceivably get the cracked version without steam and that steam is free, but arguing it's not an exclusive because you can buy at multiple retailers is a weak argument.
I haven't bought a new PC game in at least 5 years. I rarely play console games anymore either.
As a kid I was addicted to video games and dreamed of working in the industry (that dream is what got me started programming at 8). Now, at 39, I've lost all interest.
Interesting that you mention music. I just imagined how bad music would be if every label would have their own platform. Imagine you wanna listen to Artist X and have to subscribe to Warner Brothers, now you wanna listen to Artist Y and now you subscribe to Indie Label Z.
I'm interested to see what brings in the most money for studios, getting little money from their own platform (and "suffering" the piracy) or getting paid by netflix.
Even worse would be that very few artists stay on the same label throughout their career. Take Motörhead for instance. I think they had like 10 or 12 labels over their 40 year career.
Seems like the movie and TV industry learned a lesson or two from the music industry. I just have the feeling they drew the wrong conclusions from them.
The current situation in the music industry is not "ideal for consumers".
While Spotify, Apple Music, Tidal et. al. generally all do have the majority of music available, there is still a huge mess of license behind the scenes.
Albums are constantly made unavailable for weeks or even months due to licensing issues. Sometimes a badly done remaster is the only version available, sometimes important albums in an artist's discography are completely absent.
And don't get me started on the sorry state of their curation and tagging. The release date shown for any album is basically useless. Is it the original release date? A re-release? Or just the date the record company supplied it to the streaming service? It completely messes up discographies.
We can agree that it's better than the old days of only having physical releases, but ideally all music should be available DRM-free in any format you choose, for you to download and keep.
Piracy forced the record companies to finally get in on streaming and downloads. Now it's time for the dinosaurs to finally die, the only reason they still exist is because of nonsense copyright laws, where they hold the rights in perpetuity to the "classics".
Exactly. The content is going to get pirated within hours of release, so I'm not sure why they even bother.
Instead they encumber the content with drm locking me I to their platform that hopefully stays around. I actively avoid anything but subscription or short term rental options for exactly this reason.
Far from it, since it's filmed with portable cameras and pirated anyway. No amount of scare tactics is stopping that. They should be selling it right away digitally in high quality and DRM-free.
While I tend to agree about owning, it's easy to say coming from a place where I entered the streaming media age with a large library of ripped/bought digitally/otherwise downloaded music that covered a lot of the music I liked listening to on a day to day basis.
It's harder for me to make the case that someone growing up today should spend on accumulating a large digital library. Of course, it's a lot easier for people to make a copy of a digital library than it was to tape albums in the old days. But if everyone is pretty much streaming, that option largely goes away.
Exactly this. As access fades, or price becomes untenable, piracy swoops in to correct the market. Unfortunate that we have to go through these tests, but hopefully it comes out better on the other side.
> After a marked decrease, piracy appears to be on the rise again [1].
Not really. It fits some people's narrative for that to be the case, but the evidence it's actually happening is very sketchy.
Sandvine's report shows no real increase in the US - the increase was primarily internationally. And Netflix never had this sort of "peak content availability" overseas, and there isn't a marked increase in content fragmentation this year either.
The likely explanation is simply that bittorrent's fall was primarily because pirates were using Kodi plug-ins instead, and the explosive rise there has been chopped off by enforcement actions by the studios and governments. So some of those people have switched back to bittorrent. But that doesn't show piracy overall as increasing.
I am overseas (in Spain) and we definitely felt this "peak content availability" thing, maybe not as marked as in the US but it was there. A few years ago, most of the content one would want to watch was on Netflix. There was no HBO, some prominent HBO series like Game of Thrones were on standard TV. So most people just subscribed to Netflix, and watched GoT on regular TV with ads or pirated it if they wanted to watch it earlier or get rid of the ads.
Now with content split between Netflix, HBO and Amazon, and threats of other players like Disney incoming, my anecdotal observation is that plenty of people is going back to piracy. Conversations like this one (about the fragmentation of the market and exclusives incentivizing piracy) are common here too. At my home, we don't pirate but what we do is switching subscriptions from one service to the other every few months, which is unnecessarily annoying.
>At my home, we don't pirate but what we do is switching subscriptions from one service to the other every few months, which is unnecessarily annoying.
Which is probably closer to the norm. I rarely use torrents, not out of any great moral imperative, but because it's a pain, involves sketchy web sites, etc.
However, the fragmentation of video streaming is also annoying even though it's what lots of people supposedly wanted when they complained about the cable bundle. And, yes, the response will mostly be make do with a few services and either do without or buy a la carte for the rest or actively manage your current subscriptions. (Of course, a typical cable bill will pay for a lot of different services for cord cutters.)
> Which is probably closer to the norm. I rarely use torrents, not out of any great moral imperative, but because it's a pain, involves sketchy web sites, etc.
A lot of that difficulty is an up front cost. Once people get annoyed with streaming options enough to start pirating, getting them to switch back to paid options is going to be even harder.
This was the inevitable outcome of trying to move to a pick and choose your channel model. Instead of 1000 channels for $80/month you get 10. Folks are moving back to piracy again just because they don't want to pay the prices it costs to subscribe to 6 services @ $8-15/month is all.
No. The problem isn’t $60/month. The problem is having to subscribe to 6 services. Half of which are either US or Europe exclusive. Now I need a VPN...
Torrent it is.
Really, I have the money, but I want to watch my movie now without jumping through any hoops.
> the fragmentation as every studio decided they needed to build their own streaming service.
Don't forget to mention how awful many of them are in terms of quality, usability and choice. 4OD here in the UK leads with multiple minutes of HD ads, and when it switched to the actual content, the player regularly crashes, forcing you to reload and watch the ads. They also only release content for 30-ish days after airing, and then it disappears until the content appears on DVD.
Now TV (the only afaik supported way to access Game of Thrones in the UK other than subscribing for 18 months) caps their streams at 720p and doesn't support an Android TV app.
There's also the hell of discovering where and when things are available. I don't know where watch Brooklyn 99 in the UK and in willing to pay for it - as I understand it it's available on Netflix US but the latest episodes aren't on Netflix UK.
No, E4 aired episode 5 last week, which aired almost 3 months ago in the US (and the fact that both of us could be confused about that is another problem)
There's also the question of discovering where I go to find it; Netflix advertises Brooklyn but doesn't show the latest season. Amazon is the first legitimays option that appears (after gomoviestube and i0123movies) - turns out that it's amazonUS not Uk, followed by NBC. If you search for Brooklyn 99Season 6 UK get a bunch of SEO crap talking about air dates, most of which mention Netflix. I can make the same argument for basically every show.
There seems to be an assumption that everyone is going to want to subscribe to everything they had before, but that's not the case.
Netflix / Hulu for $15.99 is going to cover most use cases and act as a general purpose aggregator.
Disney+ is primarily a way of getting parents / kids more invested in the Disney universe, but won't be for everyone.
The new Apple service may appeal to some people, but definitely bold to suggest that it's in any way going to be a strong Netflix competitor.
YouTube Premium - great if you watch a lot of YouTube, and potentially a music use case there too.
ESPN etc - probably better served by traditional cable. MLB is great value if you're a baseball but living out of market.
The assumption behind cord cutting wasn't that people would replace it with a OTA package that replaced like for like what they had before, it's that they would subscribe to a few services rather than subscribe to an expensive cable service and use 2% of it.
I think the majority of people who have Youtube Premium have it because it comes with Google play music.
My dad is one of those original cordcutters. His main concern is sports which he either pays for or borrows someone else's Comcast login. He has Amazon prime but has never figured out Amazon Prime video.
Beyond that Netflix and OTA. His question for most people would be, "How much TV do you really need to watch?"
I think the issue isn't so much about quantity of television, but if being able to participate in the social zeitgeist that motivates people. Almost everyone has social groups at work or elsewhere that discuss sports, GoT, whatever reality TV show. By you still can't purchase just the 3-4 things everyone is talking about right now, so you wind up with Netflix, Hulu, GoT, maybe CBS all access, etc.
Music may have very well dismantled itself for the future though; the actual IP of your music has become incredibly low in value. Tours and other forms of merch are the revenue generators. There used to be song writers that could sell songs to pop artists to perform and record; that generates much less now. I think the middle ground of interesting bands that aren’t superstars or one hit wonders will sort of dry up.
The TV and movie industry have decided that their IP is more valuable than it was in the past. The technology has changed such that they can distribute it on their own and don’t need carriers. It kind of looks like we might be heading for a pay per play model, ultimately. It will be very interesting with Disney+, it will be brave if they really do everything at $7 a month, I suspect that they will want premium tiers though, they have been so protective of their “vault” and now they have Starwars, the marvel universe, Pixar, the simpsons, etc...
>I don't care what studio makes funny_show (either when deciding what to subscribe to, or when trying to figure out what app to launch to watch it), I just want to watch it.
There's a joke that this is exactly what cable TV was.
Back then: "This is ridiculous! I'm paying for all these channels when I only watch two or three of them. I should be able to pay for just the ones I use."
Now: "This is ridiculous! Every time I find something I want to watch, I have to subscribe to a new service!"
The problem being you still can't just subscribe to one show (or just buy it outright). You're still buying bundled deals, they've just fragmented so it's even worse.
People seem to hate bundles. And they love a huge catalog for one price like Netflix used to have. I think most people would hate paying per show.
And I don’t think the pricing per show would be much of a discount. I’d imagine the median number of shows HBO viewer actively watches is 1-3. And the cost of giving you access to shows you don’t Watch is actually less than nothing since it would take resources to lock you out of it.
People do pay for a la carte content. With a few exceptions, it's how people buy books. And a lot of films are paid for a la carte in some form or other. But the expectation is certainly shifting towards subscription streaming services and there's probably a difference between renting a new film release and paying to watch some random TV show to relax after work.
Now: "This is ridiculous! I'm paying 10 bucks a month to Hulu for thousands of shows, movies and kids content so I can watch Handmaid's Tale with commercials."
The situations aren't quite comparable. But yeah. I imagine if there were an "all content" streaming channel for $100-$200/month, a lot of people would think that was outrageous pricing because they want to watch so little of that content.
Personally, I'd probably be happier watching a lot of content with a la carte pricing but TV shows in particular seem to be at something of a premium with that model. (Assuming they're available.)
> The situations aren't quite comparable. But yeah. I imagine if there were an "all content" streaming channel for $100-$200/month, a lot of people would think that was outrageous pricing because they want to watch so little of that content.
There are always outliers, but very few people would watch $100-200 "worth" of content. Netflix is basically a walled off Spotify, where your $10-15 goes to whatever shows you watch because the rest get cancelled if they can't sustain a critical number of subscribers.
But I want more than just the Netflix-content, but let's say I can only reasonably watch $30-50 "worth" of content each month, so give me access to everything and allocate my subscription accordlingly, sort of like Spotify.
You paid for a lot more than content then. Unless Netflix is burning someone elses money I'm assuming they're getting by on their subscriptions. They also have a much larger user base than specific cable/sat companies, so they win on scale.
I'm not saying people can't pay more, I'm saying they don't have enough time in the day for the amount of content that could be produced by that amount of money.
It didn't though and prices were still substantial--especially for those who got premium channels.
My basic point is that people (understandably) would like a less fragmented streaming video market. But they mostly also want something that's significantly cheaper than an all-in monthly cable or satellite subscription was 10 years or whenever ago.
We did mostly get to reasonably priced and reasonably comprehensive streaming music--although apparently at the cost of not supporting most artists very well.
Hilarious how the op and others have come full circle. I think what people want is something more akin to cable 2.0. Better interfaces and browsing but consolidation of all content so avoid this fragmentation we are moving closer and closer to.
Doensn't that already exist? Sling and DirecTV Now are basically just cable-lite services that you stream. I actually like these better than Netflix or Hulu.
Why can't we have both? I loved the idea behind Sling TV, which let you buy buckets of channels. I wanted that, but more granular. Ideally, I'll have a single platform that I like, and I can subscribe to producers, individual series, or something in between (curated buckets of series?).
For example, I like Netflix because the interface is pretty good and I've never had a problem with buffering or lost connection. I want to be able to pay a little extra to get access to, say, Disney or HBO content, and perhaps buy access to some other series. I hate jumping between streaming platforms, so I've gotten to the point where I just don't watch things if they're not available.
I pay for two platforms, and that's about all I'm willing to do. I just can't watch some things I know I'll like because I don't want to have to remember which platform has which series. However, buying individual series/movies also too expensive IMO. My budget for video entertainment is $20-30/month, and I watch maybe 1-2 hours/day (mostly my kids, but we have movie night twice a week); that's about the cost of two unlimited services, 4-6 movie rentals, or 1 season of a series. I could consider spending up to $50 or so if it was good value (e.g. don't have to jump between services), but that's not a thing, so we get 2 subscriptions for the family and spend the rest of my time and money on immersive video games, which ends up being far cheaper per hour of entertainment.
The movie/TV industry is just ridiculous, and I'm getting tired of it. I'm not surprised that piracy is getting more common. I can afford to spend more, but I choose not to, and I completely understand the mindset of pirates; if I wanted access to more content, it would be less work to pirate than work more to be able to afford more content.
IMO, the real problem is that they're all services - cable, Hulu, Netflix, it doesn't matter. The dream was being able to pay for only what you watch, but that's not really an option in many cases. You're still being forced to pay for content you don't want to watch.
This bundling of extra content was tolerable at the Netflix price point - when you were paying < 10% of cable - but it's back to being intolerable now that it's comperable to cable prices once more.
I'm willing to pay 1 Euro per episode, but I don't want to care about which service streams what. Just a big container of every present and past show or movie, on demand and pay per view.
The current model is not interesting. I don't want to pay a monthly fee for something maybe I don't have time or the will to watch that month. Obviously those services are doing well with the customer that fit into their sales model.
I wonder if somebody would build a meta service and pay fees to the sub services (Netflix, Amazon, etc.) They probably don't want to be commoditized.
What if a new model appears, in which you get the first few episodes free, and then pay €4 per episode thereafter? I ask because many shows will need to charge something like this in order to survive low ratings.
That's sort of two ways to frame the same objection: I don't want to pay for all the extra shit I don't care about, whether that means a bunch of channels or a bunch of garbage programming across a half dozen platforms.
I don't think that's the objection: it's that there's a certain pain/annoyance with having to judge whether the new content will actually be worth the $X extra you'll pay, but it's in direct (economic) conflict with "I just want to pay a flat fee and not think about each little thing".
I have many lights, gadgets, and appliances in my home. But I only have one power meter. Which I flip a switch or push a button, different things can happen, but the meter just counts the watts, and at the end of the month, I pay one bill. That's convenience. Everything I own takes 120V 60Hz AC power, and I pay one monthly bill to run all of it.
The convenience problem with the fragmented streaming services is that everyone wants to run their own wire to my house and put their own meter on it. They need to agree to use the same wire, adhere to a common protocol, and allow resellers to act as their meter reader and bill collector.
That didn't work with cable companies because of locally-granted monopolies that prevented the signal reseller from experiencing competitive pressures, but if everyone can choose between DirecTV Now, YouTube TV, Roku, Sling, Netflix, or even RQ Hacker's Streaming TV Reselling Service, then the consumer is still in control. Partially.
Cable could force you to get 100 channels when you only wanted 5 of them. There was no one else around to sell a package with fewer channels, or even to go full a la carte. But even then, content owners could still strongarm content distributors by selling their channels to the cable companies and satellite distributors as one package. Now it's just the same thing all over again, with the consumer cutting out the middleman, and finding out that it was the supplier that was screwing us from the source all along.
The copyright holders name their price, and those who want to watch have to pay it.
What we really need is for someone to undercut Disney by ripping off their format. Bowdlerize the folktales and fables by taking out all the viciousness and cruelty, create a few trademarkable characters out of them, write a few catchy original pop songs, and stitch together into 90 minutes of family-friendly video entertainment. Throw public domain in one end, turn the crank, and get intellectual property sausages out the other. It would probably only take a few billion dollars to make an impact.
Or... maybe take a hammer to the copyright law that Disney bought, and blow the dust off the anti-trust laws. Maybe draft a new law such that no content owner can sell a bundled package of works unless they already distribute each component individually, and it must be priced such that the price of the bundle must be within a certain percentage, plus a constant, of the sum of its components, purchased/licensed individually. The ultimate source of the fragmentation problem is the copyright laws. It will never go away until they are reformed. So I'm not surprised that the fragmentation is apparently promoting piracy.
We're never going to get this sort of federation without legally requiring of companies; the large content creators would hold out.
Seems like a requirement for common selling price might work, if you sell $show using the demos's copyright system then we demand you sell to all buyers.
• I learn about shows I haven't seen via word-of-mouth or online forums.
• I preview them on sites like YouTube.
• I stream a few episodes online in low/moderate quality. If I like something enough, I download it to a personal disk in the highest quality, where it will always be available for me to watch without ever requiring an internet connection.
I understand that the companies and people who make these shows have to make money, so I'm willing to make a few compromises:
• Let me pay a SINGLE monthly fee to stream ANY show in a video player of MY CHOICE.
• Let me permanently purchase specific episodes/seasons.
• Let me rewatch my downloaded videos without an internet connection for a while, but it’s alright to require me to connect every N days to refresh the DRM license or whatever.
So far, Apple's iTunes Store is the best platform which delivers most of that.
Decades ago, when cable TV first came out from Warner(?) in my area, we were promised the vision of monthly payments to view top movies without commercials. That lasted a couple of years, I guess, and then we had to put up with commercials before the movie to howls of complaints. Then commercials afterwards. Then they upped the fees.
Now we've come full circle. Online services made the same promises, then introduced commercials, now up their fees without promising uninterrupted viewing.
Neither HBO nor Showtime existed at the time. And NONE of the original cable channels had commercials because there was only one channel, iirc, and all of the shows came via Warner.
It's obvious you are too young to know about these things at the beginning. I'm talking early 1980s when cable was making its big move across the country.
NPR also recently had a story with this conclusion.
It doesn't seem all that pricey or complicated to me. Perhaps I'm missing some of the big picture, but it sure seems odd this angle has been hitting main stream media in a reinforcing manner.
I want to re-watch Futurama. Can you tell me where it’s available to stream?
It was on Netflix for a few months, now it’s a Hulu exclusive (IIRC). For how long? No one knows.
How many services do I need to subscribe to to get most of the content I need/want? 3? 5? More? How much will it cost?
Oh, and you’re lucky if you’re in the US. If you’re outside the US, finding whete content is available becomes a never-ending exercise in frustration due to territorial limitations (which for some reason still apply to globally available and accessible internet services).
Finding where content is available outside the US isn't a super hard exercise, it's just frustrating. The answer at least half the time is "you can't".
As a Brit, it used to be a simple flow: check Netflix, almost certainly on there, watch.
Now it's usually not on there, and checking JustWatch shows that it's unavailable in the UK (without paying to buy or 'lease' the content, usually for a similar price to the streaming service's monthly rate).
You can see why torrenting is on the rise again: a Netflix subscription just doesn't cut it anymore, and Hulu isn't available in the UK without a VPN.
Canada and the US have 10-11% more content than UK. The disparity was much greater before most content providers left Netflix and before the advent of Netflix's original programming.
It was and still is even worse for other countries (I live in Sweden, it has 30% less content than the UK)
The dream of cheap streaming television will always stupid. Given that there's zero marginal cost to distributing content, "unbundling" doesn't ultimately reduce providers' costs at all (of course it's not quite this simple, you have several players involved in providing content - studios, cable operators, aggregators like netflix, etc - but in the long run these details don't matter). So given that the costs of production haven't been lowered, why would anybody expect the cost to the consumer to decrease? On average they should remain the same. Maybe everybody expected to be on the lucky side of average? Or maybe people just hadn't thought this through at all.
> So given that the costs of production haven't been lowered, why would anybody expect the cost to the consumer to decrease?
This was the part of the story I never understood. There seemed to be some sort of implied "and then VCs will subsidise things until everyone permanently accepts lower profit margins in order to lower costs". Which just didn't seem like a terribly plausible sequence of events.
It kinda reminds me of how everyone thought e-books of the latest Harry Potter should cost $1 (compared to a more expensive print book) and, surprise, it didn't work out that way either.
And a lot of people didn't. It's hard to internalize how cheap matter is at scale. For a long time I really did think most of a book's cost is in printing. I still catch myself assuming a random product is expensive because of its manufacturing; it's a hard habit to kick.
Which prices being similar in every developed country in the world where there is plenty of competition should have clued you in to not being the case.
> "and then VCs will subsidise things until everyone permanently accepts lower profit margins in order to lower costs". Which just didn't seem like a terribly plausible sequence of events.
Isn't it quite literally the exact thing Uber successfully did to taxi markets worldwide?
They only do that as a short term move to grab market share and put weak competitors out of business. Generally that's just a phase in the early days and eventually prices start creeping up, often higher than they were before.
What streaming could enable is more diverse niche channels.
If you've got a second-or-third tier channel, you're not setting your own price. You're a "for 8 cents more per subscriber, we'll also add this" sidebar in the ESPN contract negotiations. This probably puts you in poor control of your economic fate.
If you go ad-supported, eventually the marketing sector will realize that individually-addressed, anayltics-slathered and highly categorized eyeballs on digital are worth more than the pig-in-a-poke eyeballs of advertising on traditional broadcast. It might require developing centralized inventory and selling systems, but it's coming.
A good example of this is the anime market. It's funny to look at all the ads slipped into old products: "pester your cable company to carry (long defunct anime channel #229)" Crunchyroll can go direct to consumer and control its own pricing and accessibility, and it's at least treading water despite a market thart's undergone major deflation from its peak.
So given that the costs of production haven't been lowered, why would anybody expect the cost to the consumer to decrease?
Competition.
For many in the US, their cable company had a monopoly on television, so their TV bill was unnaturally high. For a personal anecdote, <streaming video service> + Internet is cheaper than cable + Internet for me. I've seen my cable provider try to win me back with discounts, but the discounts aren't good enough. Is it "cheap" in absolute terms? I don't know where that bar is set. I don't mind what I'm currently paying though.
Cable never really had a monopoly. There were always at least two satellite providers. And since the early 2000’s, the local telecoms have offered to a large part of the country. Every place I’ve lived in has had 4 options since 2005.
They all offered the same channels and mostly competed on price.
The golden age to be really was around 2009 when I was able to buy pretty much every show I wanted for download on Amazon or iTunes and pay for just that. Now with Netflix and Amazon prime etc. we just traded one form of bundling for another.
The only advantage is that I can rotate between some streaming services (e.g last month Netflix, now HBO bc GoT, then Showtime for Billions..)
Availability of content on Amazon and iTunes is very country specific. In my country, there are no TV shows available at all, and the movie selection isn't stellar either. Half the stuff I want to watch just isn't available for purchase at all.
And availability keeps changing! You want to buy a movie that was available last week, and it's gone!
In the US, very little if anything. Overseas, it depends greatly. I tried to use Amazon Prime in Norway, and it's a mess. The user can see all the titles, but can only play a fraction of them. I even got shafted after purchasing a movie because it wasn't available to stream to my location (this was on console so bypassing with a vpn wasn't a 1-click thing like on PC, that is if amazon hasn't blacklisted most major vpn providers to begin with)
tl;dr - doesn't work that well, depending on where you live. I've become reacquainted with torrent sites these last few years.
Some companies would probably have more customers by merging with others. Like how HBO, Starz and others can be found on HULU. Although they didn't reduce their pricing through when doing that
What we have now is the À la carte I always wanted that old media said we couldn’t have.
I still pay less than I ever did with cable, I don’t have to subsidize ESPN or Fox News and I don’t have to waste time watching or fast forwarding through ads.
But isn't this the opposite of À la carte? You have 2-3 massive "cartes" with content and all you can do is eat everyting on one menu. Or switch between them. If you like showA and a family member likes showB it's now not a fight over the remote, it's a fight over which month to subscribe to which service.
Also since HBO/Netflix et.al don't carry regular live TV, most of us still keep their regular TV subscriptions for news/sports etc., making it not a replacement for TV but an expensive luxury extra.
There's a perfectly acceptable solution to all of this that has been used many times in the past: Compulsory licensing. The same thing that happens with music broadcast on the radio for example.
Global Public Licence.
Paid by everyone, according to their abilities, available to everyone. Revenue is split according to views.
"Streaming" platforms just do that : streaming, and compete.
Like music, the internet supplied the dream of ridding us of the expensive middle man, instead, it was the dawn of the middle man. In time, software gets easier, and I'm still optimistic that the middle man will disappear and we will get very large, cheap distributed systems, with payments, that will allow peer to peer. Mix in UBI and the future will be bright, I mean, except for a couple of revolutions along the way.
I used to feel that way. I’ve also expected much broader democratization of production from 3D printing.
It’s possible software is just not there yet, but I think network effects and de facto cartels are an equal or greater force against the natural progress of technology.
At this point I am pretty convinced it’s going to take a union or pact amongst ai devs, or a revolution, to prevent a couple players from basically “winning capitalism”, and rent seeking off infinite labor supply for eternity.
Well, I think the internet can remove all middle men except one. The one that remains is de facto a monopoly. So prices go down as long there is competition and more then on middle man. The less middle men there are the higher the prices. And then there is no way back neither, so the remaining middle man is running a global experiment on price elasticity until growth declines.
Maybe 3D printing will be different due the physical aspects of it.
> Disney’s service will cost just over half the monthly price of the most popular Netflix plan... The goal is to achieve revenue through reach, not overcharging.
That sounds exactly like what Netflix promised originally: cheap subscriptions, growing revenue through reach not higher prices.
Y'know, like when they offered a $11.99/month subscription in 2017... which now costs $15.99/month - a 33% rise in 1.5 years, whilst reducing the amount of content available.
> whilst reducing the amount of content available.
This is the part that bothers me the most. I've been a subscriber to Netflix since 2008 and I'm getting pretty close to cancelling the streaming service.
I subscribe to the "standard" plan which is about to go up to $12.99 next month (from $10.99). Realistically the +$2/month isn't going to break me but it's the lack of content that will.
Almost every time I want to go watch something on Netflix, it's like "oh yeah, I remember watching Contact a few years ago on instant watch, let's do it up!... Oh wait, it's been removed". Then I'll think about 5 other movies I want to watch which I know I've watched in the past and they are gone too. Before you know it, I've spent 15 minutes trying to find something to watch where I end up just turning it off and doing something else.
It feels like you have to watch what Netflix is adding / removing every month instead of being able to select what you want to watch. To make matters worse I have an older smart DVD player and the Netflix UI doesn't show titles that are going to be removed if you have them added to your watch list (it only shows either or, and the watch list text always wins), which makes it a huge pain to tell if a title is about to expire since I have to use a third party website which breaks me from the watching / browsing experience.
I'll probably cancel in a few months and just stick with the 1 DVD out at a time plan which has nearly every movie. Sure the DVD plan is horrible for watching shows because of how long it would take to finish them due to shipping logistics but I watch more movies than shows.
True that! I remember that a couple of years ago Amazon and Netflix had a great overlap in the center, Netflix added at the show end of the spectrum while Amazon did the same with movies. Then it drifted away but you still could get most content by just the two with the monthly subscriptions.
And now some content isn't there at all, some is buy-only and some is rental. Factor in that everything Disney will be gone soon that sucks. Streaming got me away from "alternative" sources, if they continue like that might just return
I guess I just treat Netflix as a sort of cheaper alternative to basic cable. I don't expect every movie (or a good chunk of movies) ever made to be available at all times. That's more the realm of specific digital rental options like Amazon or Google, etc.
But when I am just taking a break for an hour or two in the evening and want to "see what's on", I fire up Netflix and flip through newly added movies/shows or skim through the familiar category listings.
It's certainly not perfect, but for (now) $13/month, it serves the same purpose as basic cable used to serve for me and it's about as much as I used to pay just for the stupid cable box rental.
What's frustrating about all this, and I suspect it's somewhat relevant, is that I really just want to pay a flat fee to get all the content and never see another ad. And because Netflix, Hulu, Disney, Amazon, etc. can't agree... I'm left to go back to Rarbg -- who gives me easy access to content, for free, without making a fuss if I use an ad blocker or VPN.
Remember that video about Jeff Bezos talking about customer experience, and how it was paramount? Right, so I need modern Jeff Bezos to be like, "Hey, all the streaming services need to get their act together... what we're doing now is really shitty customer experience and we're making it easier for people to pirate than to simply pay for our services."
What's fucked up, I pay for Netflix, Amazon, and CBS... and still I'd rather torrent it so I can stream it from my Plex because I have no idea when Amazon will make changes to their content library, or Netflix will decide that I don't deserve true HD experience due to their bandwidth issues. So... back to good ol', never-let-you-down, BitTorrent... all because these content sellers can't get their heads into modernity.
I wish Netflix/HBO would start to tier their subscriptions. E.g. I just watch the odd documentary and none of the new big series on Netflix/HBO and it feels like I'm paying a lot of my subscription money into Game of Thrones...
There is a view that has been expressed several times in HN when this topic is touched: "Netflix has enough current or future material (Netflix Originals) so that I can see it for the rest of my life, I do not really care if the quality is 10/10, I only use it as a form of light entertainment."
However, for other people, like me, the quality of art is essential, and we do want to see the best that has been produced this year and the past 100 years. Where is this material? How can I consume good European cinema from the 50s and 60s? Where can I consume the best Latin American cinema from the 80s? etc.
Maybe people don't want to watch exclusively Netflix's originals. I personally wish there was a UI feature to just hide all of Netflix's own crap and show me what else they have. Of course that feature will never exist.
>However, for other people, like me, the quality of art is essential, and we do want to see the best that has been produced this year and the past 100 years. Where is this material? How can I consume good European cinema from the 50s and 60s? Where can I consume the best Latin American cinema from the 80s? etc.
Mubi is the best service I've seen for this, but their catalog is generally quite limited at any given time, as it consists of a constantly rotating collection of films.
By and large, you probably have to just buy a lot of it assuming it ever made it to DVD. Some is probably available for Netflix DVD rental although their back catalog has been rotting. Unfortunately, a lot of content that isn't available for streaming/digital purchase increasingly doesn't really exist, especially if you're not willing to just purchase physical media.
I think the dream was that Netflix would actually become the one-stop-shop for absolutely everything old and new. That you could watch the latest GoT as well as get your fix of all of the old Schwarzenegger movies for 10 bucks a month. Obviously that never worked out. For me it's clear that in the near future every production house will have its own streaming service and they will essentially become stream-channels once an aggregator comes in and gives you a package deal. You'll save 10% if you bundle up 10 different streaming services, etc. I'm sure the next step after that will be to re-introduce commercials? Why not profit even more by having people pay monthly and serve them ads at the same time? At that point the cycle will restart as a new wave of piracy will begin because obviously people don't want to pay a fortune to watch ads and have access to a bunch of crap they never watch.
I feel like too many people don't value how easy it is to signup and cancel these services. As others have mentioned in the comments, I usually rotate my subscriptions quite a bit throughout the year depending what shows are coming out, and that context is huge. Hulu, SlingTV, PS Vue, Netflix, Prime, etc. all make it SUPER easy and hassle free to deactivate/resume all the services on any whim. You can do it all in their interface in minutes. That's such an underrated feature that many forget about. Trying to cancel and resume cable with companies like Comcast is nothing short of a nightmare. They have 0 respect for the user's time, and they always try to hit you with sketchy hidden fees and dark pattern UX's.
I'm personally very happy with this new system of being able to rotate, and juggle services where it makes sense and get the content I want, wherever it is offered. I don't mind putting that burden on myself to manage because it's easy with all the services, and at the end of the day, having no commercials and that freedom to choose is all I every wanted. Not to mention, it's still all cheaper than traditional cable.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 254 ms ] threadOverall, I pay a lot less than I would for cable and I get 90% of what I'd use anyway. So I pay a medium amount, but use everything I pay for. Compare this with cable where you pay a lot and use very little of what you pay for.
I bet lots of households are north of $200/mo between the two, which is probably close to (somewhat higher than—inflation, after all, plus we may just be spending a little more on this stuff) what phone + cable/satellite used to run for the some sorts of households.
A streaming subscription or two's nothing next to those, though tack a couple on top and we are probably paying more, inflation adjusted, for this stuff than we used to. It's cell phones that're really soaking up the dollars, though. We've got about the worst you can get and still have any data (very low data limit) and it's still almost $100 for two lines, and we own both our phones outright so aren't paying the monthly add-on for a phone payment.
Edit: I recommend US mobile or Ting for cheap phone plans. My wife and I pay ~$55 combined monthly on Ting.
Right, in functionality, but if you think in terms of a kind of slot for bills, I think home Internet fits close into where the phone bill used to (think back when phone bills were kinda high, especially if you wanted caller ID and voicemail and such, once those came around, or long distance) while cell phones tend to be a little higher and fit roughly where cable/satellite used to, as far as proportion of telecom bill goes.
> Edit: I recommend US mobile or Ting for cheap phone plans. My wife and I pay ~$55 combined monthly on Ting.
Yeah, probably time for us to shop around again. We're on T-Mobile, which was easily the cheapest option from the big carriers at the time we picked it. We like that we still get (much slower) Internet service if we hit our tiny cap, which we can do by accidentally watching youtube for a few minutes with the wifi off. But maybe we should look at re-sellers. Seems crazy that they could be cheaper than going first-party, but I guess maybe they are, somehow.
[EDIT] is that $55 with taxes and fees and such? I remember last time I looked into this, maybe a year ago, what I kept running into was that it looked like I'd save a lot looking at sales' version of the figures, but when it came time to get serious about paying and those things got added in it was no savings, or maybe just single digit $/mo so not really worth a switch.
It varies based on usage, and we're fairly light on data, so you might see higher numbers. (No cap, but if you use more you get billed more.)
Disclaimer: Googler (not on YT)
I much prefer this to traditional cable!
I’m currently operating on an 8 TB archive, of which I have two copies. One is installed in a desktop computer, and the other is in a single drive Synology. I take the Synology when traveling with our RV.
The downside is it takes more space :)
It's kind of frustrating to see how close things came to actually getting to the ideal (imho, anyway): any show, streamed on demand, on any device, for a reasonable fee. Instead, the studios are going to try to compete on content - which is not really competition. I don't care what studio makes funny_show (either when deciding what to subscribe to, or when trying to figure out what app to launch to watch it), I just want to watch it. I don't want to watch similar_but_not_as_good_knock_off on another service.
What's crazy is the seemingly unstoppable train wreck the industry is currently involved in. It's bad enough to not only see what the music industry was forced into (which is basically ideal for consumers, at least without dismantling the entire way music is produced), but the movie industry already went through this a half century ago, when theaters used to be owned by the studios and only show their own exclusive movies [2].
[1] https://www.maketecheasier.com/internet-piracy-is-on-the-ris...
[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Paramount_P....
(a) there are fewer films produced every year than music albums, and therefore the revenue can be shared among fewer producers,
(b) most expensive films are released to theatres first and many reach break-even during this period, and
(c) a comprehensive film streaming service can easily be more expensive than a music one, say $20/mo or more.
But there are probably more films and television shows produced than music albums.
Not sure why you've focused on films here, because films aren't the market.
FWIW I used to produce music, also professionally for a time (including one major label release), and what I described above was always the holy grail that I was chasing. Quality deteriorates the further you get from the initial energy of the spark. Also I don't mean to say the above is the only way to create. The same artist likes to spend months listening to records to get inspiration the perfect sound for each instrument for other projects (which is ironically closer to the derivative works you described).
If I am not living in the US and want to watch a hulu series I have zero choice but to pirate it or use a shady vpn.
No loss has occur.
We’re willing to pay.
participating in culture is required by many, esp. the young. If they can't easily get it via a legitimate means, piracy is the default.
Not watching it is not an option.
If you create a culturally relevant work then prohibit people from legally participating, you probably deserve disparagement and the forfeiture of your rights.
Unless everyone pirates it.
In the past, when localized media is the only option, locking out regions from purchases wouldn't have been an issue (since nobody would've known about it).
But now the internet exists, and information being global means that literary media must also be global. To be denied an opportunity to participate in its consumption is to deny the right to participate in cultural exchange and communication. I think that's wrong, and therefore, this justifies piracy for those individuals who would otherwise be denied due to cost/availablity reasons.
i m sure the complaints exist. I m also sure that english works is more popular than non-english works (due to english simply being the international language). My view isn't anglo-centric at all - you can make the same argument about anime.
I watch anime on crunchyroll, but i used to use torrents. The illegal method is the only option as a high-schooler who cannot afford the prices required to get a DVD set. I m glad that crunchyroll has worked to a legal means for this media.
The argument here is that streaming companies (esp. disney) is attempting to restrict their works, which has significant cultural impact, by making _their_ streaming service the only way to consume this work. This mechanism makes the price of the media higher, and people would need to pay multiple services to get the full coverage of all media they need to consume.
This is be being unable to buy the show in Russian, in the united states. Region locking doesn't just prohibit US content from being played elsewhere, it prevents Americans from seeing a lot of amazing things produced around the world just as readily.
There is a big difference between failing to facilitate (not making a translation) and actively preventing participation. Your import example to avoid piracy is not a great example because they DRM and or geolock those physical copies as well to prevent exactly what your solution is. The only legal recourse to access that media would be to travel to the country of origin and consume it "on site."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cremaster_Cycle
People used to say exactly that about music, and then Spotify came around - along with multiple DRM-free download stores. Now these things are very much seen as "God-given rights" by many.
Yes, video is especially complicated because of how costly it is to create in the first place - this is why the closest thing to a plausible solution is going to come in the form of disruption from below. Some sort of "Netflix 2.0", focusing on a somewhat more heavily-curated experience than YT does today, and skimping on challenging technical details - maybe not even providing full-HD content of any sort! Vimeo could easily enter that space.
It's also not media producers god given right to gouge customers and have the government enforce a monopoly on their products, or to even exist. Ideally we can reach a compromise that suits everyone, but at the moment it's media companies that are over reaching, they'll even happily gimp their own products so that pirated versions are better.
You're saying this is the moral and legal option, but the copyright holders lobbied hard to make this illegal. That's why there are no stores in my country offering imported DVDs for sale. It's illegal to import these if you're a business. I have to go to a foreign company and import the disc strictly for personal use.
So, I get a DVD / BluRay from a different region. How do I play this? The shop where I bought the player is forbidden, by law, from telling me how to convert my player into a multi-region player.
People aren't saying "I want this for free". They're saying "allow me to pay for it". They're also saying "the easier it is to pay for something the more people will pay for it".
Given that importing is often intentionally blocked by region-locking, it’s a straight choice between “don’t get it” and piracy.
'Copyright infringement'? 'Piracy' is a bit of a loaded term.
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/words-to-avoid.html.en#Piracy
If the content holder is not making their content available in a reasonable way, they should have no such protections.
There are people who pay for HBOgo, do so through some forwarder which makes their credit card appear to come from a US bank, and then have to find a VPN service to actually watch it with.
Multiple steps in this transaction - completely unncessarily due to the nature of the underlying technologies - cost the consumer money, to circumvent protections implemented by HBO (or more likely whatever BS contract their parent company signed), for the express purpose of preventing the consumer paying HBO to lawfully watch their content.
Or maybe it is? Different people have different views on what counts as rights and I've yet to hear of a case of God clarifying which group of people is right. Some people believe it is their God given right to keep others from modifying their own equipment in certain patterns by sharing information. Others disagree.
Consider libraries. If I built a file sharing system that allowed only one person to watch the movie at a time, but allowed as many people as wanted to watch it if they were willing to wait their turn, how is this any different than what a library does? Yet that would also be considered a form of piracy. Is running a library not a God given right.
Following the letter of the law isn't always the right thing to do.
If some corporation isn't selling the rights to view a file in your country, and it's a pain to get them the 'legal way', I think a lot of people would look at the situation and think-
"well, nobody's going to prosecute me for this. Even if I think piracy is immoral in general, this entity has made it a pain for me to get their product without pirating- they obviously aren't counting on my money. They've waived their moral right to complain about me not paying to look at their tv show- and in the lack of enforcement of the law, that moral right is all that matters to me. I'll just pirate it. If they don't want my money, they won't get it."
I mean piracy is not that big a crime especially if there's no legal alternative (and the legal / convenient alternatives to piracy have been the biggest deterrent), but if you replace "media" with idk, "consumer electronics" it becomes a different matter. I know, physical goods vs virtual ones is a big difference, but is it, from a legal standpoint?
Physical theft is always criminal.
[Thing] isn't for sale in their area, they want [thing], therefore they're justified in stealing [thing] rather than just not having it.
Is entitlement not involved in that reasoning? What is the motivation for illegally obtaining something if not feeling that you deserve to have it? The owners of the content and the distributors are wrong?
I've hoisted the black flag plenty of times in the past, but let's not pretend it's anything other than theft.
In Australia it can become criminal if the violation was of a commercial nature.
But a lot of pirates like to complain they cannot purchase it according to their specific demands.
People used to complain that they had to buy cable to watch game of thrones. They wanted a solo steaming service. Go look at old reddit posts, pirates would proclaim that they would subscribe to that instead of pirate.
HBO made exactly that. And now the complaint is that it costs too much. Or they don’t want to pay for Barry or Veep episodes they don’t want. But they’ll stop pirating if they could just buy GoT!
I think the vast majority of piracy is just because they can get it for free.
Additionally, if the content is just not available in your country yet, then at best, you would be morally/ethically justified in pirating now and then paying later when it’s allowed.
But publishers, studios, whatever you want to call them, don't get tired to tell us that users are not willing to pay for the content etc., but that's simply not true.
Most often it's about the hurdles to access the content. Be it scattering over half a dozen platforms, restricted access to specific markets or whatever.
They are the ones creating the problems that people find (more or less legal) solutions for.
I don't steal playstations out of shops, regardless of how fun it could be, because it's illegal and I'm likely to be punished for it, and because I have some moral qualms about it.
Piracy? You're not going to be punished for it, and it's qualitatively different from taking a thing away from someone. With no enforcement, all that stops people from pirating all the time is the comparative inconvenience and moral qualms.
When the entity involved is some big, faceless company, and it's a lot more convenient to pirate than buy (even disregarding the money you'd have to spend to buy!)- you could imagine not having any more moral qualms about piracy.
There isn't a natural right to consume content produced by companies who seem hell bent on making it difficult to access that content.
There's also no natural right for them to prohibit me from consuming, or to gouge me, or to push for horrible legislation with their unfair amount of influence.
No, there's not.
You also have the choice to not watch it until it becomes available in your country
If someone is forced to wait another week, or in the case of films, another few months, the movie could very well be spoiled by reading some online discussion. Fan-based communities move very fast. While they do try to censor spoilers immediately after a new release, the censoring dwindles down rather quickly.
By the time a new film is available in your region, you may have already stumbled across some very severe spoilers which would inhibit your experience.
The better solution, IMO, is to make content available globally at the same time - eliminate regional distribution for online content.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear_of_missing_out
We could ask people to behave per our moral expectations just because they should, but generally you'll find most people who make such a request themselves disregard morals when the cost benefit analysis approaches a similar analysis.
Stop being friends with such people.
It's quickly ruining PC gaming for me. Thanks DRM.
They are removing themselves from even the possibility that I might think about buying. I just don't shop there. If I can't find something that interests me on Steam, GOG, or Humble, I stop looking. And I also didn't really appreciate the constant upsell for SP:FBW DRM, and other Ubisoft titles, while I was still playing. They pulled out from Steam to not pay the "Steam tax", but they didn't lower their prices to compensate; they just made the "Steam tax" into the "Ubi tax". If consumers still have to pay it no matter where they go, they don't really have any incentive to shop at a different store.
Aren't all of Valve's titles exclusive to Steam? I remember being annoyed that I had to install steam for some version of Counter Strike in the early 00s, and didn't think the situation had changed.
They’re allowed to release elsewhere, it’s just such a pain compared to steam that nobody does so.
IMHO, exclusives are obnoxious and I'm glad Steam doesn't do that. The physical retail market is full of crap like that, or pre-order bonuses that are tied to particular retailers. All of that garbage is a cancer on the gaming market.
With streaming services, you need to pay each one of them, each month to watch your stuff.
This is the same problem with video streaming, we don't have competition on who can create the best UI, the highest bitrate, the best recommendation algorithm, just multiple monopolies.
Epic on the other hand scares me. They spend heavily on exclusives and will have to make that money back. I doubt this will be possible on just their share in a highly competitive market. Thus I doubt their long term plan coming to fruition will be in us cumstomers best interest.
It wasn't healthy if you were a developer, and were forking over a monopolistic 'PC game tax' to Valve.
Or if you cared about discovery.
Or if you cared about curation (Steam is full of crap!), or approval of games (Steam won't approve my game!). (These are two extremes of the same problem, and many people have issue with Steam's handling of it - they either want it to be stricter, or less strict.)
Mind you, it's entirely possible that you were perfectly content with all of Steam's positions on this (As well as how capriciously they changed, year, over year... But if you claim that, you stretch my credulity.) However, if you were not 100% satisfied with the state of that storefront, its searchability, discoverability, recommendation engine, curation policies, and refund policies, then it would have been in your best interests, as a consumer, to have multiple competing storefronts.
GoG gave Steam a kick in the ass about a number of its consumer-unfriendly policies. Epic is giving Steam a kick in the ass about its market-gouging 30% tax. The Satan-spawn of Origin, UPlay, GFWL are giving Steam an example of how not to run a storefront. I don't even know what Twitch and Discord are doing.
You can sell directly though your own channel and give steam keys. Afaik without paying the 30% steam tax. Those keys don't count for stuff like reviews, to prevent abuse. But this seems like a reasonable trade-off for all parties involved. I'm happy to use the launcher of my choice, dev is happy to avoid the tax, steam is happy to make more likely to use their storefront.
I mostly agree with you and would welcome competition. But I don't see benefits for me if stores compete based on their library of exclusive titles.
The multitude of stores is proving very difficult for independent developers that would ideally release on every store, because each one comes with different APIs, DRM and community features that require bespoke integrations in both the game and game server (if you have one). The documentation for this stuff is rarely great due in part to the secrecy surrounding the industry, and the speed at which publishers are knocking their own stores together.
Don't worry, they're working on that. EA Access, Microsoft All Access, and others are looking to fill that "missing feature".
I'd also point out that on the Nintendo Switch subscription program, there are a number of games (such as Tetris 99) that you can't buy or play without being a subscriber.
And so, I'd argue that the change is underway, today.
Sounds like an exclusive to me. You could buy Days Gone (a "ps4 exclusive") from walmart and gamestop (so there's competition at the retail level), but you're still locked to the PS4 platform. It's slightly different for PC because you could conceivably get the cracked version without steam and that steam is free, but arguing it's not an exclusive because you can buy at multiple retailers is a weak argument.
As a kid I was addicted to video games and dreamed of working in the industry (that dream is what got me started programming at 8). Now, at 39, I've lost all interest.
I'm interested to see what brings in the most money for studios, getting little money from their own platform (and "suffering" the piracy) or getting paid by netflix.
While Spotify, Apple Music, Tidal et. al. generally all do have the majority of music available, there is still a huge mess of license behind the scenes.
Albums are constantly made unavailable for weeks or even months due to licensing issues. Sometimes a badly done remaster is the only version available, sometimes important albums in an artist's discography are completely absent.
And don't get me started on the sorry state of their curation and tagging. The release date shown for any album is basically useless. Is it the original release date? A re-release? Or just the date the record company supplied it to the streaming service? It completely messes up discographies.
But it’s much better than it used to be, and it’s slowly approaching a healthy market.
I can stream most music from most streaming services.
I can buy DRM-free albums or songs for almost all artists in a plethora of online stores.
“Exclusive releases” does not seem to exist.
Compared to the current digital video market, this is pretty much nirvana.
Piracy forced the record companies to finally get in on streaming and downloads. Now it's time for the dinosaurs to finally die, the only reason they still exist is because of nonsense copyright laws, where they hold the rights in perpetuity to the "classics".
Instead they encumber the content with drm locking me I to their platform that hopefully stays around. I actively avoid anything but subscription or short term rental options for exactly this reason.
The actual DRM is, I think, studios closing loopholes and probably threatening anyone who leaks high quality copies with jail time.
On another note, folks: buy your media. Physically own it. Streaming is for suckers.
It's harder for me to make the case that someone growing up today should spend on accumulating a large digital library. Of course, it's a lot easier for people to make a copy of a digital library than it was to tape albums in the old days. But if everyone is pretty much streaming, that option largely goes away.
Not really. It fits some people's narrative for that to be the case, but the evidence it's actually happening is very sketchy.
Sandvine's report shows no real increase in the US - the increase was primarily internationally. And Netflix never had this sort of "peak content availability" overseas, and there isn't a marked increase in content fragmentation this year either.
The likely explanation is simply that bittorrent's fall was primarily because pirates were using Kodi plug-ins instead, and the explosive rise there has been chopped off by enforcement actions by the studios and governments. So some of those people have switched back to bittorrent. But that doesn't show piracy overall as increasing.
Now with content split between Netflix, HBO and Amazon, and threats of other players like Disney incoming, my anecdotal observation is that plenty of people is going back to piracy. Conversations like this one (about the fragmentation of the market and exclusives incentivizing piracy) are common here too. At my home, we don't pirate but what we do is switching subscriptions from one service to the other every few months, which is unnecessarily annoying.
Which is probably closer to the norm. I rarely use torrents, not out of any great moral imperative, but because it's a pain, involves sketchy web sites, etc.
However, the fragmentation of video streaming is also annoying even though it's what lots of people supposedly wanted when they complained about the cable bundle. And, yes, the response will mostly be make do with a few services and either do without or buy a la carte for the rest or actively manage your current subscriptions. (Of course, a typical cable bill will pay for a lot of different services for cord cutters.)
A lot of that difficulty is an up front cost. Once people get annoyed with streaming options enough to start pirating, getting them to switch back to paid options is going to be even harder.
Slowly this has morphed now, with all shows being splintered across services, regions, and devices.
Somehow, using a torrent is once again the easiest way to watch a show.
This was the inevitable outcome of trying to move to a pick and choose your channel model. Instead of 1000 channels for $80/month you get 10. Folks are moving back to piracy again just because they don't want to pay the prices it costs to subscribe to 6 services @ $8-15/month is all.
Torrent it is.
Really, I have the money, but I want to watch my movie now without jumping through any hoops.
Plenty of ways that are easier.
Don't forget to mention how awful many of them are in terms of quality, usability and choice. 4OD here in the UK leads with multiple minutes of HD ads, and when it switched to the actual content, the player regularly crashes, forcing you to reload and watch the ads. They also only release content for 30-ish days after airing, and then it disappears until the content appears on DVD.
Now TV (the only afaik supported way to access Game of Thrones in the UK other than subscribing for 18 months) caps their streams at 720p and doesn't support an Android TV app.
There's also the hell of discovering where and when things are available. I don't know where watch Brooklyn 99 in the UK and in willing to pay for it - as I understand it it's available on Netflix US but the latest episodes aren't on Netflix UK.
It's a complete mess.
You don't appear to have looked very hard.
There's also the question of discovering where I go to find it; Netflix advertises Brooklyn but doesn't show the latest season. Amazon is the first legitimays option that appears (after gomoviestube and i0123movies) - turns out that it's amazonUS not Uk, followed by NBC. If you search for Brooklyn 99Season 6 UK get a bunch of SEO crap talking about air dates, most of which mention Netflix. I can make the same argument for basically every show.
Netflix / Hulu for $15.99 is going to cover most use cases and act as a general purpose aggregator.
Disney+ is primarily a way of getting parents / kids more invested in the Disney universe, but won't be for everyone.
The new Apple service may appeal to some people, but definitely bold to suggest that it's in any way going to be a strong Netflix competitor.
YouTube Premium - great if you watch a lot of YouTube, and potentially a music use case there too.
ESPN etc - probably better served by traditional cable. MLB is great value if you're a baseball but living out of market.
The assumption behind cord cutting wasn't that people would replace it with a OTA package that replaced like for like what they had before, it's that they would subscribe to a few services rather than subscribe to an expensive cable service and use 2% of it.
My dad is one of those original cordcutters. His main concern is sports which he either pays for or borrows someone else's Comcast login. He has Amazon prime but has never figured out Amazon Prime video.
Beyond that Netflix and OTA. His question for most people would be, "How much TV do you really need to watch?"
The TV and movie industry have decided that their IP is more valuable than it was in the past. The technology has changed such that they can distribute it on their own and don’t need carriers. It kind of looks like we might be heading for a pay per play model, ultimately. It will be very interesting with Disney+, it will be brave if they really do everything at $7 a month, I suspect that they will want premium tiers though, they have been so protective of their “vault” and now they have Starwars, the marvel universe, Pixar, the simpsons, etc...
There's a joke that this is exactly what cable TV was.
Back then: "This is ridiculous! I'm paying for all these channels when I only watch two or three of them. I should be able to pay for just the ones I use."
Now: "This is ridiculous! Every time I find something I want to watch, I have to subscribe to a new service!"
You can in some cases though the pricing tends to be relatively high compared to streaming unless you really only want to watch a show or two.
And I don’t think the pricing per show would be much of a discount. I’d imagine the median number of shows HBO viewer actively watches is 1-3. And the cost of giving you access to shows you don’t Watch is actually less than nothing since it would take resources to lock you out of it.
Personally, I'd probably be happier watching a lot of content with a la carte pricing but TV shows in particular seem to be at something of a premium with that model. (Assuming they're available.)
There are always outliers, but very few people would watch $100-200 "worth" of content. Netflix is basically a walled off Spotify, where your $10-15 goes to whatever shows you watch because the rest get cancelled if they can't sustain a critical number of subscribers.
But I want more than just the Netflix-content, but let's say I can only reasonably watch $30-50 "worth" of content each month, so give me access to everything and allocate my subscription accordlingly, sort of like Spotify.
And, yet, that's in the range that a lot of people did (and do) pay for cable or satellite TV and that didn't even include on-demand content.
I'm not saying people can't pay more, I'm saying they don't have enough time in the day for the amount of content that could be produced by that amount of money.
My basic point is that people (understandably) would like a less fragmented streaming video market. But they mostly also want something that's significantly cheaper than an all-in monthly cable or satellite subscription was 10 years or whenever ago.
We did mostly get to reasonably priced and reasonably comprehensive streaming music--although apparently at the cost of not supporting most artists very well.
For example, I like Netflix because the interface is pretty good and I've never had a problem with buffering or lost connection. I want to be able to pay a little extra to get access to, say, Disney or HBO content, and perhaps buy access to some other series. I hate jumping between streaming platforms, so I've gotten to the point where I just don't watch things if they're not available.
I pay for two platforms, and that's about all I'm willing to do. I just can't watch some things I know I'll like because I don't want to have to remember which platform has which series. However, buying individual series/movies also too expensive IMO. My budget for video entertainment is $20-30/month, and I watch maybe 1-2 hours/day (mostly my kids, but we have movie night twice a week); that's about the cost of two unlimited services, 4-6 movie rentals, or 1 season of a series. I could consider spending up to $50 or so if it was good value (e.g. don't have to jump between services), but that's not a thing, so we get 2 subscriptions for the family and spend the rest of my time and money on immersive video games, which ends up being far cheaper per hour of entertainment.
The movie/TV industry is just ridiculous, and I'm getting tired of it. I'm not surprised that piracy is getting more common. I can afford to spend more, but I choose not to, and I completely understand the mindset of pirates; if I wanted access to more content, it would be less work to pirate than work more to be able to afford more content.
This bundling of extra content was tolerable at the Netflix price point - when you were paying < 10% of cable - but it's back to being intolerable now that it's comperable to cable prices once more.
The current model is not interesting. I don't want to pay a monthly fee for something maybe I don't have time or the will to watch that month. Obviously those services are doing well with the customer that fit into their sales model.
I wonder if somebody would build a meta service and pay fees to the sub services (Netflix, Amazon, etc.) They probably don't want to be commoditized.
The convenience problem with the fragmented streaming services is that everyone wants to run their own wire to my house and put their own meter on it. They need to agree to use the same wire, adhere to a common protocol, and allow resellers to act as their meter reader and bill collector.
That didn't work with cable companies because of locally-granted monopolies that prevented the signal reseller from experiencing competitive pressures, but if everyone can choose between DirecTV Now, YouTube TV, Roku, Sling, Netflix, or even RQ Hacker's Streaming TV Reselling Service, then the consumer is still in control. Partially.
Cable could force you to get 100 channels when you only wanted 5 of them. There was no one else around to sell a package with fewer channels, or even to go full a la carte. But even then, content owners could still strongarm content distributors by selling their channels to the cable companies and satellite distributors as one package. Now it's just the same thing all over again, with the consumer cutting out the middleman, and finding out that it was the supplier that was screwing us from the source all along.
The copyright holders name their price, and those who want to watch have to pay it.
What we really need is for someone to undercut Disney by ripping off their format. Bowdlerize the folktales and fables by taking out all the viciousness and cruelty, create a few trademarkable characters out of them, write a few catchy original pop songs, and stitch together into 90 minutes of family-friendly video entertainment. Throw public domain in one end, turn the crank, and get intellectual property sausages out the other. It would probably only take a few billion dollars to make an impact.
Or... maybe take a hammer to the copyright law that Disney bought, and blow the dust off the anti-trust laws. Maybe draft a new law such that no content owner can sell a bundled package of works unless they already distribute each component individually, and it must be priced such that the price of the bundle must be within a certain percentage, plus a constant, of the sum of its components, purchased/licensed individually. The ultimate source of the fragmentation problem is the copyright laws. It will never go away until they are reformed. So I'm not surprised that the fragmentation is apparently promoting piracy.
Seems like a requirement for common selling price might work, if you sell $show using the demos's copyright system then we demand you sell to all buyers.
• I learn about shows I haven't seen via word-of-mouth or online forums.
• I preview them on sites like YouTube.
• I stream a few episodes online in low/moderate quality. If I like something enough, I download it to a personal disk in the highest quality, where it will always be available for me to watch without ever requiring an internet connection.
I understand that the companies and people who make these shows have to make money, so I'm willing to make a few compromises:
• Let me pay a SINGLE monthly fee to stream ANY show in a video player of MY CHOICE.
• Let me permanently purchase specific episodes/seasons.
• Let me rewatch my downloaded videos without an internet connection for a while, but it’s alright to require me to connect every N days to refresh the DRM license or whatever.
So far, Apple's iTunes Store is the best platform which delivers most of that.
Now we've come full circle. Online services made the same promises, then introduced commercials, now up their fees without promising uninterrupted viewing.
Most of the original cable channels always had commercials.
It's obvious you are too young to know about these things at the beginning. I'm talking early 1980s when cable was making its big move across the country.
It doesn't seem all that pricey or complicated to me. Perhaps I'm missing some of the big picture, but it sure seems odd this angle has been hitting main stream media in a reinforcing manner.
It was on Netflix for a few months, now it’s a Hulu exclusive (IIRC). For how long? No one knows.
How many services do I need to subscribe to to get most of the content I need/want? 3? 5? More? How much will it cost?
Oh, and you’re lucky if you’re in the US. If you’re outside the US, finding whete content is available becomes a never-ending exercise in frustration due to territorial limitations (which for some reason still apply to globally available and accessible internet services).
As a Brit, it used to be a simple flow: check Netflix, almost certainly on there, watch.
Now it's usually not on there, and checking JustWatch shows that it's unavailable in the UK (without paying to buy or 'lease' the content, usually for a similar price to the streaming service's monthly rate).
You can see why torrenting is on the rise again: a Netflix subscription just doesn't cut it anymore, and Hulu isn't available in the UK without a VPN.
This is nonsense tbh.
This was never the case, and if it was it was because you had ridiculously narrow demographic tastes.
https://www.finder.com/uk/netflix-uk-vs-world-content
Canada and the US have 10-11% more content than UK. The disparity was much greater before most content providers left Netflix and before the advent of Netflix's original programming.
It was and still is even worse for other countries (I live in Sweden, it has 30% less content than the UK)
I really doubt having to google where a particular show is airing is actually a painful chore.
> How many services do I need to subscribe to to get most of the content I need/want? 3? 5? More?
That's for you to decide, but at least you have the choice now.
This was the part of the story I never understood. There seemed to be some sort of implied "and then VCs will subsidise things until everyone permanently accepts lower profit margins in order to lower costs". Which just didn't seem like a terribly plausible sequence of events.
It kinda reminds me of how everyone thought e-books of the latest Harry Potter should cost $1 (compared to a more expensive print book) and, surprise, it didn't work out that way either.
* Lots of people knew this.
Isn't it quite literally the exact thing Uber successfully did to taxi markets worldwide?
If you've got a second-or-third tier channel, you're not setting your own price. You're a "for 8 cents more per subscriber, we'll also add this" sidebar in the ESPN contract negotiations. This probably puts you in poor control of your economic fate.
If you go ad-supported, eventually the marketing sector will realize that individually-addressed, anayltics-slathered and highly categorized eyeballs on digital are worth more than the pig-in-a-poke eyeballs of advertising on traditional broadcast. It might require developing centralized inventory and selling systems, but it's coming.
A good example of this is the anime market. It's funny to look at all the ads slipped into old products: "pester your cable company to carry (long defunct anime channel #229)" Crunchyroll can go direct to consumer and control its own pricing and accessibility, and it's at least treading water despite a market thart's undergone major deflation from its peak.
Competition.
For many in the US, their cable company had a monopoly on television, so their TV bill was unnaturally high. For a personal anecdote, <streaming video service> + Internet is cheaper than cable + Internet for me. I've seen my cable provider try to win me back with discounts, but the discounts aren't good enough. Is it "cheap" in absolute terms? I don't know where that bar is set. I don't mind what I'm currently paying though.
They all offered the same channels and mostly competed on price.
The only advantage is that I can rotate between some streaming services (e.g last month Netflix, now HBO bc GoT, then Showtime for Billions..)
And availability keeps changing! You want to buy a movie that was available last week, and it's gone!
It's so frustrating...
tl;dr - doesn't work that well, depending on where you live. I've become reacquainted with torrent sites these last few years.
iTunes never had the offering OP claims tbh, but it also hasn't significantly moved from what it had.
I still pay less than I ever did with cable, I don’t have to subsidize ESPN or Fox News and I don’t have to waste time watching or fast forwarding through ads.
I think what we have now is fantastic.
Also since HBO/Netflix et.al don't carry regular live TV, most of us still keep their regular TV subscriptions for news/sports etc., making it not a replacement for TV but an expensive luxury extra.
It’s possible software is just not there yet, but I think network effects and de facto cartels are an equal or greater force against the natural progress of technology.
At this point I am pretty convinced it’s going to take a union or pact amongst ai devs, or a revolution, to prevent a couple players from basically “winning capitalism”, and rent seeking off infinite labor supply for eternity.
That sounds exactly like what Netflix promised originally: cheap subscriptions, growing revenue through reach not higher prices.
Y'know, like when they offered a $11.99/month subscription in 2017... which now costs $15.99/month - a 33% rise in 1.5 years, whilst reducing the amount of content available.
This is the part that bothers me the most. I've been a subscriber to Netflix since 2008 and I'm getting pretty close to cancelling the streaming service.
I subscribe to the "standard" plan which is about to go up to $12.99 next month (from $10.99). Realistically the +$2/month isn't going to break me but it's the lack of content that will.
Almost every time I want to go watch something on Netflix, it's like "oh yeah, I remember watching Contact a few years ago on instant watch, let's do it up!... Oh wait, it's been removed". Then I'll think about 5 other movies I want to watch which I know I've watched in the past and they are gone too. Before you know it, I've spent 15 minutes trying to find something to watch where I end up just turning it off and doing something else.
It feels like you have to watch what Netflix is adding / removing every month instead of being able to select what you want to watch. To make matters worse I have an older smart DVD player and the Netflix UI doesn't show titles that are going to be removed if you have them added to your watch list (it only shows either or, and the watch list text always wins), which makes it a huge pain to tell if a title is about to expire since I have to use a third party website which breaks me from the watching / browsing experience.
I'll probably cancel in a few months and just stick with the 1 DVD out at a time plan which has nearly every movie. Sure the DVD plan is horrible for watching shows because of how long it would take to finish them due to shipping logistics but I watch more movies than shows.
And now some content isn't there at all, some is buy-only and some is rental. Factor in that everything Disney will be gone soon that sucks. Streaming got me away from "alternative" sources, if they continue like that might just return
Disclaimer: That counts for Germany
But when I am just taking a break for an hour or two in the evening and want to "see what's on", I fire up Netflix and flip through newly added movies/shows or skim through the familiar category listings.
It's certainly not perfect, but for (now) $13/month, it serves the same purpose as basic cable used to serve for me and it's about as much as I used to pay just for the stupid cable box rental.
- Good content costs a lot of money to produce.
- That money has to come from somewhere.
- That money has to come either directly from viewers or from advertisers (or some combination).
Online newspapers have trained me over the last 20 years to need an ad blocker, without one they will serve up horrible experiences.
* The Cost of Mobile Ads on 50 News Websites - The New York Times || https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/10/01/business/cost...
What's frustrating about all this, and I suspect it's somewhat relevant, is that I really just want to pay a flat fee to get all the content and never see another ad. And because Netflix, Hulu, Disney, Amazon, etc. can't agree... I'm left to go back to Rarbg -- who gives me easy access to content, for free, without making a fuss if I use an ad blocker or VPN.
Remember that video about Jeff Bezos talking about customer experience, and how it was paramount? Right, so I need modern Jeff Bezos to be like, "Hey, all the streaming services need to get their act together... what we're doing now is really shitty customer experience and we're making it easier for people to pirate than to simply pay for our services."
What's fucked up, I pay for Netflix, Amazon, and CBS... and still I'd rather torrent it so I can stream it from my Plex because I have no idea when Amazon will make changes to their content library, or Netflix will decide that I don't deserve true HD experience due to their bandwidth issues. So... back to good ol', never-let-you-down, BitTorrent... all because these content sellers can't get their heads into modernity.
Anyway the whole thing is fucked.
I suspect the GoT viewers are subsidizing your docs, not the other way around.
However, for other people, like me, the quality of art is essential, and we do want to see the best that has been produced this year and the past 100 years. Where is this material? How can I consume good European cinema from the 50s and 60s? Where can I consume the best Latin American cinema from the 80s? etc.
If you don't mind, do you generally go with labels rather than attempting to judge goods/services on their innate qualities?
Seems like one could download a list of all Netflix content somehow and filter out their self-financed stuff? Would be a bit clunky.
Mubi is the best service I've seen for this, but their catalog is generally quite limited at any given time, as it consists of a constantly rotating collection of films.
I'm personally very happy with this new system of being able to rotate, and juggle services where it makes sense and get the content I want, wherever it is offered. I don't mind putting that burden on myself to manage because it's easy with all the services, and at the end of the day, having no commercials and that freedom to choose is all I every wanted. Not to mention, it's still all cheaper than traditional cable.