[ninjalanternshk]

Spotify is always my example. Spotify (and Apple Music I assume) is far more convenient, for a modest price, than pirating music.

It’s a shame the TV and movie people can’t seem to learn this. Most music is available on Spotify and Apple and probably other places as well.

They toyed with exclusivity for a while and I’m sure there’s still some stuff that’s exclusive to one or the other, but any time I hear a song and look it up, it’s on Spotify. Done.

Such a contrast to the stupid game of figuring out which streaming service has the show I want.

[somewhatgoated]

Most of the music i listen to doesnt exist on Spotify and I think their business model is very predatory against artists. most artists cant pay their bills with Spotify fees, they just need to be on there to get visibility for their actual revenue streams.

I think a better example is bandcamp - it’s actually sustainable for artists and just as convenient as pirating. Plus you get to actually own what you pay for as opposed to Spotify controlling what you can / cant listen to.

[crummy]

I thought they paid barely anything to artists because they are only getting fifteen bucks a month from each subscriber. And their price is restricted because they’re essentially competing (as a business model) with piracy.

[somewhatgoated]

Let me shed a tear for the business that makes 5 billion yearly revenue with 33% margin.

They aren’t competing with music piracy which is mostly dead outsides of niches nowadays.

[auggierose]

Music is very different to TV and movies. You only watch a show or a movie once, maybe twice. And it costs much more to produce it.

[th0raway]

The biggest difference there isn't production costs, but the physical costs of maintaining the giant library, in a way that is reasonable streamable at a good cost from any device, with many dubbings, and even video differences per version. Go see how many little differences are there in a random Pixar movie due to localization. The infrastructure per hour watched is relevant, and there's a lot of differences between one is willing to spend on something that is being watched hundreds of thousands of times today, and some 30 year old episode of a series nobody followed. It's a much different production than sending music files over.

Even with licensing costs at zero, the infra of Youtube, the closest thing to Spotify for video, is a very different beast. And I'd argue youtube doesn't go far enough.

[simiones]

This sounds reasonable, but it doesn't seem to reflect reality. The biggest reason that shows are region locked and/or removed from streaming sites are licensing deals, not technical reasons. Movie and TV production companies are the ones pushing for the region locks, and the ones selling limited distribution rights to streaming services.

So, while you are right that video streaming is much more costly than audio streaming, I think GP is overall more correct about the reasoning being production costs rather than anything to do with distribution.

[pbhjpbhj]

Maybe there's an opportunity for a media host to farm out data for preservation by clients (end users' computers) - what I'm thinking is torrent essentially, where the data-unit is a scene (or a series of frames between n key-frames). Clients get access to that show if they agree to store m chunks. The media repo can sell access whilst only keeping a copy in cold-storage because you can 'popcorn time' the show from the pool of user-clients.

Reduced hot-storage, increased playlist. Sort of media communism but the capitalists still hold the keys?

[pocksuppet]

This can never be legal. When I worked in media streaming the copyright owners were very specific about what we were allowed to store, and wouldn't allow unencrypted files to be transmitted to any other companies.

[GuinansEyebrows]

> Spotify is always my example. Spotify (and Apple Music I assume) is far more convenient, for a modest price, than pirating music.

streaming services do provide some conveniences over manually managing one's own library of music. i feel like "far more" is a sales pitch argument more than something that describes reality (ignoring whether you pirate or legally acquire digital music). i recently cancelled my streaming music service subscription and returned to manually managing my music. i spend maybe one day a week shuffling music on and off of my phone according to what i want to listen to in the moment. i don't really miss being able to call up any song in the world at any point - i make a note to add it to my phone next time i sync and then move on. if i simply have to play something that's not currently on my phone, i can usually find it on bandcamp or youtube without having to pay for a stream or two.

i know it's not for everybody (and trust me, apple doesn't make it particularly easy to do compared to signing up for Apple Music), but it's really not much work to manage your own music and doing so comes with some benefits you forget about when you assume you can and should have instantaneous, frictionless access to most recorded music.

[davsti4]

Except that Spotify is now becoming enshittified (battery and UI). When I have to think too much to attempt to use a UI, its time to find alternatives.

[jasomill]

As opposed to streaming video services, which, aside from the content they provide, have been shit from day one.

While the web UIs suck compared to local media players, they work well enough that I can cope.

But most services restrict 4K (and at least historically 1080p) web playback, even on Windows with a GPU that supports top-tier hardware DRM and an HDCP display.

My desktop display is a recent 55" LG OLED smart TV, and the streaming service apps on the TV work fine when my attention is devoted to whatever I'm watching, even if they tend to be slightly shittier than the already mediocre web UIs.

But when task switching or multitasking, my only options are reduced video quality, borrowing or purchasing a physical copy if available, or piracy.

Given how quickly everything shows up on public torrent trackers, I struggle to understand why the 4K limitations remain in place, as it obviously doesn't stop whoever uploads the torrents, and there has to be a vanishingly small number of paying customers who'd prefer to crack DRM locally or record HDMI instead of simply downloading the torrent.

Do streaming services get kickbacks from smart device vendors?