[ertian]

That's why it has to be lightweight. The thing that would drive prices down and keep ads at bay is competition. Since setting up a new streaming service is difficult-bordering-on-impossible, the players are protected from competition and can squeeze their customers. In other markets, if you had a lightweight payment system that isn't just a component of a walled garden (ala Medium or YouTube), you could see actual competition. Then, if some player started showing ads or raising prices, people could just up and move elsewhere.

Imagine the early internet if we didn't have HTTP & HTML. It would have been a bunch of specialized AOL- or CompuServ-type walled-garden services, each of which could have wrung their customers dry. That's the world we ended up with in streaming. But the WWW doesn't have a mechanism for simple payments, so payment infrastructure can be used to lure and trap content creators. That's why we need a simple, lightweight, portable and open payment mechanism, to complement open web protocols.

[emmo]

Sorry, slightly tangential, but haven't we seen streaming services get progressively worse as more competition has entered the space? Netflix was great when they were pretty much the only place in town; now it's a fragmented disaster of services that have to squeeze harder and harder to keep things viable.

[ertian]

Well, but that's due to a lot of problems specific to the media landscape. Netflix started as an afterthought, the big media companies viewed it as a sideshow or as a stopgap measure while they made other plans, so there was a honeymoon phase where it was cheap and had a ton of media.

Most new entrants to the market are themselves media companies, so with each one the media landscape gets fractured. They're able to leverage popular content (over which they have a monopoly) to lure customers and raise prices. There's not many of them, and the barrier of entry is almost impossibly high (step 1: develop a 50-year back catalog of beloved films & franchises...), so the market is insular.

Compare with music, where there's a ton of smaller labels, and the barrier of entry is much lower. Streaming companies compete mostly on price, interface & experience.

I think the problem is kinda inherent in the market, and Netflix was just an anomaly because it caught the media companies flat-footed. You would need openness and competition on a much more fundamental level to solve streaming video media.

In the meantime, simple and open web payments could solve for music, podcasts, prose, reporting, art, etc. And hey, maybe somewhere in the process you could see the birth of micro-studios.

[kelnos]

Agreed. But I think the solution to this is compulsory content licensing, not consolidation. Granted, the end result of that might still be consolidation (or many players just going out of business), but at least that would be true competition: the streaming services would be competing as streaming services (and would be judged on price, video quality, app/website stability and usability, reliability, recommendations, etc.), not as content producers.