Comment by cwyers | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cwyers | Hacker News Reader

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It's not a conspiracy, there's no backroom deals made through a haze of cigar smoke. The value of streaming rights is increasing, non-streaming revenue for the same content is slowly shrinking, there's multiple streaming services out there bidding up the rights to content, and the rightsholders are behaving appropriately according to their incentives.

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.

It's also the way the market should work. Content creators are selling a non-fungible product. Streaming services are to a great extent, fungible, like retailers. In fact, as content creators get their arms around streaming, I expect more of them to set up their own "shops" instead of relying on retailers, in the same way Apple and Tesla do.

> It's also the way the market should work. Content creators are selling a non-fungible product. Streaming services are to a great extent, fungible, like retailers. In fact, as content creators get their arms around streaming, I expect more of them to set up their own "shops" instead of relying on retailers, in the same way Apple and Tesla do.

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, I'd be willing to pay $50/month for access to everything in a single distributor like Netflix.

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.

They make the vast majority of their money on new content.

Making money off their old catalog is more like a freebie when it's all milked out.

You can say that of pretty much any product or service. People would rather get something illegally for free instead of paying to get it legally, if it's easy enough and the risk of getting caught is low. That by itself doesn't mean prices are too high or there is anything wrong with the market.

> You can say that of pretty much any product or service. People would rather get something illegally for free instead of paying to get it legally, if it's easy enough and the risk of getting caught is low. That by itself doesn't mean prices are too high or there is anything wrong with the market.

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.

Its a nice little bit of common wisdom that "free is always better," but its not actually true- if it were, Netflix and Spotify and their ilk would never have gotten off the ground, since there's not a thing they're selling that can't be pirated (and no realistic chance of punishment for piracy.) We're not homo economicus.

The main reasons Netflix, Spotify and their ilk exist are a) piracy is still not user-friendly enough for everyone, and b) people vastly overestimate the risk of getting caught for piracy. Both of these are largely due to the incessant efforts of copyright holders exerting their legal rights. We are, in the large, homo economicus.

I don't understand. What's hard about having multiple streaming services? It's not all that different from having different channels on a TV.

1) I don't own a TV because I find the hassle of dealing with a cable company and its business model excessive.

2) Dogpile vs. Google

About 85% of American households have cable TV. It sounds like your standards in this area are, ahem, a bit unusual. Perhaps it's not a great idea to extrapolate from your personal experience to the bulk of Americans and what they will or will not do when presented with a bunch of different streaming services.

http://fortune.com/2016/04/05/household-cable-cord-cutters/

> 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.

Not OP but: I don't want to have 10 different accounts to search/look through. It's not undoable, but it's extremely inconvenient. I'm just not going to keep up with who has what on their streaming catalogue if I can get it for free, and usually at a better quality, elsewhere. I just want to be able to turn on my TV, type a word and start playing.

It's definitely a hassle to have to look through the various services to find which one actually has a bit of content, find the login for that service, and make sure that a bunch of separate accounts are maintained. This complexity removes one of the biggest advantages streaming is supposed to have over piracy: ease of use and effortlessness.

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.

>"It's definitely a hassle to have to look through the various services to find which one actually has a bit of content, find the login for that service, and make sure that a bunch of separate accounts are maintained. "

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 "should" here. Content creators are selling a non-fungible product because we've chosen to define it that way, for example in the DMCA, which signed onto a number of copyright treaties defining specific forms of copyright.

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're confusing a good being fungible with it being non-rivalrous and non-excludable.

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.

There are plenty of non-fungible goods of this sort that are purely the result of legal constructions. The simplest example is the same movie available from two different vendors with separate digital rights systems. If I have purchased rights from one, it does not give me the right to consume the media from the other, even though it is arguably the same work. This means I can multiply the number of non-fungible versions of the same product by making it available on N different competing DRM systems.

> 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.

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.

Content is intrinsically non-fungible. People don't want a movie about fish; they want Finding Nemo. That's what gives content companies so much power even in this day and age when making and distributing content is so easy. But copyright law doesn't give them that power--its intrinsic to the nature of their product.

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