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Comment by orev | Hacker News Reader

The market is on its way to fragmentation as more content producers move to have their own apps instead of going through an intermediary. And they all want $10-$15 a month. It won’t be long before people refuse to pay for more apps, as the total cost of both the Internet connection and all app subscriptions surpasses the price they used to pay for cable. That is what limits the price any one app can charge.

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Perhaps. But we just recently tried CBS's streaming service, and it was terrible. AFAICT, only 720p, and the encoder they used appears to have had the quality set to "potato" (blurry, tons of what look like interlacing jaggies during rapid motion). It made me really appreciate how good of a job Netflix is doing on the technical side of things.

I have not seen it myself, but CBS is the clear loser of all the apps. They seem to be trying to build a pay service on the back of Star Trek (maybe they think the Internet is just for nerds?) and everything else they have is free content OTA anyway.

Yep, besides, why not just watch the OG Star Trek reruns (if they still do that, I don’t really follow Star Trek anymore) or pirate if the app is so crappy? And OTA.

I can't really agree with that. Their 1080p content doesn't look anywhere near as good as a BluRay, and their 4k is indistinguishable from 1080p. I'm often frustrated with the compression artifacts and colour banding, especially on low contrast frames like dark scenes or fade ins from black.

I think you’re right, and then we’ll see a cycle of renewed piracy, followed by the grudging realization that making some money is better than making no money. It took a while to crack the music industry, but the same inevitable forces are ultimately at play here.

For most casual consumers piracy is an inefficient way of getting content, even in the hay-day of piracy I'd bet that most consumers were getting their content via normal channels. A slight uptick in piracy may occur for the technically minded, but most consumers will pay for the convenience of streaming.

Things like Kodi boxes and steaming piracy sites have really changed the landscape. I find that many pirates today are not technical, might not know what bittorrent is, and find the whole experience to be roughly like any streaming service.

It's arguably a better experience if you don't need to be aware of which platform each piece of content is streaming on. And I'd rather see IMDB ratings then the rather meaningless "this is a 92% match for you."

I find piracy to be faster in many cases. Between a nzb downloader and a Kodi plug-in with a drebid service I'll be streaming something just as fast as you don't find it on Netflix.

You would be amazed to know how piracy became consumer grade in the past few years; I heard about streaming sites from non-technical people that were watching their favorite shows there because there was no official way to do it otherwise. Outside top 2-3 markets, most online streaming services have a serious delay that is no longer accepted by consumers, so they turn to piracy. Why wait 1-2 years to see the last episode of Game of Thrones on official channels when you can see it next week on pirate sites?

Yeah, they all want $10-$15 a month, but I doubt many will get it.

We'll see.

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