[jasode]

The article's Part 1 refers to an old HN thread and buried in there is a good comment from anactofgod about "disrupting Hollywood": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3491584

His analysis has similar to themes to the misunderstanding of "gatekeepers" like Netflix / Amazon Video / HBO and why they exist.

Gatekeepers are an emergent property of artists not having money to self-finance their projects -- and -- also not wanting to mess around with tasks that are unrelated to creativity such as managing a web server farm to distribute their videos to their fans.

There was a recent HN thread where people were frustrated that they had to pay for multiple streaming services (Netflix/Hulu/Amazon) to get all the shows they wanted. Several suggested that we need to move towards a decentralized P2P distribution platform. Unfortunately, as techies and programmers, we don't consider the underlying economic forces that created the centralized gatekeepers in the first place. For example... if director/producer David Fincher wants the highest payment for his project, he can go to Netflix execs and convince them give him $100 million[1]. How would he get that kind of payday from decentralized systems such as IPFS / Sandstorm / DECENT[2]?

[1]http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/netflix-outbids-hbo-da...

[2]https://decent.ch/

[whack]

> Gatekeepers are an emergent property of artists ... not wanting to mess around with tasks that are unrelated to creativity such as managing a web server farm to distribute their videos to their fans.

This exact same argument can also be made wrt Musicians. Justin Bieber has no interest in managing a web server farm to distribute his music to fans. And yet, I'm able to go online and purchase specific Justin Bieber songs/albums that I'm interested in, without having to pay monthly fees to some Netflix-type aggregator.

> Gatekeepers are an emergent property of artists not having money to self-finance their projects

This seems like a much stronger argument, and I agree that making a TV show is vastly more expensive than making songs. But the vast majority of new musicians do not self-finance their first few albums either. They sign up with a record label, and the record label finances the production/marketing/distribution costs. And ultimately, when consumers pay money to buy the songs/albums, a cut of that money goes back to the record company in order for them to recoup their investment.

The exact same model can work for television shows as well. HBO bankrolls David Fincher $100M to produce Utopia. Customers who want to watch Utopia can pay money just to watch Utopia, without having to sign up for HBO. And as "equity holders", a percentage of that customer money goes back to HBO.

I'm sure there are many other niggling issues that need to be worked out, but at a fundamental level, I don't see why this revised model can't work. Allowing consumers to pay only for the shows that they want to watch, instead of forcing them to pay for an entire monthly bundle, seems like it should be much more economically efficient.

[67726e]

> But the vast majority of new musicians do not self-finance their first few albums either. They sign up with a record label, and the record label finances the production/marketing/distribution costs.

Is that really the case? I'm heavily into the local music scene in my city, I'm friends with loads of musicians, go to shows almost nightly and talk to the bands, etc. Based on my experience most artists do pay for their first couple releases. With the exception of my friends who started their own "label" I only know one band who has any corporate involvement, and even in that case they're only paying to finish an album that was already being worked on.

[TeMPOraL]

> And yet, I'm able to go online and purchase specific Justin Bieber songs/albums that I'm interested in, without having to pay monthly fees to some Netflix-type aggregator.

I pay Spotify so I don't have to deal with a site per band. Going distributed has its costs; especially differences on the UI endpoint for the end-user is something bad, IMO.

Also, self-hosting MP3s is trivial (payment gateways, less so). At worst, you have to throw a couple bucks to a hosting company and hire a guy for couple hours a month to manage it. Hosting videos, however, is much bigger deal.

> Allowing consumers to pay only for the shows that they want to watch, instead of forcing them to pay for an entire monthly bundle, seems like it should be much more economically efficient.

It would be economically efficient, but honestly, I believe economic efficiency is the problem in arts, not the goal. That is, if users are paying for particular movies, then producers are incentivized to invest only in movies that are likely to be paid for. Which creates a feedback loop that promotes dumb, trivial content at expense of something that could be meaningful, but doesn't look sellable from the get-go.

[rhino369]

>And yet, I'm able to go online and purchase specific Justin Bieber songs/albums that I'm interested in, without having to pay monthly fees to some Netflix-type aggregator.

Almost all TV is available from the same sort of places that sell you Beiber songs for a per episode price.

But even the music industry is moving away from that sort of model. Flat fee is more convenient.

[jasode]

> songs/albums that I'm interested in, without having to pay monthly fees to some Netflix-type aggregator.

Many music lovers subscribe to Spotify which has 30+ million tracks to choose from. However, it doesn't have the Taylor Swift albums because she pulled them. If those customers want to hear Taylor Swift, they have to buy them from Apple Itunes or Amazon Music.

T Swift made a voluntary choice to net her the best paying deal which means digital music customers have to pay for more than one service. Add up thousands of different musicians each looking after their self-interests for the best deal and it ends up creating several intermediaries.

> Customers who want to watch Utopia can pay money just to watch Utopia, without having to sign up for HBO.

It's not about being a monthly subscriber or an on-demand occasional payer -- it's about the mystery of HBO even existing as an intermediary that often puzzles techies.

[whack]

> Many music lovers subscribe to Spotify which as 30+ million tracks to choose from

I'm not opposed to bundle-options being available, as long as I can choose to avoid them and pay ala carte. I don't even mind having to use 5 different sites in order to buy all my favorite content, as long as I'm only paying for the specific content I want on each of those sites.

That's my biggest complaint with television. For most popular TV shows, if I want to watch the latest episodes, I have to sign up and pay for an entire bundle that I'm not interested in. That strikes me as being both consumer-unfriendly, and economically-inefficient.

[TeMPOraL]

You paying for the entire bundle is what makes me, a person who likes less-than-most-popular TV shows, to be able to watch those shows - they probably would never exist without that economic inefficiency in the first place! So that's why I'm probably biased, but I do believe economic efficiency leads to lowest-common-denominator products, which I find to be a bad thing in arts.

[klodolph]

Even if an artist doesn't finance production, you can still show up at the record company with a demo tape and a fan following. There is also a long history of artists starting their own studios and record labels.