[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.