Consumers are frustrated by endless streaming services

Netflix and Hulu basically cover everything for me. Also looking forward to Moviepass for seeing a lot of new movies in theaters. Anything else gets downloaded.

Don't forget other countries. In Canada, there's no Hulu or any HBO online offering. There's a streaming service operated by Bell that has some HBO content, but they intentionally leave out the most popular shows in an attempt to avoid hurting their cable subscription numbers.

I lived in Holland for a year as a poor student and IRL shopping was very much like this... no one store had anything (or even more than a few categories of goods) so I'd have to run around half of Amsterdam trying to buy stuff. What I would have given to have a Wal-Mart nearby...

The vast majority of content goes on iTunes and Amazon pay-per-title service. It's the all-you-can-eat services that content creators are worried about.

Because they don't Netflix to monopolize the market. If that happens, Netflix will capture more than its fair share of the profits.

> Problem is, if the ice cream makers want their own store

But we have tons of stores that sell their own ice cream (and coffee, computers, etc.). Should Apple be required, by law, to sell Macs through Best Buy, Target, etc.?

> Used to be I made an item for sale, sold it to an expert in retail sales, and they sold it to a customer

My dad had a company about twenty years ago, that helped solve an important problem in getting cell phone coverage deep into buildings. They achieved this via a little hardware widget.

He'd frequently complain about various business issues, so one day I asked him: why are you guys having all these problems? Why are you leasing these widgets, why are there all these contracts in place? You guys make widgets; why not sell them?

So he explained it - if you make widgets and sell them, once every building has enough widgets, your company is done and you gotta go out and find some new way of making money. But if you're leasing these widgets, on a yearly basis, with a warranty plan, etc., etc., you can actually continue making money.

There hasn't been a "used to be" in forever. People have figured out that selling widgets isn't the best way to have a continuous revenue stream.

> Now content creators want to own the store, too.

They don't want to let any company do what Apple did to the music industry. If another company owns the platform with all the customers, then they can dictate prices to everyone else.

And even if they dont want to own the store, they make an exclusive deal with only one store.

> I’ll be damned if I’m driving all over town, so I’m skipping the ice cream.

Except in VR/internet there is no distance so “driving all over town” is the same as “walking all over the grocery store aisles” is the same as “flipping through galaxies with your fingers.”

And once you live in self driving rooms, for many intents and purpose driving all over town isn’t something you’d even notice happening.

Indeed. Otherwise within 5 years Disney may end-up buying both HBO and Netflix, because those two can't compete without content (especially after Disney pulls Marvel's IP from Netflix, which will wipe out the large majority of Netflix's own successful shows).

And let's not forget who keeps fighting for draconian copyright laws every 20 years -- Disney. I don't think we want Disney to become any larger/more powerful.

It's mostly working for patents too, with FRAND.

What do you mean by "compulsory licensing"? I skimmed the Wikipedia article but I'm missing how it worked specifically for video rental but not streaming services.

Unfortunately, Netflix' physical rental catalog is shrinking significantly as well. I assume they've just stopped refreshing much of their back catalog.

I generally agree that the fragmentation is a PITA. It would be nice to have an all-you-can-eat subscription for any content that's available digitally. Of course, then people will complain that their now bundled subscription offering costs $100/month and they can't just consume a la carte.

The analogy to cable bundles isn't perfect but it's similar in some respects. People don't really mind that they have maximum choice. They just want a cheaper price because they don't personally consume all the options on offer.

Why, services would have to compete on customer service, quality and price! That would be terrible.

I agree for rentals/purchases, e.g., I should be able to rent any movie from Vudu, Apple or Google Play. The real problem though, is that people just want to pay Netflix $10/month, and that obviously can't support anything more than it's very limited catalog.

What is the economic rationale behind such a scheme? There are almost no barriers to entry in either the content-creation market or the content-distribution market. Indeed, the barriers are lower than ever thanks to digital media workflows.

It's kind of like saying we should have a law to force car manufacturers to sell to any dealership, so Toyota can't have Toyota dealerships versus Ford having Ford dealerships. Maybe there is a hand-wavy argument that it would make car shopping more convenient, but is there an actual market failure that would justify regulatory intervention?

It should be noted that compulsory licensing for music is just an accident of history with no sensible economic foundation: http://digitalcommons.law.wne.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?articl....

Yeah I'd wish there was a way to make exclusivity contracts illegal.

Sell your TV show to all the streaming services instead of one.

I'm pretty much in the same boat. I admittedly don't watch a huge amount of video but a few purchases (physical and digital) and a few streaming services and I'm pretty good. I haven't quite pulled the plug on cable TV yet but I will sooner or later. I certainly get a lot more value out my non-cable TV spending.

There's very little that I just must see and even less that I must see right now. There's frankly far more really good content available than I'm ever going to get around to watching anyway.

Agreed. Although, my only major gripe with the current system is that "buy" !== "own." It means license and vendor lockin.

Other than that, yeah, HBO Now and Amazon are enough for me. I'll wait for everything else. Netflix used to be enough for everything, but they seem determined to become a repository of garbage these days, so services had to be swapped around :(

And is illegal.

EDIT: Does it really need to be stated that the context here is using bittorrent to illegally download copyrighted works, and that the protocol itself is not illegal?

A portion of its content requires other people to subscribe somewhere to exist.

For most, probably never. While installing Plex/Kodi on an old machine isn't that hard, it's well outside of the comfort/effort zone of most people.

There's the discoverability problem.

I currently won't buy video content unless I know I will want to watch it again, or unless I have a reasonable expectation that multiple people will enjoy it once. That's because the current price point for most DVDs is too high for me. At $5 for a package with 4 different movies in it, I can take a chance on something out of the bargain bin, but $15-$25 for one movie is not reasonable unless I have already seen at least a portion of it and liked it.

So we have a problem. I won't buy something of unknown quality, and content producers don't want to show me something new unless I pay first. My dollars therefore don't go to them until after one of the following happens: I see it at the $2 second-run theater, I see it on television, I see someone else's licensed copy (incl. Redbox, Netflix, or public library), or I see a pirated copy. Nobody wants to buy a pig in a poke.

(Yes, that's right, the latter means that piracy can result in additional sales.)

Once I have assessed the quality of the work, I can decide how much I am then willing to pay to watch it again, on demand. If that's more than the current price of a disk copy, I might buy it. If not, there's only so long I am willing to wait for the price to drop, before my disposable income is already disposed of, and my available library storage space is filled. I might save it to a gift wish list, but it's more likely I'll simply forget it exists.

And it's not lost sales that kills you in a creative business, and it's not even people hating your stuff, it's people not knowing your work exists. So in my view, the burden is upon the content distributors to get my attention that first time, to signal a level of quality that will make me feel comfortable spending my money.

So here's the model I think will work:

- Establish a basic service for streaming permanently licensed content. For this, charge the marginal cost of hosting and outgoing bandwidth. Allow customers to suspend and reactivate their accounts at will, without hassle. Allow customers to download those titles and their licenses to local storage whenever they want. Make sure your application makes local versus streamed content seamless, so customers won't be tempted to use a different player.

- Allow customers to pay an additional $X to get $X in non-refundable service credit. For each purchase of service credit, give the customer N discovery tokens. Allow purchase of additional tokens with store credit. For example, $10 might get you $10 of store credit and 40 tokens, and spending $5 of that credit might give 20 more tokens.

- Allow customers to subscribe by automatically repeating a specific purchase package on a schedule they determine. Subscribers get bonus rentals and juicier discounts to encourage that option over pay-as-you-go.

- Customers may spend discovery tokens to temporarily license and stream content. One token should probably be roughly equal to one entire feature-length movie, or three hours of a television show. While temporarily licensed, purchase of a permanent license is discounted by $X/N for each token used.

- Allow some content to be streamed without tokens, and auction off a number of permanent licenses by allowing customers to secretly bid for them with their store credit.

- Use purchase/non-purchase and auction bid/price information to fuel the recommendations engine.

The bet here is that customers will never be content to just download their permanent catalog and use your application as a media player. They will always be paying you to discover new content, and paying more for you to recommend better reasons for them to pay you. During the time when someone is in maintenance mode, you are still putting your brand in their face and cultivating goodwill every time they watch. You are also offering a value-add over Netflix in that customers build up a sort of loyalty equity in your service, so that they build up a larger personal catalog as they continue to use it.

There very easily could be a middle ground. If there was one source to stream data from and have a single login/payment where you selected your content sources and they were added to your single bill, I don't think any consumer would be unhappy. Paying for the content you consume isn't the problem is either paying for extra content you don't use with cable, or keeping track of numerous providers and having to authenticate all of them whenever I get a new device or change cards.

The content creating companies don't want this however as they would lose power in this arrangement and probably make less money. That'll just lead to rampant piracy again. As we've seen with every type of digital good where consuming it legally was difficult/frustratinf

Rentals would be more appealing if the prices on the main services weren't so sky-high. Why is it that you can buy a 2-year-old AAA game (equivalent to a summer blockbuster) indefinitely for somewhere between $5-20 when it's on sale, but it costs at least $4 to rent an old movie for just a day in HD and sometimes more like $8? Instead of pricing taking digital into account movie studios keep trying to protect their DVD/bluray pricing.

In the end for a popular movie it's often a better experience to just pirate it. Netflix churns through movies so frequently that actually finding something that's not sub-Kangaroo Jack in quality takes longer than just torrenting.

Music has compulsory licensing, and rights societies; visual entertainment doesn't.

It's based on Disney Movies Anywhere. If you've bought a Disney movie in the last few years that comes with a digital copy, you'll have gotten a code to redeem on DMA. Movies Anywhere seems to be an expansion of that to drop the Disney-exclusive branding and include content from other studios.

https://www.theverge.com/2017/10/12/16462824/movies-anywhere...

In spite of the fact that the DVD service has declined in availability, it still IMO makes a lot of sense to keep a steady stream of content coming into the house that I've deliberately chosen to watch. It's a good way, for example, to watch Oscar winners and other movies I know I want to see when they're available. I have a minimal grandfathered plan and it works for me to have two DVDs a month arrive in my mailbox.