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by rhino369
3158 days ago
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>On-demand (Netflix, Hulu, HBO's online thingy, iPlayer, what have you) has been the most effective way to actually recover rights-holder revenues. Are they though? Only 2 out of 49 million HBO subscribers are HBO Now users. And Americans still pirate HBO content in large numbers. People are canceling $100/month revenue cable plans and getting $10 netflix. That's a large loss of revenue. It's not clear to me that streaming can actually support the television ecosystem we have now. |
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But we can't pretend that that revenue is still up for grabs. The moment people are aware of the true market value of a copy of one episode of Game of Thrones, the price they're willing to pay for the convenience of watching it anywhere is going to be lower than the cost of cable. The upshot could be that what money they do end up paying is allocated almost directly to what they're actually watching, rather than a thousand channels of garbage they would never be caught dead watching.
The people who are cutting the cable can do one of three things: 1) watch it on-demand, 2) don't watch it, or 3) watch it without licensing it. If you don't have a convenient means of watching it at a price which satisfies consumers, consumers can only really justify doing 2 or 3 (which basically means you'll go out of business). That's what I mean by recovering revenues. If you don't do on-demand and paid downloads right, then you will have no revenue once all the cables are cut.
> It's not clear to me that streaming can actually support the television ecosystem we have now.
It's not clear to me either, though we must keep in mind that a) that revenue is going to dry up no matter what, and b) more direct licensing, and viewership-based licensing will make the entertainment industry more lean, and fewer shows will be basically money laundering schemes.