Netflix Will Be the Exclusive US TV Home of Disney, Marvel, Lucasfilm and Pixar

People like me.

Most homes do that. The people that hate commericals are a small but growing minority. And Hulu just recently released a no-commerical plan for like 13 bucks a month.

>I am an HBO customer and I pirate HBO shows because they load faster and are in at least as good quality.

I have really good experience with HBO NOW (and before it GO). It'll stream in 1080p the second the show airs on tv. They had some fuck ups a could years ago during some premiers, but since they moved to being hosted on mlb.tv, it's been great.

Broadcast TV DVRs like HD Homerun and Channel Master DVR+ are currently under-utilized (even TIVO, the leader, is), but eventually may become well-known and used.

Just because they were bad 10 years ago and are good now does not mean it took 10 years to get good. It means sometime in the last 10 years, they got good. That may have been yesterday, it may have been last year, or the year before, or the year before, etc.

I had no hair on my head when I was born. I have hair on my head now. Did it take me decades to grow hair, or did I grow it years ago and merely continue to have hair on my head to this day?

Also, I've never gotten close to 10GB for even 1080p films.

Well... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_film_remakes

And you have property laws giving you legal control over who gets your physical property and how it gets used. You could, for instance, loan your car to your family all you want, or agencies can rent their cars out as they wish. But the moment some stranger makes off with it, the government law enforcement agencies are obliged to help.

The legal distribution of content is a free market -- there is no government price setting agency and no monopoly more than other forms of ownership -- the public only needs to be better educated about what they are paying for.

This is addressed by something called the "first sale doctrine", which states that IP holders only have control over the direct sale between themselves and the other party, and cannot exert control over second, third, or later sales.

Tesla, of course, is not obligated to offer their cars for sale in any particular venue. They cannot, however, stop someone else who possesses a Tesla car from offering it for sale either as a private party or through a third-party dealer. This is why you can go to the Ford dealer and leave with a used Honda. Honda didn't give that car to Ford, but it legally came into the dealer's possession through an intermediary, and thus, the Ford dealer has every right to sell it on their own terms.

The difference here is that we're discussing direct physical goods that may contain intellectual property, whereas Netflix and the internet remove the necessity of the physical medium. This is really where our existing technology access laws begin to fall down. They just do not adequately contemplate a world that does not require transactions of hard physical tokens to exchange substantial sums of information. Of course, the very fact that computer networks don't require that is what gives them their power.

>Anyway, the alternative would be worse. If there was no reason to pick one streaming provider over another on the basis of content, one would quickly become a monopoly, which would be bad for both content creators and consumers.

I don't think this makes sense. Just the opposite is true. If everyone could license the content at a reasonable price and show it on their streaming service, the best streaming service in terms of actual quality would be able to win. Under the current regime, if you don't have both the capital and the clout to spend months in secret meetings with the big media companies, your video streaming startup will simply never gain steam at all. It's much better for the competitive landscape if everyone is legally allowed to show the content.

Most of those streaming services work on virtually every console and standalone streamers like AppleTV and Roku.

None of what you said holds water when you look at it objectively and economically. I hate cable companies as much as the next guy, but if you actually compare your budget on cable vs streaming, you'll often find that streaming costs more if you're trying to get close to the same offerings.

The problem with this argument is, financially, I'd be willing to pay $NN/month for access to everything in a single distributor like Netflix.

If the effort required to stay legal exceeds reason [which is what you are suggesting with N channels purchased separately] why bother?

I've honestly reached a point where I'm completely indifferent to anything that isn't already on Amazon Prime or Netflix. Create a dozen distributors and people will just pirate things.

There is no god-given reason for any of these choices. Notably, there is widespread room for disagreement on what constitutes "fair use" of these items that circumscribes the space of what makes them a product. These are legal constructs, and they exist to the extent that they are enforceable by law.

Now, for example, we are seeing attempts to cast copyright ownership across particular tunes or styles of music; if this succeeds, this is a new paradigm in ownership, it is not some pre-ordained law.

Property of all forms is a legal construct, a man-made thing. Where we set the bounds determines, to a large extent, who ends up owning it and reaping the profits. For example, the DMCA provisions required certain proprietary anti-circumvention measures to be included in all audio-recording devices; it is difficult to argue that this is how the market "should work".

You'd be surprised, I know many folks that are convinced over half the country uses Netflix. Filter bubbles can heavily influence those perceptions.

> There's five people in my house using my account, all immediate relatives.

My dorm shared an account in college... we had 8 people on the same account. 5 now have their own accounts, including myself, and the rest stopped using Netflix. Conversely, my parents and their neighbors are DVD-only Netflix customers.

I think the truth is somewhere between 100 million and 35 million streamers, which still puts it at (late) "early adoption". In that context the spread of streaming exclusives is a little worrying... "Stream anything at any time for a flat rate" is a very disruptive vision. "Some services have some of what you want" is a much weaker sell.

Exactly, that's the real question here. Anecdotally, about half the people I know have access to Netflix.... but that's heavily skewed towards young tech workers. I'm not sure how that matches the general population.

Also remember that there are many Netflix customers that use the physical DVD service without any streaming (I know many older parents in this group).

(Say there's $30 on average of revenue in the cable bundle with only $15 of it being desired spending on average. The channels get a lot more revenue with the opaque bundles, and they are still competing to some extent for the revenue.)

Then there is the period of gradual sales, i.e. people who don't buy the game because it's new / hyped, but because they like the genre, discovered it years later and so on (assuming it's a good game, and not some junk that gets forgotten for good as soon as it comes out). Over time such sales can be even significant, but they don't directly contribute to critical expenses recovery.

So for games both use cases are commonly addressed through similar distributors, yet for films this somehow poses a problem.

There are people who boycott elections because they dislike the candidates being offered. Do we see the political system change when 50% of people stop voting? No, all that happens is that the candidates focus on the people who do vote.

In a market, the biggest problem to a company is competition that will take market share and mind share. A customer that buy a competing product gives money to the competitor who then can invest that money into further competing products. A customer who boycott that market won't benefit you, but it also don't benefit the competition, so the status quo is maintained.

If we want an additional point of view, we can look into monopolies and what happens there when the single controlling entity has unreasonable prices and is strongly negatively perceived, like The Telephone Company of old. People could of course boycott them, but why would they care. So long enough people will pay what ever is demanded, then profits are earned and life will go on. When customers has no alternatives, except for stay outside of current culture and social norms, then they will pay what is demanded. People understood this already around the time of the founding of the United states and viewed monopolies as extremely dangerous and only valid for a very short and limited time, and exclusively for newly created works. That system turned into a 95+ years that we have today, and the consequences are that people no longer respect that deal that was copyright. The moral high ground of the copyright holder was lost a long time ago, and the moral thing to do is to simply deny the legitimacy of the corrupt law.

You could still eat extra meat discarded by others, stolen meat, or free promotional steaks being given away as part of an advertising campaign.

If you do make an argument, I'd advise you to leave the whole "stealing" part aside. It's really only a weak shortcut to proving the immorality of content piracy, and it's better to avoid such tricks and show the full argument.

You are making the argument that making a duplicate tractor is stealing a tractor.

With digital piracy, nobody actually loses anything. They don't gain anything, but they don't lose anything either. You can call this whatever you want. To me, the net harm is significantly different than if you took money or property away from someone, so using the same word to describe both situations is inaccurate.