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> 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. |