Hacker News Reader

> Funny how so many people screamed for al la care programming and now that it's happening everyone is realizing it's actually worse.

I wouldn't equate balkanization with a la carte. To stretch the restaurant metaphor, the current situation is akin to taking 5 cab rides between restaurants to cobble together a meal, there's a lot of overhead and waste. Traditional cable television is the restaurant with everything available, but you're required to purchase dessert and coffee to get access to soup and salad.

Yeah, but now the streaming services have kombucha (exclusive content)

Even worse; many of the restaurants still make you buy a whole bundle to get the one item you want from them. At the end of the day, in order to get your burger, fries and a shake you've also paid for 3 bowls of rice, 3 plates of nachos, 3 breakfast platters, 3 extra-large sodas, and (nobody knows why) 3 whole durian. Edit: oh, and a year of Prime shipping. Wat?

Switching between Hulu and Netflix on my TV is hardly like taking multiple cab rides. It's actually a far superior experience to cable TV.

Let's not forget that we need healthy competition in this space. We can't, and shouldn't, expect Netflix to just have everything, as good as their product is.

A la carte means that I pay $1 for that episode of that series. If I don't want to see anything else that month I don't pay anything else. What Netflix sells is a subscription. Same as for phones back into the times voice only no data services: pay as you go vs subscription. I want watch as I go.

one bonus with Netflix et. al. is that I don't have to spend 1/3 of my time sitting through mindless commercials for junk I would never buy.

No, you are confusing pay-per-view with a la carte. The a la carte world everyone was clamoring for was to not have to pay for those channels you didn't watch. You were always going to pay for a subscription for the channel.

A la carte as it was brought up originally with TV was about unbundling all the channels and letting viewers pay per channel they wanted.

What you're describing is essentially PPV/VOD, and that exists now in iTunes, Amazon and Vudu.

I guess but both the a la carte and PPV/VOD options do not operate as expected. The biggest issue is geolocation versus point of purchase, and it's very frustrating and often contradictory.

I live abroad and cannot use virtually any of my Amazon Prime since virtually every non-amazon original is blocked in the country I live in. When I was in the US, I could legally copy the file to my Kindle and view it anywhere (with the ticking timebomb that is the download expiry). While I understand the "technical" difference between this and streaming it while I'm abroad, I feel that it's splitting hairs - ultimate I'm using the same service to watch the same content, just instead of a browser cache it's temporarily loaded on my Kindle.

I understand we got here because of distribution rights,but what I don't understand is how it's still so consumer anti-friendly. I have no means of knowing whether or not I can view a video except to open it and check. With other streaming services, I have no idea whether or not their library is available in my country prior to purchase. It surprises me that this is not a function offered to let you browse the library and get an accurate idea of what you can and cannot watch. It may be a fringe case, but I would imagine for many countries, the idea of constantly moving back and forth between countries with different distirbution deals would be common enough that the support cases alone would justify such a feature.

What we're getting isn't a la carte; we're getting a bunch of bundles with more chaff than wheat.

There's nothing wrong with à la carte offerings. The failure is charging $10/month for every service.

So what should HBO, Netflix, FX, ESPN, et al be charging then? Creating content isn't cheap.

No but the supply of content keeps going up and the demand can't keep growing. At some point, the price for a generic hour of entertainment has to drop. The cost of producing content is mostly irrelevant.

> The cost of producing content is mostly irrelevant.

How is this irrelevant? Everything about making the product costs money and if there is no ad revenue they have to charge for it elsewhere.

I suddenly find myself wondering how successful a Game of Thrones season kickstarter would be. ;)

Because sunk costs are sunk, and fixed costs are fixed. In a commoditized market, the cost of the product is most directly impacted by the marginal cost to produce one additional copy. It doesn't matter if you had $100M in your production budget, or just $1k, because all it takes to make one more copy is a few squirts of electrons and a pinch of network bandwidth.

For digital goods, marginal cost of production is so near to zero that the only thing you can really sell profitably is an artificial legal right to distribute the copies.

Yeah, perhaps a Blendle model would be better. I recently got Netflix as a present, one show I like is not on there, we generally watch one show at a time, something like 2-3 episodes a week. So now I won't use it for months, apart from the occasional (once every 3 weeks?) movie. I pay (if it wasn't a present) the same as someone who watches 4 hours of Netflix per day.

My son used to watch Thomas the Tank engine occasionally. Guess what recently got removed...

iTunes has à la carte television with a small lead time. It's had it for years. I guess what people want is unsustainably cheap à la carte offerings.

I for one would be happy with either:

Pay per view (multiple sources ok)

Or

All-you-can-x from one place like Spotify

What I don't like is paying monthly to a number of services.

Also (honest question, I might send money Apples way if the answer is yes:)

Do iTunes work standaloneon Windows (and preferably Linux) and can I legally watch stuff there even if I sit somewhere in Europe?

As far as I now, the answer is yes to Windows (not Linux), and you can legally watch US stuff in Europe as long as your iTunes account is associated with a US account as far as I know (98% certain I did exactly this a couple of years ago).

However, iTunes is only pay-per-view for some films, and hasn't been pay-per-view for TV episodes for some time. TV episodes you must buy (either one at a time for typically ~$3 or you can buy a whole season, or you can pay the remainder of the season cost if you've already bought episodes from it). Some films are rentable ($3-$6, once you've rented I believe you have 30 days to start watching and then 24 hours to finish/watch as many times as you want), but most are for sale rather than rent. It's not unusual for me to run across a film I'd like to watch, but ends up not being rentable so I have to decide if I want to full-on buy it (which is closer to $15-$20).

Not the greatest solution, but usually better than other solutions for me.

Ok, guess I wasn't clear enough. I'm not a US citizsn, so I guess this means a bunch of VPN trickery && buy gift cards using EBay && enter fake zip codes or is there a simpler way?

I, like many others really want to buy. For me pirating is last option (after "let's just do something else, I don't need to see that movie after all")

No, that's correct. If you're not a US citizen unfortunately this does not help at all :/

> As far as I now, the answer is yes to Windows (not Linux), and you can legally watch US stuff in Europe as long as your iTunes account is associated with a US account as far as I know (98% certain I did exactly this a couple of years ago).

Sorry, but according to content right owners (Sony being named among the chief ones), that's not legal or acceptable. If they say you're not allowed to watch a movie in EU, it's copyright infrigement for you to pay for it in EU via US iTunes account.

Welcome to 21st century.

Then I guess Apple doesn't enforce that legal restriction ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

That seems unlikely to me, though. More likely there is more subtlety to it than that.

Yup.

I have Netflix and iTunes. I nearly always end up using iTunes. It's more expensive but iTunes UK has a great selection and I only pay when I use it. Also it streams to my Apple TV. For me the additional cost is worth the control and selection.

It's more like subscribing to 4 different cable bundles, each with one good show and 99% stuff you'll never watch just like a big cable TV package.

Lookin' at you Mr. Robot.

Although the trend now is for streaming services to offer a subscription to that one good show, though at a pretty steep price. Mr. Robot was something like $25-30 on amazon for season 2.

edit: But some are included at no extra cost. Amazon Prime customers got AMC's Humans the day after it aired for free.

Is it à la carte if you have to pay 10$ to five different providers in order to be able to choose what you want to watch?

I'd be happy with a service that charge me 1$ per show but with real choice.

That exists now through Vudu, Amazon and iTunes. But that still breaks up the model of viewing all your content in one area.

It doesn't exist at all there because they don't have everything. The only place that service exists is via piracy. What we need is a donation page for shows/movies/bands/teams/etc where people who want to pay them for their content, but don't want to pay most of that money to a middle man and don't want to be blocked by the arbitrary distribution of said middle man.

The really funny thing is that people seem to assume a la carte would be cheaper, but there's no economic reason it should be. I get 200 channels from Xfinity, and I watch about 5 of them. My neighbor also watches 5, though a different 5.

That is, I've already proven to Xfinity that I'm willing to pay my monthly cable bill for those 5 channels, so if they offer them a la carte, those 5 will cost about what my monthly cable bill costs.

Honestly, it's a classic capitalism vs. communism argument.

Economically: Many channels will die, which would lower production costs, which in a competitive market lowers consumer costs.

More importantly, channels will actually need to fight for consumers. Which means they are not going to soft ball ultra cheap reality TV that most of their core demographic hate. cough syfy

Huh? If you don't like reality TV then you aren't syfy's core demographic (or just about any channel's, really). Basically every channel has moved in that direction because people keep proving they will watch it.

Reality TV is cheap. In a highly fragmented and bundled market it can work. Yet, HBO and other premium services avoid it presumably because willing to watch is different from willing to pay for.

PS: Cheap TV can be compelling. Personally I really liked the primitive technology youtube channel which has 788,764 subscribers and is really cheap to produce 1 guy without any spoken lines. Twitch can also be extremely compelling. However, that's not paying subscribers.

I can't tell if you're arguing for or against bundling, but bundling is what can allow some channels to be given a chance. If I remember correctly Disney/ABC, Viacom, Time Warner, etc use bundles as a way to introduce new channels. They negotiate a price down on a popular channel, say ESPN, provided the service carries a newer station like Comedy Central or Viceland.

Disney could just subsidize 'the puppy channel' or whatever with their own money and have a free 3 month trial to get people hooked.

Really, it's just a question of what they get from all their channels (X + Y + ...). If Y = 0billion and X = 10billion that's the same as Y=1billion and X = 9billion.

PS: Ok, their might be some accounting magic so it's useful for channel Y not to be profitable.

Cable started as a way of people to not have to fool with an antenna. Then it evolved "cable only" channels.

That means that cable operators are sort of duty-bound to offer local stations. I will bet that those local stations are much less likely to be in your list of 5.

So what's mainly driving up your cost is local stations charging for carrying them. You'll see the odd game of chicken between local stations and cable operators when the local stations want to raise prices.

By federal law, US broadcasters can demand being retransmitted for free, or they can negotiate a price (and black themselves out if the cable operator doesn't agree to pay it).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Must-carry#United_States

Why can't we choose between multiple a la carte services each offering the entire collection of Movies/TV shows ever released?

It pretty much works this way for music, why not movies and TV shows?

I imagine cable/Hollywood execs learned from the music industry's mistakes. Music is incredibly cheap. That you can get all of your music in one place makes it a commodity. That's why some artists are trying to create their own music platforms, and capture more of their brand value for themselves, as opposed to leaving it to the customer.

a la carte programming assumed you would still access TV channels via one TV, using the same interface as before for all channels, ie. your remote. Click once and you're at a different channel.

Having to deal with several different content delivery services, each with their own sign-in, is much more complicated than that.