The future is arriving too fast
tedunangst.com
tedunangst.com
Which is a shame, because it'll be to their own detriment (as it will be for the music industry again, if 'stars' persist in exclusivity for streaming rights) when people revert back to torrents (as one comment here has already stated). The fact is, most people are prepared to pay for a VOD and/or music service. We just don't want to pay for 3 of them. Money aside, it just isn't convenient. "Can we listen to The Beatles? Yes, I'm not sure whether it's on cassette, CD or vinyl, so search through all three collections, then make sure the appropriate player is plugged in. If it's not there, we'll need to look at buying the minidisk. Or shoplifting it."
Anyway, I appreciate the point of the article wasn't purely a rant about VOD/DVDs, and it was a point well made.
1) What's good for the consumer isn't necessarily good for the creators. In other words, they have an incentive to fight the future rather than embrace it.
2) The extra efficiency of distribution created by technology is hell on legacy business models. Streaming media is an example of disruption shrinking the whole pie. Craigslist wrecked the classifieds business and became wildly successful but it did so NOT by moving 90% of the industry's revenue to Craigslist; it did so by capturing 10% of the revenue and destroying the rest.
Still, regardless of where these dollars flow, to creators or the "industry," it's fewer dollars.
In the past struggling musicians were handed cash by benificent record cartels. /s
In the past the struggle was to even get any distribution or publicity, radio play was sewn up so artists accepted terrible terms from the distribution monopolies.
Musicians typically got 0-2% of revenues. http://www.salon.com/2000/06/14/love_7/
The past sucked way more for musicians & fans.
I cite Drummond & Cauty's The Manual, how to have a number one and make a million quid * as the KLF they did just this, repeatedly & using pseudonyms. That was in the 'bad old days', Cauty & Drummond proved that without a record company bleeding them dry artists could make a lifetime's cash with a single hit.
Todays 'problem' is everyone wants to create, sample, share, remix, transcode, &c but copyright maximalism largely prevents this.
I believe that a distribution scheme could pay creatives directly, just as a little extra, they can still sell stuff - my thesis is without the 98% loss due to the cartels this is workable and everyone can play & innovate. Ireland does this in reverse, artists don't pay tax there & get tax credits (~£50 per week).
Also restore copyright back to 20-40 years putting the 20th century in the public domain where it belongs and destroying the back-catalogue leverage the monopolists abuse.
* http://freshonthenet.co.uk/the-manual-by-the-klf/
Nearly anything would be better than suing fans & killing innovation.
They are trying to reassert control over distribution by shutting down those who won't pay what they want (grooveshark) or attain censorship power even in excess of copyright- like Youtube & DRM ( trumps transcoding rights & fair use ).
There are just as bad for artists as fans, just as bad as they always were, their death grip has slipped because they were too set in their ways to comprehend the internet was the future.
They also stop or cripple technologies they don't like.
They big label cartels are a social ill supported by monopoly lobbying and governments doing their bidding.
They extended copyright for so long that they own the rights to nearly the entire 20th centuries cultural output.
It will only get worse, monopolies should be broken up they destroy free-markets and build barriers to entry.
* https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20150204/07310329906/yes-m...
I mean, a "gold record" which is pretty rare and often takes months or years for an album to reach is 500k sales. Compare that to movie tickets (which are now about the same price each, and are only a single viewing!), where 500k sales can be a disastrous failure.
2) I haven't done it, but I'd be willing to put a few quid on the 1970s having the largest proportion of albums in the best of lists e.g. http://www.rollingstone.com/music/lists/500-greatest-albums-...
Also 1970s rockstars seemed to have a lot more money than their 2010s equivalents.
Forgetting about the Musician's share, all the streaming/satellite radio revenue collectively wouldn't cover the shortfall (terrestrial radio doesn't pay).
I can't comment on public performance but it's certainly become the definitive way musicians make money now and their share has always been high in this category.
Is that really the case for movies/tv shows though?
"Back in the day" I used to get Netflix to ship me DVDs for around the same cost per month that I now pay for streaming. And they had all the latest titles available.
Surely at least as much money is going back to the content creators as it was then?
One more piece of history that you may already know: in the prime days of the rental market companies like Blockbuster paid ~$100 per movie and had access to the titles before a consumer could purchase them. Netflix didn't play ball, rather than pay those prices they'd wait until the DVDs were generally available and buy at consumer/bulk prices.
I wouldn't shed any tears for the industry though, they'll survive. Besides, just to be clear, I love Netflix, they're great.
More info: http://press.ihs.com/press-release/technology/spending-movie...
I suspect you're in a minority buying lossless albums. Most of the 'youth' I know don't buy at all. They do pay for Spotify, or at worst use it ad supported. I used to buy lots and lots of CDs. I had a few years of iPod, but now I'm pretty much exclusively Spotify. I might buy a vinyl if I go watch a band. It goes straight on the shelf and never gets played.
Spotify may not be the ideal, but it's better than Napster or Limewire. If you grew up getting music for free, it's a logical stepping stone. It's easier than stealing it, and it's legal. Giving addicts methadone may not be a cure, but it's better than the heroin trade and all the risks attached. Until we can find a cure, or in this case, a better(/fairer?) way for the artists and industry, that's where we're at.
As per my parent post, unless the 'cure' is as least as good as the substitute (or you can fundamentally change how people think), the user will go back to what they had before.
It's a funny old world, isn't it?
A nitpick - actually, it may well be the only reasonable cure we have, and it beats all "traditional" methods.
C.f. http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/02/02/practically-a-book-revi...
> Almost all clinical trials have found treatment with methadone or suboxone to be more effective than traditional rehab. Even Cochrane Review, which is notorious for never giving a straight answer to anything besides “more evidence is needed”, agrees that methadone and suboxone are effective treatments.
> Society is fixed, biology is mutable. People have tried everything to fix drug abuse. Being harsh and sending drug users to jail. Being nice and sending them to nice treatment centers that focus on rehabilitation. Old timey religion where fire-and-brimstone preachers talk about how Jesus wants them to stay off drugs. Flaky New Age religion where counselors tell you about how drug abuse is keeping you from your true self. Government programs. University programs. Private programs. Giving people money. Fining people money. Being unusually nice. Being unusually mean. More social support. Less social support. This school of therapy. That school of therapy. What works is just giving people a chemical to saturate the brain receptor directly. We know it works. The studies show it works. And we’re still collectively beating our heads against the wall of finding a social solution.
"Only allowing distribution methods that get paid" is the problem. The content industries are now in the business of preventing distribution, which turns into an eternal war on the open internet. The streaming model de-escalates this and provides a way of paying for convenience.
That's the problem: 10 bucks a month, ad supported or simply torrenting...it hardly matters unless people keep buying (not renting) content. You're not going to save any artist who depends on it, no matter how good you feel about your legally flawless Spotify subscription.
Furthermore I don't see how the availability through torrents is of any importance - with the same argument we might as well stop paying for any digital goods...including software, apps, you name it.
And how are you going to compete with the ever-increasing amount of free content out there, using up people's finite leisure time?
Nobody wants to bring back DVDs - I haven't bought a CD in years, but that doesn't stop me from buying a lot of music as digital, lossless download. I can't do the same with movies. That's the problem I'm facing with the movie industry and the solution is easy: Allow me to buy DRM-free, high quality video files and we're good - that is a very legal and easy solution.
Just because streaming is popular with users, it doesn't have to make financial sense - in fact it doesn't. Just ask most people working in music.
I understand your point regarding financial sense and artists, but times change. Just ask most people driving taxis. They'll tell you Uber is destroying an industry. It may be. But we're all using it. I don't know the answer. But clinging on to something that's slipping away, rather than letting go and channeling your energy elsewhere usually hurts more in the long run.
I find this very frustrating.. I'd like to pay 3 or 4 bucks to rent it for a single viewing, but even though it is from 2014 none of the sites offer to rent it. I'm probably going to torrent it.
Plus at this point DVDs seem like a hassle[1], they have previews, government warnings, and a lot of other crap before you even get to the movie.
[1] I'm probably not the best judge of this though, I have an Echo so I can voice control my lights instead of getting up and flipping a switch...
Yes, I think we see this happening now as the streaming part of the industry (Netflix, Amazon, etc) start producing their own content. They will slowly supersede the old industry. It seems to take longer than for the music industry, though.
Sounds like an opportunity for a Dogpile-type[1] service to come in and build an app that sits on top of your Netflix, Hulu and HBOGo subscriptions and allows you to discover/search/launch from one place.
It would probably be hacked up and functionality could be broken by one of the VODs at will, but if it lasts long enough to get some traction it would have done its job as a proof of concept to the media dinosaurs and you could make an exit.
They don't want you discovering what they don't offer. They want you to user their service. Otherwise you may find yourself using the other service more than theirs and cancel.
Plus this doesn't ultimately deal with the pain of dealing with multiple bills and, essentially, paying for the same thing multiple times where there is overlap.
So, right now my biggest problem is search and categorization by mood, rather than supply or even discovery.
Still waiting for any serious attempt to get off fossil fuels. Oh well, there goes the planet.
I'm not necessarily opposed to something like that, but then we'll be getting back into the "you sold me unlimited internet but it's not really unlimited because even if I use it at 100% capacity I can't consume infinite bandwidth, so there is in fact a real limit"
Also, the real reality sucks. ;).
As someone who did a pilot's license, real flying is pretty complicated at the moment by the time you've checked 20 things, radioed air traffic control etc. To get a movie flying car like experience I think you'd need self driving car type AI to deal with that stuff. Which could happen before long.
Humans are too dumb to be able to drive cars safely, as evidenced by over a million people dying in traffic accidents each year. That the air travel industry has so little accidents is a miracle, and in big part owed to all those pesky and annoying regulations that can coordinate thousands of people on the same task and make them do their jobs right.
I believe that the class of people who complains in this case is rather disjoint from the class that wants less regulation.
Flying car now is a better idea, if they're automated. More complicated flight systems are no problem for software. And safety will be far better than humans. Though if we get fully automated roads/cars, the speed improvement might not be so big. (Automated roads might be able to go at what, 200Kph? More on highways?)
According to their specifications [1], it can do 6 km/l when flying, and 12 km/l on land. The specs they give aren't directly comparable sadly, so I had to do a short calculation to get the flying mileage (180 km/28 l), but it suggests that your 20x figure is one order of magnitude too high. The vehicle's range also suggests a 3x difference, not 20x.
Light aircraft do something like 20mpg for a Cessna 150. No worse than many SUVs. 100 mpg is possible http://www.treehugger.com/aviation/hypermiling-plane-gets-45...
Take a drone which can carry two people's weight and put a transparent box with a door on it. Add small wheels and some minimal parking capacity. Add a parachute for emergencies. (Note that there won't be a long educations for pilots. You just choose an address in Google Maps. If the drone can land vertically you might have to select a flat area at the destination, but it should be negotiated (along with parking fee) before going there.)
Instead of flying cars I'd rather have the cheap launch capacity of the Shuttle, which must have set some record when it was ~ two orders of a magnitude more expensive per pound than promised. :-( With so low launch costs we would finally get real giant space telescopes and an industrial infrastructure outside the atmosphere.
Military drones fly themselves already. There will be routing systems for drones when e.g. Amazon starts to deliver packets to the home. And so on.
(But not necessarily helicopter. Note the "If the drone can land vertically". You could do this with a drone air plane. If the transparent box (passenger compartment) is moved automatically to/from an automated taxi to a drone, you have a point-to-point taxi service anywhere.)
Edit: The next logical step is a trailer home with solar energy -- move it anywhere with a taxi large helicopter airlift. Drones deliver groceries, while you enjoy the view from your mountain top, far from any roads.
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it"
The public has seen the future with Spotify, and wonder why video can't be the same. But there are a lot of people with influential positions in the industry whose livelihood depend on this red tape. Byzantine licensing laws fund entire departments of faceless middlemen, greedy regional affiliates and dark armies of lawyers.
Music wasn't particularly different, it's just that we are further along in the capitulating-industry-dinosaur story there.
By contrast, with the exception of a small minority of films that rake in on merchandising, in the movie/tv industry the film is the only real product. That product is extremely expensive to make. If everyone only streamed Netflix to consume video, the industry would have to drastically reduce investment in making original content. That might be an acceptable outcome to many people, but I can see why the industry would want/need to fight it.
We already know it's hideous and irritating from a consumer's point of view. But what you may not know is that it's horrendous from a creator's point of view too, at least if you're making a film with a less than $20m budget.
And that accounts for a great deal of the talent entering the industry.
In order to sell a film the conventional way, you have to visit multiple film markets to meet potential buyers, do a festival run for social proof (and go to all those festivals), potentially pay out of your pocket for a cinema run, negotiate with a bunch of people who all have far more information than you do as to the value of your film, employ third parties (sales agents) who have a near-universal reputation as crooks, and finally, quite likely sue to get anything beyond the advance you're promised.
(And other stuff. Lots of other stuff, which I'm not going into here. Masters, E&O insurance, delivery formats...)
Selling a film - not making it, just selling the finished thing - takes 1-2 years, and can easily require a $50k budget.
(Yes, you can sell the film as an MP4 from your own website. But the problem is that people won't buy it because that's not how the public are used to getting their films. At a film festival I recently attended, a very respected sales agent - and that's a rare breed - asked the audience and other panel members if they knew of anyone who had made a profit selling their narrative film digitally from their own site. Nobody did.)
By contrast, selling a book involves uploading that book to Amazon, setting a price, and promoting it. If you're being thorough about your launch process it might take 3 weeks.
I've been a filmmaker for 20 years. I'm currently dipping my toe in the world of games development, for pretty much exactly these reasons.
What about Horace and Pete (Louis C.K.'s self produced/distributed "web series")?
Obviously if Tom Cruise, say, decided to fund his own $100k feature film he could probably distribute it at a profit.
Surely you aren't still talking about Horace and Pete. Aside from Louis C.K. himself being one of the top comedians (among other things) in America, Horace and Pete starred Alan Alda, Steve Buscemi, Jessica Lange, and Edie Falco, among others.
They, and the format of the series itself, is why I used quotes in "web series". I think it would be hard to argue that it wasn't a successful self produced distributed piece of cinematography that didn't include a cast of stars.
That said, I agree to an extent -- I haven't seen a feature length, stand alone film that has been successfully produced and distributed independently like that.
And I'd argue Louis CK is, at this point, big enough to qualify as close to A-list by himself. He's famous enough to get a TV series greenlit essentially on the strength of his personal brand, for example.
Essentially, that example shows that if you have a lot of very famous people who are willing to be in your series, and you yourself are also very famous, you can self-distribute. No-one's really denying that.
Has that ever happen at all? I didn't hear about that yet.
I paid to stream the Minecraft documentary (http://www.2playerproductions.com/projects/minecraft). I think that is the only documentary my kids ever got excited about watching.
Although information flow in the film world is so limited that it might well be there's someone out there who has cracked it and is making a healthy profit - they're just not telling anyone.
A lot of talent and longer, more complex storytelling is moving to TV, which is itself moving to Netflix.
What's still lacking are digital stores which sell video files. DRM-free. Who needs circles if you can have a file and use it any way you want? But DRM poison prevents the future. So I wouldn't say it's arriving too fast. It's arriving way too slow.
If it's something I like, I prefer to have a backup of it and watch it where I want and how I want. I always do that with music, games and e-books. If it's one time use, then not making backups is more acceptable. You can ask same question about physical books. Why buy it and not just get it in the library? Similar answer will apply.
Secondly, unless that streaming is using some ubiquitous cross platform technology (like Web browser without DRM garbage), it won't be available on many platforms and will be tied to provided application. DRM-free file makes it platform independent.
Thirdly, I find it weird that streaming should be equated to inability to get a DRM-free file. Streaming is simply convenience (no need to download). But it shouldn't preclude ability to download itself. They are not contradictory, except in the mind of DRM pushers. For instance GOG's failed video service provides ability to stream video, and download it as well. Equating streaming to renting is incorrect.
And they don't even have the decency to make it easy to see 3rd party ratings or trailers. And if you start something that sucks, it's hard to tell it to stop showing it to you. They also removed the easy way to mark "Not Interested". It's become a much worse experience, perhaps bounded by their limited catalog.
They must know this. They must see the stats on how long people spend browsing vs cancellation rates.
Maybe it somehow satisfies some arcane distribution requirement in a way that saves them licensing fees on the more popular films? Maybe it helps some department improve some metric that some other department cares about?
This is not true if you have a DVD plan. There's a big "add" button next to the dvd-only results.
http://i.imgur.com/oSU4Yzh.png
I agree with your main point though.
I understand the benefits of exclusivity in distinguishing products, but rather than 6-12 months (or sometimes more), it should be more like 2 weeks, or a month. Unlike exclusivity on xbox/ps4/pc, where the content is specifically designed for those platforms, there is no technical reason for exclusivity for media content.
Half the time the rights holders don't even license some content for my country until a few weeks to months later. Occasionally, not at all. They could license it on netflix for my country, or other similar service, but refuse to do so. Yet this is in spite of netflix having a license for the same content in the US, or other regions.
With the internet, regional licensing just makes no sense for digital goods. A service like netflix should be able to obtain a license for content and distribute it to whom ever they want to, where ever they are. The only barriers to this are artificial.
So while the future may be rushing forward, in many ways, we are partially stuck in the past, held back by archaic and antiquated systems of past generations that are unable to let go. Its a matter of perspective. For some the future isn't coming soon enough, for others its rushing by.
The main problem is that the big audiences are still on the older platforms, not Netflix or equivalents (and if all audiences moved from older providers which are at least competing, to Netflix, would that really be better? Or just replacing the devil you know with the devil you don't?)
Differences in input, resolution, screen sizes, and RAM often become hurdles that take real time and manpower to overcome, and can be insurmountable, depending on how the game is structured. The companies might have legitimate concerns over whether their time is better spent on porting to new platforms, or spent working on the next title.
That's why you see so many third parties handle the ports, so the core team can move on to new projects.
Edit: he also sells used video games.
PSA: Just because a dvd is shrinkwrapped, doesnt mean it is new.
CDs are in decline, but they're still a huge market (many, many millions). Consider just the millions of used cars out there which only take CDs and you can see why the market is still probably a huge business.
46% of music industry revenue still came from CDs in 2014. [0] That's at least hundreds of millions of dollars.
The next time you are driving through any random state and stop at a gas station or truck stop, you will see cassette tapes for sale. Those are from this guy.
You also have to consider he operates on massive margins. He gets his good for next to nothing and sells it for several dollars.
On drives greater than 30 mins, it's worth it, but if I'm just going someplace ten minutes away (i.e. most of my driving), well I'd be adding an extra 2-3 minutes just hunting down the cord, plugging it in, launching the player, choosing what I want to play, etc.
Meanwhile my CD player starts the instant I turn on the car.
That being said, I did get a Bluetooth FM transmitter recently that has a built-in SD card slot and starts transmitting the SD card music the instant you plug it into the cigarette lighter, so that may eliminate my need for CDs.
> For a company the size of Netflix to fail in this regard is quite irksome.
As a shareholder, I applaud them for not spending resources to include little-used features on their mobile site. Being a big company doesn't mean you can do all things for all people.
No, but that doesn't change the fact it can be really annoying for users. Annoying enough for them to write a blog post in some cases.
Edit: I take it back. Somehow it works right on my own site, Kongregate. I wonder what the trick is?
Edit: The trick seems to be a session variable that remembers the browser used to say it was mobile. Then a request to 'm' with desktop headers should redirect to 'www'.
> they don't maintain feature parity between their desktop
> and mobile websites
Of course that's not a solution for when you want to watch a movie in the next few hours.
Has he tried switching to Firefox and use the 'Request Desktop Site' option ?
He insists, and I believe him, that this is not primarily because he is unwilling to pay for the content, but simply because getting it on demand through a commercial channel is too difficult and inconsistent.
Don't get left behind, old man. You will surely be a miserable person without the latest apps on the latest iGadget. Besides, there is no place in our ideal world for people like you.
I'd never heard of it. She asked around, and almost none of her friends had either. She was so insistent regarding its relevance that we set up a viewing party to see it.
Being naive, we both assumed it could be streamed... somewhere. We haven't used those plastic discs in a while either, but we figured we would not need them. We didn't know whether Netflix would have it, but we figured somebody would take our money so we could see it.
Nobody. Nowhere. It was completely unavailable.
I figured that the rights were tied up to keep those physical discs moving from shelves. I thought I'd run to the nearest big box store and pick it up. I went to their web site to see if they had it.
Nope. Not there.
I mean, I suppose you can imagine how my story ends: I go to a shady looking site where I can find this particular movie for free and have it saved on my hard drive with no restrictions. Just as I was becoming annoyed with the future, I was reminded of how senseless this problem is.
It was a good movie, and it was good that our friends could enjoy it. But it's easy to imagine a future where it disappears forever, for everybody.
I guess that's fair. Personally I don't even own a device that can play "plastic discs" anymore, which I think is kinda the point (of Netflix not making that a first class use case).
Some commenters for some reason have seemingly just taken the title and extrapolating to the entire content industry (did all these people actually click on the link?).
A lesser point is finding content. Movie A is on Netflix and Amazon. Movie B is on Hulu. Movie C is on plastic discs only. This is a general problem (for consumers) as the content producers fight the inevitable commoditization.
The movie industry is suffering not from piracy or streaming (IMHO) but from TV. Streaming and "plastic discs" made long form serial content viable. There's something deeply satisfying about the almost 48 hours of Breaking Bad vs the 2-2.5 of almost all movies (most of which these days seem to just regurgitate the same superhero formula time and again).
Additionally, good TV can be produced pretty cheaply too compared to any modern movie budget.
But I don't think that's what the article is saying. I think it's saying, "There's a difference between wanting and liking (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incentive_salience). Demand is determined by wanting, not liking, and so that's what the market responds to. People don't do a good job of wanting what they like, and thus the market is reducing supply too quickly."
Ie. plastic circles (and their analogs) really make people happy. If people were smarter, they'd realize this demand for them would be higher. But because they're mistaken, supply falls too quickly.
I agree, but don't know of a solution.
Impossible without the Netflix Plastic Circle service. Overall, the First Sale Doctrine makes the Plastic Circle service much more valuable than the Netflix Bits service, in my opinion.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-sale_doctrine
Seems more and more difficult to find something we haven't seen, appropriate for all of us to watch, and decent artistic quality on streaming. I think our need for immediate gratification is leading us to give up long established legal rights. Watching bad content because we're too lazy to put something good in our queue and wait for the plastic circle to arrive.
What'd Apple do to kill the floppy? I remember that floppies really only died after pendrives became common. Even with CDs before, there were still floppies around, since it wasn't as simple to copy data to CD (not to mention lack of removal).
It would be fine to sort of hide that there are discs... if my account didn't include that. But if it does, there should at least be a button somewhere near the top that takes me to the DVD website from the normal mobile / streaming website. There's certainly one going the other way!
Everything is amazing and some people aren't happy. The amazing new things make them forget that the crappier old things are still around. They just need to look underneath the big pile of amazing new things.
They don't have rights to stream any decent movies, those are all still just discs. Exactly one time in the last three years when I've gone to search for a movie I wanted to watch was it available for streaming.
That seems hyperbolic. Just browsing around (I decided to cap this at 5 minutes):
The Interview
Forrest Gump
Major League
Pirates of Carribean
Hot Fuzz
Armageddon
Kingpin
A League of Their Own
Inglorious Basterds
Scarface
Django Unchained
Legally Blonde
E.T.
Days of Thunder
The Princess Bride
Crocodile Dundee
Clear and Present Danger
V for Vendetta
Galaxy Quest
Running Man
Big Trouble in Little China
Talladega Nights
Kill Bill (1 and 2)
Star Trek Movies (including The Wrath of Kahn)
Tommy Boy
Team America World Police
Lilo & Stitch
Jay & Silent Bob Strike Back
Wayne's World
Clerks
Bill & Teds Excellent Adventure
Contrast this with the DVD/Blu Ray model: if it's available for sale you can rent it from them. There's not a mishmash of rights and availability dates.
...I've had Netflix for years, and I can knock out two movies a night.
Rapidly running out of quality content here. They don't acquire at the rate people consume. If you've been watching Netflix for a while, most of what's left to you is Asylum/Sci-Fi Original movies.
I think you consume movies at a much higher rate that the average person. The stats I can find estimate on average people watch between 1-3 movies per week.
At the moment I do have some Daredevil episodes queued up, but Netflix doesn't produce original content I watch at a rate worthy of keeping my subscription. Out of laziness or habit, I have my subscription year round, but the smarter thing would be to sub up for a month or two per year to binge watch Daredevil, Jessica Jones, and Orange is the New Black.
They don't have The Godfather.
The lack of same-as-audio-language subtitles should be an issue for some association of hearing impaired people to fight. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if legislation mandating access is required in some cases. Seems rather discriminatory to let people select audio language, but then require them to be able to hear just fine.
Of course, torrents almost never have this issue. (And have proper rewind/forward/skip/audio adjust[1] features.) At least half the time of the rare times I found something on Netflix, I just torrent it anyways as it's a superior experience.
1: Seriously, Netflix has been around for how long? And still no dynamic range compression for nighttime watching? Or "volume boost" for really quiet sources (or shitty playback systems)?
The future is here, it's just a different business model than music.
First, that the advances of technology are outpacing the scenarios which they are used. As I have voiced elsewhere here, it is alarming to see billions and trillions of dollars flowing towards people who seem incapable of balancing, let-alone considering, the higher-order consequences of their actions, like, say, shutting-down the home-automation systems your customers bought as a consequence of being absorbed by a competitor. Or, denying random people things and services they used to have access to.
More disturbingly, it seems that many do see these later effects, and they're sacrificing their customers' interests on the altar of the almighty dollar. Is this really what we want?
Secondly, modern media consumption via streaming is simpler, yes, if you're a first-world citizen with money and typical interests. It does a disservice to people who do not fit this mold, and they are legion. The older, peer-to-peer model of file-sharing (and, in some cases, sneakernets) thrives and survives in this adverse environment, in addition to providing personal independence and privacy.
Thirdly, the chain of variables in a streaming economy is so much longer than a world of plastic shiny discs. As an example, to watch a movie via a DVD you bought or rented, you need:
* viewing device with electricity and a screen (one-time cost)
* a DVD player, properly connected (one-time cost)
* software on said device able to execute and play the disc (one-time cost and not even a consideration historically)
* the disc, in a workable condition (edit: and a compatible region), and the funds or means to acquire it (one-time cost)
* knowledge to operate the DVD player
... and thats it. Compare with Netflix, Hulu, et al:
* viewing device with electricity, internet access, and a screen (one-time cost)
* a working, high-bandwidth internet account that can reach your servers with an acceptable latency (recurring cost)
* a current account with your service provider(s) of choice (1x+ recurring cost)
* current software, able to execute, on said device (recurring cost due to updates)
* a provider that is online and accessible
* knowledge to operate the media player, but also possibly the web browser, on a phone, or tablet, or computer (one-time cost)
* knowledge of current account credentials (sometimes difficult for some)
The cost side of streaming media is so much higer, and entails significant recurring obligations. If you can't pay your streaming bill, much of this goes away. There are many more points of failure. This is simply unacceptable in many parts of the world.
I've bought a region 1 DVD (beeing in a region 2 land) and had to reflash my DVD drive to play this DVD. And don't get me started on store bought DVDs which were in English and German, but if you wanted to watch the English version you had to watch it with subtitles.
Assuming you are talking about playback on a computer: Only the officially licensed software did this, along with blocking fast-forward during movie previews etc. But VLC for example let you select whatever audio track and subtitle track you wanted.
As far as I know, you can stream much more content from say Amazon, Google Play, iTunes, Crackle, etc. Just need to be willing to pay. You can also buy plastic discs from a lot of places. And if you don't want to pay, you can torrent the world.
So I don't really understand what's his complaints about? He preferred it when Netflix was a mail rental company? I doubt that's worthy of HN.
On another note: personally, many don't want to deal with Netflix+Amazon+Hulu+whoever. This attitude that one should have faith in the streaming market is an affront and slap-in-the-face to collectors, people with shitty internet, critics, teachers, historians, archivists, remixers, and anyone else with an interest in private use or working with the bits.
Sure, additional services can be provisioned to fill in those gaps... but those gaps never existed when data sharing was about files and not streaming services. This business model of the cloud looks more and more like windshield-repairmen walking around parking lots with baseball bats at 3 A.M.
Netflix will still send you DVDs in the mail. They just don't promote them much. If you're a digital subscriber the disc add-on starts at $5/month.
You can also download Jupiter Ascending from iTunes for $15 (though you can't rent it).
It does suck that there's no DRM-free way to buy a movie online. But, again, no worse than the DVD-only era.
(edit - Yes, two. The app doesn't deal with DVDs either)
If he can't code hire a dev, $200 should suffice.
I found the problem in the past was licensing 'issues' prevented whole swathes of old movies ever being shown in the UK - this is pretty efficiently fixed now.
Solving the legal issues is a separate problem that was trivially solved for previous disruptive innovations.
Compulsory blanket licenses, existing media taxes, distribution agencies - just like when radio & libraries were innovations would allow outdated laws to catch up with technological reality. Maximalist copyright is an anti-capitalist protection racket devised by ancient distribution monopolies.