[55555]

There is no way they had more paying subscribers than Netflix. Netflix has 160 million paying customers. These two guys had "more" and made only 1 million dollars total. What?

Probably their total pageviews vs Netflix's total paying customers or something dumb like that.

[wp381640]

The DOJ presser said the site was "larger" than Netflix, Hulu and Amazon combined in terms of available content - some media reports have misreported it as larger by subscriber count

[jmcs]

That goes without saying, content providers are shooting themselves in the foot with an atomic shotgun with the current fragmentation and lots of content is not legally available anywhere.

[dddddaviddddd]

A tragedy of the commons among the content providers -- exclusive content is an edge that they can't resist individually, but damages them collectively.

[magduf]

I don't think "tragedy of the commons" is the appropriate term for what's going on here. These movies aren't a "commons", they're all privately owned by a bunch of different private entities. They used to license them to Netflix to be streamed, but now they've pulled back from that a lot so they can operate their own streaming services.

"Tragedy of the commons" is when a bunch of private interests use a publicly-owned resource in a greedy way and end up ruining it for everyone. I don't think this quite applies here, but I don't know of any other term to call it because I can't think of any non-internet analogies.

[55555]

Thanks, that makes sense. The HN title should probably be corrected then, at mods' convenience.

[rambojazz]

Yeah the title is definitely misguided.

[saagarjha]

Or law enforcement trumping up a number that’s larger than any reasonable number of subscribers they actually had.

[roberson87]

I think it was a typo, later in the article they mention this service had more content than Netflix, Hulu etc. I share your scepticism that two individuals could build a streaming service catering to >160m customers.

[dmix]

Not to mention the infrastructure, even if they didn’t host the video content themselves (which I doubt?) just handling that many paying customers would be a major operation.

[jessaustin]

didn’t host the video content themselves

I guess you could host the most popular stuff, plus the first five minutes of everything Netflix and other streamers have, and then just redirect the rest of those streams...