[archey1]

Netflix is just getting more expensive and less interesting to me. With all of the content I like being taken off to be hosted on network exclusive streaming platforms that I refuse to pay for - I'll probably eventually just cancel Netflix as well going back to the tried and true method of just buying bluray box-sets of the content I want to watch.

Or piracy.

I think the critical mistake that all these megacorps are making is that people don't actually want to pay for a bazillion streaming services. That's the reason we cut the cord in the first place. People hated being locked into packages and this is basically the same thing - you need the "NBC" package for The Office or the "CBS" package for Star Trek. I can't be bothered to spend all that money.

Netflix was worth it because it made accessing so much content easier than piracy, but with everything getting pushed into a walled garden "package" approach again...piracy will be easier again.

I get HD over the air with less than a dozen chanels, and that's often enough to keep me distracted if I'm not feeling up to playing a videogame or watching a movie.

[noelsusman]

Of course people would rather pay $10 a month to access everything, but that's just not sustainable. Look at Netflix's own financials. They got into content creation and they're now deep in debt despite their massive subscriber base.

I also don't get why everyone is clamoring for one company to control all video entertainment distribution. Isn't that what we hated about cable? Didn't we beg for the ability to pick and choose what we actually want to pay for? Now we finally have that and people instantly want to go back? Why?

If Netflix doesn't make enough content that interests you then stop giving them money and give it to whoever does instead. I thought this is what we wanted.

[atombender]

People aren't asking for a single distribution channel in the sense of a single monolithic company owning all the IP. They do want (1) convenient apps that aggregate, such as Apple TV and Amazon Prime Video, and (2) a way to get all the content without having to pay lots of individual companies (I'm subscribing to around 5 streaming services myself).

Why can't video be like music? Spotify and Apple Music aggregate pretty much all the music in the world now. You don't have to sign up Warner and Sony and a thousand other labels to play music. There are stragglers, of course, but they're getting fewer. If this model works for Spotify et al, why can't it work for movies and TV?

Moreover, all the music is licensed through a single IP rights licensing system. It's what allows music to be played on the radio and so on. I know very little about how it works technically, but it seems to work just fine.

[dragonwriter]

> Why can't video be like music?

Music is still fighting being “like music”.

> Spotify and Apple Music aggregate pretty much all the music in the world now.

There have been a number of recent media reports about how exclusives, which never were absent from streaming music, are playing a bigger role now.

> You don't have to sign up Warner and Sony and a thousand other labels to play music.

Well, yeah, we haven't gotten to the point of the content owners taking their ball and going home in music yet, we’re in more the Netflix and Blockbuster bidding for exclusives phase when it comes to music. But we know where that ends up.

> Moreover, all the music is licensed through a single IP rights licensing system.

No, it's not, it's just that public performance licensing has a small number of agencies that most artists are affiliated with, and offer blanket licenses, so you don't usually have to deal with individual content owners.

But no one is putting the ki d of money into an album they do into a major motion picture and hoping for that kind of return, so video (at least the top tier) isn't going to look like that.

[badestrand]

>> Moreover, all the music is licensed through a single IP rights licensing system.

> No, it's not, it's just that public performance licensing has a small number of agencies that most artists are affiliated with, and offer blanket licenses

At least in Germany we have a single agency (GEMA) that acts on behalf of virtually all artists worldwide. They are responsible for a range of licenses, be it for bands that want to cover a song on their new album, a bar that wants to play music or a music streaming service that wants to get started.

In my experience it is a tremendous help to have a single entity for licensing that even has ready-made rates for most things.

I don't see a reason why this could not exist for movies as well. Cost-intensive productions can easily be reflected by tiered pricing so that it costs more to stream/show Jurassic Park than some independent movie.

[lonelappde]

Right. Streaming video will be like Spotify as soon as Disney+ finishes buying every IP franchise.

[NotSammyHagar]

I wonder how far they can go before they are told they can't buy anything more? I think they have too much right now.

[Nexxius]

Probably at about the same point Taco Bell is viewd as "Fine Dining"

[richardw]

Radio probably prevents exclusives to some extent. If you can't get your song onto general radio you're going nowhere. Can't have exclusive online when radio isn't.

(generally, obviously there will be exceptions.)

[nickv]

Because Music isn't TV or film. The vast majority of revenue for most artists come from live performances.

It's not like the cast of Stranger Things can go and tour the world and perform a live Stranger Things inside stadiums. It doesn't work that way.

Additionally, Spotify, especially, has done wonders for obscure discoverablity with Discover Weekly which incentivize smaller bands to support it (because again they make their money from tours). Discoverablity is much easier tho when it requires a 4 minutes time commitment while commuting with headphones as opposed to a multi hour commitment of film or TV.

They're not at all even remotely the same beast.

[VBprogrammer]

> It's not like the cast of Stranger Things can go and tour the world and perform a live Stranger Things inside stadiums. It doesn't work that way.

I for one would totally pay to see that.

[tjoff]

It doesn't follow that they need to be exclusive. It's just that exclusive titles are the best way to market your own service.

It is quite profitable if you are among the very few popular services. But now it's just a tragedy of the commons situation.

Yet again there is no practical way to watch a given serie/movie. Which is the whole premise of streaming services.

So yet again piracy gives you better quality with less fuss.

[Twisell]

This was absolutely true... before the Star Wars franchise in 70’s. And I’d bet that "stranger things" derived products are massively more cash producing than any artists live performance.

The real question is about independents, not blockbusters.

[adventured]

> People aren't asking for a single distribution channel in the sense of a single monolithic company owning all the IP. They do want (1) convenient apps that aggregate

I generally agree with that. I don't care about one platform at all. I'll pay up to ~$30 total per month for nearly everything (TV + movies), whether that's on one site or spread across four.

With the way things are going, it looks more likely that I'll just frequently turn subscriptions on and off. That's the routine I've found myself in the last year or so. I might watch some shows on HBO or Showtime, then when they end for the season I kill the subscription. I might maintain one central subscription, such as Prime (which makes it easy to add and remove other 'channel' subscriptions). This seems to be how a lot of consumers are behaving now.

[lonelappde]

Premium cables costs $100/mo, and some stuff is still pay per view. Why wout you expect to get it for $30/no?

[hiram112]

Not the parent, but because that's all I'm willing to pay for Hollywood's mostly recycled content.

Push the price to more than $30, and I'll just use my antenna and find other things to do. I cut the cable cord years ago, and I lived.

Only when when reasonably priced subscriptions like Prime, Netflix, and maybe HBO or Showtime, often rotated, could be had for $30 / month did I come back to Hollywood.

Exact same for music. I'm old enough to remember making $6 / hour at the grocery store and then taking my paycheck straight to BestBuy to purchase $17 CDs. But ever since I got my first DSL connection about 20 years ago, the music industry hasn't earned a cent off me.

Only recently did Spotify at $10 / month bring me back as a customer. I guarantee you if I start finding songs I want to play are premium priced or missing, or they start raising prices like Netflix, well I guess the music companies won't be getting my $10 anymore either.

The $100 / month for commercial TV that Cox, Comcast, and friends have enjoyed, same as the $17 / CD that the music industry once took for granted, isn't going to work with the next generation like it did with the Boomers. We don't have as much disposable income, and there are too many other options out there.

[singron]

I saw a chart a while ago that showed how much of your subscription your cable company forwarded to the content networks. Most channels were cents per month. ESPN was highest by far and was still only 5 dollars iirc. It seems like if your ISP is already providing connectivity, you should be paying closer to these prices.

[noelsusman]

This is a good point, though Spotify hasn't been without its bumps. It has lost money almost every year and substantially reduced the total amount of money artists receive from people listening to their music. Artists have been forced to find alternative revenue streams to remain solvent, and it has taken a hammer to the "middle class" of musicians.

All of this has been great for the consumer since we get cheap music, but if we want to port the same system over to shows/movies then we need to think through the implications of reducing the total amount of revenue that content creators get from people watching their content. Where are the alternative revenue streams? You can't take a TV show on tour.

It's definitely possible, theoretically, but I'm not sure it's possible at a price point that people actually want to pay. Making video content is orders of magnitude more expensive than making music.

[wool_gather]

It's funny; I think that Spotify is an insanely good deal. I would absolutely pay more for the service, a lot more. I'd probably use it more if I were paying more, too, so maybe it wouldn't work out for them. But in my opinion, they're underpriced.

[toast0]

> Why can't video be like music? Spotify and Apple Music aggregate pretty much all the music in the world now

Compulsory licensing in general, and specifically for radio style plays makes a big difference in the rights landscape. Movies and TV don't have anything like that, so you have to get agreement with content owners to do anything.

[wang_li]

> a way to get all the content without having to pay lots of individual companies

Ironic, as a decade ago the complaint was that we need a la cart pricing. Now that it's happening everyone is complaining about it being too expensive. What it seems people really want is the cable all you can eat buffet model, but at a 90% discount.

[SomewhatLikely]

A la carte paid to a single provider. Not five different monthly payments, logins, and likely five different apps with slightly different ux and controls.

[wool_gather]

À la carte means you pay for the ITEMS you consume. This is absolutely not à la carte. This is multi-prix fixe pricing.

[didibus]

I'm not sure it is happening though. Can I just say... pay 10$ a month for access to 10 TV shows of my chosing?

Or even better would be to pay by the minute at a rate where it ends up that 1h of TV every month is around 10$. But where the selection of shows is the entire catalogue of all shows ever.

[xiphias2]

It sounds great, but as the content is already created, this business model doesn't reflect the real cost of business either. The more people watch the same shows, the better the synergy between content creators and viewers.

[NotSammyHagar]

Well, a big company can work to make money on all their productions, like when they make a ton of money with a few big shows like say friends. I have a vision that a lot of money goes to the endless division of licensing to all those middlemen negotiating small different broadcast allowances, that have to be implemented, enforced, checked, have lawyers on both sides, produced etc. That's overhead must waste a lot of money. What if every programmer had a middleman negotiate your wage and take 15%? That wouldn't make it more productive, but would pay for a lot of useless businesspeople in the middle.

[didibus]

Right, but I think you're conflating two things. How a business will successfully offer what consumers want in a sustainable manner and what consumers would want. Saying, that wouldn't be a viable business model doesn't mean that if someone could make it viable it wouldn't allow them to take over the market and shake the industry, since it would deliver on what customers might want most.

And that's kinda what Netflix had set out to do at first, and I'm hoping are still trying to do.

[ctack]

The way I understand it, the aggregators don’t pay at all well. Bands and producers make their money playing gigs these days and try to make it big where there is mega money in everything including the aggregator exclusives. Generally the aggregators pay badly, but do mean exposure. TV shows can’t work like that, they have much higher overhead and actually need to be paid.

[atombender]

And yet you can get a wealth of TVs and movies from various streaming services today at around $10/mo each.

If studios all pooled their IP in a single marketplace under a compulsory, fair licensing scheme, the calculation would be about the same, because currently most streaming services don't overlap much (though in some cases you can find movies on both iTunes and Google Play, for example).

What would change is that the current aggregators' revenue would shrink and their ability to have exclusive content would disappear. A company like Netflix would become just another content provider competing for views in a single marketplace.

Perhaps a better analogy is the movie theater business. Movie theaters generally show movies from all rights holders (though I'm sure studios also compete for the best screens for tentpole launches). Theaters share revenue with studios. In principle, anyone can go to any theater to see a movie of their choice, and theaters can show the movies they want as long as they license them. It's not on-demand, but that's pretty irrelevant. Also, I can start a movie theater and start showing movies, as long as I abide by the licensing rules.

[godzillabrennus]

I basically have this with Hulu. I pay for the live tv package and cloud dvr. It lets me access a back catalogue of streamable content for each “channel” in my package.

I have hbo/starz/and the big name cable channels for about $140/month with 200gb of cloud dvr.

My only real complaint is that I can’t download content to my phone for flights.

It’s not $12.99/month but when I’m traveling in Asia I can VPN back to my house and watch whatever I want off the cloud DVR.

[01100011]

Oh, only $140/month? What a deal...</s>

Bring it down to $60-$80 and I'd consider it.

[gambiting]

All of these values are insane to me. People really spend that much to effectively watch TV?

[jasonlotito]

No.

With "effectively TV" you had to sit down at a certain time and watch it at that time. You had a selection of shows you could watch on a number of channels.

What the person here is talking about is $140 for something that is not "effectively TV." They can watch it pretty much where ever they want. They can watch it without commercials. They aren't limited to the shows or channels available on their provider. They get instant access to movies they want to watch, when they want to watch it, without need of special, single use hardware.

> All of these values are insane to me.

It's a special kind of hubris to to assume that everyone else is insane and you are not when you admittedly don't understand the topic at hand.

[gambiting]

>>Why can't video be like music?

Because with music I literally don't care what I'm listening to. If famous artists left Spotify I couldn't care any less - I just want a playlist with "music" and that's good enough for me. With video, I don't want random TV shows - I want specific ones that interest me, and either they are available on Netflix or they aren't, the fact that there is 10k other shows does nothing to justify the subscription.

[atombender]

Most people care about what music they listen to; Spotify's main mode of function isn't "random" like live TV. Moreover, while you might consider music to be a "random" experience by design, streaming movies/TV doesn't have to be. I was talking about the licensing model, not the consumption model.

[freeflight]

But just because you don't care what you are listening to, doesn't mean that nobody does, most people I know are rather picky with their music.

Just like you apparently care about what you are watching on VoD services, even tho there are also plenty people out there who use VoD as "background noise" and often couldn't care less about the actual shows.

[inetknght]

> I also don't get why everyone is clamoring for one company to control all video entertainment distribution. Isn't that what we hated about cable? Didn't we beg for the ability to pick and choose what we actually want to pay for? Now we finally have that and people instantly want to go back? Why?

1) I don't want to pay for content I won't watch.

2) I don't want to be required to pay for content I won't watch in order to watch content I want to watch.

3) I want to easily watch the content I want without needing to have dozens of different separate accounts or services. I mean similar to "press button, get bacon" style of easy.

4) I want to pay in money and nothing else. I don't want to pay with my data; I don't want to pay with my viewing history.

5) I want to watch whenever and wherever I choose, no take-backs.

[OkGoDoIt]

Amazon, Apple, Google, and Microsoft all offer paid rentals of nearly anything, on a per movie, episode, or season basis. So what you are asking for definitely exists. It’s just priced disproportionately high compared to the streaming packages that are popular these days.

[toast0]

$4/movie when i could get a month of X service for $8-12/month is kind of too high. Pay per episode for the TV shows I want to watch is too high almost whatever the price (who would pay anything to watch the logan's run tv series??)

Maybe we can get a frequent renter's club. $20/month for 8 movies (two a week) and 20 episodes?

[Wowfunhappy]

I agree movies are expensive.

However, I’m very okay with iTunes’s <$3 per episode. Sure it’s more than most vod subscriptions, but the shows are mine forever, and I can buy just about whatever I want.

If I watched more TV overall, it might get too expensive, but I don’t, so quality over quantity.

[jcims]

The Amazon Prime model works decent i think. Bunch of included content and stuff that’s too expensive to throw in for free gets a rental charge.

Was trying to find John Wick 3 this weekend and no joy. I would have paid a premium for that.

[Wowfunhappy]

* Except, annoyingly, for Netflix and Amazon originals. I waited a year for Stranger Things Season 2 to come out on BluRay. :(

[bcrosby95]

Use PLEX, buy dvds, and copy them onto your PLEX server. It satisfies all of your listed requirements.

[hiram112]

Yeah if you have tons of free time and want to watch the same DVDs over and over.

Some of us don't have that much time anymore (I did run Plex when I was younger, though). I'm either willing to pay about $$25-$30 / month for a few services like HBO and Prime without commercials*, and available in demand, with plenty of quality series to keep my 1 hour / day TV habit satiated, or I'll just take my ball and go home. Cable TV and $100 / month for 30% commercials is something I can and will live without.

[ohithereyou]

The only system that can cover all five of your points right now is piracy.

1) No charge, so you're not paying for content you won't watch

2) Same as 1

3) A torrent client speaking RSS + a private torrent site that serves RSS covers this

4) You pay with nothing - no money, no data, and no viewing history

5) Files without DRM can be played on any device and cannot be retroactively deleted by the service provider

Piracy really is most often a services problem.

[jogundas]

That's right! It would be interesting to see how torrented series statistics correlate with online streaming prices. My feeling is that as Netflix-like services become more expensive and/or fragmented, piracy picks up. Don't have any numbers to back this up with though.

[austhrow743]

Physical discs.

[snuxoll]

DRM, high cost, and ironically, poor availability (I bought all the seasons of ER in 1080p off iTunes, there exists no Blu-Ray sets for the show and the DVDs are often more expensive than what I paid Apple for digital copies that I promptly stripped the DRM from)

[lonelappde]

And the silent 6) I want DVDs, but without the physical disc management and without the high cost and without the DRM that makes publishers feel safe distributing digital content.

[thirdsun]

Same here. I want Bandcamp for video.

[Alupis]

> They got into content creation and they're now deep in debt despite their massive subscriber base.

I've found that while Netflix has some decent original content - the overwhelming majority of it is garbage and totally uninteresting.

Sometimes I feel some of the Netflix Originals where mothballed from normal venues, so Netflix picked it up, failing to realize why nobody else wanted to produce it in the first place.

As just an example, I was a huge fan of Arrested Development - but continuing that show where it left off after ~10 years of not being on air... it just didn't "have it" anymore...

And... when I search for a movie, it seems about 90% of the time they don't have it. Instead, they recommend a bunch of Netflix Original's that totally aren't what I'm looking for.

[addicted]

The best Netflix originals are the British shows they've rebranded as Netflix originals in the US.

The actual Netflix created ones have largely missed the mark for me.

[ljm]

And a lot of 'Netflix originals' over in the EU are essentially localised variations of a theme.

The theme is usually the end of the world, zombies, or the dead coming back to life. Or some horrible phenomena at the edge of a forest, and the once peaceful town is under attack from the supernatural.

What makes it worse is that Netflix now dubs foreign content by default to make it all look English. And they do their best to trick you.

[dreamcompiler]

You can still watch it in the original language with subtitles. It's just a setting.

But yeah, why is everything about "horror forests" nowadays? It's been done to death.

Maybe because so many people nowadays have never seen a tree?

[jrnichols]

what's frustrated me about Netflix originals is the same thing that drove me away from a lot of traditional TV - some awesome shows being cancelled after 2-3 seasons. I had hoped that Netflix would at least give their own shows a good story arc, but nope. they're doing the same thing Fox/CBS/NBC do.

i still much prefer shows without commercials, though.

[dreamcompiler]

Somebody wrote about this during the last week (can't remember where): Netflix purposely only produces two seasons of shows, because that's the right amount to convert new subscribers without alienating old ones enough to quit.

[Consultant32452]

I enjoy the standup specials. I remember when Comedy Central used to have stand up comedy. But I also remember when MTV was mostly music.

[Beldin]

Remark that that past evolution (of niche formats) does not bode well for the future of streaming video.

Case in point: I expect ads to arrive (within a decade) to streaming videos, much like they did for cable.

(Cable's main advantage in the early days was the lack of ads - or so I'm led to believe)

[cgriswald]

They’re already here. I even pay Hulu extra for no ads only to be greeted occasionally by a statement that due to licensing agreements a video has to have ads. And even the things that “don’t have ads” have ads for their other streaming videos, or try to cram ads in between auto plays.

[dreamcompiler]

True. In the early days of cable networks there were no ads. But slowly they came back when they realized people would tolerate them.

Now cable seems like mostly ads with a little bit of ghost hunting sprinkled in.

[b_tterc_p]

> the overwhelming majority of it is garbage and totally uninteresting.

This is true of pretty much all tv. Because most people want that.

[Alupis]

If I'm going to search through a bunch of listings, and select a show that's part of a series, all just to have something on while eating a 20 minute meal, I feel like I need to have something good on that I'm committing too.

On the other hand, if I turn on my cable box and Dog the Bounty Hunter happens to be on and halfway through an episode, I'll watch it until I'm done eating and be done with it. I don't actually care what going on in the episode, and I'm only half paying attention. It's mostly just noise and moving pictures in the background.

That's "disposable" television, and it's only something that you can get from an always on network.

Netflix requires more effort, and with that effort I feel I should get something good out of that time. Instead I spend 30 minutes looking for something to watch only to give up, switch back to network television, and eat my now cold meal.

[conductr]

Seems like they could use their content to create “channels” that essentially mimic a broadcast schedule

[xaedes]

I am still hoping for this to happen.

[b_tterc_p]

I get that people do this and the mental path that leads there. I don’t get people who are self aware of doing it and still complain. If you’d be comfortable randomly watching garbage so long as you don’t expend effort to choose it, then pick randomly. Alternatively if there’s nothing on it you want to watch, don’t watch it.

I think this comes across as condescending but I really don’t get it.

[alexashka]

A 'random offering' button or channels based on a theme that mimic traditional tv channels would be trivial to add to Netflix, and something they should seriously consider :)

[dreamcompiler]

Sturgeon's law applies.

[noelsusman]

Everyone thinks the overwhelming majority of all content is garbage and totally uninteresting. You might be surprised to learn that 31 million accounts watched Adam Sandler's most recent Netflix movie within the first three days, rivaling Stranger Things numbers. I remember the Internet laughing at Netflix for investing so much into Adam Sandler.

And Netflix (correctly) abandoned being a movie library service a long time ago. They're pretty much just HBO with a more broad appeal now.

[iamnotacrook]

"I also don't get why everyone is clamoring for one company to control all video entertainment distribution. Isn't that what we hated about cable? Didn't we beg for the ability to pick and choose what we actually want to pay for? Now we finally have that and people instantly want to go back? Why?"

I don't know about anyone else but I'm interested in shows, not channels. I'm not going to sign up to 10 channels - that'd cost too much and some months I'd probably watch nothing on some of them. If I could pick and choose which shows I watched I'd have no problem with a low-friction "sign up via email and pay for what you watch" but that's not the offer. Your suggestion is fine for people who are rich and have loads of time to watch hours of tv every day. That's not the target for these companies though - they recognize it's a zero-sum game and want it to be them you pick over Netflix (or vice versa).

[NeedMoreTea]

Content creation? Unjustifiably huge budgets on stars, sets and effects with pocket change relatively speaking for the scripts and stories, especially after the first season. $100m to buy a minor series about comedians in cars that cost $100k an episode to make. $100m! No wonder their financials look ropy.

> Didn't we beg for the ability to pick and choose what we actually want to pay for

Erm, no? Don't know about the US but the UK experience of cable and satellite was a basic package with dire content, then every interesting thing was £££ extra. By the time you had a reasonable selection you were at £50-£100 a month. more if you wanted the sport channels. So we didn't cable cut, we never signed up in the first place. Compared to the licence fee it was always appalling value. Netflix want nearly a whole BBC yearly licence fee, and deliver a tiny fraction of the content. Not that I like all the Beeb do. :)

When we cancel Netflix (very soon going on current programmes), it'll be back to terrestrial only as none of the streaming services now have "enough". So whatever comes to the BBC and Channel 4 then. I'd start torrenting again before subscribing to Amazon, Disney or whoever just to watch one interesting series, then hope I remember to cancel timely enough.

[mjevans]

The Industry can't get this simple message in to it's collective head:

The convenience needs to be better and cheaper (including perceived risks') than piracy to win.

These are the things they MUST do:

    * One payment, that's reasonable.
    * All the content from FOREVER accessible FOREVER in one place.

Honestly, that's it for most people. For me they also need to...

    * Be DRM free so that it actually works on OSes that respect my privacy.

[icelancer]

>> The convenience needs to be better and cheaper (including perceived risks') than piracy to win.

Exactly. People saying "well it's not profitable" or this that and the other are missing the boat. Piracy is always going to exist and it's always going to be basically free. There is no beating that. That is the new reality we are in.

Now, they must adjust to that reality, whether they like it or not. Many services have and many people pay plenty of money because of it. But we're rapidly moving to a place where piracy is simpler than what we have now, which is embarrassing for paid services.

[edanm]

It kind of sounds like you're getting your history backwards here.

Piracy has existed for almost 2 decades at this point. Back then, people were making the argument that the industry needs to adjust, needs to make things as simple and cheap as piracy is, etc.

[Freak_NL]

It would be nice if this problem could be solved through cooperation rather than just hoping a unicorn will appear.

A flat subscription fee, perhaps with tiered pricing in terms of content resolution and number of concurrent users in a household.

Figure out some fair distribution key for the viewer's contributions. Newer content gets a higher slice of the pie to encourage investing in new content, but older content under copyright (like a 40 year old film) will still bring in some money, and it makes sense to make a back catalogue available.

Allow users to use their own clients if they wish (technically possible if you forget about DRM), and let enthusiasts create a user experience no platform has ever seen that can rival the ease of use of piracy (e.g., Popcorn Time, and similar services).

Start out as a conglomerate of big studios with a clear short to midterm business model, but aim to set up a non-profit custodian in the long term to handle the maintenance and development of the platform, and make it possible to represent any content owner in a fair way — because if you don't, you'll end up the target of anti-trust lawsuits.

This won't happen because of greed of course. Ah well, there is always piracy to supplement a Netflix/Disney/Whatever subscription and just pretend it does exist.

[ninth_ant]

You’re making the alluring mistake of thinking of a monolithic “we” who all want the same thing.

In reality people have many preferences and desires, and they pay for streaming services or not for a variety of reasons.

Some people are maybe sick of being stuck with a giant cable company and are happy to pay for many streaming services. Other people likely still have cable and use streaming to supplement that for specific shows. Others have different reasons.

[mc32]

Maybe they can have different subscription levels for different audiences, either resolution or content library or freshness. Although seeing that it’s artificial and only the resolution could have justification I’m not sure enough of their subscribers would identify of find value in that differentiation.

[ilikepi]

> I also don't get why everyone is clamoring for one company to control all video entertainment distribution. Isn't that what we hated about cable? Didn't we beg for the ability to pick and choose what we actually want to pay for? Now we finally have that and people instantly want to go back? Why?

Well, that's only half of it. The other half is that people became fed up with their bills, not realizing that everyone has a unique subset of channels they liked, and paying for the full bundle was a way to subsidize all the other channels.

Sadly it's rather difficult to balance these two issues.

[icelancer]

>> If Netflix doesn't make enough content that interests you then stop giving them money and give it to whoever does instead.

This isn't the alternative reality Netflix and others are fighting. People are just going to pirate it if they can't offer it easily and at a price that the market will accept. There is no escaping that. It is on them to adjust, not the consumers.

[wnevets]

>They got into content creation and they're now deep in debt despite their massive subscriber base.

because content companies started holding their content hostage for higher fees or outright refusing to allow netflix to license it. Netflix creating their own content was a matter of survival.

[hanklazard]

Or check out DVD.com (old-school Netflix) if you’re looking for selection. It’s way better for movies and TV shows if you’re willing to wait a few days.

[autokad]

I think streaming is incredibly worth it. if you watch anything with advertisements, that's typically 1/3 of your time watching commercials, thus if you make 50 an hour, you pay for your streaming service in just 1 hour. 10 hours if you make a 10th that, which its still paid for in a week for most people. its a fair argument that I spent about a year of my childhood watching commercials. thats 3240$ in netflix subscriptions to get that back.

I think streaming has incredible value, and broadcast television's value proposition is extremely poor. I hope once people start doing the math, tv commercials is a thing of the past, or at least there is 1 commercial per break.

that being said, netflix does have some deep concerns for me if I were to invest in it. its still never made a profit, subscribers are maxing out, and competition is just getting started.

Netflix has also been extremely liberal politically, and that's a recipe to divide your customer base by 2, something with their extreme debt loads is problematic.

[alecco]

> Netflix has also been extremely liberal politically, and that's a recipe to divide your customer base by 2, something with their extreme debt loads is problematic.

I'd say it divides by more than half. I don't want any politics with my entertainment as many other people do. Even if the politics are aligned to my own. It becomes annoying as "preaching to the choir".

[rorykoehler]

You can only watch so much content. Streaming platforms should pay the content creators based on what is actually watched. The fact that they chose to also produce content is irrelevant. That's a completely separate business and if they mixed their books that's their mistake and they have to deal with it.

[topranks]

Nobody wants “1 company to control all content.”

What we do need is something like the music industry has. Subscribe to Spotify, Deezer, Tidal. They all pretty much have the same stuff, with slight differences in UI and the odd exclusive to differentiate them.

That’s what they need to do - cross license. They can even have a delay before they do so for their own content or whatever.

Just the admin of subscribing to 20 different services is enough to make me subscribe to none.

[01100011]

> I also don't get why everyone is clamoring for one company to control all video entertainment distribution. Isn't that what we hated about cable?

No. We hated cable for the high prices and bad service which were enabled by physical monopolies.

If the backend was based on open protocols, you could buy an aggregating frontend from Netflix, Hulu, TiVo, etc and then buy whatever content you like from whatever content owner you like.

[deegles]

Why is it not sustainable? Because of content licensing fees. If video content was treated (i.e. regulated) like radio with a fixed price per minute then there would be competition for one stop streaming services instead of walled gardens.

[e40]

How much did Netflix pay for the Rock and Chappelle specials? I read it was over $100M, for both men's specials, and that was what, less than 10 hours of programming? No wonder they are deep in debt.

[e40]

Rock: $40M

Ricky Gervais: $40M

Chappelle: $60M

Eddie Murphy: $70M

$210M for less than 20 hours of programming. Wow.

[cyborgx7]

> I also don't get why everyone is clamoring for one company to control all video entertainment distribution.

Sounds like a perfect case for publicly funded infrastructure to me.

> Now we finally have that

We don't. We still have the one or two things we want packaged in with a ton of stuff we don't.

It's actually worse. Each package (subscription platform) has one or two things we want distributed accross all of them, which a bunch of stuff we don't want packaged in.

Not seeing how this is a good system.

[crystalmeph]

>> I also don't get why everyone is clamoring for one company to control all video entertainment distribution.

>Sounds like a perfect case for publicly funded infrastructure to me.

Why would it be a case for publicly funded infrastructure? We’re talking about entertainment, not highways or clean water.

As a consumer, yes, I would prefer an option to pay only for the shows I want to watch, but I don’t see why your tax dollars should fund my preferred method of entertainment.

[hiram112]

> Sounds like a perfect case for publicly funded infrastructure to me.

No thanks. My paychecks, after state and fed taxes, fica, retirement, insurance, etc are down to literally half of my actual salary.

I don't want another few percent pilfered so I can subsidize my fellow Americans' NCIS and Dog the Bounty Hunter habits.

[lonelappde]

The too common refrain is people arguing talking themselves in circles trying to prove that they should get more content for a lower price due to some incoherent ad hoc theory of economics. Paying a la cart is "ripping us off by nickel and dime", and bundling is "cable packages, ugh".

[didibus]

> Didn't we beg for the ability to pick and choose what we actually want to pay for?

Yes, and that is slowly disappearing, as everything is becoming isolated again and bundled with extra crap I don't care about.

[1337biz]

It's not a reasonable argument. If things are not super convenient many will just go back to piracy. The content house brands are just too weak to be able to demand a subscription.

[JTbane]

>People hated being locked into packages and this is basically the same thing - you need the "NBC" package for The Office or the "CBS" package for Star Trek. I can't be bothered to spend all that money.

At this point it is very tempting to go back to good, old-fashioned torrents of TV shows.

[quicklyfrozen]

It's certainly a hell of a lot easier to not have to think about where to find your favorites. And once it's downloaded there are (almost) never any playback issues.

[bamboozled]

It’s laughable to me that after all the years of investment and business development in these steaming services it’s still much, much, much easier to use p2p networks to get content you want.

I wonder if there would just be more profit in injecting advertisements in tv shows and distributing them openly using BitTorrent? Think of the size of the audience, yeah people will cut the ads out but a lot of people couldn’t be bothered.

[TremendousJudge]

The fact that 15+ year old tech developed by some hobbyists (over asymmetrical networks not optimized for it mind you) provides a better service than anything modern corporations can deliver really is amazing to me.

[TallGuyShort]

It's because the corporations aren't really interested in providing a better service to the viewer, they're interested in providing a better service to their advertisers. That said, the idea of embedding the advertising freely is an interesting one, and I wonder if it's been seriously considered by the networks. Probably harder to convince the cheque-writers of the value they're getting, though.

[sombremesa]

> It's because the corporations aren't really interested in providing a better service to the viewer

I sold all of my Netflix stock (which wasn't a huge number anyway) the moment I saw that you could no longer see reviews of content on Netflix. It was a clear cut sign that they no longer "get it".

[praxulus]

Netflix and HBO don't have advertisers (well, except as providers, but not as customers).

[res0nat0r]

Free is always going to be more attractive and excuses made by folks who don't want to pay for services.

Netflix/Prime/HBO/etc all work perfectly fine, just sign up once, login, and that's it.

Folks are just using this yet again as an excuse to not want to pay more than $10/month for every tv show and movie ever made, but that's not sustainable. It was obvious from the start that folks who wanted to cut the cord and buy content piecemeal would just have essentially a Comcast subscription with 1/10th of the channels, for the same price in the end.

[bamboozled]

Folks are just using this yet again as an excuse to not want to pay more than $10/month for every tv show and movie ever made

This is absolutely not accurate.

These streaming services lock you into a specific catalogue of their curated material. There is absolutely no way the statement you made about having access to everything is true. It's also especially less true if you're not living in the US. For example if you're a foreigner in a or regoin country, you're access to certain content is often limited.

With p2p sharing, none of this is a blocker.

Then there are other strange developments, let's take the fact that nearly every good album on Spotify now has only the "Remastered" or "Deluxe" editions available for streaming. I don't remember that being part of the deal when signing up. Now I'm forced to listen to sub-par versions of albums.

Who knows, maybe in 40 years will be thanking people who preserved Terrabytes of original content for the world to access?

[thatguy0900]

I think the only thing that would work that way would be product placement. The problem would be one person cutting out ads and reuploading it, there'd be no reason to watch the original

[pessimizer]

> one person cutting out ads and reuploading it

Nobody would care enough. Canada (CityTV?) has those oldschool banner ads that appear at the bottom of the screen for a few seconds and disappear; those work for p2p, too.

Maybe the answer for content producers is banner ads and product placement, and posting their own content for free. Crawls would be cut out, full screen commercials would be cut out, but nobody cares about unmoving, temporary things, or the kind of car the character drives.

I'm starting to have a vision of video production as catalog. I wouldn't mind there being a site where I can find out what couch that was in the opening scene, or where the main character got that shirt the spy at the bar complimented her on. Having a site for it might give you some metrics to judge the product placement with.

Would it be so bad for Ikea to have a few sitcoms where everyone moves through rooms filled with Ikea stuff? Isn't that how free-to-air TV used to work?

[afiori]

except if you publish it properly yourself, a company that would embrace torrents as distribution method and took care of putting it on the relevant site would effectively solve the trust problem that is inherent in choosing a torrent between many.

[ianai]

Why not just edit the video codecs to support calling out to advertisements? Maybe offer people the option to watch the ads at start, end, or usual positioning, too. There would be abuse, but if it were done correctly the abuse wouldn’t be more than current.

[NullPrefix]

Do you seriously expect someone will go the length of covering all the Ford logos in a car movie? That is the thing about product placement ads, when done correctly, the ad is part of the content.

[jrnichols]

i thought that as well, but there are still some hoops. or in the case of most of the apps for the Fire TV sticks, a new hurdle - unstoppable full screen video advertisements. i've noticed that releases of things like Popcorn Time have slowed down tremendously but Terrarium/cinema/etc for the fire sticks has picked up a lot. and they all have built-in ads now.

just interesting to me how the scene has changed.

[boznz]

advertisements generally only make sense in the country of origin, the adds would be pointless for anyone else

[eikenberry]

But there is a difference in that you aren't locked into things the same way you were locked into cable, where it was all or nothing. You can subscribe and unsubscribe to different services at different times as you wish. Given you get all the content available during your subscription why would you stay subscribed to all of them all the time. Just subscribe to the ones that have the shows you want to watch at that time and cancel all the rest.

[cgriswald]

Sure. So I subscribe to Amazon for The Grand Tour, the girlfriend subscribes to Netflix for Marie Kondo, the kids subscribe to NBC for THe Office and Disney for Disney stuff, and Mom subscribes to CBS for Star Trek and now I’m back to basically paying for cable for the five shows we want to watch right now, with the added convenience of worrying about dropping and adding subscriptions for as long as it takes these services to figure out a mechanism to prevent this behavior.

[Mirioron]

Or better yet: just don't watch them. There's plenty of entertaining content on YouTube, twitch, dailymotion etc.

[tzakrajs]

If you don't have private tracker access, usenet is probably best for speed and content availability since usenet providers have insane amounts of bandwidth to spare and there are publicly available nzb sites for searching usenet.

[eridius]

People don't like the proliferation of streaming services because of the cost. Buying "just NBC" or "just CBS" is still preferable to the old model of "if you want ESPN you have to get dozens of other channels at the same time". But buying just a single network's content only works if the price is such that you can subscribe to all of your networks and not end up paying more than the old cable model cost you.

The problem of "now I have to look at a bunch of different apps to see what's on" is solved by aggregators like the Apple TV app (though of course Netflix refuses to participate in that app, I don't know why because it means I don't see Netflix shows when I go browsing my recently-watched stuff in the TV app).

[kelnos]

The issue with "buy NBC" or "buy CBS" is that I don't care at all about networks. I care about particular shows. If I could pay $1/mo each for 20 different shows, I'd be fine with that.

[eridius]

$1/mo each doesn't pay for the show though.

If all you care about is a single show, buy the show on iTunes. Each episode costs $3, or you can buy the whole season for cheaper (seasons are usually around $30, though it depends on how many episodes are in the season).

[nilkn]

What’s most interesting to me is the rise of YouTube. Increasingly for movies I just rent one, for TV shows again I just rent or buy a whole season unless it’s a show I’m really into, and for “open the app and try to find something randomly” moments I go to YouTube, not Netflix anymore.

[dontbenebby]

I just went to download a movie - legally. I have streaming access, but apparently I can't download it for offline viewing (not even within Netflix's DRM'd app).

To me, that's unreasonable, especially since the movie in question is >14 years old - at the time of the founders it would be in the public domain by now!

That being said, Netflix currently has enough content I find it useful - a lot of older shows I never caught on the air like Frasier or Star Trek. But longer term I may ditch it and stick to Prime Video.

[dragonwriter]

> I think the critical mistake that all these megacorps are making is that people don't actually want to pay for a bazillion streaming services.

That's not a mistake they are making; they are all aware of that. They just want the other guys to be the ones that die first.

[tolmasky]

I am fine paying everyone is whatever convoluted ways, but I'm not OK with this translating to a miserable UI experience. At least TV had a single interface. I don't want to manage apps for shows, and have to search within apps or learn different menu trees for each different app, etc.

I think there is nothing wrong with wanting to charge me for exclusive content, packages of content, whatever you want. But do not then it actually harder than just channel surfing.

[edanm]

> I think the critical mistake that all these megacorps are making is that people don't actually want to pay for a bazillion streaming services.

I don't think anyone is making this mistake. It's just still in their interest to sell that.

And to be quite clear, it doesn't seem like there is a viable alternative that's priced at a level most people are willing to pay.

Of course people want a super convenient option, that's all in one place, and that's cheap to boot. But... it doesn't work economically. People would also want to all be driving Rolls Royces that cost 5 cents. For some reason, when it comes to physical goods, people understand that that's impossible, but when it comes to digital goods, they don't.

[Waterluvian]

Are box sets still batshit insane? It didn't make sense to me to pay $120 for a week of binge watching.

[remarkEon]

I own The Sporanos, The Wire, and Breaking Bad in box set. I have The X-Files somewhere on DVD, too.

For shows that are, essentially, an art form it's sort of worth it.

But you bring up an interesting point, because there are shows that have come out that are on par with e.g. The Wire or Breaking Bad during this steaming age (Chernobyl most recently, and maybe Game of Thrones for some - though I never got into that one). It's hard for me to think that I'll ever "buy" newer shows on hardware.

[cglace]

Some people watch the same show over and over.

[thebigspacefuck]

Resell it for $100 and you paid $20 for a week of binge watching. Buy it used for $100 and resell it for $100 and you watched for free.

[pessimizer]

There's a antagonism towards resale amongst content producers that makes this difficult and the resale prices low.

[zaroth]

Whatever the resale price is, if you buy and sell used then you shouldn’t care, right?

I think the problem is the likelihood of not being able to resell what you bought (because it was pirated in the first place) is high, the likelihood of getting bad feedback is high, the likelihood of getting your reseller account canceled is high, and the likelihood of the item taking forever to resell is high.... all adding up to “a small chance of recouping your cost with a reasonable level of frustration.”

[mc32]

Why does Netflix need to make big budget shows?

Quite a few smaller (as well as bigger) markets do with cheaper smaller budget shows. Or are they hoping to corner the market before bringing down the hammer on production excess?

[Gravityloss]

With movies you can rent or even buy individual ones online. No subscription required. No packages. Why not for series too?

[devoply]

People hate it but it obviously works, otherwise they would not be doing it. What you need is a religion (or some other sort of huge corporation or union of people) around consuming content that everyone religiously follows that forces the corporations hands. Individually all you can do is pirate or buy.

[frankbreetz]

People hated cable and they are now struggling, people are always looking for something better