Comment by PaulHoule | Hacker News Reader

Comment by PaulHoule | Hacker News Reader

Stupid article.

There is the atavistic fantasy of "you can watch everything you want at one low price", except the price is not a low price, it is a high price.

The big anti-competitive problem with cable is that cable and satellite providers do not offer a choice of packages. You get basically the same thing with all providers. Hollywood loves it because they get paid no matter how good or bad the stuff they make is, but long term it is bad because there is no market discipline.

Some people with kids will love a Disney-branded streaming bundle and find a lot of value in it. Sports fans will see value in getting the games and commentary they want from ESPN.

Note Disney hasn't announced a "Marvel" or "Star Wars" bundle because in those cases they probably will need to partner with other companies. For instance, what kind of Marvel bundle doesn't have Spider-Man or the X-Men? Sony has the film rights for Spidey, Fox has the rights for the X-Men.

To make a really appealing "Superhero" bundle, Disney may need to team up with other companies...

well, there is a way to fulfill that fantasy: piracy. pretty much everything anyone wants, at the low, low price of free.

Piracy's been declining, but only by around 6%, according to this report ("Daily visits to piracy sites", pg 8): https://www.muso.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/MUSO_2017_Gl... And with VPN's, stream ripping, etc. getting more popular & copyright enforcement getting even more lackadaisical it's not clear if that's due to measurement bias or actually represents a decline. (And I don't know why it disagrees with the article's linked stats of 18% to 15% or 12% to 10%: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2016/07/04/internet-pi...)

It's not really clear if piracy's sustainable... will the free/illegal + paid/legal split continue forever? Or will the different sites continue to merge together somehow, despite the failure of streaming sites to offer 'all in one' deals? They almost seem like two different markets, with minimal overlap: https://www.forbes.com/sites/scottmendelson/2017/05/16/box-o...

don't forget that producing all this content costs 10's of billions per year so someone has to pay for it. both the cost of production and the amount produced keeps increasing so prices need to go up to.

Unless demand goes down.

Sure, but they can sell the content many times for one upfront investment.

Up to what?

I find the costs for producing films and TV shows a bit absurd. I'm sure they can optimise a lot, but they don't because they're used to paying 100 million dollars for a superhero movie. They can easily get 99% of the production value at far lower cost.

I find the costs for producing films and TV shows a bit absurd

I'm sure that if you, dingo_bat, were in charge of a film studio or TV company, you'd no doubt find incredible ways, overlooked by everyone else in the industry, to dramatically cut costs and increase profits.

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