[wrasee]

Supply and demand might argue that if there was real demand for something like this that people were actually willing to pay a lot of money for, then the market would be all too happy to provide.

I think the inconvenient truth here is that when anyone has got close to doing such a thing the price has been high enough that it turns out nobody actually turns up to pay for it, not at least outside a small niche.

[l72]

You have to have real options or people can’t make informed decisions.

I have a background in city planning, and in the US, you’ll constantly hear about how trying to make cities more friendly to pedestrians, bicycles, or public transit is a waste because no one uses it. But the truth is, most people will end up using the system you design. If you build a system just for cars, people will use cars. If you build a city around public transportation, people will happily use it. If you build a walkable city, people will walk.

[brailsafe]

Great analogy. I'm visiting a particularly car-centric city atm, and from the car driver's perspective, "nobody uses the bike lanes, I never see them, so why build them, it constrains traffic". Well ya, there's so much car traffic because it's car-first, and nobody wants to be around tons of cars, not even people in cars. It's like arguing that you never see cyclists on the freeway, therefore nobody likes biking and we should discourage it.

[cyberax]

> If you build a walkable city, people will walk.

No, they won't. If you build a walkable city and then make it impossible to do anything else, then people will walk.

It's a subtle difference, but it's there.

[II2II]

I live in a "walkable city". By walkable, I mean the old parts of the city that predated the automobile (and weren't destroyed in the name of modernization) are walkable. New parts of the city are completely unwalkable. If you came here, you would notice that massive numbers of people walk in the old parts of the city. Even the people who drive into the old parts of the city tend to walk once they are there. In the new parts of the city, virtually all of the pedestrians you see are on their way to or from a bus stop.

That said, there is more to a walkable city than a bunch of sidewalks. It also has to offer what people want and what they want must be easy to access. Something similar can be said about piracy. It wasn't streaming services that stymied piracy, it was cheap and easy access to legal sources of music and video. Even then, cheap was likely a secondary factor (as long as the price was reasonable).

[cyberax]

> By walkable, I mean the old parts of the city that predated the automobile (and weren't destroyed in the name of modernization) are walkable.

OK. Here's my question: is it possible and feasible to NOT walk?

Because when the answer is "yes", people tend to not walk.

[II2II]

It is both possible and feasible to drive in the old parts of the city. It is a North American city, so old is not that old. It just predates the automobile. Yet virtually all of the roads are plenty wide for two lane traffic, on street parking and sidewalks. What differs most significantly is land use patterns. More stuff (homes, businesses, schools, parks, etc.) are within walking distance. One could argue that parking is problematic, but that is true of the core of every city I've been in. Even the modern car-centric ones. It should also be noted that plenty of people drive in the old parts of the city, it's just that people have an opportunity not to and plenty of people choose not to.

[allarm]

In many places where I’ve lived people walk just for fun, because it’s enjoyable activity.

[djtango]

I knew plenty of people in London who chose to walk 30+ mins. This is over other available options like ebike, bus, underground and taxi - simply because it is pleasant.

[GuinansEyebrows]

it's a welcome change from "if you build a driveable city and then make it impossible to do anything else, then people will drive".

[marcus_holmes]

Absolutely not true. If anything, the opposite is true - people will walk unless/until you make the city unwalkable.

[toomuchtodo]

Still good!

[hxtk]

Streaming services were great back when they were separate from content producers and IP holders.

Once every media company became a streaming company and started using anticompetitive licensing practices in an attempt to drive viewership to their own platforms, the market fractured too much for it to be profitable.

Something smells “prisoner’s dilemma” about it: the best move for any individual streaming service is to have exclusive content (and the best-positioned players to do that are the studios), but when everyone does that, it decreases the overall profit available in the market more than it increases their slice of the pie.

[jacobgkau]

> more than it increases their slice of the pie.

That's the part that might not be true, unfortunately. If each individual content producer sees more return on their own streaming service than they did sharing revenue from one of the independent services, then that's better for them, even if the total pie got smaller. If that wasn't the case, you'd think we'd see some of them shut their services down and go back to independent services once their income drops.

Sacrificing a wide audience to extract more from the most dedicated portion of the fanbase isn't an entirely new concept, and it financially makes sense short-term (until you start losing some of those dedicated fans over time and don't have the mindshare outside your bubble to attract new ones).

[baby_souffle]

I think we will see this eventually.

Once Netflix isn't the only one that doesn't share their monthly subscriber numbers anymore, we'll know that they're beginning to at least question why they own everything instead of license their content out

[withinboredom]

They just have to out-survive the competition, selling theme park tickets and merch. Oh, and putting hit movies in theaters.

The streaming service itself doesn’t need to be profitable.

[izacus]

Copyright is inherently monopolistic and violates basic rules of free market like supply and demand.

You can't talk about those rules when a single publisher corporation commands exclusivity deals and dictates pricing essentially forever.

[sneak]

Nah; copyright is a monopoly on specific media/titles. It breaks all of the “market willing to provide” mechanics because there is no free market for Star Wars, it’s Disney or FOAD.

Pray they do not alter it further.

[CivBase]

Bingo. When distributors get exclusive rights to media, there is no competition anymore. You either do whatever the publisher wants, pirate, or go without.

[area51org]

The aggravating part about this: that was not the intention of the copyright clause. "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries."

Authors and inventors. Authors and inventors.

Not companies. Not entities, or even individuals, who purchased the "rights" and now "own" works. That has nothing to do with the intent here, which was to encourage actual authors and inventors to make more stuff. Walt Disney has been gone for more than half a century; he's not going to be able to come up with another Mickey Mouse.

"Intellectual property" is an oxymoron. Pray, tell me, which part of my brain does Disney own? Do they own the part that knows what Mickey Mouse looks like?

[crote]

And it has only gotten worse since then. A copyright for a decade or two is completely reasonable, but "life of author, plus 70 years" benefits only large companies. Someone is violating your rights? Good luck suing them if you are an indie creator! Want to create a parody, which is totally legal? Sorry, you can't upload it anywhere - all the hosting companies decided to apply Copyright 2.0 instead!

[Levitz]

Supply and demand rules go out the window when the product is infinitely replicable.

[gmueckl]

Digital video is a big enough amount of data that replication at scale takes up a significant amount of netural resources and energy. That is true both for storage and transmission/streaming.

[TheOtherHobbes]

Supply and demand means that corporations attempt to maximise their revenue. If the cost of providing a good service eats into their profits, they will provide a bad service.

This idea that "markets will provide" is eccentric, and obviously empirically wrong.

Markets are there to extract value and reinforce power imbalances. Consumer happiness is reliably at cross purposes with that.

[franciscop]

IMHO not really, supply here is the limiting factor since the constrain is in licensing the work. The goal of the right holders is not to maximize access to the work or those stated by OP, but to maximize profit for the company, which when at odds with those other goals still prevails.

e.g. someone calculated/believes that having a big catalog from Disney at X/month is more worth more for Disney than sublicensing to Netflix at Y/month.

[l72]

I really wish we had laws that producers of content cannot also be distributors. That just creates perverse incentives to use content to lock people into their distribution platform.

If they had to be separate, that gives content producers the ability to cross license and those licenses to be better deals. We’d actually have competition in distribution companies as distribution providers would then be competing on price, quality, convenience, and other things that matter, not locking content away.

[thaumasiotes]

> I really wish we had laws that producers of content cannot also be distributors.

We have laws like that for beer and cars, and they're disasters in both cases.

Why would we want to implement an incredibly stupid idea a third time?

[anonymars]

I think you're going to have to back that up with a bit more than "it's stupid"

Here's a much more relevant precedent: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Paramount_Pic....

[wrasee]

Yes I considered the same but decided to keep the point simple.

And I still can’t help but think that if there really was a large market of people willing to pay a premium for a more permissive access model then we might already see trends in this direction. My hunch is the most folk don’t really care and price remains the dominant factor.

The essential point of the article was that it’s higher prices that’s pushing people towards piracy (either through price rises or fragmented subscriptions). It wasn’t that it is the restrictive streaming model that is pushing people towards piracy.

I’m fact it was precisely this restrictive streaming model that was the one to finally beat piracy. At low prices, that’s already been proven and it’s higher prices that is brining piracy back.

[wrasee]

Unpopular opinion here but I wonder how much of the justification for piracy in this thread, broadly around what is perceived to be unfair business practices (“if only the terms were fairer and I would pay”), would actually stand up if the terms were actually fairer but the prices higher.

Or how much is really just the simple rational economic idea that piracy is better value for money.

[cyberax]

I personally buy physical media (BluRays and/or DVDs). But I often feel too lazy to deal with the content ripping, so I just download it.

I like Youtube Premium and I'm gladly paying for it, although I'm considering switching to an alternative YouTube client because the official YT App is crap. But then the creators will lose income from my subscription.

Sigh. I wish content providers just gave us API to get the content in exchange for payment.

[phkahler]

>> having a big catalog from Disney at X/month is more worth more for Disney than sublicensing to Netflix at Y/month.

But sometimes that leads to really stupid things. At one time all Star Trek TV shows were on Paramount while all the movies were only on Max. I believe they're all owned by Paramount, but apparently the shoes are the big draw (the new series "Picard" was exclusively on Paramount) and they could get more profit by putting the movies elsewhere and collecting a bit more than if it were all on their service. GAK!

[underlipton]

Food for thought:

There are (possibly) two streams of demand:

1) How much customers are willing to pay.

2) How much pirates are willing to risk legal consequences.

Both represent sides of the implicit and intrinsic demand that drives acquisition.

[prepend]

No, because the owners of content libraries make more money with silos.

They won’t license content to third parties. So market forces can’t work.