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Comment by remir | Hacker News Reader

P2P forced the industry to adapt and now we have good streaming services, but the content selection is nowhere as good as what you can find on torrent sites.

What the Popcorn Time devs did was simply amazing. It had a Netflix-like interface plus a huge selection of content that you could watch right away. The industry should learn from these guys.

Just make your content available, easy to obtain and people will pay for it. It's that simple. There's no reason, in 2018, that I cannot go online and legally stream/download any movie/TV show I want. Classics, old movies, 90s movies, whatever. Just make it available at a reasonable price, in a easy to use UI and people will pay. How is that hard to understand?

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When one uses any of the popular commercial streaming services they also submit to non-free software (proprietary software, untrustworthy by default), and tracking.

The media one gets from such services contain DRM (digital restrictions management; I use this expansion of the term because I side with the people who are subjected to the restrictions, not with the publishers who subject others to those restrictions). DRM is anti-user, always implemented with non-free software, and (even on its own greedy merits) routinely fails to achieve the claimed goal of preventing unauthorized copies. But DRM achieves a little-discussed goal of giving someone else control over one's computer. In this time of remote control and mass surveillance, it's worth noting that DRM is rightly seen by those subjected to it as a threat, not a friend.

And there's nothing incompatible with commercially distributing DRM-free copies of digital works via a free software client. Private BitTorrent trackers work and could be set up and used by authorized distributors to implement commercial distribution. But years into the existence of the commercial streaming services there's no indication that they care to try.

These issues aren't explored at all in the wholly lacking article; these issues are ignored as reasons why people would want to retain full control of their computers and copy data via a free software BitTorrent client.

> Just make your content available

Agree. Regional licensing restrictions (music & video) and timed availability (video) seem to be lingering issues for legal streaming services and until they're solved/ forgotten the Popcorn Times will always have a place.

It is lawyers all the way down, sadly. And old old old contracts...

> Just make your content available, easy to obtain and people will pay for it. It's that simple.

No, that's just easy from a consumer perspective. But it's not simple at all from the business perspective. Making movies and TV is expensive and complicated. Getting them to break even means a lot of careful work to maximize revenue and profit from a variety of revenue streams. It means dealing with a lot of players that are trying to maximize their own revenue and profit.

Things can and will get better. But not by ignoring the essential complexity of the domain.

Except people would happily accept variable pricing for content provided it was centralised.

Steam gets this so right - games change price all the time, go on sale etc.

It's the same phenomenon you see with landlords - rental properties go unoccupied for huge periods of time because they believe they'll get a better deal just in the future - with media we've let absurd copyright durations do the same damn thing, and probably at the expense of artists and content creators who I want to support.

Valve have absolutely nailed the consumer-centric business model. Gabe Newell was the first person I heard the concept of "piracy is a service problem" from and they've turned it into their core competency.

However, centralization of the marketplace, even from a publisher standpoint, isn't a Good Thing. Steam's degree of control over the game publishing platform market is pretty pathological from the view of developers.

A better solution from the content creators' standpoint is a marketplace with competitors. In gaming, this doesn't really exist (maybe GoG/Humble?) but in streaming media delivery, it does (Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Video).

Sure. Consumers like this and Steam likes this, because they get a cut of everything on their platform. But game makers are maybe not so interested in having their industry collapse into a monpsony situation, where their choices are 1) give Valve whatever Valve wants and accept whatever Valve gives them in return, or 2) don't make games.

Free markets don't promise perfect efficiency in each case. They promise to be reasonably efficient on average. They also don't promise perfect happiness for just one side of the market; they're a means of reaching a compromise between all participants.

What if the correct licensing entity could receive the micropayment made by the viewer?

What hidden complexity am I missing on the delivery / payment side?

Not speaking of making content free, but making content easily accessible, at a nominal price.

The easily accessible part has been proven solveable, by hobbyists, already.

You are missing that movies are not primarily paid for through direct sales and micropayments. Movies have an extremely complicated system of distribution to many audiences and through many media. The point of this system is to maximize producer revenue. If they don't do that, they can't afford to make movies.

US movie studios are reasonably good at making movies. They are maybe not so good at translating them into Chinese, figuring out how to market them in China, and distributing through the many channels there (first-run theaters, second-run theaters, VOD, DVD, streaming, and probably more). So they sell distribution rights to other companies.

If you want to replace that, you have to come up with a system that is better both for consumers and producers. Yes, hobbyists have figured out part of what's better for consumers. (Although those technologies are terrible compared with Netflix, so only a part.) But optimizing for one criterion is way easier than optimizing for two or more.

Netflix is trying and they are a huge business. If it was easy they would have been disrupted by now.

They had things going for a time, but then they switched to their own branded content (supposedly because the big guys wanted more of the pie and so set up their own services).

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