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by th0raway 31 days ago
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.
2 comments
simiones 31 days ago
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.

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pbhjpbhj 31 days ago
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?

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pocksuppet 31 days ago
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.
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