À La Carte Television finally makes financial sense for TV networks
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They are going to recoil from "You want to watch the Americans? Just 3.99 for FX Networks package." "Better Call Saul? 4.99 for the AMC package (5.49 during Walking Dead months)."
More tiers is probably the right way forward. Segregating sports, movie channels, prestige cable networks into packages might work.
Now each customer isn't the average customer. Some will win (because they use very few channels), but some would lose (light users who watch a large variety of channels sporadically).
I agree that on average people are unlikely to save a lot though it may change some behaviors to the degree that watching something becomes an affirmative decision to spend money.
A few years ago when we got the service you could find tons of fantastic movies and tv shows to watch. Today I've switched away in frustration after spending 30+ minutes browsing and searching for something to watch. The menu is mostly filled with crappy 1 to 3 star content. You can't even find good movies from the 80's and 90's. Sure, maybe a few here and there but, for the most part the experience is an exercise in futility.
My kids are watching a Spanish kid's show to improve their language understanding. They are 60 episodes into a 260 episode show. When they are done I think I might cancel Netflix and move on.
Here's the criteria: When I find myself browsing regular TV listings to record good movies to watch and endure having to commercial-skip every two minutes to watch them. What that happens. And you actually end-up with a bunch of really good contemporary movies recorded. That's the moment when you realize Netflix, today, has a bad product. And that's already happened multiple times.
One exception I'd say is that Netflix Original Programming is getting quite good. Narcos, The Crown, and Stranger Things are all fantastic.
But yes, in general their selection of quality 3rd party titles is horrible. It's rare to browse Netflix hoping to find a specific movie and not be disappointed.
Unless things change I'm cancelling by the end of the year.
Amazon Prime seemed a bit better but lately it seems to be filled with the same kind of crud. Bad "B" and below movies.
Seriously, who watched this crap?
There are thousands of good movies out there. Maybe it's a revenue struggle with the studios, I don't know. The fact that you can't even find "The Marx Brother" or "The Three Stooges" or "Abbott and Costello" on these services might be a clue. In other words, you can't find popular black and white movies that by all accounts should fill these services. Or good 80's, 90's and earlier TV series. Not there. Maybe a few here and there, but not en-masse as they should be.
I was looking for Battlestar Galactica the other day. Not the goofy one, the other one with Edward James Olmos. It was there a few years back but no-longer available. My oldest kid wasn't old enough to watch it then but he could now (and it is a good series). Gone. Not sure why.
I would imagine the viewership for old black and white movies is infinitesimal, even if the rights are cheap. The value proposition apparently doesn't make sense.
I agree that the non-original TV show content seems to have declined somewhat but the good original programming makes up for it.
The only networks we watch are rural cop shows and Food TV with some rare cable TV news and only one network out of the options there. There are hundreds of other junk channels that I never watch. There is one game show channel that my in-laws like to watch when they visit.
The other channels just have nothing that ever appeals to anyone in the household. We're more than happy to occasionally (like once every 2 years) watch a TV show like Breaking Bad on Netflix years and years after it was a popular event. Would be happy to downgrade to a package that has Food Network and almost nothing else.
In general, I think the bundles appealed to the "I have to watch X" demographic. When in reality there are a large number of people who are perfectly happy to watch something else, if X doesn't happen to be on a channel they subscribe to.
There's more quality content nowadays than viewer eyeball-hours.
Also, curious question for someone up to date on cable tech. What's the technical ability to deliver a la carte channel subscriptions?
That kind of practice should be banned, and is generally a clear indicator of monopoly status. If they had true competition they would be absolutely slaughtered forcing customers to buy TV packages to get the internet package they want. It's one thing to offer a discount for bundling, it's another thing entirely to force bundling to get certain types of service.
This has implications for the overall outlook of both the industry and cable company, fees for channels the cable company is paid to carry, and cost of advertisements, especially on channels the cable company owns.
While I would love to be able to order channels a la carte and get the best internet available, I don't have good options for switching -- the other internet providers suffer from typical rural ISP issues.
From personal experience with the same company in a major US city, the rural service ranks among the best ISPs I've ever used whereas in the big city it was the absolute worst. There are actually options where I live, but there's only one good choice -- the newcomer national behemoth.
I think in general telecom competition should be allowed to happen more often, but in this particular case I'm not sure it's a competition issue. I would have to investigate more about the local/regional/state situation to really decide.
And it will only save money for people who watch less channels than average. You might say people who watch more channels should pay more, but that really doesn't make much sense really.
Should someone who watches Fox News 18 hours a day pay 10 times more than someone who watches 10 channels a month for 2 hours combined a day?
Shows can be purchased a la carte currently, but the price is still out of whack ($30 for a season on iTunes) for what customers expect.
I'd prefer to be able to rent for a single view at a lower price, yes. But it seems reasonable for something that I really want to watch.
https://stratechery.com/2017/the-great-unbundling/
The only thing that is working is not forcing consumers to pay for expensive sports channels that they don't want. Consumers who love sports will pay the price to get it.
People call themselves "cord cutters" but are still paying for services like Sling, Hulu, etc. that are still being delivered by a cord coming into their home.
That being said, I gladly play $45 a month for Sling, Hulu, CBS All Access to replace cable, $10/month for Starz during the summer, $10 for Netflix (which I would have even with cable), and $100/year for Amazon Prime for all of the benefits including Amazon Video.
All together, that's not much cheaper than the quoted price for cable, but the benefits over cable are:
* No extraneous fees -- network access, regional sports, fake government fees (fees that are not charged by the government but the cable company wants you to think they are), HD technology fee, and cable box rental fee (in my case an extra $50 for five additional TVs). All of the fees together would add $80+ to my monthly bill.
* "TV Anywhere". The apps will sync up what I watched and what I haven't between devices -- my phone, iPad, Roku sticks, and AppleTV's. I also don't have to deal with the cable company's box.
* I can cancel any service without having to deal with a retention department.
Personally, I've refused to pay for any TV product that contains ads for something like 10 years now and have absolutely no regrets. I almost never watch broadcast TV either because of the presence of ads.
In total our household probably watches 20 hrs or less a week of TV from the above sources.
I'm probably a terrible example here because I don't have a TV, but I pay for the cable bundle with my internet.
Seems like what consumers want is to be able to go onto any of their devices, search for what they want to see and then watch it. Probably huge hurdles legally and from the studios.
They have literally allowed legally contracting themselves into a six foot grave.
I bet iTunes has a better catalog that Popcorntime practically speaking.
So you can get House of Cards, NFL games, Flip this house etc... all through a single platform.
Yes! I have some experience in this industry and it is pretty much impossible. Every level of the industry has long-standing practices with "optimized" expected fees. You have distribution package deals, release windows, release regions, etc. Any sense of new value is fought over like seagulls for potato chips and giving up a single penny is worth torpedoing contracts.
Netflix had the best chance of anyone, but even they could not do it. The price to make this software (likely a hardware box with DRM) available would be not be financially viable. I would estimate in the high hundreds per month, or in the low hundreds if they could limit what you watch and how much.
So lets say that popcorn time wanted to go legit. I don't know how many viewers they have but I would assume it's in the millions monthly. I guess they would have to be the sole source of viewership for production studios to agree to license to them, and even then they would have to fight other distributors for exclusivity.
So it seems the only way to get there is if you somehow get 100M daily viewers then you could have a compelling case to make for licensing.
Even then there is friction in the system. Look at some of the enormous distribution platforms for music like itunes and spotify. Some people still refuse to deal with them.
It is pretty hopeless. I think the difficulty is why ycombinator has been seeking disruption in the entertainment industry for so long.
Also, I'm unwilling to subsidize a handful of folks who watch sports channels (who collect the biggest fees) largely driven by the NFL. Doesn't help that I find NFL as an organization somewhat despicable too.
I've stuck with Netflix for the occasional movies / TV shows. I don't mind seeing them late as I don't want to wait artificially for next weeks EP (around my schedule not theirs). Occasionally when it took a while to get to Netflix/Amazon I bought a season and was happier for not having to be bother with OTA scheduling.
- a win for consumers because they only pay for the shows they want to watch
- a win for producers because they get a lot more dollars per viewer than they get now
But of course, that model has been a massive failure. Consumers panned it because it seemed expensive, and of course there are many networks/shows that aren't there. Maybe the networks would have come if the model was successful, but I doubt that Netflix would ever have...
Apple Season Pass should be like $3/season, not $5/episode.
Edit: Netflix didn't negotiate certain seasons or episodes of Breaking Bad, nor did it negotiate all of AMC's content. Netflix negotiated rights to specific shows.
I want nothing to do with any of the TV that they sell, but because the cable companies have gotten used to selling fatter bundles, the average price goes up.
And the price of "internet only" service goes up too, so that their stupidly expensive TV packages look reasonable. It's such a goddamn racket.
Personally I like CBS All Access with Hulu, but sometimes I drop Hulu to get Netflix.
There are 3 or 4 options for lots more channels at 30-40/month. Streaming seems like a good deal so far.
Actually, I wish Pandora would take over radio stations and use their subscribers' driving patterns to optimize playlists. It'd be really interesting to hear a song on the radio that I'd actually choose to listen to, particularly if I was driving through Kansas.
I don't watch sports so I might be completely off the mark, but it seems like a form of entertainment people would gladly pay for (people pay tons for TV packages that include sports networks so they can keep up).