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by wang_li 2530 days ago
> 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.
3 comments
SomewhatLikely 2530 days ago
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.
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wool_gather 2529 days ago
À la carte means you pay for the ITEMS you consume. This is absolutely not à la carte. This is multi-prix fixe pricing.
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didibus 2530 days ago
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.

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xiphias2 2530 days ago
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.
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NotSammyHagar 2529 days ago
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.
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didibus 2529 days ago
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.

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