Hacker News Reader

Comment by nxsynonym | Hacker News Reader

Agreed. I only pay for netflix and HBO (and amazon, but that's a bonus for paying for prime). HBO doesn't feel like "extra" because it's always been an optional add-on that costs more.

First all the "major" studios will split and start charing $10/month. Then adds will start creeping back in. Before you know it everyone will be paying for an ad-hoc cable subscription.

I think a better option would be to do what Amazon is doing for HBO - offer a small portion of the studio (in this case Disney) included with the platform (Netflix) with the option to pay additional fees for the entire catalog.

The biggest deterrent, for me at least, is not the price but the need to switch platforms. I'm already annoyed when I have to go from Netflix to Amazon to find a movie/show I want to see but can't remember where it is. No chance I'll add a third, forth, or fifth platform to the mix.

View on HN

Long term, we'll probably wind up with a couple of major marketplaces that provide a UI that ties together content bundles that you've purchased from different distributors (who will actually serve up their catalogs).

It's a bit depressing how similar that sounds to how cable networks work. Or platform specific app stores.

The big Media companies want it to work like cable because they think their "premium content" will get people to pay more.

In reality, they are likely to trigger a backlash that increases piracy instead.

I don't know why all these people behind these decisions don't just look at Gabe Newell and his simple statement - "Piracy is a service problem."

Steam is a rampant success. You'd think people would catch on. Have the content, make it easy to access, make it easy to pay, and people will give you money hand over fist.

That's only partly true. There are countries where average wage is $300/month. They are NOT going to buy legal software and media for $40/thing no matter how easy it is.

Brazil checking in. People still pay for steam games despite the cost. It is often cheaper than the currency-converted USD price, and otherwise you don't have multiplayer. Piracy is down by orders of magnitude from 10 years ago.

There are always exceptions, I don't think this invalidates the parent comment in any way.

In general, this is usually solved by pricing things differently in different markets.

well said

It's hard to convince someone of something when their income depends on them believing the opposite.

Steam was successful because it combined advantages for producers and consumers with minimal changes to the business model. The old business model is people buy games that come on a CD or DVD in a small cardboard box for $30-50; the new business model is people buy games that finish downloading in a few hours for $30-50. Not really much of a change in revenue stream.

Cable TV, however, relies on splitting up the channels people want into different packages, that each come with lots of channels they don't want. They also need to overcharge you so they can afford to cut the prices for the "package deal" (TV/Phone/Internet bundles). What people want instead is more à la carte options, with a discount from package deals because they're asking for fewer channels.

So moving to a service that would cut piracy would still hurt financially. Another advantage of piracy is that they can blame their financial troubles on "filthy criminals" and use that to extract some benefits from compliant government allies. Offering a less profitable service that reduces piracy robs them of that as well.

Steam does more than that. It combines social elements (What are my friends playing now? Do they want to join me? What games do they recommend?) and lower price points as well (Summer Sale etc). I know lots of people that stopped pirating games because Steam was reliable (pirated games rarely are), took away the pain (mostly) of patching games and because if you are willing to wait, games are actually pretty cheap.

For me, it's not about the price (within reason). If it's reliable, easy, and centralised, along with an (albeit weak) guarantee that I will have content access if steam goes belly up, I'm in.

And you're forgetting download speeds. When steam started being successful it would take me a full day to download a game, while in steam I could get it in a couple hours maximum.

Maybe that's not true anymore. But I'm sure contributed to steam's success.

I think there's another point that is very important: Steam was the original cloud.

Back in the day where GMail was heralded as being amazing, and offering 1GB of storage for your mails, Steam came out and said "don't worry about how to install Half-Life/CS, or which patch to apply, I'm automating all of it."

"You don't need to worry about your CDs any more. I'll give you the content, for free, anytime you change PCs."

"Just log in with your Steam account on the cybercafé computer. All the games you own are already installed."

Steam was made mandatory to install the new version of CS (was it the 1.6 release?). That was Valve's best move ever (even though I hated it back in the day).

Save files and settings were sucked into the cloud as well (sometimes). Great for little games I like to play on multiple computers.

Stream uses DRM, has famously bad customer service, geofilters content and uses differential pricing, keeps content it produces itself exclusively to the platform and withholds it from others, bars some content based on arbitrary criteria, maintains a singular store that doesn't play especially nice with third party indexing tools etc etc etc.

Even Valve doesn't believe in Gabe's statement, and never did. Dozens of media companies have much larger market caps than Valve's estimated value.

The statement conforms to the prejudices of a lot of Hacker News, but there is significant evidence that it's not empirically true.

So DRM, geofiltering, and differential pricing are all requested by publishers and distributors. If you want something more equitable then try GoG, but as you'll notice that not all new or big games are on that platform.

As for third party indexing tools, I read that to mean scraping the site for various reasons. Which I can understand they might not want due to the extra load it generates.

I said make it easy, steam did make it easy. It is easy to use steam to buy and play games. Maybe it's not easy to use steam to buy a game, and then play it without steam... but then that wouldn't fit into my argument.

The only way the Steam model would work for media is if content owners would agree that if someone on the platform purchased a digital copy of something that the ownership couldn't be rescinded.

Nobody will purchase, for instance, all the seasons of M.A.S.H. if they know that there is a risk that the rights owners will pull their content off of the platform in a few years and the person loses the ability to watch what they paid for.

The platform should also have the ability to "import" previously purchased rights. If someone buys a TV show on iTunes, they should be able to import that purchase into the platform so they can consolidate all of their purchases into a single platform.

Lastly, the other thing that made Steam a huge success is the sales. Daily sales of some content, quarterly sales of large swaths of content, etc. That would have to occur for a media platform to have the same kind of success.

I'm an unabashed pirate because it's easy... but if I could use a platform like this that didn't have a recurring monthly cost I would use it.

If Pixar put their upcoming movie available for pre-purchase (like Steam Greenlight) at 40% off, I would likely pre-purchase it. If Disney wanted to drum up interest in their new Duck Tales reboot by putting the original series up for sale for $20, I would be all over that. A TV series in its 4th season with struggling ratings could put up a flash sale of previous seasons in order to get new viewers to binge watch before the new season starts. A TV series could also sell a season pass BEFORE the new season starts for an infusion of cash and release the episodes on the regular schedule.

A steam-like platform could work wonders for media consumption, but it'll be hard to get companies to do it.

Steam took off because it was required for an awesome video game that Valve released. Eventually Steam was more valuable than the game.

That's the only way something like this happen for media. A small studio with a hot property could build the platform for their own offerings but invite other media owners to participate. Adult Swim or SyFy or FX could probably pull it off.

Good point komali2.

My steam library is full of games I'll never play, never would have bothered to pirate. Why? because steam sales.

I'm sure the same could be achieved for Hollywood. Not only could they make sure people are paying for the content they watch, they could have saps like me paying for content they never watch.

I view many of these streaming services as one-time purchases.

I'll look to see if something I want to watch is on Netflix. If I find something looks interesting, great! I'll sign up for one month of the service and then cancel it immediately.

I also do this for football season. I signed up for Sling TV + Red Zone and paid for a few months. When football season was over, I canceled it.

I do the same, but I think that's harder with a family. Right now my wife and I don't have time to watch much, so we usually pick a single show together and watch it start to finish, but if we both had our own watching habits or kids I don't know what we'd do. I dont imagine anyone else would have the patience to start/stop service no matter how easy it is (I can't even get them to turn off the lights when they leave the room).

Or to summarize, every studio thinks they're better than their competitors. And thus deserving of a larger portion of streaming revenue than their competitors.

People will definitely turn to piracy if it becomes too difficult/fragmented to watch the content they want to watch.

As a result, for these services to be successful, we'll probably see some renewed fighting against piracy and some work toward increasing regulation on the internet. Unfortunately, the political climate is probably pretty good in the US right now for Disney and other big content creators to start pushing for these.

Or just not watch. It's just TV. If it's too hard I'll go and do something else and not even miss it. That doesn't help the content creators long term if I'm no longer even interested in their product.

Tbh, mindless entertainment where I shut my brain off is critical to staying chill for me.

FireTV and AppleTV already do this some degree. On FireTV when you search for a movie/show it will give you options where to play it based on which apps you have installed (netflix, hulu, or via amazon/prime)

The Apple TV's "TV app" is great for this... but for some reason, it only functions in the US. I get that it has a "live cable" Single-Sign-On component that cable providers need to sign up with–but all I want from it is the unified interface for searching/browsing and watch-tracking of content within streaming services!

I'd wager that's because (aside from Apple generally being US-based) international distribution rights are an even bigger minefield than US distribution rights.

The Roku does this as well, without giving preferential treatment to any particular vendor.

It's alright but clearly dependent on the content providers and platform operators to be honest and accurate. Recently I tried to watch the new season of Archer. My Fire TV told me that show is available on Netflix and Hulu but didn't seem to know which seasons. I opened Netflix first and found they had old seasons but not the latest. I switched to Hulu and the thumbnail for the show mentioned Archer Dreamland, the latest season. I opened that up and found that the latest season was not available and Hulu had the same offering as Netflix.

FXX themselves do not seem interested in my money and require that I have cable so I continue not consuming their content.

Long term, it'll be the DRM free copies that are preserved for future generations to enjoy the historical context of.

Yes -- just like how the copies of 8-bit computer games that we can run today on emulators are generally the cracked copies rather than the copy-protected (old-school DRM) originals.

DVD's and Blu-Rays are pretty much archival quality, and the minimal copy protection is easily circumvented, at least for the next decade or two https://superuser.com/questions/251369/what-is-the-lifespan-...

I briefly worked for a company that wanted to do this (Fanhattan/FanTV). It was more an aggregator than a marketplace, but similar concept. But that was back in 2011, so they were a bit ahead of their time (and also seemed allergic to actually shipping things, but that's unrelated, I suppose).

https://www.justwatch.com/ by HN user endymi0n; Show HN (2015) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9005641

"largest streaming search engine in the world [...] with around 12 million unique visits per month" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14842083

http://www.canistream.it/ by former HN user SeyelentEco

justwatch doesn't do anything but aggregate affiliate links.

That's like saying Google "just" aggregates indexed websites. I use justwatch on a weekly basis to find out whether a movie is on any of the services I use (instead of checking all three of them individually), and browse new releases on each service.

Sure. But OP was responding to the below excerpt. At least from the way I've interpreted the request, they are looking for a single interface to watch their content from multiple providers. justwatch does not do this.

px1999 1 hour ago [-]

Well, not really. Most content providers don't even have affiliate programms.

More referring to all the overpriced pay to own links.

Has anyone had luck with canistream.it? I've never once had success with it and tried at least half a dozen times over months.

Just now I did a search for "all the presidents men." Top hit was "All The King's Men" but the right movie did show up second. It says "Not available for streaming, rental, or purchase. Click below to set reminders."

So I hopped around and did a few quick searches:

streaming on Netflix (i think) https://www.netflix.com/watch/243547

streaming on amazon (with Cinemax) http://a.co/605SHmD

for rent or sale on iTunes https://itunes.apple.com/us/movie/all-the-presidents-men/id5...

for rent or sale on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZAGNFnI7mZ4

The page also says it's not for sale on DVD or Blu-Ray (showing an Amazon logo): http://a.co/aoa6bG8

Agreed. I've probably tried using that site about 5-6 times over the past year, and it has never told me anything was streaming. Never. And yes, about half of the things I checked were indeed streaming upon further review.

https://gowatchit.com/watch/movies/all-the-presidents-men-44...

Click "Watch the Movie" and it will show you several ways you can watch it (including all you've listed above and more).

canistream.it seems to have better SEO because I've never heard of gowatchit.com and I swear I've googled some variant of "where movies are streaming" multiple times.

Roku and AppleTV seem to do a decent job of aggregating this information, but that UI isn't always handy and I'm usually more flexible about my viewing options than just those devices.

Here's a streaming search I like, that lets you sort by RT/Metacritic score.

https://www.cinesift.com/ by reddit user yombato (not sure of their hn alias)

instantwatcher.com for Netflix + Amazon

> Long term, we'll probably wind up with a couple of major marketplaces that provide a UI that ties together content bundles that you've purchased from different distributors (who will actually serve up their catalogs).

If you actually had something like that, it could know that you watched Cosmos on Netflix and then suggest physics lecture videos from Open Courseware. It could suggest YouTube videos alongside Hollywood movies.

Which is exactly what the studios don't want, because they want you watching only their content. That is the real reason they're so obsessed with DRM -- they want creating that to be prohibited by law, because it would allow a free market for content curation instead of allowing the major studios to control it.

It's the same reason they don't like Netflix. Netflix is producing their own content and is happy to accept content from small players. It's not a fully open market but it's still too much like real competition.

But fragmentation isn't going to save them. People aren't going to subscribe to a dozen separate streaming services each with their own incompatible interface.

Hopefully they'll realize that sooner rather than later and decide that it's better to have open interfaces and protocols than let someone else (i.e. Netflix) have market power.

I think your comments about the power are largely spot on - and bigger players can make a move for their own streaming services, but smaller ones will need to band together (not necessarily via an all-in-one subscription service like Netflix, but via some sort of content platform/store/whatever).

That said, I think that the curation aspect is something that studios aren't overly concerned about - they just hate that a direct competitor is stealing their profit and making their own content. If Netflix wasn't being as aggressive (or wasn't being so damn profitable; or wasn't negotiating prices with the studios), I don't think that the content creators would be trying to run away so quickly.

I hope that open protocols win out, that's the best solution here for everyone (and would be the ideal "major marketplace" in my parent comment). That said, it may just wind up being an organisation owned by a consortium/cartel of studios (or even some other third party) that's contractually obligated to "fairness".

"there are “only two ways to make money in business: One is to bundle; the other is unbundle.” - Jim Barksdale

https://hbr.org/2014/06/how-to-succeed-in-business-by-bundli...

"We don't want the consumer to make better choices, we want them to make our choices, they need to conform to our marketing plans"

You mean Netflix and Amazon Prime Video...

I probably described it poorly, but both of those services are $/month for access to a full catalog that Netflix/Amazon manages and curates.

That's not really a marketplace, which would have individual vendors selling their own subscription bundles.

Officially there is no such service, but unofficially you can do a lot of stuff :-)

You pay $12 to Netflix and you can watch it officially on 4 devices, which means it's $3 for any of your 4 friends, but you can "oversell" it actually more if you've some friends in different timezones. Many services work this way just fine. Streamwarez(tm) is here for a long time already.

That's not how cable works, they bundle content you don't want with the tiny amount you do. What you are describing allows me to make much finer grained choices about my content.

I'm suggesting that if you add eg "Miramax" to your library by paying their subscription you gain access to their back catalogue. I may only want one or two movies from them, but thanks to the bundling I have access to way more. Or Disney might divide subscriptions up by its studios or labels. I don't see them offering individual shows in a subscription, as that has limited appeal (has been done already and doesn't _really_ require its own platform)

Overall, it's not so different from cable channels, except that it's on-demand.

| The biggest deterrent, for me at least, is not the price but the need to switch platforms. I'm already annoyed when I have to go from Netflix to Amazon to find a movie/show I want to see but can't remember where it is. No chance I'll add a third, forth, or fifth platform to the mix.

That's my biggest pain point as well. I already have to switch between Netflix / Hulu / Amazon to figure out who has the content I want. I've always been a huge Stargate fan; Netflix and Amazon used to have it, now only Hulu has it. Amazon is the only one that has the latest episodes for shows that I like, (although I have to pay extra, I'm willing to bite the bullet for my favorite show).

IMO, one of the biggest design goals of Apple TV is precisely exposing content on a provider-agnostic interface, to avoid this pain. As services get more and more fragmented, Apple could become more and more competitive in that space.

Using Prime and Netflix with the FireTV Stick, if I search for a movie in Amazon's interface and Netflix has it, Amazon will tell me so and provide a button to click directly to that movie in the Netflix app. Same with the Showtime app (not sure about Hulu as I don't subscribe to it currently)

Unfortunately, Amazon is a large part of the problem too.

People who want to watch Japanese cartoons get to pay for yet another streaming service, and for years there was a split where we had to pay for both Crunchyroll and Funimation. We finally saw light at the end of the tunnel with the advent of a partnership to share content. Only it turned out to be an Amazon freight train in the form of Anime Strike, which not only requires a $99/yr Prime account, but an additional $5/mo surcharge.

And now once again, we have a service cannibalizing half the important shows each season. And I'm just ... out. Amazon is not getting more money from me. I'm not supporting this balkanization of media content. And I will likely drop Crunchyroll because it doesn't have half of what I want to watch anymore.

These companies are never going to learn. I am happy to pay for content, but I'm not going to sign up for one streaming service per show I want to watch. Like most people, I simply can't afford that.

I buy DVDs. My data cap is too low to stream, and I can't get a higher one. (I've tried.) Netflix and whoever licensing shows for streaming only really pisses me off because then there's no way for me to watch those shows.

You can't download over wifi somewhere?

Some people (lots) have caps even on wifi/ethernet connections.

> These companies are never going to learn

They're not trying to learn, they already know. If you continue to think they are optimizing for your happiness you're the one who'll never learn.

Well we've gotten the bifurcation we have because thats what people have always wanted.

An ad-hoc cable subscription. Few people really wanted all the channels they were getting and would gladly have paid less to get only what they wanted.

Another thing we might see here though has happened to me a lot with music because of Spotify.

If you music isn't on Spotify or Soundclound... I'm just going to listen to it less. Its too much trouble to go download/buy from so many different sources.

I can't be bothered to spend the time anymore.

To me, that indicates that your favorite must-have content is available on Spotify.

If more of your favorite artists were not available on streaming services you'd probably be ok with spending the time.

> I'm already annoyed when I have to go from Netflix to Amazon to find a movie/show I want to see but can't remember where it is.

This problem was solved for me by Roku search on my roku device. It still is something I'd rather not need to do, but the search interface is just as good as the dedicated ones for amazon or netflix and shows you the results across all services.

yup. same for me. Having a search that centralizes all subscriptions you currently have really makes it easy to access that content. I remember the Wii U was supposed to have something similar, it never worked for me. The roku search on the other hand, works just fine. Even the voice search is not that bad.

>> Before you know it everyone will be paying for an ad-hoc cable subscription.

Still better than a cable subscription. That's my biggest beef. I want 2 channels and I can't get them for less than $150 a month. So they get nothing and neither do I.

If we move fully into that model, how long do you think it will be before they realize merging with smaller networks to start hiking prices is more lucrative than letting people pick and choose?

That model is clearly not working currently.

> kill competition, then raise the prices

Do I really have to go over econ 101 with you? The past distro channels look to "not work" while there's a better alternative; once the latter have a monopoly - oh fuck it, just sit back and pay attention.

...and for those who are paying $150, $130 of it goes to lawyers and people trying to get laws passed to allow them to sabotage any real competition before it even becomes a problem. facepalm

>I think a better option would be to do what Amazon is doing for HBO - offer a small portion of the studio (in this case Disney) included with the platform (Netflix) with the option to pay additional fees for the entire catalog.

Just a heads up - HBO is pulling their shows from Amazon in mid-2018[1]. They essentially view it as competition with HBO Now.

[1]http://variety.com/2017/tv/news/hbo-amazon-shows-leaving-str...

My Mi Box (Android TV) lets me search accross apps so I just usually search for movies and shows that way unless I know it's already on Netflix. The weird part for me is Disney coulda just made themselves exclusive to Hulu instead. Just means I wont be watching any Disney movies or shows ever again since I won't bother paying for just Disney or even having regular cable (no more Disney channel for me). Sadly for others it may mean torrenting because the convenience is taken away for the sake of profit.

With HBO I simply do one month subs when a season will complete during it so I can get the whole season in. Once a site passes the $10 mark I quickly lose interest and then I start determining how I can maximize my sub time.

Now what will be interesting is seeing which studios cannot float their own streaming service and combine either with another studio or group of them under an all inclusive banner. I figure we will go nearly full circle and end up with an aggregator like cable was but this time without too much junk.

my beef with some of these "premium" sites is they think that ever after they get $15 from me that I have to watch THEIR ads. Really? I paid for the shows, not 30 to 60 seconds of your ads.

I will never pay for YouTube Red. When an unskippable ad starts playing, I just look away. Most of the time, I realize that I'm wasting time watching idiotic YouTube content, and I quit the app. In this, they're actually lessening my addiction to their platform in that they're giving me a break to consider if I should keep watching or not.

> When an unskippable ad starts playing, I just look away.

Does uBlock Origin block YouTube ads?

I'm asking because it's been years since I saw/was forced to watch a video ad on YouTube. Sure, there are occasionally the banner ads at specific times in the videos, but no video ads.

So either the channels I watch have somehow opte out of video ads, or uBlock is taking care of them?

Or maybe this is a geographic thing and YouTube in Germany doesn't show video ads?

Anyway, if you have Android and want to watch on mobile, I highly recommend NewPipe (F-Droid). Lets you: watch, listen, download, repeat YouTube videos and I've never seen an ad in it. Really awesome app!

It does block YT video ads, not banners

I have an Apple TV and I have to switch from it to the TV to get Amazon because Apple and Amazon won't play nice together.

You soon won't have to do that any longer: https://www.theverge.com/2017/6/5/15732608/amazon-prime-vide...

You just made my day :)

Like if each music label decided to create their own online music-store/streaming-service.

I guess greed?

(derp.)

If you use an Amazon Fire, you can use Alexa to find titles whether they're on Prime, Netflix, or Hulu, at least, and probably others. Unfortunately the Nextflix integration is problematic if you're not in the US, because it still uses the US catalog.

Yep -- Comcast was getting up to $200 a month. You want Netflix + Disney + HBO + Prime + Hulu + Discovery + BBC iplayer + ...

$150/month on top of your cable bill. And let's bundle it.

Actually, I'd love to be able to pay BBC even $20/month for iplayer access in the USA.

> The biggest deterrent, for me at least, is not the price but the need to switch platforms.

Agree, especially when most doesn't work nearly as well as Netflix. I prefer to use the TV app and the horrible user experience I had with HBO (for instance) made me quickly stop using it.

For a streaming company user engagement should be taken very seriously, but it seems that most studio-turn-streaming-company miss this. They think content is everything because that's what a studio is about. But content doesn't matter if I can't stream it easily and many studios are so over-protective of their content that they forget about usability.

> HBO doesn't feel like "extra" because it's always been an optional add-on that costs more.

Disney Channel used to be a premium, ad-free channel.

And they didn't have enough subscribers to justify that model. I wonder what they think has changed.

Maybe on demand Disney movies are valuable enough to enough parents to justify this?

I bet star wars changed this.

Marvel and Star Wars both.

Plus Pixar and ABC (with Shonda Rhimes' shows) and every movie and show they've ever released since they stopped being a premium channel. Disney has managed to get a lock on a lot of very hot property.

I'm fairly certain that it's still ad-free.

what about Roku? I thought they have a central search where you can enter a movie or show name and then it shows you the results from your connected services like HBO, AmazonVideo, Netflix etc.

> Then adds will start creeping back in.

When this happens, I will drop that service, full stop. I don't pay to be advertised to.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com