I got interested in the show Alter Ego on Fox and wanted to catch up on what I'd missed. Fox let me watch one episode before registering (and paying?) but I was able to watch it all on Youtube.
Odds are better that you find anything on Youtube than any place else unless it is a Chinese TV series that shouldn't be obscure but practically is. (Like how I had to get a bootleg of Three Kingdoms from Singapore.)
Did a few searches, and YouTube does seem to have great access for a lot of titles.
It's not always real economical though. One season of the Handmaid's Tale is only available to buy, not rent. And it's $25. I could pay for 2 months of "no ads" Hulu and get that season and everything else they have, for less.
Yeah Alter Ego isn’t. I think parent was looking at officially available paid offerings only. Not pirated streaming which the grandparent/OP is referring to. Content creators don’t get anything in that case though.
I believe the OP meant bootleg uploaded copies. Otherwise like you said. Many streaming services have it: Hulu, Fubo. Even Fox’s subsidiary Tubi has it. Which is free streaming I believe with ads. A one month subscription will usually be cheaper then buying.
I sometimes pirate things that are on services I'm paying for just because I don't want to have to remember which one has the thing I want to watch, every time I go to watch it, or switch between apps if watching multiple shows, or whatever.
The only thing that really tempts me to piracy are shows only available for streaming via iOS apps that disable picture-in-picture viewing during commercial breaks.
This particular behavior should really be banned by App Store guidelines, as it generates no revenue for Apple, and I can't imagine a single provider willing to forgo ad revenue from iOS users as a whole over such a rule.
Show commercials, if you must, but trying to force me to pay attention to commercials via technological means is where I draw the line.
Instead of actually bothering to pirate the show, however, I generally just do something else.
I'm honestly curious why (AFAIK) major content producers haven't looked beyond existing revenue streams and experimented with freemium (or at least "low-costium") models, along the lines of Microsoft studios releasing current AAA titles through Game Pass — which, while not free, is arguably inexpensive — but charging extra for optional in-game purchases and DLC.
In other words, make base versions of shows available for free or at a low cost, then charge a few bucks per season for premium features like early access to episodes, 4K/HDR, and bonus content. For major franchises, at least, I imagine there are at least enough fans willing to pay, say, $10-20 per season for such features to make such a venture worthwhile.
I'm happy to not deal with the world of pirating much these days. Only things I really pirate are some BBC/UK shows that likely won't ever make it to the US and the GD Pac-12 Network because they can't get their act together and get their network on any streaming service worth subscribing to.
There are also very few shows that I absolutely have to watch. There's far more good content out there than I have time to watch so if something is hard to get at, I'm generally fine with moving on to the next thing. I don't watch a lot of video.
I only subscribe to Netflix, and these days I don't even bother to check if things are on there first. If its a show I actually want to watch, why not go where it's guaranteed to be?
Ignoring cost, there's two things preventing me from watching content legally in acceptable quality: DRMs and connection speed.
The day streaming providers allow downloading high quality, DRM free video files to watch for later, I'll happily pay 3 bucks per movie.
As it stands, I can't play anything >720p because of DRMs. If you're willing to prevent paying customers from watching what they're paying for, just for the sake of reassuring your shareholders that you're combatting piracy (though failing miserably), then I have no remorse torrenting your content.
> As it stands, I can't play anything >720p because of DRMs.
Should be able to play 4k via the official Netflix app on Windows, assuming you have the relevant chain of DRM protection (ie. TPM might be required, along with HDCP cables and monitors).
> (though failing miserably),
I'd argue that they're winning, actually - torrenting these days requires some upfront costs (hard drives and a media server) and an initial time investment (dedicate $xx hours to learning and managing a media server + media library software). It's much easier to punch in your credit card to the 3 streaming services you want to use that month.
This is on top of the fact that most media giants contract out a service to automatically send DMCA takedown requests to the ISP of every torrent peer. If you're in the U.S. doing this, you're most likely going to get a letter from your ISP asking you to stop torrenting illegal content. Xfinity in particular has a 3 (or 6?) strike system for DMCAs, after which they'll terminate your service. Any torrenting effectively must be accompanied by a VPN that is torrent-friendly and ignores DMCAs.
Eh? I'm pretty sure at least 80% of pirates just delete the movie/show from their PC/laptop when they're done watching it, maybe casting it to a TV in the process.
Yes, but those are all non problems for anyone remotely tech-savvy. The point is, DRMs are hurting paying customers and do not even make it more difficult for pirates: when you download a torrent, DRMs are already completely stripped, so the only people prevented from consuming DRM'd content are paying customers with non-HDCP compliant hardware. That's insane.
> on Windows, assuming you have the relevant chain of DRM protection (ie. TPM might be required, along with HDCP cables and monitors).
Load of bollocks. The requirements are difficult to figure out and hard to fulfil. The standards in the ecosystem do not help at all either. Cables or monitors shouldn't be certified HDMI-compatible when they don't do HDCP for example.
The "just try and find out, and hope the situation won't change" approach is so customer-hostile I have no sympathy when someone moans about pirates yet again.
Exactly this. For a couple of years, I was onboard with streaming. It was convenient and frictionless. But now I find myself having to search google to find out which service a movie/show is on, only to find its on none of the ones I have. I pay for Hulu, share my inlaws Netflix account, and I have Amazon Prime. If whatever I want isn't readily available on one of those, I immediately just pirate it and put it on my Plex server (and my backup drive), where I'll always have access to it.
Gabe Newell put forward his thoughts on piracy and the success of Steam as a digital content platform about a decade ago now, saying “The easiest way to stop piracy is not by putting antipiracy technology to work. ... It's by giving those people a service that's better than what they're receiving from the pirates.” And for a couple of years, I think streaming services achieved that. Netflix and Hulu really did seem to capture the market in paid services because they were so convenient. But as the market fractures into smaller and smaller services, I think a lot of people are going to turn back to piracy.
Now epic is ruining gaming platforms. Was fine with origin, steam, Battle.net. Now I don’t want to buy anything cos worried epic will go bribe the game to remove it from other platforms. In favor of its own turd service.
It feels more like a hybrid model these days, with a mix of pirating and, well, sharing, but some companies might want to call it pirating at this point. I pay for netflix, and share it with friends, and they reciprocate with HBO, Hulu, and Disney+. It's a solid setup, and whatever I can't find on any of the above, I turn to the old standby.
With Everything, I can access any episode of whatever tv show I want instantly in full resolution. With Emby it takes a few extra seconds. I don't see how streaming can compete with local files.
I went to the TV app on my iPhone, searched for Survivor, scrolled to season 41 episode 9, and saw I could watch it for $3, or you can sign up for Paramount+.
It is $3 to instantly watch it as long as Apple decides to keep serving it and/or does not ban you from their services.
Presumably, if you subscribe to Paramount+, then you can also watch it as long as you are paying the monthly fee.
My point is I got to the media I was looking for rather quick. I would never spend my time watching Survivor for free, much less pay for it, but my opinion of the experience of trying to watch it was quick and easy.
Searching across multiple services is a key feature I have yet to find a reliable option for. For syndicated shows I want to see if they exist on a service I already pay for and if not, price shop.
Rokus do that for any of their channels that supports it, which are a whole lot.
You can use it on the web, too, and it shows which channels require a subscription: https://www.roku.com/whats-on/search I assume it's accurate for those services across other platforms than just Roku.
The predicted fracture has started, with different networks starting their own streaming services. Luckily, there seems to be an acceptable minimum level of quality in the UI and service so far, which was one of my fears.
We subscribe to a number of the services, but it's still cheaper than cable TV and there are no commercials, and it's all "on demand" which still seems to be pretty iffy on cable directly.
I feel like it's going to be a constant struggle to only subscribe to the ones that we're actually using, but it isn't as bad as I feared yet.
I'm still predicting that they'll get ridiculously fractured, and then realize their mistake and start bundling together again.
It has kind of already happened with Paramount+ and Showtime's bundle, and I think some of the others were doing it before them even. But these bundles are just a bandaid. You still need to actually use 2 different sites/apps to view your TV, and it's hard to get a list of what shows have new episodes across all the sites/apps. We end up just starting up each app and checking until we find something we want to watch right then.
> The predicted fracture has started, with different networks starting their own streaming services.
I do not understand why anyone would have expected any different. Is that not the beauty of the internet? That you can consume the content from anyone, regardless of the owner of the wire coming into your house? (which should not be a private entity in the first place, but that is a different topic)
I think people clearly want something like a Spotify or YouTube music, but for video content. You can host videos all you want on the internet, but YouTube and Spotify are popular because of it's aggregation and suggestions.
I want to watch shows that I'd like, I don't care who makes them. Finding good stuff to watch is harder than watching it, and people would clearly pay for a unified service that recommended you (and enabled 1 click viewing) of content regardless of license holder.
You can clearly see why content owners wouldn't want to do it, you lose the "stickiness" of your product, and have to compete with other shows for eyes, without the friction of "exit the app, open another app, find what you manually have discovered".
There's probably a 9 figure startup idea in there if you can figure out how to do it without getting sued.
I think that the hope was that you could pick a single service, pay them, and access anything.
When stated that baldly, it's fairly clear that this was never going to happen. Nevertheless, I think many of us would have preferred if, for example, content creators [0] did not all have their own streaming service, and cross-licensed to different streaming services, meaning that stuff wasn't available on only 1 such service.
[0] of course, in reality, no content creators have their own streaming service. They strike up deals with production companies, who strike up deals with distribution companies, some of whom have a streaming service, and those that don't strike deals with streaming services.
Hulu, for Showtime and HBO pre-HBO-Max, had the best approach I've seen to bundling. Amazon offered the same stuff - and more add-ons, even - but their UI is godawful, while Hulu's has improved a lot since it's crazy redesign.
Disney doesn't seem interested in keeping a one-stop-shop, though. There's weird crosstalk where I can see NHL games from my ESPN+ subsciption on Hulu, apparently, now, but not Disney's own Disney+ stuff? And the HBO deal seems unlikely to live forever with HBO Max being its own thing now, with its own separate set of content.
Agreed. I always find this argument from people really odd.
"They don't sell what I want in the form that I want therefore it's OK for me to steal what I want in the form I want"
Would they apply to same logic to Costco for instance? "Costco only sells the widget I want in 10 packs so that gives me the (moral) license to steal one widget from the producer"
Theft deprives the seller of the object, causing direct financial losses. With piracy, there's no difference between someone who doesn't consume the media and someone who pirates.
If consuming media without paying the copyright holder is morally wrong, then so is second hand purchasing and selling, as well as rentals. Indeed, copyright industries have a long and storied history of trying to shut down rental chains, to some success in Japan.
Just because you paid someone some money to view a TV series, doesn't mean you paid the people who funded production.
> With piracy, there's no difference between someone who doesn't consume the media and someone who pirates.
This assumes everyone who pirates media would not have paid for the media if piracy was not an option. If piracy was truly impossible or was highly enforced with strict penalties, do you think everyone who pirates media would just stop consuming that media?
I know of people who pirate every minute of content they watch on TV and pirate nearly every second of music they listen to. Do you think they would just cease watching TV shows and movies and cease listening to music? Or would they start purchasing access to some?
There's obviously some percentage of piracy that happens because content is truly unavailable in a way for the consumer to reasonably consume (region blocks, licensing deals, etc) or because the content is just astronomically priced out of their reach ($10/mo for someone who makes $100/mo income, $1,000 software packages for students) that would not have purchased it. I fully agree there would be some percentage of people who truly would never buy the media regardless of the ability to pirate. But I think if piracy was truly impossible or had almost assured steep penalties there would be some amount more sales.
How does not paying for something you weren't going to pay for anyway harm anyone? If it was a physical good, sure. But a zero marginal cost good? nah that's not selfish at all.
I think if the copyright on the work is older than 25 years, its immoral to extract rent on it. As much as a lot of Netflix's stuff isn't that great, at least they're making new content to talk about. Disney doesn't really deserve any more money for A New Hope.
I pay for Netflix and pirate what is available on Netflix, because my local video player has much better hardware acceleration than web browsers, is more efficient and as a byproduct gives me better video quality.
The most insane part of streaming is all services are capped at 720p on desktop. This is the biggest thing everyone should be yelling at lol. To watch anything on desktop I have to pirate it just to have watchable quality
But you still want to consume the media that Disney and Amazon makes (and at the end of the day, is hiring artists, writers, and animators), so you see some value in it.
Kind of muddies this righteous stance you're pretending to take.
First, I don't consider auto-playing content a commercial, and I don't consider the promoted content to be a commercial, either. (It's an advertisement, but not a commercial.) To me, a commercial is something that advertises something I'm not watching and prevents me from watching what I want to. A non-skippable trailer for a movie is a commercial, for instance.
So I don't consider Netflix to have commercials... And I'm pretty sure I turned that autoplay crap off in every instance that I could anyhow.
We've also got Disney, Showtime, Paramount+, HBO Max, and ... I feel like there's another. I haven't seen commercials on any of them, though I understand that some of them have forced commercials for certain shows on them, which I think is total BS. The live TV streams on them still have commercials, also, which I don't watch, ever. When available, I chose the subscriptions that eliminated commercials.
> To me, a commercial is something that advertises something I'm not watching and prevents me from watching what I want to. A non-skippable trailer for a movie is a commercial, for instance.
Autoplaying content is the advertising of something you were not watching (if you wanted to watch something you would have selected it) and prevents you from watching what you wanted to (again, you wanted to watch nothing, otherwise you would have selected something).
This is true and it is annoying, but there is an upside. When a streaming service starts to suck, it is super easy to cancel just that one service. Consumers finally have some pushback on the programming.
Cable ate itself when most channels realized that reality programming is astoundingly cheap to produce and it made no difference on their income. If you are subscribed to the Sci-Fi streaming service and it switches to pro wrestling content, you just cancel the service.
The predicted fracture and uptick in downloading. I subscribe to several services, yet I still download copies to watch in Plex because it's so much easier. Some of the streaming apps (HBO Max, looking at you) are horrible. I don't feel bad shifting my usage to a working app.
They'll eat themselves then. We're being nickeled and dimed to death with all the streaming services and the kids at least are not going to pay: they'll share accounts. And when that stops working they'll just go somewhere else where the content is free.
The anticipation on the executives part is probably something like a total squeeze on consumers, where they have no other option but to pay for these services to be in the know with the times or whatever (like how Squid Game memes have popped up everywhere overnight).
The reality on the consumer end is that people are paying less money over all. Me personally I pay for like one service and have the logins from like six family and friends. I don't even know who is paying for the underlying account, someone's mother down the line I'm sure. I'm not alone with this either. As more services pop up, people become less likely to want to have yet another individual subscription, and its very common to hear about people sharing account info among friends and family.
However it's gotten to the point of annoyance where even I will just resort to piracy half the time, with access to every streaming service at my fingertips, because there are still some movies that for whatever reason are rented digitally for something like $4 for 72 hours as if we've stepped back in time and reverted to the brick and mortar blockbuster business model for the information age vs offering a sane alternative.
It really blows my mind how merciful the RIAA has been on the otherhand allowing Spotify and Apple Music to have such a vast and unsplintered catalog.
Is that Paramount+ now? I have the service, but I don't think I've actually watched anything on it yet. My wife wanted Showtime for Dexter and was interested in things on Paramount+, too. She's used them, but she isn't as picky about UIs as I am, but I haven't heard any complaints.
I was kind of agreeing with the author, right up until he talked about setting up a pipeline involving Plex to have a good UX. Maybe I'm in the minority, and maybe I'll get downvoted, but to me, Plex has a horrific UX.
1) If I import something its scanners cant' scrape metadata for, it might as well not even exist. Its not displayed to me at all. I have to fiddle with title and re-scan until its metatdata scraper finally realizes what it is.
2) They've gone to some dark patterns to convince you to make a plex account and log in, just to talk to a server on the same LAN.
3) They now hide your content and promote their own streaming content in a tv-channels like grid. I don't want any of that, I just want my movie library, don't make me scroll for it.
There are other frustrations, but these are the high points. I need to find time to setup kodi again..
Seconded. Happily running it in a Docker container on an old Linux box. Set-up took minutes and it's been working, through occasional upgrades, for something like two years now without a hiccup. I mostly use the Roku and Web clients.
I spent years trying to get Kodi how I wanted it and it just never worked out. Between the jank and the way they've chosen to structure the UI, I don't think I'll ever like Kodi. Jellyfin is a much better fit for me, with no tweaking at all.
I use Plex (I don't pay for a Plex Pass) too, and I don't have the same issues.
1.) This only happens for me if, say, I use youtube-dl to download a music performance and then drop it in. Every time I've gone outside of my Sonarr/Radarr setup to manually add a TV show or movie, it's always handled the metadata just fine. It's when I throw it a curveball (that, tbh, I expected) that it doesn't handle it for me. Maybe I've just been lucky?
2.) Completely agree with you here. I'd love to know if there's a workaround, though I haven't spent any time looking into it.
3.) Not the case for me. My home page goes Recently Watched -> Recently Added Movies -> Recently Added TV -> the streaming bullshit you mentioned. The UI loads with the left menu open, and all I need to do is hit "down" one for TV, twice for movies; no scrolling necessary. To your point, I wish that it didn't show those extra streaming options at all.
I’m pretty happy with Plex, happy enough to buy a lifetime sub a few years back. I didn’t like when they started to mix in some of their Plex TV or whatever it is, but I (and my kids) find it pretty damn easy to use and at this point, I think I’ve paid around $3/mo for it.
4) Plex only supports some codecs. Oddly enough, my Samsung TV seems more flexible than Plex. For a handful of video files it's easier to just stick them on a USB stick and walk over to the TV than to wander lost in the dark forest of video transcoding.
The built in Samsung media player has correctly played audio from a wide array of pirated video files. I don't know if it does the right thing with multichannel audio, I only use the built in stereo speakers.
1. I completely agree. It's super frustrating that all these random kids videos I have I can't just drop in a folder and have Plex pick them up and just show them in alphabetic order.
The frustrating thing is that I could swear there used to be a "home videos" section or something for videos w/o metadata, but they seem to have killed that, or hidden it so well I can no longer find it.
I switched to Emby for these reasons. It works like Plex did six or seven years ago. The one downside is they charge for the android tv app, but otherwise I haven't run into many problems. It seemed a bit more feature complete then Jellyfin last time I looked.
>If I import something its scanners cant' scrape metadata for, it might as well not even exist. Its not displayed to me at all. I have to fiddle with title and re-scan until its metatdata scraper finally realizes what it is.
You can use the 'Fix Match' option within Plex and tweak it's search parameters (usually just title and year) until it matches. Alternatively you can paste stuff like IMDB IDs into the field and it'll match based on that instead. For some titles with obscene names etc, that's the best way to get an accurate match.
>They've gone to some dark patterns to convince you to make a plex account and log in, just to talk to a server on the same LAN.
Settings -> Network -> List of IP addresses and networks that are allowed without auth -> Put your LAN subnet in there.
>They now hide your content and promote their own streaming content in a tv-channels like grid. I don't want any of that, I just want my movie library, don't make me scroll for it.
Yeah that's a bit annoying, but can be fixed: Use the 'pin' functionality to force your libraries to the top. This applies even for unauthenticated users (just tested in a private tab).
I ditched Plex a few years back due to UI annoyances. I've come back because they're mostly resolved, and honestly the alternatives (Jellyfin etc) aren't great. I chucked the money at them for a lifetime pass as well (mostly for PlexAmp), so I guess I'm pretty invested now :)
There used to be a way to not have any metadata, and just get plex to show you the files. I think they called it something like "home movies". The first time I setup plex, it was easy. But I can't find it anymore..
Settings -> Libraries -> Add -> Type 'Other Videos' should do it. Though if anything's matched and you would prefer it to have other info showing, you can hit the pen icon for the item and manually enter fields.
Emby is open source and can stream outside your network for free. The metadata grabber fails sometimes or needs to be manually refreshed but you can edit metadata for each episode.
I’ve tried several times to setup plex and I just can’t get it working… it makes me feel stupid. I did briefly get video from my computer playing on the tv but couldn’t for the life of me figure out how to get the subtitles working.
Agreed, i gave up on Plex too. Too many annoyances and bugs.
Now i just use a simple app on my iPad (nPlayer - no subscription!) and just play files from a network share. Plain and simple and it always works perfectly without all the bloat.
If you look at twenty years ago, there's far more content available now, for far less money. Your minimum cable outlay back then would still cover the cost of a couple streaming services.
What there isn't is a good way to get a single subscription to watch anything you want. The cable bundle was close to that for TV content, but very lacking for movies. So if you want to watch a really wide sampling of TV content, it can feel like we're going backward, since there's no more one-stop-shop.
Careful what you wish for? The big desire then was a la carte, and right now you can bounce between streaming services at will, and they're all still far easier to cancel than cable.
Some things have fallen through the cracks, particularly long-running (going back to the pre-streaming era) major-network content like the aforementioned Survivor (a random missing episode seems like a weird problem, would love to know what was going on). And getting US content stuff internationally is often sub-par, although... I don't recall stories of this being easy at all two decades ago.
So consumers are overall definitely winning, but it's not a perfect victory for everyone.
I think that's pretty unlikely for something made this year. YoutubeTV and other Cable co's should be pretty similar in that regard. Buying the music for availability on "cable cable" and "CBS's own app" but not "streaming cable" would be baffling.
True, the edge case of "I want TV but not internet" users are not in a great place to access streaming content. They still have all their existing cable content, though, at least? And in 2001, good chance they were already paying for internet back then too.
I don't think it's realistic to assume "no internet" is a standard default these days, though, regardless of if/how you watch TV.
What do you mean by low bandwidth? 56K dialup? 1.5Mbps DSL? 10Mbit?
Streaming only was able to take off because broadband (back then this wouldn't even have been that much, >~2Mbps) was already widespread. So I'd say yes, nobody liked waiting for slow connections.
Yes? HD video calls and backing up your personal media. Even an old person can benefit from high upload being able to do a remote doctor visit with an HD camera.
Do you have more details or a source on this? I'm wondering if the 1 in 6 is no centralized household internet, or no access whatsoever e.g. via a smartphone with a data plan.
The info I'm thinking of came from a Pew report that went around work, I'm not finding that on the public internet. There is this, which comes up with a similar number:
"The number of mobile connections in the United States of America in January 2020 was equivalent to 107% of the total population."
I'm not sure how to disaggregate that to humans. I do personally have more than one device with a data plan, although I'm not sure how typical that is.
Huh, this is a good point actually. I was going to argue that people have internet anyways, but that's not always the case. My FIL would have to both lay an internet cable, pay for internet, and pay for streaming to switch.
True, but the cost of that connection also covers plenty of non-watching, so it would be fairer to add only a portion. I suppose if you measured it by data transfer watching is likely a large chunk, but you wouldn't choose to go without any kind of connection, even if you weren't interested in streaming, unless you really couldn't afford it.
The biggest difference is that people use the internet for far more things than just streaming, so the internet bill is diluted into the overall utility. For example, without good internet speeds you couldn't attend classes properly in lock down, nor attend meetings with people across the country or world.
Good internet is becoming more of an overall utility than just a luxury.
I've seen teachers and young students during covid, it wasn't pretty.
I have that feeling that internet is boiling frogs making people think it's that amazing christic thing when a few phone calls and organization would go as deep. Plus kids and teachers are often computer illiterate, a single file format can delay information for days if not weeks because people don't know how to mail or open something.
Fair point, I suppose that would be kinda like including the price of a TV onto the cable bill comparison, and then the computer on streaming, and etc etc.
I don't know what the situation is like in the US, but in Canada: the typical cost of basic cable service plus a couple of cable packages in 1990 cost roughly the same as basic internet service plus a streaming service today. It is difficult to even claim that this comparison is even remotely fair for a variety of reasons.
- The only major loss with the current system is local programming. You may be able to get it with free OTA channels, but people subscribed to basic cable in the 1980's and 1990's simply because cable was more reliable than a good residential antenna tower so it is justifiable to count this as a loss.
- The current system is much better in that you can watch commercial free programs when you please, any given streaming service is usually less expensive than any given cable bundle, and the content in any given streaming service will usually have more in common than the channels in any given cable bundle. (Cable companies were notorious for putting similar channels in different packages.) As an added bonus: the "watch when you please" aspect means that you can defer viewing, may that be to switch between streaming services to keep monthly costs down or to simply cancel during the months when you have better things to do than watch television.
- The current system is also better in that Internet service can replace many other products and services. Subscribing to newspapers is a novelty these days. If it wasn't for societal expectations, people would have dropped phone service since the Internet provides far better communications options than traditional landlines.
> a random missing episode seems like a weird problem, would love to know what was going on
In almost every case like that, the answer is "we can't figure out if this is licensed for streaming because it didn't exist yet". Usually it's music, which they licensed for "broadcast and video cassette release" or some similar language. In most cases they've decided DVD is close enough to VHS to still count, but is streaming? Courts haven't really decided yet.
The season 8 premiere of Forged in Fire last year got pulled because one of the contestants turned out to be a neo-Nazi with a visible neo-Nazi tattoo.
> What there isn't is a good way to get a single subscription to watch anything you want.
I would even settle for a way where I can ask, "Where can I stream X?" There used to be canistream.it -- which is apparently now being rebuilt but has long been mostly useless. Fingers crossed that it becomes useful.
The Google TV app does a good job at that. It checks all my installed apps and links directly to the media item in that app if I pick a piece of media on one. It will also link to services I don't have, or offer a pay-to-play through Google itself.
Media content is typically sold based on the populations’ purchasing power. It is why the same book is sold in Asia for $5 that is $50 in the US.
Since the marginal cost of selling an additional unit is near zero, it makes sense for sellers to heavily price discriminate such that poorer people are charged what they can afford and richer people are charged what they can afford.
Would it be legal to ask for a paysheet and determine the price based on that? When I hear price discrimination, I do understand that it’s always been the deal, but I wonder whether we’re trending towards something proportional to salary.
I am sure it is legal to ask for the pay sheet, but no seller would give you that. Sellers usually do not price discriminate merchandise that is not differentials within the same country since commerce within the country cannot be easily restricted.
That is where brands come in for differentiable products. The generic brand lotion and the name brand lotion might come from the same factory. Maybe it is even the same product, or the different in quality is only slightly better for the name brand. But now the seller can target people willing to pay $x for lotion, and people willing to pay $2x for basically the same lotion.
Or you implement “binning”, where products of worse quality get branded differently, even though the sale price difference between the better quality product and the generic quality product is disproportionately larger than the cost to produce the better quality product than the generic product.
Anyway, you cannot do this for a movie or tv show, so the sellers of movies/tv shows do it more crudely via country or region of the world.
Outlets get differentiated too. You can buy last years hardcover books at Family Dollar at 50-75% off. You used to get softcovers at the supermarket at a discount as well.
Between the time element and snobbery, the market is segmented and revenues maximized.
That would not be prohibited, but it might not be a good business idea due to customer resistance.
Classic economic theory on pricing lists commonly used options that essentially try to achieve that but with various indirect methods:
1. provide discounts to various demographics that are known afford less - e.g. students, seniors, etc.
2. provide different prices at times or places that have customers with different average ability to pay - e.g. geographic discrimination, and also discounts provided at times when traditionally employed people can't take them.
3. simple "inconvenient obstacles" e.g. coupon schemes, intentionally created queues, etc where people who accept the inconvenience get a better price, and people who can afford to pay more simply don't bother and pay.
4. Direct, prolonged, serious personal bargaining and haggling, resulting in an individually negotiated price that depends on your willingness to pay.
But IMHO people would not like if it was explicitly based on their ability to pay, so companies try to disguise that.
Sure, but even the $20/$30 minimum cable packages in the US were more than Netflix is today, without even including inflation.
What was the situation outside of the US if you wanted to watch The Sopranos or Sex and the City or something else on HBO back then? My assumption is that this wasn't all free and over the air?
No. In NZ we only got what the local broadcasters had licensed.
In retrospect, they did a great job of curation.* I seem to spend more time looking for something to watch than watching, and often just give up and go to bed.
* Up til subscription satellite TV became available. Quality was inversely related to the number of available channels.
But any payment to Netflix is on top of the (significantly higher) ransom one pays to Comcast/Spectrum/etc for leasing bandwidth on the pipes (which cable bills include in the default). So cost of streaming content today is Netflix + internet connection with enough bandwidth.
Yes, but the cost of N streaming services is not N * (Netflix + Internet), it's (N * Netflix) + Internet — and the internet has utility outside of streaming services as well. The internet price is the same whether you subscribe to 0 or 100 streaming services. If you just want to stream from one provider and otherwise not use the internet at all, I guess counting them together that way as the "price of entertainment" makes sense. But I don't think that's a very common situation.
I don't disagree with anything you said. But I should add or clarify to parent post that there is some difficulty in installing and maintaining infrastructure that affords a company power over the customer. Said power is how they "easily" achieved a monopoly.
I think the focus should be on keeping the market fractured. If content is of poor quality that just means the population is ok with poor quality. There is business to be made on poor quality. /s
Once upon a time I worked as a CSR for a cable company, and a couple customers, old honest people, opened the conversation along the lines "I only come back because, impossible as that might appear, the other company is even worse than you are"
> the $20/$30 minimum cable packages in the US were more than Netflix is today
I highly disagree with that sentiment. Cheap cable packages maybe had 40 channels which barely expanded on the local broadcast availability, littered with advertisements. No real dedicated movie channels, movies were often cropped and edited to fit the time slots and ratings allocations for the channels when they did air. Time shifting meant having to keep a VCR well stocked, or later buy/rent a DVR. And if your VHS or DVR was full, well, you're out of luck, you just missed that episode. Decide you want to start watching some TV show that's been on for a few seasons? You're out of luck, better go rent some tapes or DVDs to get caught up. Want to watch on the go? Sorry, you're out of luck, the only place you can consume this is at home, or lug around a TV, VCR, and VHS tapes with you.
For less than half the price of your supposed $20 cable package (before adding additional expensive hardware) I can watch literally thousands and thousands of movies and shows at a moment's notice anywhere I have an internet connection.
Interestingly, much higher quality internet/mobile network access seems to also be cheaper outside the US. I was kinda shocked when I heard how much some acquaintance paid for gigabit internet/ 4G mobile in Spain.
Yes. Internet has always been 30€ here in France, and nowadays 20€ per month for fibre. Mobile is 12€ for 50-100GB. Many people thank the EU’s competition watchdog for that, and it’s probably politically desired. It still didn’t create a Silicon Valley ecosystem, though ;)
This is only true in letter (rather than spirit) because subscription television in the UK was delivered by satellite (“Sky”) rather than cable - a fully loaded sports and movies package would easily dwarf $170/mo, and still required a separate phone line from BT in addition.
Sky don't show their prices on their website, but according to [1] the "Sky Complete bundle" costs £111/month. And Virgin Media have a £99/month bundle [2] (although admittedly it includes broadband and mobile phone)
They weren't a thing inside the USA unless you loaded up on premium movie and sports channels. From 2004~2018 I always paid around 45-60 for basic cable. Sometimes less if I bundled with internet.
Per https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/ a $50 cable bill from 1990 is about $110 now. Depending on where your reference point is, more streaming for less money sounds good, but don't forget Netflix was around with no real competition for a long while, and at $10/month. $50 (for Netflix+Hulu+Paramount+Disney/whatever vs $10 is quite the increase!
You could definitely pay less than $50 for cable throughout the 90s, it's HD which I remember pushing prices up. But those would be your basic packages, without addons, and especially without HBO and such.
But now if all you wanted was HBO, you could get it for under 20 bucks if you have anything but the slowest internet packages!
Except Netflix never had the streaming content that you can get today for $50--both because of its own original content and because a lot of content (especially films) was never available on Netflix streaming.
I agree with the parent. Without live TV, a streaming bundle you assemble is clearly cheaper than you were paying for cable TV (or cable TV plus Netflix) in the US. Today, add a live TV streaming service and you're probably back to about price parity with a lot more choice of content.
I think expecting Netflix to stick around at $10/mo with such a library of content was unrealistic. Sometimes there are odd fluctuations in markets.
For example, the current used car market has insane values with used vehicles costing more than the MSRP on new ones sometimes. Likewise, when Netflix had no competition, they were able to sign deals with content providers for almost nothing because content providers thought streaming was worthless. Either streaming was going to fail and that $10 deal would go away or streaming was going to succeed and content providers wouldn't license content so cheaply. That era was an odd thing in the market before content owners realized that streaming wasn't just a little additional revenue, but a replacement for their service.
I don't think you can really compare a market blip to a sustainable business model. HBO and others weren't going to continue licensing their catalogues to Netflix once it was clear that streaming was popular. They made the mistake of licensing to Netflix assuming that they'd be getting a little extra pocket money rather than cannibalizing their services. That mistake is probably the reason Netflix is the giant it is today. Netflix signed deals to license content before content owners realized the value of streaming. They used that content to gain subscribers until they could afford to build their own library of first-party content.
Even from Netflix's side, they might have been spending more on content than they wanted to long-term to try and gain subscribers that would be sticky as their library waned and they transformed from "we licensed most of the content you want" to "we're another HBO with a limited content selection".
These things happen. We saw MoviePass come and go because it was an unsustainably good deal.
I think it's also important to remember that back in that era of Netflix, most people were still paying for cable and renting DVDs. Maybe you weren't, but most people were. I think it's important to think about the whole amount that people were spending and people were spending a lot on their entertainment. It was perfectly normal to head to a Blockbuster and spend $10 renting two DVDs each weekend. That feels like such an alien concept today, but people were spending $100 on cable plus $40 on rentals and getting a lot less entertainment than they are today.
Sure, if you were one of the few that only had Netflix, it was a glorious time. $10/mo never bought so much entertainment! Likewise, if you were a MoviePass subscriber, no one had ever gotten so many theater tickets for so little money. But it wasn't going to last because it was unsustainably good. Once MoviePass found that people would actually use the service, it was dead in the water. Once content owners saw that people would cancel their HBO subscription because Netflix had HBO's content, the era of Netflix having such an expansive library for so cheap would end as the deals ran out.
Comparing current prices to a market blip isn't really a fair comparison - but there was a pretty great 5 years in there.
I want more a la carte. Give me one service without bundles where every "channel" has a price. I don't want my provider negotiating a 14-channel package for every viewer (YouTubeTV and NBC Universal). I don't want MTV and VH1, but I do want Tennis Channel (which isn't an option).
What bothers me is missing shows from my Countries' offerings. Netflix is supposed to have Arrested Development. Not from my Country. Why? No information.
The answer is always the same: no licensing deal could be arranged. The precise reasons for that may vary, and certainly the license holders will vary, but since there's essentially nothing you could do about that, there seems to be little point in Netflix telling you over and over "this would be available if we could get a license deal"
Plus, you can share it with family members. And watch on multiple devices. And turn services on/off without having to get on the phone. It's much, much better.
People seem to forget how bad things used to be. We are extremely fortunate with the ability to watch what we want, when we want, without being interrupted by commercials, for an extremely low cost. There also appears to be a great deal of progress with respect to being able to view programs/movies produced for foreign markets. But the best thing is:
> you can bounce between streaming services at will, and they're all still far easier to cancel than cable.
Add to that cheaper, since you don't have to deal with connection fees. If you know that you're not going to have the time to use the service for a couple of months because you're too busy with work, you don't have to pay for it. If you have decided that you are going to spend most of your summer pursuing outdoor recreational activities, you don't have to pay for it. If you're going on the road for a few weeks (vacation or business), you don't have to pay for it. If you decide that you want to watch programming on two different streaming services, you can simply rotate through the services on a monthly basis and only pay for one service at a time.
Why do I bring all of this up when it's not directly related to the article: it's because these articles reek of entitlement. Yes, there are times when licensing causes shows or movies to fall through the cracks. On the other hand, the situation is also far better than it used to be when using the same metrics. Not only that, but it can be a heck of a lot less expensive even when factoring in the cost of an Internet connection.
On the one hand, we got what we asked for: _a la carte_.
I think what makes people frustrated is that cable channels were _themed_. I was frustrated that I was paying for TLC and Bravo because I didn't watch reality tv. I was paying for Discovery even though I didn't watch nature shows. I was paying for Lifetime even though I didn't watch cheap shows for women. I was paying for ESPN even though I didn't watch sports.
I wanted to pay for the comedy, the scifi/syfy, the cartoons, and the kids programming. That was, like, five or six channels.
Which streaming service do I go to now for the science fiction? Which streaming service do I go to now for the horror or the feel-good sitcoms?
Streaming arose during the collapse of genre channels. There are now three genres of programming: prestige, drek, and children's.
> There are now three genres of programming: prestige, drek, and children's.
This is something I've been feeling for awhile but haven't managed to articulate this clearly. All new programming is either a mega-budget tentpole or it's something to fill out the menus.
I think of that as "Look at all the new shows Netflix has" -> "95% of new Netflix shows wouldn't have been funded under the old model, because they're bad"
Most of them aren't so much "bad" as "of narrow taste". They certainly look awful to me, but Netflix isn't just throwing money away. They've got a ton of data on what people want to watch. Somebody is watching this dreck.
Some of it is genuinely a failure. Funding an entertainment project is always a pig in a poke. Even promising things sometimes just flop. But streaming makes it possible to lower the opportunity costs of those flops, so they can take bigger chances.
I say "bad" in the sense that Transformers is bad.
In the sense that an F-22 is used for CAS / bombing in The Tomorrow War (which I'd assume was one of Amazon's better funded efforts).
A lot of them just feel like "Oh, you just gave some money to people, removed the usual checks and balances that exist in filming, and told them to deliver a movie ASAP."
It'd be one thing if they were making niche or more interesting content, but it feels like they're mostly just making more action movies and baking shows... faster and at lower quality.
> A lot of them just feel like "Oh, you just gave some money to people, removed the usual checks and balances that exist in filming, and told them to deliver a movie ASAP."
I've been sort of watching "La Brea" thinking this show is pretty bad. Then I'll watch some sci fi made-for-TV movie from long ago, and that'll be far worse.
How does one even write lines like:
"We need to work together!"
"I won't give up on you!"
There was a time when Netflix shows seemed to be almost made by algorithm or big data- as if someone said like 32-37 year olds love detective shows with angry but smart main characters. My sense is its gotten better with more quality and less quantity lately though.
> Which streaming service do I go to now for the science fiction?
Exactly. Every company has segmented their content by company, not by type. Sure, I can buy a subscription to Boomerang and get a lot of cartoons, but it's just the cartoons owned by Warner. But not all of them, because they've moved some of them--like Dexter's Laboratory--off to be HBO Max exclusives.
There's no way to say "I want a science fiction themed service" that includes Paramount and HBO and the old PTEN and the like, because no company would stand for another service mixing their IP like that.
Peacock has Battlestar Galactica but the Caprica prequel is on NBC only for cable customers. Disney+ can’t put the Spider-Man movies next to the other Marvel movies. When Doctor Who first came to HBO Max, you couldn’t watch it on a Roku TV because it wasn’t HBO Now or HBO Go. The industry is littered with exclusive regional contracts that continually expire and don’t make sense to the customers.
One thing I actually miss from themed channels is that they selected content for you, which is actually nice sometimes.
Yes, sometimes you just want to watch a specific show and you want to watch it now, and the streaming services are great for that.
But sometimes you just want to turn on the TV and watch something, anything, without really making a choice. I still have cable because it's included in the rent, and sometimes it's nice to just switch the channel to FXX or something and get maybe an old episode of the Simpsons, or a new episode, or maybe some Family guy, or maybe an old episode of some other comedy series, or maybe something completely new.
And that's nice and has value, but streaming services absolutely suck at that, because you always have to make a choice yourself with them.
I realized exactly this recently: people don't channel surf anymore, and I kind of miss it.
It was relaxing to me, post- many cable channels (81?), pre- guide/DVR, to just click through.
"Oh, Armageddon is on again. Hercules. (flip, flip, flip)" and then settle on something random, pulled from what's currently playing.
It used to be: survey and then choose from a very limited but rotating subset of all content.
Now it's: choose from all content ever and then find where the content lives and then figure out how much of it you want to watch.
For movies, the new way seems superior. For TV, it feels like a lot has been lost. And overall, I feel like the new system definitely leads to winner-take-all.
It can pick either something you're already watching (TV series or unfinished movie), or guess something based on what it has learned about you. Of course it's just the Netflix catalog, but that's pretty extensive.
It sounds godawful to me, so I've never used it. But it sounds like almost precisely what you just asked for.
Its funny, but I never watched broadcast TV or Cable primarily becuase "just watching whats on" meant a 99% chance of sitting through dreck that I can't stand, so I never did it. In 1995, I had a collection of over 200 VHS tapes of movies I loved (all purchased, not copied.) In 2005 I had a collection of 500 DVDs that I had purchased.
Today, I have about 700 movied ripped from DVDs (and the DVDs still in boxes somewhere), and 500 movies purchased on iTunes. I don't subscribe to Netflix, Amazon Prime, HBO, or any other streaming service because, again, 99% of it is dreck I can't stand. So instead I have a collection of 1200 movies that I like and specifically chose and purchased. Some are better than others, but they're all ones I like.
I don’t believe this is true, and I can’t find any confirmed examples of it happening.
There have been cases where users thought they lost a purchase, but it ended up being an issue where they changed storefronts to one where the purchase wasn’t available. The movie reappeared when they went back to the original storefront (and I believe even that behavior was a bug that’s been fixed).
I keep an eye on this because I’ve also purchased a lot of movies from iTunes.
The licensing part is most likely true. Can you download purchases for offline play in a random (non-Apple) video player? Or do you need iTunes to exist in order to watch "your" purchases?
Cable channels were themed, but cable packages were not. There was not a realistic chance of that changing. The technology was not good enough for that. If I recall correctly, analog cable depended upon bandpass filters that were rarely perfect so it was best to group channels in blocks. When digital cable entered the fray, the other motivation entered the forefront: it simply didn't make business sense to sell individual channels.
When it comes to that business sense, we probably have the closest thing to perfection today. Streaming services are forced to compete against each other, with the only real constraints being the cost/restrictions of licensing content and the cost of distribution (i.e. not controlling infrastructure to the home). It is very easy and relatively inexpensive to pick and choose, provided that you are willing to defer your viewing. You also have the choice between large streaming services that offer a broad range of genres and smaller ones that offer more specialized programming.
Yes, that closest thing to perfection is far from perfect. On the other hand, I very much doubt that we are going to get anything closer unless we are willing to pay the price.
> Cable channels were themed, but cable packages were not.
Themed packages did and do exist, though most channels for cable were normally available mainly through stacked tiers. But alongside the main generic tiers, language-specific (especially spanish language) and some other (sports, often) themed packages were available from many cable providers, and premium channels were often available in themed groups as well as individually.
I agree with the point but I will say that that's not how bundle pricing works. If you have 100 channels and you want to pay for two of them, the price doesn't go from $100 to $2, it goes from $100 to $90 (arbitrary high number here) because you have people who are willing to pay $45 even though you only want to pay $1. At that point, most people say just give me the other 98 channels
> On the one hand, we got what we asked for: _a la carte_.
But we don't. It's worse than ever now. Shows are fragmented into way too many different subcriptions (netflix, etc) each with their monthly fee and a bunch of stuff I won't be watching.
True a la carte would mean eliminating all those exlusive distributions so I could get any show from any streaming vendor for a one-off price (say, 25 cents for a show, $2 for a movie, or whatever) without having to subcribe to any recurring service.
I've given up, I'm not going to subscribe to half a dozen things, that's way too inconvenient and expensive.
I remember most people, including myself, would get the full DirectTV/Cable subscription, hook up TiVo, and just record/watch on demand whatever you want. Those days seem impossible now. It certainly feels like things have regressed.
Well, anything that was part of the cable package--which increasingly was not where a significant amount of top TV (and certainly films) were available from, especially without adding on a lot of premium content like HBO.
I canceled my cable TV as I increasingly realized I simply was watching either live or recorded on my TiVo stuff once in a blue moon.
Indeed. I used to have cable, over 100 channels for $30 and MythTV hooked up to record whatever I wanted.
To replicate that today I'd need to subscribe to many different services all with separate monthly fees and way less conveniece (a single unified interface through MythTV was magical).
So I don't watch any TV anymore, oh well. More time to code.
> To replicate that today I'd need to subscribe to many different services all with separate monthly fees and way less conveniece (a single unified interface through MythTV was magical)
Plex shares or even Pseudo TV Live partially could replicate this. But it’s a grey area obviously.
Correct, things used to be worse than they are now. Does that mean that the automatic rebuttal to any complaint with anything remotely modern is that at least we're not still living in mud huts and writing on sheepskins? Nobody's forgotten that things were worse, we're just not willing to let that hold us back from making them better. To claim the article "reeks of entitlement" is unnecessarily dismissive of the (in my experience) entirely accurate claims the author makes about the current state of on-demand television.
>Careful what you wish for? The big desire then was a la carte, and right now you can bounce between streaming services at will, and they're all still far easier to cancel than cable.
"a la carte" means I don't subscribe to anything and instead I have access to "all the things" with a separate charge for each thing. The whole idea back then was to compete with the ease and access of piracy like Steam did.
That said, "careful what you wish for" currently applies to sitcom episodes for rent on Amazon costing more per minute than mega budget movies.
There is also too much "content" being made, and not enough quality movies to watch. There's a recent reddit thread[1] about this weird trend lately where more and more of what's offered is junk "made for TV" quality content. Even the word we use for it is revealing: Content. So boring. So gray and bland. Like a dry cardboard media ration made specifically to be consumed by some global ISO-standard Consumer. Everything has this odd B-movie With Big Stars hue. But two months after you view it, you struggle to even remember what it was about. Polished, featureless content, but hey, it's in 4K and stars Dwayne Johnson.
High-quality, daring, inspired, more than superficially controversial, world-changing movies are another casualty of the rise of streaming.
Is there some difference between streaming companies and classic movie studios that makes this the case? Arguably, the current state of movies is a direct result of studios realizing that well-produced, middle of the road content is the most profitable.
Of course, I could be missing something about the industry and how streaming has shaped it. I just struggle to see how the streaming ecosystem has different content requirements than a normal movie studio.
> Is there some difference between streaming companies and classic movie studios that makes this the case?
I have no inside knowledge and am fully speculating, including some random tidbits I've read here and there.
Think about how Netflix changed when moving from DVD to streaming. They used to optimize for recommending you movies you would rate highly. Now it's all about what keeps people viewing the longest.
2 middle of the road acceptable movies that you rate a 6/10 is more viewing time than 1 higher quality production that you'd rate a 9/10 -- I doubt the costs are they cut and dry but I think that's the idea. More content that is passable wins out against less content that is of higher quality.
> Is there some difference between streaming companies and classic movie studios that makes this the case?
Yes. Movie studios and streamers have different business models. Movie studios also deal with more "legacy" actor contract negotiations and the like (see disney v scarlet). Theater released movies make most of their money upfront, and make money out on a per-view basis. So they need as many viewers as early as possible.
With streamers, they can lose the subscription any month, and only gain it back if they lure you - so they're incentivized to give you "anchors" that keep you there. Think game of thrones keeping people subscribed to HBO month over month or Squid Games that gets lots of attention. Once you're there, they just have to have "something" for those days you don't really know what to watch. That "something" is different for everyone, so they have to make lots of low budget generic stuff that appeals, collectively, to a wide audience. Each show/movie can have few viewers, because its going for niche targeting en mass - think themed cable channels but one company has to make something for each theme. Once a streamer makes a show, its "free" to them to share it with as many people as possible, but also doesn't cost them anything to not show it.
Ben Thompson (stratechery) has talked about this a lot, check him out!
>Arguably, the current state of movies is a direct result of studios realizing that well-produced, middle of the road content is the most profitable.
yes, if streaming movies well-produced, middle of the road, not terribly expensive is most profitable - as per this recent discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29247571 on red notice
if cinema, big expansive events most profitable (currently)
if shows, high quality addictive, dramatic, character driven, etc. is most profitable
why is quality series more profitable than middle of road? because you have to get people to make the investment of spending 10+ hours.
why are medium quality competence streaming movies most profitable? because many people are willing to spend 90 minutes passing the time with something mildly enjoyable, despite the many draws on our time it's still not seen as a serious investment.
why are big events blah blah blah - because it costs a lot to go out it is a hassle compared to staying home, I tend to go to restaurant as well when I do it so for me at least it definitely has to have been a night worth it at the end, and something big is more likely to make everyone like whoa I had an experience I can't have at home.
The big difference is that movie studios actually directly offer higher quality content, simply due to the fact that they make a side business of selling their low quality content to companies like Netflix who are more than happy to purchase a finished film and throw it on the front page for all their subscribers to see even if its crap. The movie studio is able to get a return on a steaming pile of crap film that was probably super cheap to produce and avoids the reputation tarnish, netflix is able to advertise a wider catalog and hey, sometimes these junk films really do pop off for netflix like what happened with Kissing Booth.
The UFC discovered the same thing: they realized they made more money on high-volume, non-prestige fight cards than their former model of "every fight card matters"
> studios realizing that well-produced, middle of the road content is the most profitable
I'm curious if they actually have scientifically valid data to back that up, or if it is just assumption and common knowledge from industry people with the common trait of not questioning if the assumptions are actually right. It is very hard to tell from where I'm sitting, because there is so much puffery and fake numbers tossed at the public. Actually comparing apples to apples would be difficult, as there are so many variables such as advertising budget and media placement to account for.
I don't see why you would blame that on streaming. There was plenty of low-quality content before netflix. Movie budgets have gotten huge, in order to guarantee a return, they play to the lowest common denominator, including international audiences.
They wouldn't be making over a dozen films a year if they weren't making money. Hereditary was their top grossing at like $80 million and was a $10 million film. Lady bird did $79 million on a $10 million budget as well. Moonlight did $65 million on a $4 million budget.
If it's not obvious, the more diverse a group is, then lower the lowest common denominator will be. That's just a law of nature.
So if you are selling a global movie, you are not going to be able to rely on cultural references, witty banter, or sophisticated plots. You will not even be able to rely on a lot of dialogue as the movie will need to be dubbed and subtle dialogue doesn't translate well.
You will rely on boobs and explosions, because that's the lowest common denominator that will sell well in New York, Indonesia, Nigeria, Italy, Egypt, Chile, and China. And if many nations don't allow boobs, then explosions it is.
There just isn't a lot that the world has in common, which forces movies with a global audience to be extremely shallow.
One reason, for example, for the dearth of good comedy films is that it's really hard for comedy to translate across different cultures. Maybe something like slipping on a banana peel will work, but more sophisticated stuff doesn't work.
> High-quality, daring, more than superficially controversial, world-changing movies are another casualty of the rise of streaming.
Yes, but what has maybe replaced the movie is the high-quality, daring, world-changing series. Squid Game, Outlander, etc. Directors and consumers are now no longer limited to a 3 hour time in the theater, as far as the art of the motion picture is concerned.
> Careful what you wish for? The big desire then was a la carte, and right now you can bounce between streaming services at will, and they're all still far easier to cancel than cable.
I feel like people say they want a la carte but that's not actually what they want. What they want is all the good content and none of the crap filler content, for cheap. People pushed for a la carte because in their mind all content costs the same, so they figured that by removing the content they don't want and only keeping the content they do want, they would save tons of money. They don't understand that the good content (live sports, FX, AMC, HBO, et al) is precisely what studios are charging a premium for and what is driving most of the cost in packages in the first place.
It's roughly akin to someone looking at a Vegas buffet that costs $100 and features 100 entrees and saying "well there are 100 entrees but really all I want is the cheese, prime rib, crab legs, and caviar, so if I remove the other 96 entrees then this should cost $4" then being shocked when they are still charged 40 dollars. Sure it's cheaper but in their minds it should be an order of magnitude cheaper than it is.
Remember that streaming services don’t only compete with each other, but they also compete with torrents. Netflix won not because of being cool or good, but because it was way more convenient than torrents for the majority of content. This isn’t true anymore, as all major studios want in on the market, which makes the TAM smaller due to fragmentation and lost network effects. (It is common to hear people saying they won’t pay for more than 1, 2, maybe 3 services.) Ice is thinner than it seems, but streaming services know this.
> Ice is thinner than it seems, but streaming services know this.
but would streaming services rather compete with piracy than another big player?
With piracy, they have the law on their side - they can lobby for rules to punish piracy using state resources, rather than their own. They cannot do so for their competitors.
I think the archaic system with tv/movies that does not exist (in the same capacity) with games and music is the point of frustration with customers. The barriers are a bit strange. Consumers aren't really averse to spending money for content they want, as evidenced not just from streaming but Steam/GOG, which by contrast directly benefits creators more. With paid streaming it's more abstracted. You're paying, but with the machinations it's unclear how well content creators are compensated or how it will eventually benefit them. Even with music the option to directly support artists, with digital download purchases, is dead easy between Bandcamp and other options. Can't do that with film, have to buy a physical copy that will be eventually be obsolete hardware, and costs more. To be fair I think there's more of a "one and done" attitude people have towards film, consumed then disposed, so streaming lends better to it.
I remember the VHS era of renting movies. I'm fortunate enough to live in a large city that had a great, independent, rental store. Lots of selection. I suspect the selection at that rental store is better than the selection at any of these streaming services, or all of them combined.
My dad recorded many made-for-TV movies in the 1980s. These movies exist on IMDB, but nowhere else. I wonder why TV networks don't make their back catalog available.
After all, TCM seems to do well running their back catalog of movies.
>My dad recorded many made-for-TV movies in the 1980s. These movies exist on IMDB, but nowhere else.
Dear Lord, this! This!
I would dearly love to be able to get a good copy of Love is Never Silent with working subtitles but sadly since it was a Hallmark made for television movie it's simply not available to me. There are certainly others like that, half remembered movies that I'd watched in my youth that would be worth revisiting as an adult or to share with others but they're simply unavailable except through IMDB to remind myself that I didn't imagine them, they do exist.
> What there isn't is a good way to get a single subscription to watch anything you want. [...] So if you want to watch a really wide sampling of TV content, it can feel like we're going backward, since there's no more one-stop-shop.
This is the issue for me. My lineup of currently-"airing" shows requires subscriptions to Netflix, HBO Max, CBS All Access, Disney+, and Amazon Prime Video. And I feel like I'm forgetting another one or two.
To be fair, these subscriptions, in total, do cost less than what I was paying for cable back in 2005 (last time I had cable).
I don't want one streaming platform to rule them all. A monopoly doesn't sound great. So ok, we keep the idea of several competing streaming platforms. I'm sure there are downsides to this, but maybe a legal requirement for compulsory licensing to competing platforms under RAND terms might help?
22 years ago Napster existed. 21 years ago the Gnutella (LimeWire etc.) and eDonkey2000 networks existed. 20 years ago Kazaar and BitTorrent existed. Around that time, LAN parties with hundreds of seats and 100mbps connections existed, and attendees would use Direct Connect or simple SMB shared to download pirated media for 24 hours straight.
This is mentioned in other comments, but a large part of the reason streaming services got going was because piracy was so much more convenient than the brutal grind of actually paying for something. Users could be sitting in their living rooms with wallets out ready to go, and still choose piracy, because the only other alternative was waiting for a physical CD or DVD to arrive.
If the streaming wars do too much damage to consumers, they'll just flip the playing board and go back to piracy.
> If the streaming wars do too much damage to consumers, they'll just flip the playing board and go back to piracy.
I think that's already happening among the tech literate. The difference now is that the majority of consumers are not technically inclined and don't mind paying for several streaming services to get easy access to their favorite content, so the industry generally doesn't care about losing a small fraction to piracy.
Pirating content is now more technically difficult than paying for a service, but the benefits are still there: DRM-free content that can be consumed on any device, accessed offline, safe against removal, licensing issues, region locks, easily shareable, etc.
Paying for a streaming service now has the same issues as paying for cable did: you get access to tons of low quality content you don't care about just to watch the few shows and movies you actually do. Content curation is still an unsolved problem and the industry is ripe for disruption once someone figures out what I actually want to watch and how I can pay for only that.
Or pirating will become easier and they'll continue to lose revenue.
> So consumers are overall definitely winning, but it's not a perfect victory for everyone.
You could say the same in an alternate reality where everyone is still putting up with using Sourceforge and getting the occasional binary download bundled with malware. People would have forgotten how much more difficult it was to receive CDs by mail, so by your definition these poor alt developers would be winning.
A la carte might only make sense in a world of themed channels. After that, pricing gets hard because no one wants to pay $3 for an episode of Friends (I suppose the season is only $10), they want to rent access to everything like with Spotify, but it's complicated because sports cost a lot more than most other content, and content like reality shows is dirt cheap to make. Then there's pricing streaming movies. Everything older than 2 years included, add-on charge for new releases? People don't like microtransactions. And this is in a hypothetical world where video streaming isn't balkanized.
> If you look at twenty years ago, there's far more content available now, for far less money. Your minimum cable outlay back then would still cover the cost of a couple streaming services.
That's an odd argument and reminds me of the situation with science publishers that led to scihub and friends: Publishers were offering package deals to universities which technically had a wealth of content, except the vast majority of it was garbage. Nevertheless, universities had to buy the packages, because of the few flagship journals that were embedded in the packages.
> Careful what you wish for? The big desire then was a la carte, and right now you can bounce between streaming services at will, and they're all still far easier to cancel than cable.
Who was wishing for anything here? Streaming has always been pushed by the industry as an acceptable alternative to piracy. The supppsed benefits of streaming were always part of the sales push.
What we need is a company to come together and make deals with all the different streaming services and put them into one interface. The could charge like $100/mo and share the fees with all the other companies.
This is obviously a joke, but honestly, it seems like the direction we are heading -- cable V2.
I really wish streaming video had a similar licensing model to audio -- pay a central licensing authority for the content, and it's the same price for everyone. Then the streaming services could compete on their UI and the content creators will compete on making popular content.
The distinguishing feature of cable (and satellite) was that you had no option to instantly play what you want when you want where you want. And no option to instantly watch from the media owner and cut out middlemen. And no option to watch select episodes or subscribe for only 1 month.
No, that was the distinguishing feature of linear TV. You can tell because cable has those features now too, for the content that is already in their system. They are now trying to get more content in to their system.
What cable did was bring multiple networks together into a single interface which had never been done before.
A TV antenna plugged into a TV that can change channels brings multiple networks together in a single interface.
But the point is all those bundles were only necessary due to lack of technology that could connect content owners directly to content viewers. We even have search engines that, theoretically, you should be able to search the content’s name, get to the content owner’s website, and be presented with the options of how you can watch it.
Edit: I think I get your point, that bundling might be more economical for content owners. And that cable facilitated that by subsidizing less watched content with more watched content. But I guess in that case, I am guessing the cable company just becomes the content owner (like Comcast) and the various content owners get big and produce a variety of media.
This is commonly repeated but untrue, cable was originally just grouping together OTA channels so you could get perfect image quality of all the channels in the area without having to get a big antenna tower. Those OTA channels still had ads. Cable existed in this way for decades before cable-only ad-free channels started appearing. Even then, most of those cable-only channels still had ads.
SoundExchange kind of works like you describe but not quite. You report to them “I played X for user Y at time Z,” and they go cool, for the billing period and that play count, it’s $4,000 to clear your rights. What’s left unspoken is you still need a redistributable copy of the recording before you can do that. SoundExchange does not provide that and buying something from iTunes or Amazon, for example, still doesn’t get you legal in most cases. You’re looking at Beatport Pro and even more expensive things like that designed for professionals.
Worse: SX only covers the recording. You still have to talk to the big three licensing agencies about the written music. (That was my understanding about 15 years ago in Internet radio. This point might have changed.)
There isn’t an insert coin receive MP3 with all rights attached service, which sounds like how you’ve understood SoundExchange to work, and what you’re lobbying for in video. I agree that would be cool but it’s extremely unlikely for the same reason you can’t do it with SX.
Oh yeah, I’m familiar with that, too. That makes more sense. Believe it or not that doesn’t clear the big three for music either, or at least didn’t when I got out of the business a decade ago. But BMI and such have special deals with real radio that would make Internet radio weep, so you’re right it’s better. (Former MD here.)
That’s the likely outcome. They’ll probably push for the mechanical video recording and the creative content within it to be different licenses just like music. And then you’ll still have to license the music within it, probably both the recording and the creative. IP structure in complex media is so entwined there won’t be a simple answer here, I’m afraid. I wish it weren’t so.
The worst outcome possible would be a lot of creative folks in a television production realizing the distinction between the two music licenses and creating a setup where there is five or six for video (script license, series license, translation license, likeness licenses, blah blah).
It's really, really shitty that media consumption has been commoditized in the way it has - with every service having to secure rights (at different times and varying prices), and users constantly being forced to either add an additional service or cancel a service to watch the content they actually want to watch.
The radio licensing model would have (and still would be) SO much freaking better.
Whoever can pull this off will be the next iTunes/Spotify. But I don't think it will happen until piracy starts becoming a major problem and streaming services are pressured to consolidate to compete. Plex shows there is a larger potential here.
I don't understand what the problem with multiple services is. Is going to a different site really that difficult? There are plenty of aggregators that tell you the good stuff on each site, and their recommendations are usually better than each sites' anyway.
It's a logistical nightmare. It's fine perhaps for a single person, but with kids and less technical elderly parents, it becomes troublesome.
Every new device requires logging into a bunch of services. When a login expires I have to explain how to log in again and what the password is. The kids (and I!) have to remember which content they want to watch right now is on which service.
At least with cable I could just leave a single page instruction sheet that said "press this button on the remote, and the cable will turn on, here are the channel numbers you care about".
Finally we can basically just search for "Title streaming" and google will tell me which services I can find it on, but before then it was such an annoying crapshoot to try to find where something actually was.
Quick, find me the 90's era SNL character movie Bob Roberts, starring Tim Robbins, Giancarlo Esposito, and Gore Vidal. It's not available anywhere. Until obscure movies like this are a few taps away, streaming services will have not met their true potential.
Lately none of the movies I am looking for are available. I've been starting to think of classics I should watch with my kids. Ruefully buying DVDs again.
I have a huge list of movies (and a few TV shows) that don't seem to have made the jump. Some are great (the BBC series of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and Smiley's People), some of them are very cult (Meet the Feebles), and some are just bad (Poor White Trash II, originally titled Scum of the Earth). Everyone said that streaming would make the "long tail" accessible because the costs to transfer and distribute would be so low, but that doesn't seem to have happened, at least to the extent that I'd like.
(I've had the same issue with music--my MP3 collection consists of a few dozen LPs that I've ripped because they were never digitized and added to the different services.)
Star Trek new season got canceled just recently, because Paramount pulled it off Netflix. It was due to start coming days. Now people have ti wait until 2022 and get the then available paramount subscription on top of Netflix, Disney, and A+.
Who is willing to do that? I bet many people will opt for illegal downloads again.
If it's easy enough to start and stop a subscription, lots of people will do it.
My family wanted to watch Mandalorian so we subscribed to Disney+. It took us two months to get through the series so it only cost $15 or so which seems like a pretty good deal for that many hours of TV. Since I subscribed via Apple, cancelling was painless. We did the same with Peacock for a different show.
HBO, Hulu, and Netflix seem to have enough stuff that we watch that we've stayed subscribed to those for years now.
To clarify for anyone in the US, this applies to everyone _outside_ the US. Previously, Paramount released Star Trek: Discovery on Paramount+ in the US and Netflix everywhere else. Now it's Paramount+ everywhere, only that doesn't exist everywhere yet.
It's amazing to me that the company feels that the benefits of this outweigh the goodwill it costs them among the fanbase. Trekkies are going apeshit over this. It makes me more hesitant to buy Star Trek media in the future, and I'll admit I'm not one to change my buying patterns based on companies' behavior ordinarily.
Not just that, they're not releasing them yet outside the USA and Canada even in places that do have Paramount+, such as the Nordics. So outside the USA and Canada, Prodigy and Discovery are pirate-exclusives even if you are subscribed to Paramount+.
Why would they pull it before having a replacement ready? Is this just classic US-first thinking where the rest of the world kinda fell through the cracks?
Seems like it. I imagine there were a lot of people at Paramount who were unhappy with this, but who weren't empowered to stop it from happening. I want to believe that Paramount is a good steward of the franchise, so I'm hoping we'll eventually get an explanation of how this was somehow unavoidable because of how Netflix does business or some weird contractual stuff.
The timing was so abrupt that I really doubt this was just a horrible rash decision. That's totally still possible though.
While it's plausible to believe that all VPNs are actually honeypots for the police to catch criminals, getting sued over torrenting something is a civil case.
In this case, the hope is that your VPN won't accept money from media rights holders, in exchange for your data.
I think not being subjected to terrible, emotionally manipulative ads for 1/3 of the time you’re watching TV/Movies is the actual win for consumers in the streaming era.
It's a little thing, but given the choice of watching something on a streaming app versus watching the same show on the cable DVR and having to fast-forward through the commercials, even with smart-resume, it's kind of a no-brainer.
I moved to the USA in 1989, and after 24 years in the UK, found trying to watch TV in the US totally unbearable. I thought it was because (a) the shows were so bad (b) the ads were terrible.
Netflix has made it clear to me that although many of the shows were awful, not all of them were, and that being able to see them without ads gave me a totally different appreciation for what (some) people were trying to do on TV over the last 3 decades.
Every now and then I browse the OTA channels (>50 tunable channels in my area). It always impresses me how much I can channel surf and hit ad after ad after ad. Sometimes I can tune through 8 or 9 channels in a row without hitting any actual content.
This isn't a very strong post. Customers are losing because you can't access an episode of a show you like?
Difficulty in watching some things has been present from the earliest days of streaming, and has only been less of a pain as the world has moved away from cable. (I never had DVR, so the pre-streaming world for me meant either watch it live, record it to VHS, or maybe catch it "On Demand".)
I know what it's like to be in your situation (usually when trying to stream live sports), but the remedy is almost always to do a bit of research and decide if you want to take the path they want you to take.
I'm very happy with the streaming landscape right now, and I think it's way better than it was five years ago.
It’s a little more complicated than “an episode”.
For instance, the most popular cable program “Yellowstone” is on the Paramount Network. New episodes are shown there for a few days, but prior episodes are on NBC’s Peacock network. Many other popular shows are that way—new episodes on one platform (Chicago Med on Hulu), prior episodes on another platform (earlier eps in Netflix).
The Star Trek franchise is a grab bag between Amazon Prime, Netflix, Hulu and Paramount+.
TV app on macOS and iOS solves this problem, outside of stuff on Netflix. I know it is a solution only for Apple users, but if a content owner does not want to make it easy for people, then that is the content owner’s problem.
There are some college sports that are maddening. Need cable type subscription to get the Big Ten Network, but some of the games appear on the subscription service B1G. Their presence on one or the other is mutually exclusive. Then some matches will appear on ESPN, or if somehow popular enough on an actual network. And that's just to follow a single team.
The thing is that everything is sliced up and packaged not to present a single package of what the customer wants. Rather, it is packaged so that what the customer wants is distributed across multiple packages which must all be purchased separately. Look at the NFL - Monday night football ESPN, Thursday Amazon Prime, Sunday Night - NBC, Sunday Day - various.
I'm just done chasing. Bring me my entire team's season or get no money from me at all. I can understand the odd game out, but this has been deliberate.
There's no point in paying for essentially any streaming service these days. Piracy legitimately provides a better user experience for free if you know how to do it right
I disagree. I want to support the content I like. So I type it into my browser, find the content owner, see if they have a quick and easy way to buy it directly from them, and then watch it.
If that takes more than a few seconds, I open up TV app on my phone, search it, and decide if it is worth buying.
If it is any more difficult than that, I spend my time doing something else. The situation is much better than the old days of relying on Comcast.
> I disagree. I want to support the content I like. So I type it into my browser, find the content owner, see if they have a quick and easy way to buy it directly from them, and then watch it.
How often can you just buy the content? There are many movies that I would love to buy and own but there is no option. It is either lend them for streaming or buy a super expensive blue ray which I don't get to own because of DRM. I wish there was a gog.com kind of solution.
The only way I can truly own a movie is to pirate it.
I get wanting to help content creators but I think it is fine to help just some of them (especially the smaller ones). There is no reason to feel bad about not helping all of them. Pirating something can still help the creators buy creating more attention. You might not pay for it but the friend you are telling about it, might. Or you might pay later after having more money.
Dude just pirate it and then if you really want send a donation directly to the content creator so you're not sending part of the money to Disney/Comcast/etc lol
I used to pirate everything. Now it's easier to just pay for a subscription and get what I want in the highest quality ever. I will say though, I will never "buy" something digitally like on iTunes or whatever.
Except you can't really get good quality. Netflix 4k bitrates are atrociously bad. Compression artifacts are super noticeable especially in dark scenes. I think they use around 10mbps for 4k, which is just a joke. Blu-ray is around 50mbps, cinema is around 250. You can't actually get decent quality without buying physical media or pirating.
Yes, which avoids all compression artifacts that come from the cross-frame compression that mpeg does. There's a reason DCP is used in cinemas - those kinds of artifacts become a lot more noticeable on very large screens and are hard to avoid completely. But for now, you can't even get Blu-ray quality video over streaming which would be sufficient for everyone with nice TVs. Netflix takes a 250GB master and compresses it down to about 10GB. The dark scenes in most Netflix content make me want to cry. Macro blocking on moving scenes, and so on. It's the video equivalent of listening to 64kbps mp3s.
Pre-streaming watching episode 9 looked like waiting and hoping the DVDs would come out for this show. They’d cost about $50 for a season.
Pre-DVD you’d just be screwed. Your show would be episodic (much of Star Trek TNG) and you’d hope to catch as much as you can on syndication or reruns.
It was very sparse. "Episode bundles" were common, like "here's two TNG episodes" that might be thematically but not necessarily chronologically linked, more like "best of" releases. Getting complete sets of many shows meant recording them yourselves.
As a father my guess is Disney is winning. They'd get 2X my money if they had fine print that said "You have to pay again for Frozen". Basically they just have to hook your kid on one thing and then they're getting your subscription. The number of rewatches of the same content has got to be through the roof for them.
All the other streaming services are fighting over your remaining 1-3 slots in your household. Of them it would seem Amazon looks good because they make you think you're getting a deal with Prime, but it doesn't seem to have the same pull as a 5 year old who needs to watch Disney.
The others also have the disadvantage that adults are going to know how to share an account. With kids you don't want to be coordinating it.
As for UX, I don't quite understand why anything is ever taken off the streaming service. Isn't it one of the things that makes it better than a Blockbuster? Every movie you've ever had on can be left there. There's gotta be a way to shove the long tail content on some slower/less replicated infrastructure, but maybe it isn't a technical consideration.
Disney should easily be winning globally, but outside of America they're failing to launch their service in new countries. I have friends in Europe who'd pay for Disney+ to be able to watch Star Wars and Marvel series but they can't, because the launch is postponed until mid-2022. I'm quite surprised they haven't tried to launch faster, seeing that we have more lockdowns coming and people will be spending more time in front of tv again
It’s complex licensing deals and other revenue streams (hotels, airplanes, foreign broadcasts, regional monopolies etc) that are the reason. You accessing some cold content is not an issue for them. They have enough spare capacity to handle small volume requests like that easily.
> I don't quite understand why anything is ever taken off the streaming service.
Probably won't happen for the first-party services like Disney Plus, Paramount, etc. but things leave Netflix because the deals for streaming usually last 5-15 years; no studio exec wants to be the name attached to something like "Netflix gets exclusive streaming rights to this film in perpetuity" when 50 years down the line it would've made more sense to relicense it to X other company or bring it into your own streaming library. It's not anywhere near a technical limitation like you suggest, it's a money issue.
I don't get Disney+ at all, exactely because of this: if you want to watch Frozen 50 times, a DVD is a much better deal. You can get the entire Disney/Pixar catalog of kids movies for the price of a year's subscription.
I was thinking along similar lines. If re-watching a small number of movies or shows is the primary use case then there are cheaper ways to achieve the result.
DVD’s aren’t as seamless as launching a streaming service and playing a title. There’s also the aspect that a Disney Plus can be in multiple devices easily while DVD’s cannot without physical friction. (Even worse if we’re talking digital and you have different devices from different providers).
Disney Plus meets the conscience criteria while having frictionless content switching if one’s kid wants to watch new content.
Its the convenience factor. Log in to the streaming app on <insert device here>, collection with UI easy enough for a kid to mostly figure out is right there good to go. Replicating this experience with DVDs means figuring out ripping them, setting up and managing a Plex/Emby server, teaching your kids to use this interface, etc. For many of us in the tech world that doesn't seem like a big ask but there's definitely tons of parents where they see learning how to rip a DVD to be a big ask.
> Why would you try to watch a TV show on your phone? Is that a zoomer thing?
Maybe you're at the airport or on a plane/train/car, maybe you don't own a laptop, maybe you're traveling for work and just brought your work laptop, maybe someone else is using the TV, maybe...
Plenty of reasons you might watch a TV show on your phone lol...
I very very rarely watch TV, but when I do it's usually on my phone. I don't have a television, so when my wife and I watch a movie together it's on our laptop, but when I'm by myself I prefer my phone.
A sizeable minority of Gen-Z adults to not even own or use a TV. Streaming on phones/tablets/laptops is “good enough”, so why shell out the money for a TV?
Heck, even when my Gen Z friends do have a TV right in front of them, they’ll often end up watching TV on their laptops or phones anyways. I suppose it’s easier than fiddling with a Chromecast.
Interesting. I haven’t had a reason to open Disney+ up after the first day. Is Disney+ relevant if you don’t enjoy Marvel or Star Wars, nor children’s shows? I know it has Simpsons, Pixar, and more. That’s pretty slim pickings compared to any other service though if you care for the three major categories above.
I did watch some of the Marvel tv content as it got a lot of hype. I don’t get it. The production quality is insanely high, but the shows and pacing seemed pretty tame. If that sort of action isn’t your thing, Netflix stuff blows it out of the water in my opinion.
Disney+ is mostly for kids and Star Wars remake fans, right?
HBO, Apple TV+ and Netflix have all mostly fallen into this trap of producing really elaborate, super expensive drama shows that are mostly really depressing, boring and dystopic. Fantastic HDR cinematography though.
It's hilarious that after a decade of explosion in streaming the corps still can't (don't want to) beat the experience of torrents + mpv.
The latter is particularly interesting since there are no licensing issues. Every professional streaming service should have a better player than mpv. None actually do.
You could say that it's always like that because pirates get their content for free. However, Spotify and others managed just fine with music which used to be even more widely pirated than tv shows and movies.
(Survivor.S41E09.Whos.Who.in.the.Zoo is available on torrents in 1080p.)
Let me know when mpv can run on a smart TV. Most people watch via smart tv/streaming box (roku, google tv, etc), so the players work for them there.
The real competition is Plex/Emby/Jellyfin allowing access to people's media libraries in a way that's mostly on-par with existing services, and the added benefit of having all content truly in one place. The issue is that there isn't a completely legal way to get media content as unencrypted files (since ripping blu-rays is legal, but breaking the software protections to do it isn't).
This isn't entirely the corps fault, but legacy legal licensing agreements on each. and every. piece. of content. Not to mention all the unions you ave to deal with to make sure all the talent in the content gets paid. Clearances AND tracking can be a nightmare. A lot of that has improved in the pat decade as digital/streaming agreements are now standard, but getting content (like the music in a show for example) cleared for all territories can still be a headache.
Meh, I'm winning, at least here in the UK. I have Disney, Apple, Netflix, Amazon and BBC, including the option to buy/rent new stuff on amazon, giving me massive amounts of choice for less than mother-in-law pays for her Boomer TV package with Sky, and she gets adverts!
Apple was 'free' with the last phone I bought, but I'll pay for it when the next season of For All Mankind is on.
Still have to torrent stuff. Paramount literally won't let me buy the latest version of Discovery after their shocking "fuck you" to the world this week.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 282 ms ] threadOdds are better that you find anything on Youtube than any place else unless it is a Chinese TV series that shouldn't be obscure but practically is. (Like how I had to get a bootleg of Three Kingdoms from Singapore.)
It's not always real economical though. One season of the Handmaid's Tale is only available to buy, not rent. And it's $25. I could pay for 2 months of "no ads" Hulu and get that season and everything else they have, for less.
So fragmentation is still an issue.
Maybe Apple is doing the right thing by forcing everything to go through the App Store on iOS.
I subscribe to Netflix, HBO, and Disney. If what I want to watch isn't on either of those three, it's getting pirated.
This particular behavior should really be banned by App Store guidelines, as it generates no revenue for Apple, and I can't imagine a single provider willing to forgo ad revenue from iOS users as a whole over such a rule.
Show commercials, if you must, but trying to force me to pay attention to commercials via technological means is where I draw the line.
Instead of actually bothering to pirate the show, however, I generally just do something else.
I'm honestly curious why (AFAIK) major content producers haven't looked beyond existing revenue streams and experimented with freemium (or at least "low-costium") models, along the lines of Microsoft studios releasing current AAA titles through Game Pass — which, while not free, is arguably inexpensive — but charging extra for optional in-game purchases and DLC.
In other words, make base versions of shows available for free or at a low cost, then charge a few bucks per season for premium features like early access to episodes, 4K/HDR, and bonus content. For major franchises, at least, I imagine there are at least enough fans willing to pay, say, $10-20 per season for such features to make such a venture worthwhile.
Not like I have any other choice anyway when some stuff is just geolocked from me (Disney+, some HBO stuff, etc).
The day streaming providers allow downloading high quality, DRM free video files to watch for later, I'll happily pay 3 bucks per movie.
As it stands, I can't play anything >720p because of DRMs. If you're willing to prevent paying customers from watching what they're paying for, just for the sake of reassuring your shareholders that you're combatting piracy (though failing miserably), then I have no remorse torrenting your content.
Should be able to play 4k via the official Netflix app on Windows, assuming you have the relevant chain of DRM protection (ie. TPM might be required, along with HDCP cables and monitors).
> (though failing miserably),
I'd argue that they're winning, actually - torrenting these days requires some upfront costs (hard drives and a media server) and an initial time investment (dedicate $xx hours to learning and managing a media server + media library software). It's much easier to punch in your credit card to the 3 streaming services you want to use that month.
This is on top of the fact that most media giants contract out a service to automatically send DMCA takedown requests to the ISP of every torrent peer. If you're in the U.S. doing this, you're most likely going to get a letter from your ISP asking you to stop torrenting illegal content. Xfinity in particular has a 3 (or 6?) strike system for DMCAs, after which they'll terminate your service. Any torrenting effectively must be accompanied by a VPN that is torrent-friendly and ignores DMCAs.
Eh? I'm pretty sure at least 80% of pirates just delete the movie/show from their PC/laptop when they're done watching it, maybe casting it to a TV in the process.
Load of bollocks. The requirements are difficult to figure out and hard to fulfil. The standards in the ecosystem do not help at all either. Cables or monitors shouldn't be certified HDMI-compatible when they don't do HDCP for example.
The "just try and find out, and hope the situation won't change" approach is so customer-hostile I have no sympathy when someone moans about pirates yet again.
Gabe Newell put forward his thoughts on piracy and the success of Steam as a digital content platform about a decade ago now, saying “The easiest way to stop piracy is not by putting antipiracy technology to work. ... It's by giving those people a service that's better than what they're receiving from the pirates.” And for a couple of years, I think streaming services achieved that. Netflix and Hulu really did seem to capture the market in paid services because they were so convenient. But as the market fractures into smaller and smaller services, I think a lot of people are going to turn back to piracy.
Presumably, if you subscribe to Paramount+, then you can also watch it as long as you are paying the monthly fee.
My point is I got to the media I was looking for rather quick. I would never spend my time watching Survivor for free, much less pay for it, but my opinion of the experience of trying to watch it was quick and easy.
CanIStreamIt used to fill this gap but no longer.
You can use it on the web, too, and it shows which channels require a subscription: https://www.roku.com/whats-on/search I assume it's accurate for those services across other platforms than just Roku.
We subscribe to a number of the services, but it's still cheaper than cable TV and there are no commercials, and it's all "on demand" which still seems to be pretty iffy on cable directly.
I feel like it's going to be a constant struggle to only subscribe to the ones that we're actually using, but it isn't as bad as I feared yet.
I'm still predicting that they'll get ridiculously fractured, and then realize their mistake and start bundling together again.
It has kind of already happened with Paramount+ and Showtime's bundle, and I think some of the others were doing it before them even. But these bundles are just a bandaid. You still need to actually use 2 different sites/apps to view your TV, and it's hard to get a list of what shows have new episodes across all the sites/apps. We end up just starting up each app and checking until we find something we want to watch right then.
I do not understand why anyone would have expected any different. Is that not the beauty of the internet? That you can consume the content from anyone, regardless of the owner of the wire coming into your house? (which should not be a private entity in the first place, but that is a different topic)
I want to watch shows that I'd like, I don't care who makes them. Finding good stuff to watch is harder than watching it, and people would clearly pay for a unified service that recommended you (and enabled 1 click viewing) of content regardless of license holder.
You can clearly see why content owners wouldn't want to do it, you lose the "stickiness" of your product, and have to compete with other shows for eyes, without the friction of "exit the app, open another app, find what you manually have discovered".
There's probably a 9 figure startup idea in there if you can figure out how to do it without getting sued.
When stated that baldly, it's fairly clear that this was never going to happen. Nevertheless, I think many of us would have preferred if, for example, content creators [0] did not all have their own streaming service, and cross-licensed to different streaming services, meaning that stuff wasn't available on only 1 such service.
[0] of course, in reality, no content creators have their own streaming service. They strike up deals with production companies, who strike up deals with distribution companies, some of whom have a streaming service, and those that don't strike deals with streaming services.
Disney doesn't seem interested in keeping a one-stop-shop, though. There's weird crosstalk where I can see NHL games from my ESPN+ subsciption on Hulu, apparently, now, but not Disney's own Disney+ stuff? And the HBO deal seems unlikely to live forever with HBO Max being its own thing now, with its own separate set of content.
"They don't sell what I want in the form that I want therefore it's OK for me to steal what I want in the form I want"
Would they apply to same logic to Costco for instance? "Costco only sells the widget I want in 10 packs so that gives me the (moral) license to steal one widget from the producer"
If consuming media without paying the copyright holder is morally wrong, then so is second hand purchasing and selling, as well as rentals. Indeed, copyright industries have a long and storied history of trying to shut down rental chains, to some success in Japan.
Just because you paid someone some money to view a TV series, doesn't mean you paid the people who funded production.
This assumes everyone who pirates media would not have paid for the media if piracy was not an option. If piracy was truly impossible or was highly enforced with strict penalties, do you think everyone who pirates media would just stop consuming that media?
I know of people who pirate every minute of content they watch on TV and pirate nearly every second of music they listen to. Do you think they would just cease watching TV shows and movies and cease listening to music? Or would they start purchasing access to some?
There's obviously some percentage of piracy that happens because content is truly unavailable in a way for the consumer to reasonably consume (region blocks, licensing deals, etc) or because the content is just astronomically priced out of their reach ($10/mo for someone who makes $100/mo income, $1,000 software packages for students) that would not have purchased it. I fully agree there would be some percentage of people who truly would never buy the media regardless of the ability to pirate. But I think if piracy was truly impossible or had almost assured steep penalties there would be some amount more sales.
Kind of muddies this righteous stance you're pretending to take.
You're projecting.
> But you still want to consume the media that Disney and Amazon makes
Barely. I'd never pay for it, except as stand-alone content.
I must have touched a nerve among the Netflix base
So I don't consider Netflix to have commercials... And I'm pretty sure I turned that autoplay crap off in every instance that I could anyhow.
We've also got Disney, Showtime, Paramount+, HBO Max, and ... I feel like there's another. I haven't seen commercials on any of them, though I understand that some of them have forced commercials for certain shows on them, which I think is total BS. The live TV streams on them still have commercials, also, which I don't watch, ever. When available, I chose the subscriptions that eliminated commercials.
Autoplaying content is the advertising of something you were not watching (if you wanted to watch something you would have selected it) and prevents you from watching what you wanted to (again, you wanted to watch nothing, otherwise you would have selected something).
Cable ate itself when most channels realized that reality programming is astoundingly cheap to produce and it made no difference on their income. If you are subscribed to the Sci-Fi streaming service and it switches to pro wrestling content, you just cancel the service.
They'll eat themselves then. We're being nickeled and dimed to death with all the streaming services and the kids at least are not going to pay: they'll share accounts. And when that stops working they'll just go somewhere else where the content is free.
The reality on the consumer end is that people are paying less money over all. Me personally I pay for like one service and have the logins from like six family and friends. I don't even know who is paying for the underlying account, someone's mother down the line I'm sure. I'm not alone with this either. As more services pop up, people become less likely to want to have yet another individual subscription, and its very common to hear about people sharing account info among friends and family.
However it's gotten to the point of annoyance where even I will just resort to piracy half the time, with access to every streaming service at my fingertips, because there are still some movies that for whatever reason are rented digitally for something like $4 for 72 hours as if we've stepped back in time and reverted to the brick and mortar blockbuster business model for the information age vs offering a sane alternative.
It really blows my mind how merciful the RIAA has been on the otherhand allowing Spotify and Apple Music to have such a vast and unsplintered catalog.
1) If I import something its scanners cant' scrape metadata for, it might as well not even exist. Its not displayed to me at all. I have to fiddle with title and re-scan until its metatdata scraper finally realizes what it is.
2) They've gone to some dark patterns to convince you to make a plex account and log in, just to talk to a server on the same LAN.
3) They now hide your content and promote their own streaming content in a tv-channels like grid. I don't want any of that, I just want my movie library, don't make me scroll for it.
There are other frustrations, but these are the high points. I need to find time to setup kodi again..
I spent years trying to get Kodi how I wanted it and it just never worked out. Between the jank and the way they've chosen to structure the UI, I don't think I'll ever like Kodi. Jellyfin is a much better fit for me, with no tweaking at all.
1.) This only happens for me if, say, I use youtube-dl to download a music performance and then drop it in. Every time I've gone outside of my Sonarr/Radarr setup to manually add a TV show or movie, it's always handled the metadata just fine. It's when I throw it a curveball (that, tbh, I expected) that it doesn't handle it for me. Maybe I've just been lucky?
2.) Completely agree with you here. I'd love to know if there's a workaround, though I haven't spent any time looking into it.
3.) Not the case for me. My home page goes Recently Watched -> Recently Added Movies -> Recently Added TV -> the streaming bullshit you mentioned. The UI loads with the left menu open, and all I need to do is hit "down" one for TV, twice for movies; no scrolling necessary. To your point, I wish that it didn't show those extra streaming options at all.
You can use the 'Fix Match' option within Plex and tweak it's search parameters (usually just title and year) until it matches. Alternatively you can paste stuff like IMDB IDs into the field and it'll match based on that instead. For some titles with obscene names etc, that's the best way to get an accurate match.
>They've gone to some dark patterns to convince you to make a plex account and log in, just to talk to a server on the same LAN.
Settings -> Network -> List of IP addresses and networks that are allowed without auth -> Put your LAN subnet in there.
>They now hide your content and promote their own streaming content in a tv-channels like grid. I don't want any of that, I just want my movie library, don't make me scroll for it.
Yeah that's a bit annoying, but can be fixed: Use the 'pin' functionality to force your libraries to the top. This applies even for unauthenticated users (just tested in a private tab).
I ditched Plex a few years back due to UI annoyances. I've come back because they're mostly resolved, and honestly the alternatives (Jellyfin etc) aren't great. I chucked the money at them for a lifetime pass as well (mostly for PlexAmp), so I guess I'm pretty invested now :)
There used to be a way to not have any metadata, and just get plex to show you the files. I think they called it something like "home movies". The first time I setup plex, it was easy. But I can't find it anymore..
Now i just use a simple app on my iPad (nPlayer - no subscription!) and just play files from a network share. Plain and simple and it always works perfectly without all the bloat.
What there isn't is a good way to get a single subscription to watch anything you want. The cable bundle was close to that for TV content, but very lacking for movies. So if you want to watch a really wide sampling of TV content, it can feel like we're going backward, since there's no more one-stop-shop.
Careful what you wish for? The big desire then was a la carte, and right now you can bounce between streaming services at will, and they're all still far easier to cancel than cable.
Some things have fallen through the cracks, particularly long-running (going back to the pre-streaming era) major-network content like the aforementioned Survivor (a random missing episode seems like a weird problem, would love to know what was going on). And getting US content stuff internationally is often sub-par, although... I don't recall stories of this being easy at all two decades ago.
So consumers are overall definitely winning, but it's not a perfect victory for everyone.
Music licensing?
It would not cover a typical US internet bill with speeds to support streaming, plus a couple streaming services.
I don't think it's realistic to assume "no internet" is a standard default these days, though, regardless of if/how you watch TV.
Streaming only was able to take off because broadband (back then this wouldn't even have been that much, >~2Mbps) was already widespread. So I'd say yes, nobody liked waiting for slow connections.
> I don't think it's realistic to assume "no internet" is a standard default these days
About 1 in 6 US households has no internet access, nowhere near a small enough number to start rolling up alternatives.
https://datareportal.com/reports/digital-2020-united-states-...
That also claims:
"The number of mobile connections in the United States of America in January 2020 was equivalent to 107% of the total population."
I'm not sure how to disaggregate that to humans. I do personally have more than one device with a data plan, although I'm not sure how typical that is.
Good internet is becoming more of an overall utility than just a luxury.
I have that feeling that internet is boiling frogs making people think it's that amazing christic thing when a few phone calls and organization would go as deep. Plus kids and teachers are often computer illiterate, a single file format can delay information for days if not weeks because people don't know how to mail or open something.
- The only major loss with the current system is local programming. You may be able to get it with free OTA channels, but people subscribed to basic cable in the 1980's and 1990's simply because cable was more reliable than a good residential antenna tower so it is justifiable to count this as a loss.
- The current system is much better in that you can watch commercial free programs when you please, any given streaming service is usually less expensive than any given cable bundle, and the content in any given streaming service will usually have more in common than the channels in any given cable bundle. (Cable companies were notorious for putting similar channels in different packages.) As an added bonus: the "watch when you please" aspect means that you can defer viewing, may that be to switch between streaming services to keep monthly costs down or to simply cancel during the months when you have better things to do than watch television.
- The current system is also better in that Internet service can replace many other products and services. Subscribing to newspapers is a novelty these days. If it wasn't for societal expectations, people would have dropped phone service since the Internet provides far better communications options than traditional landlines.
In almost every case like that, the answer is "we can't figure out if this is licensed for streaming because it didn't exist yet". Usually it's music, which they licensed for "broadcast and video cassette release" or some similar language. In most cases they've decided DVD is close enough to VHS to still count, but is streaming? Courts haven't really decided yet.
[1] https://www.markhneedham.com/blog/2012/09/03/a-rogue-3572732...
I would even settle for a way where I can ask, "Where can I stream X?" There used to be canistream.it -- which is apparently now being rebuilt but has long been mostly useless. Fingers crossed that it becomes useful.
https://www.justwatch.com/
Now if only someone would combine all of these search engines...
Since the marginal cost of selling an additional unit is near zero, it makes sense for sellers to heavily price discriminate such that poorer people are charged what they can afford and richer people are charged what they can afford.
That is where brands come in for differentiable products. The generic brand lotion and the name brand lotion might come from the same factory. Maybe it is even the same product, or the different in quality is only slightly better for the name brand. But now the seller can target people willing to pay $x for lotion, and people willing to pay $2x for basically the same lotion.
Or you implement “binning”, where products of worse quality get branded differently, even though the sale price difference between the better quality product and the generic quality product is disproportionately larger than the cost to produce the better quality product than the generic product.
Anyway, you cannot do this for a movie or tv show, so the sellers of movies/tv shows do it more crudely via country or region of the world.
Between the time element and snobbery, the market is segmented and revenues maximized.
Classic economic theory on pricing lists commonly used options that essentially try to achieve that but with various indirect methods:
1. provide discounts to various demographics that are known afford less - e.g. students, seniors, etc.
2. provide different prices at times or places that have customers with different average ability to pay - e.g. geographic discrimination, and also discounts provided at times when traditionally employed people can't take them.
3. simple "inconvenient obstacles" e.g. coupon schemes, intentionally created queues, etc where people who accept the inconvenience get a better price, and people who can afford to pay more simply don't bother and pay.
4. Direct, prolonged, serious personal bargaining and haggling, resulting in an individually negotiated price that depends on your willingness to pay.
But IMHO people would not like if it was explicitly based on their ability to pay, so companies try to disguise that.
What was the situation outside of the US if you wanted to watch The Sopranos or Sex and the City or something else on HBO back then? My assumption is that this wasn't all free and over the air?
In retrospect, they did a great job of curation.* I seem to spend more time looking for something to watch than watching, and often just give up and go to bed.
* Up til subscription satellite TV became available. Quality was inversely related to the number of available channels.
I think the focus should be on keeping the market fractured. If content is of poor quality that just means the population is ok with poor quality. There is business to be made on poor quality. /s
Once upon a time I worked as a CSR for a cable company, and a couple customers, old honest people, opened the conversation along the lines "I only come back because, impossible as that might appear, the other company is even worse than you are"
I highly disagree with that sentiment. Cheap cable packages maybe had 40 channels which barely expanded on the local broadcast availability, littered with advertisements. No real dedicated movie channels, movies were often cropped and edited to fit the time slots and ratings allocations for the channels when they did air. Time shifting meant having to keep a VCR well stocked, or later buy/rent a DVR. And if your VHS or DVR was full, well, you're out of luck, you just missed that episode. Decide you want to start watching some TV show that's been on for a few seasons? You're out of luck, better go rent some tapes or DVDs to get caught up. Want to watch on the go? Sorry, you're out of luck, the only place you can consume this is at home, or lug around a TV, VCR, and VHS tapes with you.
For less than half the price of your supposed $20 cable package (before adding additional expensive hardware) I can watch literally thousands and thousands of movies and shows at a moment's notice anywhere I have an internet connection.
[1] https://openmedia.org/article/item/2021-rewheel-report-shows...
[1] https://www.offersnewcustomers.co.uk/sky-tv/complete-bundle/ [2] https://www.virginmedia.com/broadband/packages
But now if all you wanted was HBO, you could get it for under 20 bucks if you have anything but the slowest internet packages!
I agree with the parent. Without live TV, a streaming bundle you assemble is clearly cheaper than you were paying for cable TV (or cable TV plus Netflix) in the US. Today, add a live TV streaming service and you're probably back to about price parity with a lot more choice of content.
For example, the current used car market has insane values with used vehicles costing more than the MSRP on new ones sometimes. Likewise, when Netflix had no competition, they were able to sign deals with content providers for almost nothing because content providers thought streaming was worthless. Either streaming was going to fail and that $10 deal would go away or streaming was going to succeed and content providers wouldn't license content so cheaply. That era was an odd thing in the market before content owners realized that streaming wasn't just a little additional revenue, but a replacement for their service.
I don't think you can really compare a market blip to a sustainable business model. HBO and others weren't going to continue licensing their catalogues to Netflix once it was clear that streaming was popular. They made the mistake of licensing to Netflix assuming that they'd be getting a little extra pocket money rather than cannibalizing their services. That mistake is probably the reason Netflix is the giant it is today. Netflix signed deals to license content before content owners realized the value of streaming. They used that content to gain subscribers until they could afford to build their own library of first-party content.
Even from Netflix's side, they might have been spending more on content than they wanted to long-term to try and gain subscribers that would be sticky as their library waned and they transformed from "we licensed most of the content you want" to "we're another HBO with a limited content selection".
These things happen. We saw MoviePass come and go because it was an unsustainably good deal.
I think it's also important to remember that back in that era of Netflix, most people were still paying for cable and renting DVDs. Maybe you weren't, but most people were. I think it's important to think about the whole amount that people were spending and people were spending a lot on their entertainment. It was perfectly normal to head to a Blockbuster and spend $10 renting two DVDs each weekend. That feels like such an alien concept today, but people were spending $100 on cable plus $40 on rentals and getting a lot less entertainment than they are today.
Sure, if you were one of the few that only had Netflix, it was a glorious time. $10/mo never bought so much entertainment! Likewise, if you were a MoviePass subscriber, no one had ever gotten so many theater tickets for so little money. But it wasn't going to last because it was unsustainably good. Once MoviePass found that people would actually use the service, it was dead in the water. Once content owners saw that people would cancel their HBO subscription because Netflix had HBO's content, the era of Netflix having such an expansive library for so cheap would end as the deals ran out.
Comparing current prices to a market blip isn't really a fair comparison - but there was a pretty great 5 years in there.
Do not pay Disney, and send an email to the US Tennis Association or whoever keeps contracting with ESPN.
If you keep paying Disney to watch Tennis, you will never get it a la carte.
> you can bounce between streaming services at will, and they're all still far easier to cancel than cable.
Add to that cheaper, since you don't have to deal with connection fees. If you know that you're not going to have the time to use the service for a couple of months because you're too busy with work, you don't have to pay for it. If you have decided that you are going to spend most of your summer pursuing outdoor recreational activities, you don't have to pay for it. If you're going on the road for a few weeks (vacation or business), you don't have to pay for it. If you decide that you want to watch programming on two different streaming services, you can simply rotate through the services on a monthly basis and only pay for one service at a time.
Why do I bring all of this up when it's not directly related to the article: it's because these articles reek of entitlement. Yes, there are times when licensing causes shows or movies to fall through the cracks. On the other hand, the situation is also far better than it used to be when using the same metrics. Not only that, but it can be a heck of a lot less expensive even when factoring in the cost of an Internet connection.
I think what makes people frustrated is that cable channels were _themed_. I was frustrated that I was paying for TLC and Bravo because I didn't watch reality tv. I was paying for Discovery even though I didn't watch nature shows. I was paying for Lifetime even though I didn't watch cheap shows for women. I was paying for ESPN even though I didn't watch sports.
I wanted to pay for the comedy, the scifi/syfy, the cartoons, and the kids programming. That was, like, five or six channels.
Which streaming service do I go to now for the science fiction? Which streaming service do I go to now for the horror or the feel-good sitcoms?
Streaming arose during the collapse of genre channels. There are now three genres of programming: prestige, drek, and children's.
This is something I've been feeling for awhile but haven't managed to articulate this clearly. All new programming is either a mega-budget tentpole or it's something to fill out the menus.
Some of it is genuinely a failure. Funding an entertainment project is always a pig in a poke. Even promising things sometimes just flop. But streaming makes it possible to lower the opportunity costs of those flops, so they can take bigger chances.
In the sense that an F-22 is used for CAS / bombing in The Tomorrow War (which I'd assume was one of Amazon's better funded efforts).
A lot of them just feel like "Oh, you just gave some money to people, removed the usual checks and balances that exist in filming, and told them to deliver a movie ASAP."
It'd be one thing if they were making niche or more interesting content, but it feels like they're mostly just making more action movies and baking shows... faster and at lower quality.
Describes Red Notice by Netflix
How does one even write lines like:
"We need to work together!" "I won't give up on you!"
It's like an AI bot wrote the dialog.
The thing is so ripe it would have been easy to take the next step and make it a sly comedy.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=6c9GdOJbi_c
Exactly. Every company has segmented their content by company, not by type. Sure, I can buy a subscription to Boomerang and get a lot of cartoons, but it's just the cartoons owned by Warner. But not all of them, because they've moved some of them--like Dexter's Laboratory--off to be HBO Max exclusives.
There's no way to say "I want a science fiction themed service" that includes Paramount and HBO and the old PTEN and the like, because no company would stand for another service mixing their IP like that.
Yes, sometimes you just want to watch a specific show and you want to watch it now, and the streaming services are great for that.
But sometimes you just want to turn on the TV and watch something, anything, without really making a choice. I still have cable because it's included in the rent, and sometimes it's nice to just switch the channel to FXX or something and get maybe an old episode of the Simpsons, or a new episode, or maybe some Family guy, or maybe an old episode of some other comedy series, or maybe something completely new.
And that's nice and has value, but streaming services absolutely suck at that, because you always have to make a choice yourself with them.
It was relaxing to me, post- many cable channels (81?), pre- guide/DVR, to just click through.
"Oh, Armageddon is on again. Hercules. (flip, flip, flip)" and then settle on something random, pulled from what's currently playing.
It used to be: survey and then choose from a very limited but rotating subset of all content.
Now it's: choose from all content ever and then find where the content lives and then figure out how much of it you want to watch.
For movies, the new way seems superior. For TV, it feels like a lot has been lost. And overall, I feel like the new system definitely leads to winner-take-all.
It's why I still subscribe to satellite radio.
(and yes, I've thought about subscribing to video service from Spectrum, but I'm not a huge TV watcher)
https://about.netflix.com/en/news/play-something-netflix-doe...
It can pick either something you're already watching (TV series or unfinished movie), or guess something based on what it has learned about you. Of course it's just the Netflix catalog, but that's pretty extensive.
It sounds godawful to me, so I've never used it. But it sounds like almost precisely what you just asked for.
Today, I have about 700 movied ripped from DVDs (and the DVDs still in boxes somewhere), and 500 movies purchased on iTunes. I don't subscribe to Netflix, Amazon Prime, HBO, or any other streaming service because, again, 99% of it is dreck I can't stand. So instead I have a collection of 1200 movies that I like and specifically chose and purchased. Some are better than others, but they're all ones I like.
iTunes sells licenses, not movies. Providers can pull content from iTunes and you lose access to whatever you paid for.
There have been cases where users thought they lost a purchase, but it ended up being an issue where they changed storefronts to one where the purchase wasn’t available. The movie reappeared when they went back to the original storefront (and I believe even that behavior was a bug that’s been fixed).
I keep an eye on this because I’ve also purchased a lot of movies from iTunes.
When it comes to that business sense, we probably have the closest thing to perfection today. Streaming services are forced to compete against each other, with the only real constraints being the cost/restrictions of licensing content and the cost of distribution (i.e. not controlling infrastructure to the home). It is very easy and relatively inexpensive to pick and choose, provided that you are willing to defer your viewing. You also have the choice between large streaming services that offer a broad range of genres and smaller ones that offer more specialized programming.
Yes, that closest thing to perfection is far from perfect. On the other hand, I very much doubt that we are going to get anything closer unless we are willing to pay the price.
Themed packages did and do exist, though most channels for cable were normally available mainly through stacked tiers. But alongside the main generic tiers, language-specific (especially spanish language) and some other (sports, often) themed packages were available from many cable providers, and premium channels were often available in themed groups as well as individually.
https://coda.io/@shishir/four-myths-of-bundling
But we don't. It's worse than ever now. Shows are fragmented into way too many different subcriptions (netflix, etc) each with their monthly fee and a bunch of stuff I won't be watching.
True a la carte would mean eliminating all those exlusive distributions so I could get any show from any streaming vendor for a one-off price (say, 25 cents for a show, $2 for a movie, or whatever) without having to subcribe to any recurring service.
I've given up, I'm not going to subscribe to half a dozen things, that's way too inconvenient and expensive.
I remember most people, including myself, would get the full DirectTV/Cable subscription, hook up TiVo, and just record/watch on demand whatever you want. Those days seem impossible now. It certainly feels like things have regressed.
I canceled my cable TV as I increasingly realized I simply was watching either live or recorded on my TiVo stuff once in a blue moon.
To replicate that today I'd need to subscribe to many different services all with separate monthly fees and way less conveniece (a single unified interface through MythTV was magical).
So I don't watch any TV anymore, oh well. More time to code.
Plex shares or even Pseudo TV Live partially could replicate this. But it’s a grey area obviously.
I could get DSL, but it's shit here and anyway only ~$25 cheaper than the cable (which is 5x faster...).
For $15, I could get cable tv, apparently diverting what I currently pay for internet away from profit and over towards channel fees.
I've never fully digested them, but Michigan seems to have shitty franchise laws written in service of the large cable companies.
"a la carte" means I don't subscribe to anything and instead I have access to "all the things" with a separate charge for each thing. The whole idea back then was to compete with the ease and access of piracy like Steam did.
That said, "careful what you wish for" currently applies to sitcom episodes for rent on Amazon costing more per minute than mega budget movies.
It’s been good for me, I just watch a whole lot less crap and get more sleep.
High-quality, daring, inspired, more than superficially controversial, world-changing movies are another casualty of the rise of streaming.
1: https://old.reddit.com/r/movies/comments/qx4rtu/i_think_movi...
Of course, I could be missing something about the industry and how streaming has shaped it. I just struggle to see how the streaming ecosystem has different content requirements than a normal movie studio.
I have no inside knowledge and am fully speculating, including some random tidbits I've read here and there.
Think about how Netflix changed when moving from DVD to streaming. They used to optimize for recommending you movies you would rate highly. Now it's all about what keeps people viewing the longest.
2 middle of the road acceptable movies that you rate a 6/10 is more viewing time than 1 higher quality production that you'd rate a 9/10 -- I doubt the costs are they cut and dry but I think that's the idea. More content that is passable wins out against less content that is of higher quality.
Yes. Movie studios and streamers have different business models. Movie studios also deal with more "legacy" actor contract negotiations and the like (see disney v scarlet). Theater released movies make most of their money upfront, and make money out on a per-view basis. So they need as many viewers as early as possible.
With streamers, they can lose the subscription any month, and only gain it back if they lure you - so they're incentivized to give you "anchors" that keep you there. Think game of thrones keeping people subscribed to HBO month over month or Squid Games that gets lots of attention. Once you're there, they just have to have "something" for those days you don't really know what to watch. That "something" is different for everyone, so they have to make lots of low budget generic stuff that appeals, collectively, to a wide audience. Each show/movie can have few viewers, because its going for niche targeting en mass - think themed cable channels but one company has to make something for each theme. Once a streamer makes a show, its "free" to them to share it with as many people as possible, but also doesn't cost them anything to not show it.
Ben Thompson (stratechery) has talked about this a lot, check him out!
yes, if streaming movies well-produced, middle of the road, not terribly expensive is most profitable - as per this recent discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29247571 on red notice
if cinema, big expansive events most profitable (currently)
if shows, high quality addictive, dramatic, character driven, etc. is most profitable
why is quality series more profitable than middle of road? because you have to get people to make the investment of spending 10+ hours.
why are medium quality competence streaming movies most profitable? because many people are willing to spend 90 minutes passing the time with something mildly enjoyable, despite the many draws on our time it's still not seen as a serious investment.
why are big events blah blah blah - because it costs a lot to go out it is a hassle compared to staying home, I tend to go to restaurant as well when I do it so for me at least it definitely has to have been a night worth it at the end, and something big is more likely to make everyone like whoa I had an experience I can't have at home.
I'm curious if they actually have scientifically valid data to back that up, or if it is just assumption and common knowledge from industry people with the common trait of not questioning if the assumptions are actually right. It is very hard to tell from where I'm sitting, because there is so much puffery and fake numbers tossed at the public. Actually comparing apples to apples would be difficult, as there are so many variables such as advertising budget and media placement to account for.
In what sense is "International Audiences" part of "The lowest common denominator"
So if you are selling a global movie, you are not going to be able to rely on cultural references, witty banter, or sophisticated plots. You will not even be able to rely on a lot of dialogue as the movie will need to be dubbed and subtle dialogue doesn't translate well.
You will rely on boobs and explosions, because that's the lowest common denominator that will sell well in New York, Indonesia, Nigeria, Italy, Egypt, Chile, and China. And if many nations don't allow boobs, then explosions it is.
There just isn't a lot that the world has in common, which forces movies with a global audience to be extremely shallow.
One reason, for example, for the dearth of good comedy films is that it's really hard for comedy to translate across different cultures. Maybe something like slipping on a banana peel will work, but more sophisticated stuff doesn't work.
Yes, but what has maybe replaced the movie is the high-quality, daring, world-changing series. Squid Game, Outlander, etc. Directors and consumers are now no longer limited to a 3 hour time in the theater, as far as the art of the motion picture is concerned.
I feel like people say they want a la carte but that's not actually what they want. What they want is all the good content and none of the crap filler content, for cheap. People pushed for a la carte because in their mind all content costs the same, so they figured that by removing the content they don't want and only keeping the content they do want, they would save tons of money. They don't understand that the good content (live sports, FX, AMC, HBO, et al) is precisely what studios are charging a premium for and what is driving most of the cost in packages in the first place.
It's roughly akin to someone looking at a Vegas buffet that costs $100 and features 100 entrees and saying "well there are 100 entrees but really all I want is the cheese, prime rib, crab legs, and caviar, so if I remove the other 96 entrees then this should cost $4" then being shocked when they are still charged 40 dollars. Sure it's cheaper but in their minds it should be an order of magnitude cheaper than it is.
but would streaming services rather compete with piracy than another big player?
With piracy, they have the law on their side - they can lobby for rules to punish piracy using state resources, rather than their own. They cannot do so for their competitors.
I'm paying twice as much for cable internet as I used to pay for basic cable, before even starting to pay for a streaming service.
After all, TCM seems to do well running their back catalog of movies.
Dear Lord, this! This!
I would dearly love to be able to get a good copy of Love is Never Silent with working subtitles but sadly since it was a Hallmark made for television movie it's simply not available to me. There are certainly others like that, half remembered movies that I'd watched in my youth that would be worth revisiting as an adult or to share with others but they're simply unavailable except through IMDB to remind myself that I didn't imagine them, they do exist.
This is the issue for me. My lineup of currently-"airing" shows requires subscriptions to Netflix, HBO Max, CBS All Access, Disney+, and Amazon Prime Video. And I feel like I'm forgetting another one or two.
To be fair, these subscriptions, in total, do cost less than what I was paying for cable back in 2005 (last time I had cable).
I don't want one streaming platform to rule them all. A monopoly doesn't sound great. So ok, we keep the idea of several competing streaming platforms. I'm sure there are downsides to this, but maybe a legal requirement for compulsory licensing to competing platforms under RAND terms might help?
This is mentioned in other comments, but a large part of the reason streaming services got going was because piracy was so much more convenient than the brutal grind of actually paying for something. Users could be sitting in their living rooms with wallets out ready to go, and still choose piracy, because the only other alternative was waiting for a physical CD or DVD to arrive.
If the streaming wars do too much damage to consumers, they'll just flip the playing board and go back to piracy.
I think that's already happening among the tech literate. The difference now is that the majority of consumers are not technically inclined and don't mind paying for several streaming services to get easy access to their favorite content, so the industry generally doesn't care about losing a small fraction to piracy.
Pirating content is now more technically difficult than paying for a service, but the benefits are still there: DRM-free content that can be consumed on any device, accessed offline, safe against removal, licensing issues, region locks, easily shareable, etc.
Paying for a streaming service now has the same issues as paying for cable did: you get access to tons of low quality content you don't care about just to watch the few shows and movies you actually do. Content curation is still an unsolved problem and the industry is ripe for disruption once someone figures out what I actually want to watch and how I can pay for only that.
Or pirating will become easier and they'll continue to lose revenue.
You could say the same in an alternate reality where everyone is still putting up with using Sourceforge and getting the occasional binary download bundled with malware. People would have forgotten how much more difficult it was to receive CDs by mail, so by your definition these poor alt developers would be winning.
A la carte might only make sense in a world of themed channels. After that, pricing gets hard because no one wants to pay $3 for an episode of Friends (I suppose the season is only $10), they want to rent access to everything like with Spotify, but it's complicated because sports cost a lot more than most other content, and content like reality shows is dirt cheap to make. Then there's pricing streaming movies. Everything older than 2 years included, add-on charge for new releases? People don't like microtransactions. And this is in a hypothetical world where video streaming isn't balkanized.
That's an odd argument and reminds me of the situation with science publishers that led to scihub and friends: Publishers were offering package deals to universities which technically had a wealth of content, except the vast majority of it was garbage. Nevertheless, universities had to buy the packages, because of the few flagship journals that were embedded in the packages.
> Careful what you wish for? The big desire then was a la carte, and right now you can bounce between streaming services at will, and they're all still far easier to cancel than cable.
Who was wishing for anything here? Streaming has always been pushed by the industry as an acceptable alternative to piracy. The supppsed benefits of streaming were always part of the sales push.
This is obviously a joke, but honestly, it seems like the direction we are heading -- cable V2.
I really wish streaming video had a similar licensing model to audio -- pay a central licensing authority for the content, and it's the same price for everyone. Then the streaming services could compete on their UI and the content creators will compete on making popular content.
The distinguishing feature of cable (and satellite) was that you had no option to instantly play what you want when you want where you want. And no option to instantly watch from the media owner and cut out middlemen. And no option to watch select episodes or subscribe for only 1 month.
What cable did was bring multiple networks together into a single interface which had never been done before.
But the point is all those bundles were only necessary due to lack of technology that could connect content owners directly to content viewers. We even have search engines that, theoretically, you should be able to search the content’s name, get to the content owner’s website, and be presented with the options of how you can watch it.
Edit: I think I get your point, that bundling might be more economical for content owners. And that cable facilitated that by subsidizing less watched content with more watched content. But I guess in that case, I am guessing the cable company just becomes the content owner (like Comcast) and the various content owners get big and produce a variety of media.
Worse: SX only covers the recording. You still have to talk to the big three licensing agencies about the written music. (That was my understanding about 15 years ago in Internet radio. This point might have changed.)
There isn’t an insert coin receive MP3 with all rights attached service, which sounds like how you’ve understood SoundExchange to work, and what you’re lobbying for in video. I agree that would be cool but it’s extremely unlikely for the same reason you can’t do it with SX.
That’s the likely outcome. They’ll probably push for the mechanical video recording and the creative content within it to be different licenses just like music. And then you’ll still have to license the music within it, probably both the recording and the creative. IP structure in complex media is so entwined there won’t be a simple answer here, I’m afraid. I wish it weren’t so.
The worst outcome possible would be a lot of creative folks in a television production realizing the distinction between the two music licenses and creating a setup where there is five or six for video (script license, series license, translation license, likeness licenses, blah blah).
It's really, really shitty that media consumption has been commoditized in the way it has - with every service having to secure rights (at different times and varying prices), and users constantly being forced to either add an additional service or cancel a service to watch the content they actually want to watch.
The radio licensing model would have (and still would be) SO much freaking better.
Every new device requires logging into a bunch of services. When a login expires I have to explain how to log in again and what the password is. The kids (and I!) have to remember which content they want to watch right now is on which service.
At least with cable I could just leave a single page instruction sheet that said "press this button on the remote, and the cable will turn on, here are the channel numbers you care about".
(I've had the same issue with music--my MP3 collection consists of a few dozen LPs that I've ripped because they were never digitized and added to the different services.)
Who is willing to do that? I bet many people will opt for illegal downloads again.
I think a lot of people will just do without.
My family wanted to watch Mandalorian so we subscribed to Disney+. It took us two months to get through the series so it only cost $15 or so which seems like a pretty good deal for that many hours of TV. Since I subscribed via Apple, cancelling was painless. We did the same with Peacock for a different show.
HBO, Hulu, and Netflix seem to have enough stuff that we watch that we've stayed subscribed to those for years now.
It's amazing to me that the company feels that the benefits of this outweigh the goodwill it costs them among the fanbase. Trekkies are going apeshit over this. It makes me more hesitant to buy Star Trek media in the future, and I'll admit I'm not one to change my buying patterns based on companies' behavior ordinarily.
The timing was so abrupt that I really doubt this was just a horrible rash decision. That's totally still possible though.
In this case, the hope is that your VPN won't accept money from media rights holders, in exchange for your data.
https://github.com/trailofbits/algo
Plus Netflix and Amazon are actually creating some decent content.
Netflix has made it clear to me that although many of the shows were awful, not all of them were, and that being able to see them without ads gave me a totally different appreciation for what (some) people were trying to do on TV over the last 3 decades.
My god, the ads. So many. So flashy. After every single one, she was convinced she needed whatever toy was being peddled.
Never again.
Difficulty in watching some things has been present from the earliest days of streaming, and has only been less of a pain as the world has moved away from cable. (I never had DVR, so the pre-streaming world for me meant either watch it live, record it to VHS, or maybe catch it "On Demand".)
I know what it's like to be in your situation (usually when trying to stream live sports), but the remedy is almost always to do a bit of research and decide if you want to take the path they want you to take.
I'm very happy with the streaming landscape right now, and I think it's way better than it was five years ago.
The Star Trek franchise is a grab bag between Amazon Prime, Netflix, Hulu and Paramount+.
The thing is that everything is sliced up and packaged not to present a single package of what the customer wants. Rather, it is packaged so that what the customer wants is distributed across multiple packages which must all be purchased separately. Look at the NFL - Monday night football ESPN, Thursday Amazon Prime, Sunday Night - NBC, Sunday Day - various.
I'm just done chasing. Bring me my entire team's season or get no money from me at all. I can understand the odd game out, but this has been deliberate.
If that takes more than a few seconds, I open up TV app on my phone, search it, and decide if it is worth buying.
If it is any more difficult than that, I spend my time doing something else. The situation is much better than the old days of relying on Comcast.
How often can you just buy the content? There are many movies that I would love to buy and own but there is no option. It is either lend them for streaming or buy a super expensive blue ray which I don't get to own because of DRM. I wish there was a gog.com kind of solution.
The only way I can truly own a movie is to pirate it.
I get wanting to help content creators but I think it is fine to help just some of them (especially the smaller ones). There is no reason to feel bad about not helping all of them. Pirating something can still help the creators buy creating more attention. You might not pay for it but the friend you are telling about it, might. Or you might pay later after having more money.
Pre-DVD you’d just be screwed. Your show would be episodic (much of Star Trek TNG) and you’d hope to catch as much as you can on syndication or reruns.
All the other streaming services are fighting over your remaining 1-3 slots in your household. Of them it would seem Amazon looks good because they make you think you're getting a deal with Prime, but it doesn't seem to have the same pull as a 5 year old who needs to watch Disney.
The others also have the disadvantage that adults are going to know how to share an account. With kids you don't want to be coordinating it.
As for UX, I don't quite understand why anything is ever taken off the streaming service. Isn't it one of the things that makes it better than a Blockbuster? Every movie you've ever had on can be left there. There's gotta be a way to shove the long tail content on some slower/less replicated infrastructure, but maybe it isn't a technical consideration.
Probably won't happen for the first-party services like Disney Plus, Paramount, etc. but things leave Netflix because the deals for streaming usually last 5-15 years; no studio exec wants to be the name attached to something like "Netflix gets exclusive streaming rights to this film in perpetuity" when 50 years down the line it would've made more sense to relicense it to X other company or bring it into your own streaming library. It's not anywhere near a technical limitation like you suggest, it's a money issue.
Disney Plus meets the conscience criteria while having frictionless content switching if one’s kid wants to watch new content.
Can you not just download stuff from NZB and use whatever open-source software you like to stream and play it on your computer device of choice?
Maybe you're at the airport or on a plane/train/car, maybe you don't own a laptop, maybe you're traveling for work and just brought your work laptop, maybe someone else is using the TV, maybe...
Plenty of reasons you might watch a TV show on your phone lol...
I watch all my TV while walking usually. Trying to lose some gained weight. iPad/tablet can work too if I’d want to.
Unless it’s an action thing, a bigger screen isn’t needed. Phone is on me and quicker.
I’m not sure what NZB is. I just want to quickly watch something usually.
Heck, even when my Gen Z friends do have a TV right in front of them, they’ll often end up watching TV on their laptops or phones anyways. I suppose it’s easier than fiddling with a Chromecast.
I did watch some of the Marvel tv content as it got a lot of hype. I don’t get it. The production quality is insanely high, but the shows and pacing seemed pretty tame. If that sort of action isn’t your thing, Netflix stuff blows it out of the water in my opinion.
HBO, Apple TV+ and Netflix have all mostly fallen into this trap of producing really elaborate, super expensive drama shows that are mostly really depressing, boring and dystopic. Fantastic HDR cinematography though.
The latter is particularly interesting since there are no licensing issues. Every professional streaming service should have a better player than mpv. None actually do.
You could say that it's always like that because pirates get their content for free. However, Spotify and others managed just fine with music which used to be even more widely pirated than tv shows and movies.
(Survivor.S41E09.Whos.Who.in.the.Zoo is available on torrents in 1080p.)
The real competition is Plex/Emby/Jellyfin allowing access to people's media libraries in a way that's mostly on-par with existing services, and the added benefit of having all content truly in one place. The issue is that there isn't a completely legal way to get media content as unencrypted files (since ripping blu-rays is legal, but breaking the software protections to do it isn't).
Apple was 'free' with the last phone I bought, but I'll pay for it when the next season of For All Mankind is on.
Still have to torrent stuff. Paramount literally won't let me buy the latest version of Discovery after their shocking "fuck you" to the world this week.