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Comment by mikestew | Hacker News Reader

Used to be I made an item for sale, sold it to an expert in retail sales, and they sold it to a customer. Now content creators want to own the store, too. Problem is, if the ice cream makers want their own store, and the meat growers have their own store, well I’ll be damned if I’m driving all over town, so I’m skipping the ice cream.

In this analogy, I dust off my copy of a bittorrent client that I thought I’d retired after HBO wised up. Because HBO Go, Netflix, and iTunes to fill in the gaps is as far as I’m willing to drive.

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> 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.

I think businesses even prefer to lease with a support contract because its easier to account for the steady cost. But as an individual, I absolutley loath leasing.

People have figured out that selling widgets isn't the best way to have a continuous revenue stream.

I'll make note of that should I ever find myself selling widgets. Should I ever buy said widget, I'm sure I won't need another one until this one breaks. Seems to me one could make money selling widgets that are a little different than the last ones sold, so the customer keeps coming back for more. Starting to see where I'm going with this?

However, Disney isn't selling widgets. Disney is selling a product I've purchased hundreds of times over. I mean, I've seen a movie. I own bits of plastic should I ever care to reuse that product. Yet I keep buying more of them. Just like no one leases me ice cream, either.

But I'm not here to argue. I'm here to say, "should Outcome A come to pass, here's what you can expect from me." Disney can do whatever the hell they please.

> Seems to me one could make money selling widgets that are a little different than the last ones sold, so the customer keeps coming back for more

The Apple/Samsung model.

> Disney is selling a product I've purchased hundreds of times over.

Disney is extending copyright terms with heavy lobbying and cronyism, and then every few decades opens their "vault" for the new and younger generation of parents to buy the same product. As long as they can keep successfully lobbying for longer copyright this is a sustainable business model because quantity will be limited, and who owns a VHS player any more? Guess you should buy that DVD player after all, and the new DVD copy of Snow White. DVD? What's that?

Videos are consumed, though, unlike these widgets you mentioned.

There should be two choices you make as a consumer, for two separate things:

One, your streaming platform marketplace of choice. Amazon, Hulu, etc.

Two, the specific media you want to watch. You pay for that.

If you want to watch Stranger Things for example, it'll cost around $15, and you can purchase that on Hulu, Amazon, whatever.

Streaming services can get good at streaming, and compete with each other for the best platform.

Media creators can be good at media, and compete with every other media there is.

> 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.

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.

There's also the technical analog of this, too. Which services work well on my smart TV, my Chromecast, my Roku, my Amazon Firestick, my XBox 360, my PS3, my Android tablets, or my Windows machine is a total crapshoot. Even before we consider the yipping chihuahuas like Google and Amazon refusing to play with each other or questions of effective DRM or region locking, making something work on all those platforms is really hard.

(If only they could have seen this coming... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5639076#5639327 oh right. This is pretty obvious stuff.)

It also works the other way around.. Example, some content is licensed to Netflix for all regions except the US. Most annoying for me was Star Trek Discovery. CBS wanted to use it to promote their own $6/month most-ads or $10/month least-ads streaming service in the US.

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.

Netflix already has the outsized source of the profits. Disney and the like better hope theaters still exist in 10 years or their business model is toast. A home television screen is already better and if Netflix has good enough television and movies, there's no reason Disney needs to exist.

>better hope theaters still exist in 10 years

No real reason to think they won't be. Unit ticket sales have been declining some but overall box office is flat to a bit up.

Going to a movie is still a night out and thats going to keep people going.

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.

Netflix has a download feature. Does 'download' in this context mean downloaded from unlicenced sources?

> Netflix [...] basically covers everything for me

Not if you live (for example) in Germany. Every time I compare German Netflix to US Netflix I want to cry a little.

Procy service?

Netflix has been winning the war on proxies recently according to my friends - all VPS and VPN blocks are either already blacklisted or get blacklisted a couple of weeks after going live

Linode in the U. S., then ssh tunnel? I did that for the London Olympics with a London node, worked a treat. Seems to my ignorant mind to harder to detect.

I did that, not with Linode, but IIRC it stopped working around July/August 2015 and I stopped trying. They first completely stopped streaming to IPv6 addresses (people at that time were using Hurricane Electric as IPv6 tunneling) and when I enabled IPv4 on my VPS they banned the IP.

> 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.

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

> 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.?

If it weren't possible to buy a Mac at Best Buy, you might begin to have a coherent point. Beside, I'm not asking for laws to be made, Captain Strawman, I said I'm not driving across town for ice cream.

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