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Comment by adrianN | Hacker News Reader

I find this development very sad. For a short number of years it looked like the Internet would enable me to legally watch any movie I want whenever I want it. But Hollywood did not want it that way. Instead streaming services are slowly but surely becoming just another TV station. Everything is siloed again and unless I want to pay ten bucks a month per movie studio I'm again left choosing between movies I don't really want to see. Not long now and it'll become strictly worse than renting DVDs in all dimensions but the small inconvenience of having to go to a physical store.

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You’re really discounting how good things have gotten.

Movies today are $12/movie. Netflix is selling you any movie for ~$10/month. Not just crap movies, Cuaron! If you’re not watching a movie alone, it’s a better deal.

Cable would cost you $75-$100/month. Now that service included with your movies.

You could buy 5 of these services and it would still be cheaper than it cost you 15 years ago to see similar content. Most people only buy 1 and share accounts with their friends.

Renting movies is easier than ever and still a great option. You don’t even have to leave your house. Previously you would drive to the rental shop and pay $4. Or waited in line at redbox and pay $1. It’s true that you can’t always rent, a lot of times ive tried it’s for purchase only.

The silo doesn’t make sense though when you compare to the price of buying movie tickets, or the cost of cable TV, or even the cost of renting. It’s way cheaper today than it used to be.

> Netflix is selling you any movie for ~$10/month.

are you talking about their streaming options or dvd mail service? their streaming service has very limited options for good movies. and the good ones are ones i have usually already seen (and yet netflix's machine learning "experts" constantly recommend them to me, i.e., they have nothing else to offer or they aren't experts). netflix is pushing their own content more and more, which i personally find not good. they also tend to oversell their role in production. it's gotten to the point where i watch maybe a couple of good things on netflix a month, and so the price no longer makes sense. i'm personally thinking of going back to their dvd mail service or just canceling it all together.

many of these services are now not worth the $10-15 a month. for example, for hbo go or now, or whichever is the streaming only option, i just pay when i am ready to watch some tv series for a month or two and then cancel it. it's akin to renting. it isn't worth it to pay year round, although i would say their movie options for streaming are probably better than netflix's, they're just less in number.

your hbo story is really good. i think a lot of services fall in that category of “only when i want it”. which is exactly the shift from old world cable. just the fact that you have the option to do that with hbo go, all for less than $50 and without a single phone call, is incredibly improved over 10 years ago

I think that viewpoint many of us had about the Internet was naive and it doesn’t take much to realize why.

In order for commercial content to be produced, consumers have to pay money somehow. TV stations preferred an ads model.

When you pay money as a consumer, you pay to a commercial entity.

Therefore a single fee you’d pay for watching all the content you want has to go to a monopoly. Whether that’s a state agency that handles the collection and distribution, or whether it’s a natural monopoly that destroyed its competition, it really is the same thing.

That we’ve got “silos” can only mean that we still have competition in this space.

I would be more afraid of a future where there’s only one commercial entity left. Which sounds good in the same way that communism sounds good.

It doesn't have to be that way. You could have multiple providers like Netflix and traditional TV stations competing on quality of delivery, whilst licensing content from each other.

Exclusives are by definition anti-competitive. Some sort of compulsory licensing might work. Or it might lead to no-one producing anything...

There's not much to compete on. I don't see a difference between Netflix and HBO GO in terms of the actual distribution ... HBO GO's app and website are shittier, but that's irrelevant as long as it lets me watch their shows in HD.

And I disagree that exclusives are anti-competitive.

If Netflix can create value using its own money, they should be allowed to establish whatever licensing terms they want, including none other than streaming to its own subscribers. If that's anti-competitive, then the definition is broken.

There is a lot to compete on. Recommendations and reviews for example, customer service, price, outages, video quality. The problem is that those things are harder to build a marketing campaing on than "We are the only channel that has Game of Thrones".

Exclusives serve only the producer. They are terrible for consumers, as the orignal commenter lamented. Perhaps "anti-competeitive" is the wrong word, since each channel can compete at having the best exclusives ... probably "anti-consumer" is what I meant.

Anti-consumer, just like copyright law. My argument is that arguing against this practice is arguing against copyright law. And that's fine. We can agree that the copyright law is at least out of touch with the reality and that the copyright duration is outrageous.

But there's an argument to be made that the producer is incentivized to produce content by the prospect of making a profit. And that ultimately this benefits consumers too.

Would Game of Thrones exist if HBO wouldn't be allowed to have exclusive content?

I don't think so. And personally I'm seeing the quality of these shows from HBO and Netflix going up, versus the experience we've had on TV where the shows are optimized for serving ads. I also don't think anybody would pay for an HBO subscription without exclusive hits such as Game of Thrones.

> "Recommendations and reviews for example, customer service, price, outages, video quality"

There's not much customer service to be had. I never interacted with the customer service of HBO or Netflix. Not much on video quality either IMO, there's basically HD and the ability to stream HD over mobile data connections and that's almost a solved problem.

Also on recommendations or reviews, that's ultimately a natural monopoly. Think of how Amazon is thriving due to having the best product reviews, which can't be migrated and any newcomer in the market starts at a serious disadvantage due to not having reviews.

If anything I believe it is review platforms that should be made a shared resource, part of "the commons", like highways.

I think you might be right on incentives, that's why I said it might lead to no-one producing anything.

What about a limited period for exclusivity? Do you think, say, 3 years would work? I would be happy to wait that long... in fact I only just recently watched Person Of Interest on Netflix and that has been out for ages.

As to other differentiators like quality of service, I think there is a lot of scope there but channels currently have very little need to innovate because the issue of what content they have dwarfs all other considerations.

That’s like saying it’s “anti-consumer” for Apple to have the iPhone as an exclusive and not be forced to license the design to other companies.

That would remove market competition forces from the most important aspect of the whole the industry: content. Distribution is a solved problem. Everyone does it fine. I want companies competing to make content people want to watch.

“All you can eat” movies for $10-20 per month is unrealistic. These movies cost tens of millions to hundreds of millions of dollars to make. I’ve got 3-4 subscriptions for $10 per month or so, and that covers pretty much everything. Occasionally, we’ll rent or purchase something on iTunes, where the prices are completely fair.

As an industry development Netflix and Amazon Prime have been great. The problem with Hollywood was not the price, but the fact that it was releasing total crap. The streaming services have created real competition on that front.

They should make less expensive movies, than. Hundreds of millions of dollars for less than 2 hours of content is absolutely ridiculous, as are the wages paid to these so-called "celebrities" in them.

Big movie business needs to die, and fast.

People want the big, expensive movies with big-name actors. How do we know that? Because that's what they pay for. That's the competitive market at work. With modern technology, digital cameras, digital editing, and digital distribution, you can make movies for a fraction of the price of Hollywood blockbusters. There's no barriers to entry stopping you from distributing your low-budget movies to hundreds of millions of people via Youtube, etc. But nobody wants to watch that indie crap. They want $250 million MCU blockbusters. Indeed, you're seeing the push towards higher production values in TV too. Low-budget weekly shows are being replaced by high-budget "prestige TV." Back in the day, "Lost" was expensive (for a new show with an unknown cast) at $3-4 million per episode. Today, Netflix and Amazon are blowing $50-150 million to pre-shoot an entire season of shows like House of Cards, the Crown, Altered Carbon, etc.

And at the end of the day, it's all just entertainment. The market is structured to give people what they want, what's wrong with that?

Entertainment is a hit driven industry where the returns are highly nonlinear and the increase in return (whether measured in viewership, popularity, or dollars) goes up dramatically as you move up the success curve. Audiences have demonstrated without question that they prefer bigger movies (yes, I know, my big fat Greek wedding and Clerks, these are six sigma outliers that are fun to talk about precisely because they are outliers). The people who make films make them (gasp) to make money, because if their films don't make money they can't raise the money to make another one and they want to make more than one. They need to raise money because no one wants to see a film shot on a $6 budget, and no one wants to invest all that time and creative energy in a film no one will want to watch.

Some of my favorite movies were made on small budgets, such as most classic horror and splatter films.

For a newer example, Primer was made on a tiny budget and it's great. I like films that aren't just yet another CGI blowout, and I'm not alone.

Big budget cinema could die off today, and we would be better off.

Better off by what metric? Nothing is stopping people from making and watching small budget movies. They just choose not to. The last movie I watched was Venom. $100 million budget. I thought it was awesome. If you could get everyone who watched Venom opening day to pay $1 you could shoot and distribute a real movie using modern technology. But those people don’t want to watch your $1 movie, they would rather pay $14 to watch Venom. You may not be alone in preferring small budget movies, but you’re clearly in a small minority.

Better off as in less focus on pointless bling and spectacle, more focus on storytelling and creativity.

They do make less expensive movies, and good ones, at that. They fail in competition in the marketplace.

They do make less expensive movies. Lots of them.

When GP said "I'm again left choosing between movies I don't really want to see" those are the movies he was talking about.

Be careful what you wish for. The Internet made it easier for vendors to provide that "anytime, anywhere" service to you. It didn't however give them an an economic incentive to do so.

Right now you can still buy a physical DVD/Blu Ray which can be ripped into a digital format of your choice. You still have control. You still only have to pay once. You even have the ability to re-sell it as a used product.

That's going to change once studios decide physical media isn't worth it anymore, and so if you want to re-watch something, you need to have a subscription, or need to re-join the service to watch.

This is amazing. TV is a second best thief of time. You should be happy you have time to do other stuff.

What's the first best?

For me, online forums.

Children.

Minecraft.

Did you honestly think you would get all content ever created, old and new, for $10/month without ads for the rest of your life?

Renting DVDs costs about one or two Euros per DVD and they have to have physical stores and employees and can only rent a movie to one person at a time. The cost of streaming a movie to a customer is close to zero. I think it's reasonable to expect being able to stream a movie for at most one Euro. I don't watch a movie every day, so ten to twenty Euros a month sounds realistic.

Renting movies or TV episodes for a dollar or two is possible even online. People want a lot more than 10 movies a month though.

You're only talking about the infrastructure cost in that equation of distribution. The issue is that the movie owners want to be paid for their content availability even if few people watch it. There isn't much Netflix can do about that. You're not just paying for how many movies you watch per month (eg 10), or how much bandwidth you consume, you're paying for access to all of the content Netflix offers. It's a communal distribution of cost across the entire customer base to enable an artificially large library for the masses with all their variety of taste. Why? Because they have to pay all the content owners, or they walk. Those content owners effectively get a little sliver of your monthly fee. If Netflix increases its catalog of movies from external owners by 4x, the sliver gets smaller per movie on average (or they have to raise prices a lot). They'd have to convince content owners to give them most movies for free.

Consider the model of monetary distribution based on actual watching of content. If you're a movie library owner, with a catalog of 1,000 mediocre quality studio movies to offer up to a streaming service, are you going to take close to $0 from Netflix based on few people watching the content there, or will you take a lot more from a competitor that needs filler content to take on Netflix? Due to this effect it's impossible to distribute the majority of movies on streaming services based on how often they're actually watched (the demand for them). There will always be some other service willing to bid the bottom quality 3/4 of movies up.

If all of their customers globally were actually willing & able to pay ~$22 per month for Netflix streaming, they could probably technically afford to give you access to nearly all movies ever made at today's licensing rates. Hollywood won't comply with that however, not under any circumstances. Netflix can realistically never afford to pay Disney enough to not launch its own competing service.

Maybe. $10/month times 1 billion people is $120B a year... that should be enough to run an entertainment industry.

There aren't a billion people on this planet that can afford to pay $10/month for entertainment.

The US has 325m people. The EU has 512m people. Let's conservatively assume that half of these spend $10/month on entertainment (e.g. by going to the movies once a month, or paying for any sort of TV subscription). That's already over 400m people, and that's before we start considering other developed countries with a lot of people (e.g. Brazil, Argentina, Turkey, Japan, South Korea).

That's just a back-of-the-envelope estimate, but yeah, I'm absolutely confident that there are over a billion people right now who already pay $10/month for entertainment media.

The majority of movies from all major studios are available for rent on Apple iTunes and Google Play.

And Amazon Video.

This assumes you are in a region Hollywood approves of. And even then often not all languages are available. Some movies even become available much later than in the US for example.

So far piracy is still more convenient and accessible even if I am willing to pay for movies and TV shows. Good thing it's legal in my country.

I remember spending 2 hours trying to buy a new TV show in Germany but in English (so on Amazon.com and not .de). VPN, fake US address, virtual gift card sent from one account to another. Nothing worked. In the end, I pirated the show.

Yes. That's exactly my issue. Often they also only have English in Stereo.

Localization issues are one of those things that cross the border of insanity. Yes, dear distributors, I understand that you want to make moniez by translating movies to local languages. But in every country, a good chunk of population can speak English, and many of us actually prefer to watch in English. That chunk of population usually also has money to spare, so why won't you let us pay you and watch the original material?

Baked in subtitles that you can't turn off, drives me damn near insane.

It hasn't been an issue for me in the past couple of years but I recall, in the not-to-distant past, that I often had to pirate things that were unavailable to me. I'd attempt legal ways of purchasing but they would fail and I would have to resort to piracy. I feel that content creators have become a whole lot better at making content available than they were 5 years ago.

Regarding buying, "The Gifted" is not available at Amazon.de but is at Amazon.com. And that's without the problem of often not available English subtitles even when English audio is available.

On Netflix Germany (the only Netflix I can get since they banned VPNs) I can't watch most animes in Japanese with English subtitles.

On Prime Video from Amazon.de, they often don't bother to even license the OV audio at all.

The Netflix web player can use external subtitles provided by the user, on the other hand, if you aren't using the right combination of browser and platform, you are restricted to 720p.

So, yeah, not really a solution...

The entire streaming paradigm is a step backwards. Paying ala carts for the content you want would make it much easier for the end customer and enable greater diversity of content. There is no reason for the streaming service middleman when quality content can be independently financed/produced/marketed and then sold point-to-point as in the Apple ITunes model. I am involved with financing and producing independent TV content. The existing distribution model of cable channels and streaming services is nothing but an obstacle. But so long as this is the dominant industry model I have to live with it.

Netflix “beat” the iTunes ala carte purchase model the old fashion Silicon Valley way - by subsidizing an unsustainable provision of services with very foriving capital markets. No it was never realistic to fund all the content you wanted to see for $12 a month.

Now everyone wants their own streaming service which just means we end up replicating the old bundled cable model. It’s funny that this is happening without the actual technological reasons that original cable model existed in the first place.

I do think this (unfortunately) ultimately leads to greater piracy. I don’t see streaming services 6-20 getting a place on the average consumer’s monthly spend.

I hoped the same - it was unfortunate that bandwidth lagged CPU speed, otherwise a video Napster if it had existed and rampant mp4 piracy would have forced the movie industry down the same route as music: one or two major services with everything on it. Instead we have Amazon Prime, Netflix, Hulu, BBC iPlayer, the coming Disney service, and so on.

It wouldn't. Music was always collectively licensed, for decades, in order to provide radio. The industry developed around that model as half it's income.

That was never the case for TV, and never will be.

The differences between how music and movies are paid for is not driven by bandwidth, but by the fact that an average movie is 2 hours long and an average song is 4 minutes long.

Taking 2 minutes to switch from Netflix to Amazon to watch a 2 hour movie is no big deal. Taking 2 minutes to switch from Apple Music to Spotify to listen to a 4 minute song completely recks the experience.

They're just utilizing the rent-enabling framework that was put in place by Hollywood lobbyists (and forced on the rest of the world by US power). In a sense, it's inevitable unless people of US get their shit together and fight copyright laws that are a huge economic drain at this point (from multiple subscriptions because exclusives to DRMs of all sorts to zillions of hours of art removed from YouTube because it "violates copyright"). True, there were a few years when lobbyists were lagging behind, but without political pressure there is nothing preventing them from coming back in force, which they did.

If you're only paying $10-12/month per service, this was inevitable. There's no way you could fund all the TV and movies that people want with a small fraction of what people used to pay for cable/satellite TV.

So instead of watching thousands of movies for free you can watch thousands of movies for 20 or 30 dollars a month.

What do you think about Amazon? They have a large collection of movies to rent. In that sense it's like the classic rental store. (I concur that the internet hasn't done much to upgrade business models in a way that favor consumers more, besides adding digital delivery.)

> Everything is siloed again

Jeez. Extrapolate much? A few things are siloed. Almost everything is available at both Apple and Amazon.

CBS content is on CBS Access only. Disney is moving their content out of Netflix as they launch Disney+. HBO original content is only HBO only. Same with original content from Amazon, Netflix, and even YouTube Red.

There is a lot of content out there now for almost every demographic on each of these platforms so finding something to watch is rarely a problem. But that doesn’t mean silos aren’t real.

Hollywood movies are available on any rental service. But not all good movies are made/produced by the big studios now. So they remain unavailable unless you subscribe.

Some of these streaming services will fail.

Netflix, Amazon and Apple are producing unique content which will ONLY be available on their respective platforms. Go look at the TV space where you can only watch Stranger Things, Black Mirror, 13 Reasons Why etc on Netflix. And they are talking about extending this to movies.

Seems pretty reasonable to me to be alarmist.

For now, at expense. The only major pain I have from the iTunes library is no Miyazaki. Unfortunately they are also licensed by Disney in the US so I’d not expect Ghibli works to ever show up.

Personally I’ve found the netflix mail service to be the best for scratching the itch of arbitrary movies, if you can be patient.

EDIT: also, TV shows are clearly siloed, but I was under the impression you were referring to movie rentals.

I should have been clearer that I meant movies. TV is indeed more siloed.

And of course I meant now, and in the US.

Both of which are junk where I live. They might be ok in some places, but not here in New Zealand.

> Almost everything is available at both Apple and Amazon.

In the US. I.e. for roughly 10% of the Internet-connected population.

EDIT: I originally wrote "1%" which was correctly pointed out to be wrong. I meant 10% (the US population divided by 50% of the planet), just did an off-by-one-zero error.

> In the US. I.e. for roughly 1% of the Internet-connected population.

1%?

According to https://www.statista.com/topics/2237/internet-usage-in-the-u... the United States has

> nearly 290 million internet users as of 2016

According to https://www.statista.com/statistics/617136/digital-populatio...

> almost 4.2 billion people were active internet users

The US is roughly 7% of the Internet connected population.

True, but that percentage is probably going down as we speak, as China/India/etc. are moving up in the world.

Couldn't read that without thinking "but, but, Apple is a silo".

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