How about we also get Spotify, iTunes and Google Play to step up the exclusives on their music services so I can never have a single place to go to listen to music.
http://www.theverge.com/2016/4/1/11343526/kanye-west-life-of...
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.
Pretty much the only thing that keeps me from dropping cable TV is the fact that I can't get anything OTA so dropping cable TV would mean dropping TV 100%.
(I do periodically toy with the idea of idea of dropping down to non-HD basic cable. But it's a bit like dropping landline phone service. It would save some $$s but I would be giving up a service that I use, albeit lightly.)
> It's the content creators driving this.
You're agreeing with the post you replied to.
I understand it, and I'm not sure why you felt the need to state it.
> My reading of his argument is that it's a conspiracy between Netflix, Hulu, etc, to make more money for themselves.
I was trying to find a nice way to say "I think that you read the argument wrong".
darpa_escapee's argument is about a conspiracy of content owners. The conspiracy that they're talking about is spreading content from the major providers across as many distribution channels as possible, so that one would have to subscribe to half a dozen services to get access to all the media produced by a particular content owner, for example.
Remember, part of what made Netflix possible to begin with was the fact that the content they were licensing had already made its money through theatrical runs, cable deals and home video for movies, and original network fees and syndication rights for TV shows. So the content holders only had to worry about marginal revenue over negligible costs -- you can get very little for the content and still come out ahead. As streaming becomes a bigger and bigger piece of the pie, it canibalizes those other revenue channels, and more and more streaming money is required to make it revenue-positive. The market is reacting.
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.
The problem with this argument is, financially, all the content distributors and rightsholders we currently have right now can't survive on that price. I mean, you're breaking out the dumb pipe provider into their own price bucket, so it's not apples-to-apples with current cable companies, but think of how much an everything package with a cable or satellite company costs, and think about how much content you don't get in such a package.
Making money off their old catalog is more like a freebie when it's all milked out.
I'm talking about the quality/difficulty of service access, not the price.
I probably should have just used $NN as the price. I've changed the OP from $50 to that if it makes it clearer.
If you make me sort through 10 services, the time for the consumer to access the desired content is faster via piracy.
2) Dogpile vs. Google
> Combining the cord-cutting trend in recent years with the growing number of consumers who have never subscribed to cable television, a total of 24.6 million households, or 20.4% of all U.S. households, were cable-free at the end of 2015.
Just fyi.
And yeah, I don't really care about changing minds at this point. I've accepted I'm never going to be in the majority on anything.
In contrast, TV comes with a built in meta-discovery system. You can effortlessly switch between channels and even quickly summon up an overall display of which channels have which.
It seems like there might be a hole opening in the market for a streaming aggregator which will provide a unified interface for managing your various subscriptions and switching between them (including to paid sources). It's too bad that every company would likely oppose such a service and thereby make it technically and legally impractical to maintain.
A nice feature I recently discovered of the Roku. It exposes a "Search" feature that searches across all the various streaming channels and apps. Then, when you click on it, it takes you to the relevant page seamlessly (so long as you have a subscription to that app).
Not sure if the other streaming devices have that, but a Roku is all I've tried up until now.
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".
Without legal protection, you're absolutely correct that a film cannot be excluded from consumption by non-payers and infinite reproducibility makes it non-rivalrous.
That doesn't make films fungible though. They are very far from being even imperfect substitutes. If I am somehow able to keep the latest Avengers film excludable then very few will be willing to accept the "substitute" of a knock-off rom com with C-list actors.
In markets, profits flow to whoever owns a monopoly.
This goes too far. There are clearly better movies and worse movies, but if you have the choice between two movies of the same quality, they are basically fungible. If one of them is on the streaming service I subscribe to and the other one isn't, I know which one I'm going to watch and which one I'm not going to get around to.
Conversely, the more market power netflix gains, the better they can negotiate with more rightsholders for more content while piracy -- as a free grey market alternative -- hopefully keeps them from abusing their position too much.
A few years back [0] Netflix was getting too strong, and fearing the iTunes effect the studios pushed back and stopped licensing their best stuff to Netflix.
0: http://www.dailytech.com/Hollywood+Executives+Fear+Netflixs+...
Is there any app like that but standalone, where you don't need a special speaker for it?
Still it's not much different from Hulu having exclusive rights to stream airing episodes of television shows. Someone has to be paid for all of this work.
Besides, ITS NETFLIX. Everyone has a Netflix account or a family member's login. If this were done on some other kind of service, then we might reasonably expect a backlash.
Everyone?
How about no?
That's hilarious, where did you get that idea?
Netflix has roughly 35 million accounts in the US, out of a population of over 300 million. It's the most popular streaming service, but stream isn't that popular yet... internet denizens always forget we are a tiny minority of the US population.
Which accounts for both those who are using a relative's login, or multiple family members in a household. There's five people in my house using my account, all immediate relatives. A bit more than a year ago, household penetration of streaming was 40% in the US[1] (combined Netflix, Hulu and Amazon). The original statement was obvious hyperbole, but I wouldn't be surprised if well over 100 million people had access to Netflix through those ~35 million accounts.
1: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/12/business/nielsen-reports-2...
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).
[0]http://files.shareholder.com/downloads/NFLX/1915968503x0x886...
Because the companies that profit off our extremist copyright laws control the media, they don't talk about this very much, but copyright, as currently implemented, is extremely unfair for the consumer, to the extent that many consumers break copyright laws several times a day and often don't even know they've done anything illegal.
We need serious intellectual property modernization and reform.
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.
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.
You are the one who is trying to mis-apply a legal doctrine developed for physical objects (first sale doctrine) to digital files.
The old adage is "possession is 9/10ths of the law". We need to think about how that applies in the digital age, when much of what we "own" is only represented by a relatively small handful of bits on a drive in a datacenter somewhere, and not in the legal owner's direct physical possession.
I have season pack DVDs and I have season packs I've bought on Amazon Video (I also have over 200 games on Steam, where this issue is probably much more salient). Ideally, the medium wouldn't matter, legally speaking; what would matter is that I owned a copy of something. As it stands, I have substantially more rights with a DVD than with a bit assigned to my user profile in Amazon's database somewhere. We need to find a way to port the first-sale doctrine to the digital world, and otherwise update our arcane technology access laws.
Separately but relatedly, we also need to weaken copyright protections substantially to grant a more even balance between the financial interests of the rightsholders and the cultural interests of the public at large, and to correct the economic inequities that flow from government's grant of a practically-eternal (since most copyrights that come into being today are not going to expire until most or all of us are dead), almost-unlimited (since copyrights allow the rightsholder to squash almost any use and since it requires millions of dollars to fight the media conglomerates and establish as valid just one single, isolated usage as legally fair) monopoly to the rightsholder.
You mean the public that still exchanges terabytes [1] of pirated content every month in the US alone that the rights holders are unable to stop?
1. Sandvine estimates single digit percentage of daily Internet traffic in the US is BitTorrent. That is huge in absolute numbers.
EDIT: Also, it's improper to classify all BitTorrent traffic as piracy. It was specifically designed to transfer large files. Applications like World of Warcraft use it internally to distribute game files.
> If everyone could license the content at a reasonable price...
...I think you're touching another precedent: compulsory licensing (or statutory licensing, in UK parlance).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compulsory_license
This is an interesting idea, although it'd be tough to get the right people to agree to it. It also raises the question on just what streaming services would be competing on, if not content. UX, perhaps?
My guess is that under a scenario like this, the price for any one service would be substantially higher than what we're paying now for Netflix and competitors. I'd personally be just fine with a service that had, say, a $30-40 month range, even if it were partially supported by ads the way Hulu is (although it'd be nicer if, like Hulu, you could pay a little more to make most of the ads go away).
I'm not real optimistic that people will ever come to see exclusive media deals as contracts designed to increase revenues.
Streaming services are the worst. I shouldn't have to subscribe to a half dozen different services. Someone should sell a bundle that gives me access to all of them for a lower price.
Their price is a reflection of how much people want it. ESPN (and sports as a whole) are a big driver of cable subscriptions, which helps all cable channels.
Here's a NYTimes article from 2012 titled "The 'Mad Men' Economic Miracle". http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/09/magazine/the-mad-men-econo...
AMC was making $30 million per MONTH off 80 million subscribers despite Breaking Bad having less than 3 million viewers.
Instead we have all those channels in a perpetual race to the bottom to attract just enough eyeballs to be worth "keeping on the payroll" of the bundle.
The racing footage I used to be able to get on Speedvision (on the rare occasion where my local provider HAD Speedvision!) was worth far more to me than the $0.20 they got from my subscription.
I for one, welcome our a-la-carte overlords, where my dollars go to the content I want.
(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.)
But a la carte hasn't taken off in streaming services, so now we're recreating channels. Next will be bundles where you can get Netflix and Hulu and Amazon together. Blah.
http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2013/01/26/cable_unbundl...
Now how is that any different from cable?