[basch]

Both journalism and video could be fixed with the same solution.

1) a standard oauth2 login system. One identity I can use to sign into all my streaming platforms.

1b) mint/manilla like management tools from the account provider for keeping track of subscriptions, bills, and what you are actually paying for.

2.5) something that can deduplicate when you are paying for the same content twice. It's very easy to end up paying 2 or 3 times for access to the same streams, whether they be viacom or fox or nbc. Once I pay for the rights to a library, I should be exempt from paying a second service again. Its very hard to see overlap, when youve signed up for access to the same libraries through multiple providers.

3) a rss/pubsub like standard for feeding video to a video player. Sure if I want to navigate to the Netflix app to see the netflix experience for browsing video, I can, but I should also be able to click videos and see all the videos I pay for across all services, in any library browser I choose.

Roku and Apple TV, and to some extent Amazon, have all somewhat recreated this experience for the user through sheer force, but it requires streaming platforms to be compatible with Roku and Apple and Amazons way of doing things. It's not an industry standard for 1) tracking licensing access 2) providing authenticated access to raw video. Anyone should be able to write a video player interface that can automatically interface with compatible video providers. Just like web browsers and websites.

And to the same extent, until paying, tracking, and access to journalism follows some kind of open standard, its just too hard to pay for access to tons of articles from a ton of providers. Ill gladly pay a la cart or through usage (not when I open a tab, but after i finish at least half an article?) And I know these kind of startups exist, but they are still proprietary, they arent a technology built right into the browser and and into each news platform. I should be able to prove I pay for a news site, and get the content, without the site caring what browser/librarymanager I am using.

In essence, the frontend newsreader/videoplayer should be completely decoupled from the backend content provider infrastructure, and both ends should be infinitely interchangable and compatible.

[neuralRiot]

It should be something easy to implement, perhaps a "token" system where you start to read and a mesaage tells you "this article costs x "readerCoins" continue?".

[Kalium]

As soon as you throw in a custom currency, the whole thing falls apart. From the user's perspective, part of the value-add is the seamlessness of the proposal. Micropayments are anything but seamless.

[TylerH]

That will never happen in a capitalist system

[basch]

It happened with DVD and Blu-Ray players. Standard delivery/transport/storage mechanism, from all the studios, that play in any certified player.

I didnt need a separate WB, Disney, Sony hardware device to watch movies, my Sony played them all.

[guitarbill]

Ha, if only is was that straight forward.

For DVD, there were almost two standards (yet again), but computer manufacturers Apple, Compaq, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, and Microsoft basically forced the video industry to stop messing around and use the same format.

But otherwise? Phonograph cylinders vs disks (records), VHS vs Betamax, Blu-ray vs HD-DVD, etc. XBox vs Playstation vs Switch vs PC exclusives. The list goes on, so I wouldn't hold my breath.

[basch]

I am ok with multiple competing standards or two projects merging into one. The difference is, despite licensing, the dvd and blu ray specs are published standards.

What Im less ok with is this completely proprietary vudu, ultraviolet, moviesanywhere, fandango, itunes, googleplay, amazon digital locker tangled web mess. I should have ONE master account at ANY platform that tracks my ownership of digital keys, and it should grant me access to play it back on any platform that chooses to serve me the video file. If I decide to move from google to itunes I should be able to export or transfer my key library. If I have a google account, paid for Bumblebee in Play Movies, Apple should choose to honor my request for playback on my Apple TV, and cover the bandwidth. It would be in the best interest of making their product Just Work. And if Apple only wants to offer files for keys I have stored in their service, it should seamlessly fall back to grabbing the file from google without the user having to do a damn thing. It should just silently work. As a movie watcher I dont need or shouldnt need to care if the file is streaming from Apple or Google. (but if i were apple I would want full control of the video quality on an apple tv.)

None of this "you can load it into moviesanywhere and see it in vudu, but then you cant see it in intues or ultraviolet." Permanently locking the keys to proprietary temporal services seems explicity designed to have these services ebb and flow into new services and magicaly lose my keys from time to time, or make them nearly inaccessable if they can only flow into one specific other site.

Do they want my business? I am willing to pay, if it means not balancing full price access to nyt, wsj, foreign policy, bloomberg, wired, ars, etc etc etc. I cant just sign up for every single one of those, and they cant expect me to. Im not going to devote myself to just reading one or two of them. So either they can cater to people who are willing to spread money around, little bits to each of them, or they can ignore that market and lose potential business. Ive paid for those products in the past, but now I'll just go read something else.