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Comment by ubermonkey | Hacker News Reader

I'm surprised it's not higher.

The implicit promise -- actually, occasionally made EXPLICITLY in marketing -- of high-speed broadband was that everything would be available, but the reverse has proven true. A person living in an urban area had a larger selection of movies available for rent in 1999 than they do today because the first sale doctrine protected the video rental business, but streaming is governed by different agreements -- which leads to ridiculous "availability windows."

We mostly use Apple's movie rental system, because the quality is better than Netflix, but you still get the availability shifts. Sometimes something won't be available for rental anymore, but remains in the list as a purchasable (ha) item. This is just straight-up rent-seeking bullshit, and it didn't (and couldn't) happen when movies were tied to a physical object.

If you want a deep library of rentals, DVD/BR by mail is still better. If you want better quality, DVD/BR by mail is the best option. And obviously if you live somewhere with shitty connectivity (basically the entire rural US), then by-mail might be your ONLY real option.

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I agree. The wake-up call for me that the streaming promise was hollow was when PBS Video went on line. I imagined it steadily growing to cover the entire back catalog of PBS. What a fabulous public resource that would be. Alas, no, it's a tiny slice of stuff with limited availability windows.

We supplement streaming Netflix with our local library system, which has a fairly deep collection.

In Germany it was even worse. The public broadcasters launched a huge portal where you could watch pretty much everything in their catalog. The private broadcasters sued and won and now content is only available for two weeks after it was shown on TV. We paid for it to be produced by tax money, yet private companies were allowed to lock it up!

In Norway the public broadcaster have everything available for streaming. Well, as long as it's produced by the broadcaster at least. When it's produced by external studios things can get a bit complicated, but it seems like they've achieved agreements with most studios that produce content for the broadcaster the last couple of years. Even content the broadcaster have bought is usually available for at least two weeks, but I imagine it depends on the contract with the rights holder.

And speaking as a Norwegian expat with children, it's great. All hail NRK.

Pretty much the same with SVT in Sweden. They also have a site called ”öppet arkiv” (open archive) claiming to be one of the world’s largest TV archives.

Do you think the licence fee changes will affect this?

Finland's Yle has a similar thing.

What argument was used for forcing a copying decision upon the copyright holders?

I think it was something along the lines of unfair business practices due to public broadcasters being able to use taxpayer money...

Tbh that is one of the worst used of tax payers money in Germany. I wish I could opt out

"Fuck you, pay me?"

What was in the catalog ? Media produced by public broadcasters ?

yes. They didnt for example had the rights to upload some sport broadcasts which they were only allowed to show on tv.

Like it was already mentioned, this was about unfair business advantage, not about the actual copyright.

PBS Passport [1] is what you are looking for if you want to watch content that's outside of the original availability window.

[1] https://help.pbs.org/support/solutions/articles/12000043556-...

Wow only 60 USD/year! They're practically giving this publically-funded resource away!

As the other commentator has stated, the vast majority revenue for PBS is by member contributions, donations of broadcast rights, and distribution fees. In 2018, members gave $197,552,000 while public grants and contributions were $105,336,000. A quick look at their revenues suggests that public grants and contributions only make up ~16% of revenues for PBS. Without asking for $60/year for Passport (which you also get if you're a member) they wouldn't be able to do most of what they do.

https://bento.cdn.pbs.org/hostedbento-prod/filer_public/PBS_...

PBS is only about half funded by public sources. Apologies if I misread your comment.

It costs lots of money to digitize and host the old stuff. And the non-profit organization doesn't lend itself well to selling access - it takes time and effort (read "money") to research with the lawyers whether "selling" or "membership fees" or whatever other business model is legally acceptable under the organization's structure.

But since new content is shot in digital, and edited digitally, it's a minor step to convert for streaming and also broadcast so they just stick to that.

Torrent sites seem to manage it. I don't think it's about cost of digitizing but it certainly has to do with old business model having trouble to adapt.

FWIW a lot of work DOES go into making high-quality releases, running infra, writing tracker code and maintaining high quality, even on torrent sites. Sure, a dedicated small team of passionate individuals can do it in their free time, but it's still work. Also, hosting a torrent file is pretty different from running a streaming service, even if there are more or less turn-key video streaming pipelines out there these days (e.g. https://aws.amazon.com/cloudfront/streaming/ / https://www.ooyala.com/ / https://www.anvato.com/ / https://streamspot.com/ depending on what you're trying to do , live vs hosted content vs subscription vs something more custom )

They can host torrents at least. And then someone will make streaming over torrent (hint).

streaming/watching torrents as they download has been a thing for years.

That's what I was implying (hint).

Torrent sites aren't hosting the content though. They're just hosting some tiny files to connect you to the hosts of the content (seeders/peers)

The content (and associated bandwidth demands) comes from those seeding the torrent.

I think hosting could be solved somewhat easily depending on how much control PBS actually has of their programming. They could go peer to peer, which makes total sense for a public good.

Digitization costs are still an issue, of course. I wonder if they just have a tape archive or if there’s some internal effort to digitize everything already (maybe cheaper in the long run than storing a huge quantity of tape?)

It’s a bit annoying though when people complain about cutting federal funding for PBS under the guise of “saving Big Bird,” yet the taxpayer doesn’t have access to the fruits of those tax dollars. Similar to publicly funded research being hidden behind paywalls. If PBS has the money (some from taxes) to make the programming, they should have enough to provide the content for free either via their own streaming services or via commercial services.

They do have a free streaming service and they do stream stuff through YouTube. The availability of a show will depend on the licensing restrictions they have from the content producers though. It's the member stations that are the ones who are producing all of the content (or licensing it from other broadcasters (e.g. BBC) and production houses (e.g. Ken Burns).

Ah, right. The "that guy did it" excuse.

If they aren't legally obliged to purchase "broadcasting right" from "members", they can always stop doing so.

If they ARE legally obliged (or forced by corporate mob, depending on your preferences) to engage in the rent-seeking, their budget founding should be permanently set to zero.

At the very least, declare it all public domain, and provide BitTorrent links. Maybe something like Popcorn Time for PBS and other public domain works

They're often not public domain works and are not fully funded by taxpayers.

So maybe we should require it to be public domain? We complain about the government using proprietary software like Microsoft Windows so why not complain about royalties and copyright licensing agreements?

The whole industry makes no sense to me.

It makes no sense to be that Netflix doesn't own full, unrestricted rights to house of cards without paying anyone anything extra after the work is completed (residual).

They could but it would cost more to make as the people would want to be paid more without a residual.

Same here, once wanted to view some old Frontline from the 80's. Nope.

Ugh, the catalog of Frontline is insanely huge. What, am I supposed to pay $24.99 per DVD of previous episodes? uh, no, I will not. Please PBS, give us real access to your catalog.

Agreed. Went back to watch the "US of secrets" on Netflix last year, gone. It was on Kanopy last I checked at least.

WTF does public television think its doing with this strategy? Makes me want to pull funding.

I complain about how long it takes my guests to pick a movie on Netflix + Hulu + Apple + whatever else I have this week, but if I'm being perfectly honest we used to spend more time at Blockbuster. Especially if you included transit time.

Because Blockbuster had a lot more movies than Netflix streaming ever has. And you can scan a rack of movies faster than you can scan in Netflix.

I cancelled my netflix account because I realized I was spending more time looking for things to watch than actually watching things. I was spending more time with netflix in a bored/annoyed state than an entertained state.

I'm finding myself in HBO way more than Netflix these days. I think part of it is the library science side of it. When I go into the HBO app, it's one swipe and one click to continue watching the last thing I was watching. Everything else is well organized too, with good separation between the list of all content in categories vs the content they're promoting.

In Netflix, not only is it hard to find the last thing I was watching, but everything else is mixed together and worse: it moves around nearly every time I open the app. An endless amount of categories and lists seem to be invented all the time and are at the top of the interface where my "continue watching" category should be every single time. I get it, you're creative Netflix, and you want to promote stuff but that's not as helpful as consistency... and the proof is that you're losing me.

Let me finish what I'm in the middle of and promote your stuff afterwards, or at least have a consistent shortcut to get to the continue watching category much more easily.

Me too. I distinctly remember sitting for 30 minutes trying to pick something and then just browsing the web and not finding anything. There were movies I'd want to watch, it's just that Netflix didn't have them.

I plan on joining again for a bit, watch a few shows they made in the years since I left, then probably dropping them again.

I spend A LOT of time downloading and organizing my movie collection, but somehow I enjoy even that time, alongside the occasions I can watch a whole movie (between job and family obligations)

Really? Here in Brazil I remember Blockbuster having a fairly limited number of options, mostly the new releases. The old pop and mom video store usually had way more options (because they didn't throw anything away most of the time).

There are still days I can't find anything I want to watch on Netflix but it seems way better than the DVD/Blueray situation we had here.

It could very much be a function of town size, and year. There was always a prominent and large section dedicated to recent releases but once you wandered off into Sci Fi or Action or Horror, there were a lot of classics and quite a few B movies available.

It's important to keep in mind that there are some Dark Patterns in Netflix to try to fool you into thinking there is more back inventory than there really is. And now they've started flipping the cover art even in My List every time you wrap around. If it happened once in a while I'd think they were A/B testing on different cover art to see what happens, but the fact it happens in your List and every time you navigate is pretty damned sketchy.

Also as someone else complained, their UI has sucked sucked sucked for a while now. I think the only reason people don't complain is that Hulu has somehow created one that's substantially worse. Honestly the whole management chain for the UI team at Hulu should be fired. How that abomination survived so many approvals is shocking.

Interesting that bring up the cover art topic.

Artwork Personalization at Netflix.. https://medium.com/netflix-techblog/artwork-personalization-...

Excerpt:

Another challenge is to understand the impact of changing artwork that we show a member for a title between sessions. Does changing artwork reduce recognizability of the title and make it difficult to visually locate the title again, for example if the member thought was interested before but had not yet watched it? Or, does changing the artwork itself lead the member to reconsider it due to an improved selection? Clearly, if we find better artwork to present to a member we should probably use it; but continuous changes can also confuse people.

Bullshit. They change it within a single session and if I’m ever on a room with a netflix employee they’re not leaving until the understand on a very profound level how infuriating this is.

If it’s a bug they need to fix it. If it’s on purpose they need to fix their brains.

> How that abomination survived so many approvals is shocking.

How? That's because they pretty much own all the content that is on cable. Titles are gradually disappearing from Netflix and appearing on Hulu.

Netflix was smart to start creating their own content early on, without it they would be dead right now.

> their UI has sucked

Would you be willing to elaborate on what you find frustrating? We're doing work in a similar area.

As I tried to articulate this I realized that Hulu and Netflix now have the same problem. In netflix, right arrow, up and down always mean the same thing, but left changes meaning in an unpredictable way. In Hulu it’s the up button.

To get out of a list you have to walk off the beginning. In both cases there’s now a very small limit to the number of things you want in the screen because you’ll have to walk back or go clear through to get out. It reinforces having a scarcity of entries or too many subsections.

They should go back to using the menu button to escape out of a subsection. Make the subsection four or five elements wide and continuous scroll. But they keep doubling down on their poor use of real estate. Adding things like auto playing previews that some of us hate.

Hulu used to work like this, which is why I have such venom. My tv had the old UI on it, so I stopped using the Apple TV version for a year or two. But when I got the new TV I was stuck with the awful, and they’ve done basically nothing since.

The interface is slow (though I think the actual design is decently usable but nothing great).

Which categories you get are random, yes you can search for specific tags but that's a bit of a hassle and involves typing on a remote. What I'd really like would be both custom and sticky categories. Categories that will always be shown to me (simply by liking a category), and sticky custom categories by combining tags (like creating a action comedy category by combining the action and comedy tags and having that category always show up on my feed).

Netflix lacks personalization IMHO, because algorithms will never replace my actual taste. Let me tell you what I want you to show me.

Also, they should make a drill down search (minimize typing, please!). What I mean is a simply search menu with 5-10 major category types (genre, actor, director, tags) then being able to continue filtering by different categories on the fly.

Also, add a completely optional where I can see what my friends liked (with their permission ofc). That way I can, hassle free, get recommendations from people I trust.

You can even make public feeds! Famous movie critic public feed, etc.

So many possibilities to improve Netflix, I wouldn't even know where to start.

Start by turning off the god damn trailer auto play. Just give me an option under settings. Please. I just want to browse in peace and quiet.

I agree this should not be turned on by default, but FYI if you mute it, that's sticky as long as you're not clearing cookies.

I’m referring to the AppleTV Netflix app specifically.

I miss actual 1-5 star ratings. I want to know if a movie is rated by a majority of people to be more than 4 stars. If its not I don't want to waste my time watching it. I don't care if the movie is rated to be a 95% match for my wife.

The star rating was never the value of everyone's opinion, it's always been based on what Netflix thought you would rate the film[1]. So the % match hasn't really changed. Being able to give an honest opinion though, has. Now it's just a binary "yes" or "no", which is super annoying.

[1] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/netflix-ratings-really-mean-1...

At one point they had the star ratings where you could see two different star ratings. The primary one was of users like you and then in smaller print could see average of all users. Going back even further you could see see you friends' ratings of a title.

I miss it too, but I expect that the vast majority of people only rated films they watched as 5 stars, 1 stars, or no rating (meh, or the same as 3 stars). Most things I watch still don’t get a rating, so it’s really a reduction of 5 levels to 3, not a binary.

Probably got rid of it because most of their films are terrible

"Here in Brazil I remember Blockbuster having a fairly limited number of options, mostly the new releases."

This was exactly what Blockbuster was like in New York.

They focused on mainstream, mostly blockbuster movies (hence the name, maybe).

For a really good selection, you had to go to independent video rental stores, like Kim's Video in Manhattan, which had way, way, waaaay more movies available than any Blockbuster store I've ever been in could dream of. There were some other independent video rental stores scattered across NYC and Long Island with similarly good selections.

Also, Blockbuster movies were often cut or censored, so you had to go to an independent video rental store to find uncut films. I've heard some people dispute that Blockbuster ever carried such films, but I'm far from the only one who remembers this happening. Search around on the web, and you'll see others reporting the same thing.

At a certain point, Blockbuster had some sort of "guaranteed to be in stock" kind of thing, which meant they would just have walls and walls of one single movie.

Was it a limited space store or something? The blockbusters down here in Texas, where property was cheap were huge.

The store itself was big enough, but their use of space was not very efficient.

I'm not sure why they chose to have that focus, but it was clearly a choice on their part, not something they were forced to to.

My guess is that they did what they thought was most profitable for them, because most of the customers they catered to just preferred to watch mainstream, very popular movies.

Good independent video stores had a different model of catering towards viewers with more discerning tastes, so had extensive selections of more obscure films.

Blockbuster, from what I heard, was pretty data-based with both predictive (demographic driven) and continuous modeling/monitoring of demand for each corporate location (they also had franchises, which may have been different) which drove quantity and selection of stock.

> Good independent video stores had a different model of catering towards viewers with more discerning tastes, so had extensive selections of more obscure films.

Of course independents had to focus on the market underserved by Blockbuster, even if that was a less profitable segment.

"Blockbuster, from what I heard, was pretty data-based with both predictive (demographic driven) and continuous modeling/monitoring of demand for each corporate location (they also had franchises, which may have been different) which drove quantity and selection of stock."

I'm not sure how much that kind of demographic data and prediction/modeling was worth.

Even now, though I've rated hundreds of movies on Netflix, Netflix routinely recommends me movies that I absolutely hate. Their recommendations are far more often wrong than right.

Blockbuster didn't have individual customer's ratings of the movies they watched to go on, and the technology and predictive/modeling algorithms they had access to 20 or 30 years ago must have been far, far worse than Netflix has now.

> Blockbuster didn't have individual customer's ratings of the movies they watched to go on

But they weren't doing individual recommendations, they were trying to predict aggregate demand for titles at local stores; aggregate predictions of the type are a lot easier to get usefully correct that individualized predictions of subjective quality.

My family moved around a lot, and I saw many types in the US, including Blockbusters with almost nothing but newest releases, Blockbusters with almost every movie & video game I could imagine, and several in between.

I remember Blockbuster seeming to have lots of selection in the 90s and then they beat out a bunch of smaller stores and chains, then seemed to have less incentive not to suck and by the mid 2000s was as you say, limited, mostly new releases.

I can't recall going to Blockbuster to rent something I had already seen. Usually more time was spent when they introduced the walls of empty boxes. Sometimes you found a case which served as representing a physical copy behind the counter, while most of the time was waiting for employees to check their return slot to see if what you wanted was there without being scanned back into inventory yet.

I'm afraid a similar thing will happen with video games in the next 20 years, mark my words. I remember when you could buy a video game for 60 dollars and keep it forever. You still can, but I would not be surprised if this eventually stopped being the case.

With mobile games, developers are starting to realize that they can get far more money from the addicts who need to play 4 hours a day by throttling gameplay to 20 minutes a day, and forcing them to buy gems in order to bypass the throttle. This could get worse with things like Google Stadia if they decide to monetize their platform in a "pay as you play" sort of model, where you can pay, say, $4.50 for 5 hours of playtime.

I watched the google stadia announcement video and I was amazed by what they accomplished, but your comment cuts through all of that and points to a future where google sets the artistic priorities via financial incentive... the way they currently do on YouTube.

With some games you can not or at least will not soon. The first few waves of games with online features now have their online parts shut down. A lot of games are online only now so when those games shut their servers it will be all over.

I wouldn't say we're seeing the first few waves now - MAG and Metal Gear Online were circa 2008-ish, right?

I'm mostly surprised because for free you can request the same titles (including Blu ray) from the local library. In my county you can search for a title and have it shipped from any library to the one closest to you (and conversely return it at any county library location).

Why pay 10ish a month for something that has the same selection and speed as Netflix?

There's also Kanopy, which is a free limited-views-per-month streaming service you can sign up for with some library cards. My boring Midwestern city's main library has it—the library network in the outer 'burbs didn't, but most people in the area can get a free card in the main system anyway—so I assume it's pretty widely available. Signing up was kinda clunky but now I can watch 12 things a month on it. Selection skews "art" and documentary but there are quite a few mainstream movies on there. Lots of Criterion Collection, too, if you're into that. No idea if you can inflate your views-per-month by having others in your house sign up for it too, and juggling logins.

Criterion also is launching it's own platform next week. I've been missing having the full collection absolute since filmstruck died because it was too good for this world.

I loved FilmStruck and am glad criterion grabbed it.

They are small, so super responsive. I had gotten halfway through a film and was interrupted, came back the next day and it was off catalog, so I gave some feedback about wishing for more transparency.

They sent out a schedule of movies leaving to all subscribes like the next day.

If you liked filmstruck you might want to take a look at mubi as well. They have 30 movies at a time and ever day one movie gets added and another one leaves. It's very well curated and you get introduced to some real gems that you otherwise might never hear of or end up on your watchlist forever. About half the time I watch a movie there because I'm interested and it's leaving soon. It's a great forcing function. Many of the most memorable movies I've seen the last years were through mubi.

Libraries vary tremendously in their selections of DVDs. Some libraries have pretty good selections (though still not nearly as extensive as Netflix). Other libraries have absolutely awful selections.

Also, from my experience, many library DVDs tend to be scratched up (especially popular DVDs), while Netflix DVDs tend to be better (though some still don't play on my DVD player, for some reason).

In my experience new releases have long waiting lists at libraries. Might be less true now that everyone streams most things, but this is how it was when I was in college.

I used to go to the college library and get videos pretty often. I'd usually rip them to my laptop and return them in the same day, letting me get way more movies than I could watch.

>In my experience new releases have long waiting lists at libraries.

True, but libraries are more my goto for things that aren't on streaming. For example I wanted to watch "Reanimator" and none of my steaming services had it but the local library had a DVD.

For new stuff I'm willing to pay a dollar or two on Amazon. (Especially since you can earn that easily by picking a slowing shipping speed on nonessential items... so order a dvd the library doesn't have, get a credit for a current release, and rent an old favorite to tide you over.)

It's not perfect, but in my experience you're often paying for convenience, and being willing to be slightly inconvenienced pays dividends.

FYI, Shudder has "Re-animator" for streaming. No, I'd never heard of Shudder either. It's a streaming service specializing in "Horror. Thrillers. Suspense". $3.99/month on an annual subscription, $4.99 month to month.

$5 would be a bit much just to watch one movie, but if you had 3 or 4 horror/thrillers/suspense movies you wanted to watch, subscribing for a month, watching them, and canceling might be reasonable.

I suspect that is where we are headed for now. That's certainly how I plan to deal with Disney's new streaming service. There is no way that I'm going to become a regular subscriber to that, because most of the Disney movies I've watched over the last few years are Marvel stuff, Disney/Pixar animation, and Star Wars. For most of that I'm content to wait until it shows up on FXX/TNT/TBS/Freeform.

If something comes out from Disney that I do not want to wait that long for, I'll subscribe for a month to watch it, and catch up on all the others I've been waiting for at the same time, and then cancel.

I just did that with Netflix for MCU. I want to catch "Avengers: Endgame" in theaters, because I'm pretty sure that it is going to be nearly impossible to avoid major spoilers for the whole thing before it reaches non-premium cable, or even streaming, and so took advantage of a weekend stuck at home due to snow to sign up for the Netflix trial, catch up on Marvel, Disney/Pixar, and a few other things, and then canceled.

I think once you've paid for Netflix, Prime video, and your taxes to a public library and can't get content, creators are running the risk people will get fed up and buy a fast VPN instead.

It's still true.

Earlier this week I returned a new release that my wife ordered from the library. She waited several months for it to become available.

Part of the problem is that the library allows online pre-orders, so even when the movie is still in theaters, it has a waiting list several hundred deep. The other problem is that the library system holds back a number of copies for people who walk in, which I totally understand. Doesn't help my wife, though.

>Part of the problem is that the library allows online pre-orders, so even when the movie is still in theaters, it has a waiting list several hundred deep.

Also IIRC there's no limit on DVD preorders. Conversely the Overdrive kindle lending service maxes you out at 20 and usually has reasonable (well, sometimes 3-6 week) wait times.

I wish that were so for all over. My library does indeed offer dvds, but the selection is no where as robust as Netflix.

I can hope that one day libraries will stop siloing themselves from each other and implement an efficient inter-library loan system that sends direct to customer.

It’s like they see themselves as competitors.

Assuming you're talking public libraries, it depends on the state. Some states do ILL much better than others, including lending through multistate compacts.

Having both a family member and a couple friends who are/have been librarians, I seriously doubt it is a competitive instinct. I'm sure there are exceptions, but most librarians are genuinely dedicated to information freedom. (They certainly aren't getting MLS degrees for the money...)

I doubt they'll ever mail it direct to your home, though.

Some libraries used to do that but media mail replaced the USPS service that they used.

In my area, about 40 regional libraries are linked and will ship most stuff to the library of your choice. They also accept returns anywhere.

It’s fabulous except for new bestsellers.

ILL exists, but as far as I can tell, it's limited to books.

I've ordered books from libraries thousands of miles away. It takes a few weeks for the books to arrive, possibly because they go 4th Class mail. But they get there eventually.

This depends on your library system. In parts of New York, ILL will send you DVDs as well.

It has nothing to do with competition. The biggest barrier is cost. ILL is one of the most expensive services libraries provide.

Here in San Francisco we have a pretty robust inter-library loan program (Link+) but unfortunately it's limited to books only.

I loved Netflix DVD, but this is the primary reason I canceled. I wasn't watching them as often, and I told myself that once I exhaust the library's selection of all the movies I want to see, I would resume the Netflix subscription.

Are you in Bergen county, NJ? Because I'll be honest, BCCLS is probably one of the best library consortia in the world - 70+ libraries and massive collections. PALSPlus, the Passaic county system, is comparatively pretty awful - in part because of the priorities of the library boards and directors.

> Why pay 10ish a month for something that has the same selection and speed as Netflix?

Possibly because you don’t trust the government.

What is there to trust the government with? And I'm sure anything they could get from the library they could get from Netflix, if they found it interesting/useful.

>>> today because the first sale doctrine protected the video rental business.

First sale only applies if the video rental business purchases physical copies. It is/was not unusual for a large rental business to, rather than buy copies, to license the work for distribution during a particular time/area. That allowed them to burn/build DVDs to meet demand and replaced broken disks as needed. When the license was over, the DVDs were destroyed per the licensing contract.

The threat of first sale was still enough to protect the video stores during negotiations so the threat mattered. As an example, I recall hearing Netflix had some early negotiations fail and went to buy disks in stores as an end run.

Sure, but they only needed that surge in inventory when the rental was in high demand. But a few copies could be purchased outright to remain on the shelves, available to rent for market rates, loyalty discounts, etc, for the lifetime of the media itself. The status quo today is far worse.

There is certainly the case to be made that physical DVD/Blu-Ray rental is still a viable business due to the stagnation of internet improvement in the US.

With that said, I'd think that Redbox basically does Netflix-by-mail more efficiently, no? It seems like the speed of the mail service guarantees that it will take at least a few days between you sending your finished movies back before new ones arrive, as opposed to driving to your nearest grocery store or gas station to pick something else.

History has shown that this isn't the case... otherwise people would've kept Blockbuster in business in the face of Netflix DVD rentals. People value the convenience, it's only recently that people wax nostalgic over the whole "going to the video store to rent on a Friday night". They generally forget the long lines, employees who were rude and didn't care because it was a minimum wage job, often messy as hell store where the availability was mixed... the list goes on.

Blockbuster wasn't good at video rental. They were the big, inefficient bully, and the last choice of anyone with any sense.

The selection was tiny compared to the independents they mostly priced out of existence, then became the most expensive place to rent once that was done. They had major films sooner for about as much as going to the cinema. That's it. Their only selling point. They got shot of old stuff far too soon so you could never actually find old stuff in Blockbuster unless it was 2001 or Wizard of Oz.

The corner shop near us that rented, and next door but 2 to Blockbuster, kept going years after Blockbuster closed. Having experienced Blockbuster in 3 or 4 places I've lived, I gave a little cheer when they went.

There's still a thriving video chain in the area where I live: Family Video. Family Video focused on owning their real estate instead of renting.

I can get a BluRay from Family Video and a pizza from Marcos delivered to my door in under an hour with a $10 or more purchase from Marcos. It ends up being a cheap date night with my fiancee.

Does the Marcos deliver the video too? I know some Family Videos have Marcos attached to them.

I rented a lot of movies from Family Video in high school. There was a location about halfway between my house and my girlfriends. It closed at Midnight, and my curfew was midnight, so I stopped by right before closing almost every night one summer. They had a deal where you got an old release for free with every new release and it was like 3 dollars.

That was a fun summer.

Yes, Marcos delivers the video with the pizza. It's a five day rental, though I've returned it after seven days with no late fees.

I worked there as a kid, and trust me, I agree for the most part.

My comment just worked better with Blockbuster since Blockbuster is/was the poster child of that era of video rental. :)

People value the convenience, it's only recently that people wax nostalgic over the whole "going to the video store to rent on a Friday night".

First, we got the convenience. Only when most everything went online and the alternatives had faded to irrelevance did the availability start to go away. Now we consumers have less than we did before.

DVDs drive library engagement.

Netflix is a Trojan horse. The whole business model is moving to in-house stuff, and each of the big content owners will stand up their own platforms.

...and then we have basically come full circle to cable v2.0.

I am curious about how streaming will develop over the next few years as more services come online. I doubt the average person is going to want to maintain that many (expensive) subscription services. I already dislike the juggle between Netflix, Prime, and Hulu.

This is what the new Apple TV channels thing is trying to solve for while also contributing to the problem :-)

I'm at capacity with content platforms... I've dropped CBS, and once DC Universe expires, I'm out there too. It's worse that they're both the same damned company. Hulu and Amazon are all I'm keeping for now. May return to Netflix if anything really interesting to me hits. Or have it a couple months, binge watch and cancel again.

I used to rent a ton of movies, and never once ran in to a rude employee.

Long lines were annoying, but the worst was having to drive to and from the store. The independent video stores in my area were much further away than the nearest Blockbuster, so Blockbuster was more convenient but their crappy video selection made going to the independents instead worth it for me, and Blockbuster was the store of last resort.

Once I started using Netflix's DVD service, I never set foot a brick and mortar video rental store again. Why would I drive somewhere when I had an excellent DVD selection at my fingertips that would mail the DVD to me?

>I used to rent a ton of movies, and never once ran in to a rude employee.

My guy, the rest of your comment is great. You've gotta realize how wildly useless this line is, though.

Bad service exists and video store employees were known for being in this stereotype, as were theater employees. You just got lucky.

Are you sure it isn’t the other way around? Wasn’t video store clerk a sought after job among young people with little work experience, because it was related to something that’s fun? Wouldn’t the staff usually be at least somewhat helpful because they’re passionate about movies?

This misconception that people who worked at those stores were all movie buffs is very much nostalgia poking through.

Context: I was one of those employees, and I worked in multiple regions of the USA and have conferred with friends who worked at Blockbuster UK as well.

Anecdotally, every video chain store I have ever visited, from Blockbuster to Video Ezy, Civic Video, Channel X, United Video (here in New Zealand) has had at least one movie buff employee.

I've also never experienced a long line at a video store, despite it being a regular Friday night thing for me to do for many years...

Gotta say, the thing I miss most is the ease of browsing through a curated back catalogue. Netflix and co are terribly awful by comparison. Several hundred square metres vs a 55" television screen...

Netflix's DVD catalog is very, very deep. There are likely 6 digits of titles. A Redbox machine probably has under 1000 DVDs in it, so your selection is about 100x-1000x better with Netflix.

Netflix might have a deep catalog of movies they once rented but they don't seem to be refreshing their catalog when a DVD goes missing. I suspect they are winding down their DVD service.

We gave up on Netflix DVD when about half of our saved for later queue flipped over to queue of DVDs they no longer have.

It used to be that Netflix competed with Blockbuster by carrying movies Blockbuster did not rent. Netflix was originally the movie service for movie lovers and Blockbuster was the service for new releases. This was before Netflix also started carrying new releases. Now if I want to see a movie that was made more than 5 years ago, it is no longer available.

I don't doubt you, but it's frustrating to have a "Saved For Later" queue of 50 or so titles that will likely never appear on Netflix.

Walking Tall? Giant? Gaslight? Beach Blanket Bingo anyone? Return of the Dragon? Ran?

4 out of 6 of those movies are available for free on a popular streaming site.

I've read that Netflix is simply not interested in offering movies, preferring tv series. When I subscribed (in Europe) the selection was very limited.

I think you're right. I feel like Netflix would love to 86 their disc business.

I am very confused trying to check on these movies. They show up in search results. I click on them. They redirect me to dvd.netflix.com and suggest that I get a subscription. I don't want to sign up. I want to know if your service offers them or not. Nonetheless, maybe they'll help you?

https://dvd.netflix.com/Movie/Walking-Tall/60034554

https://dvd.netflix.com/Movie/Gaslight/70074384

https://dvd.netflix.com/Movie/Beach-Blanket-Bingo-How-to-Stu...

https://dvd.netflix.com/Movie/Return-of-the-Dragon/60020726

https://dvd.netflix.com/Movie/Ran/60027429

Thank you. The first two links are to different versions of the films I had in my queue (c'mon, no one needs a remake of "Walking Tall"). The last three indeed go to the titles that are in my "Saved" queue (which means they are not available to rent but are in their database nonetheless).

I went ahead and added the different version of Gaslight to my queue though. Thanks, stranger.

Do you not pay the extra money for Blu-ray? Giant and Ran are both listed but it says Blu-ray only.

I have chosen to rent both Blu-ray or DVD and in the case of both the titles (Ran and Giant) they still show "Saved" — meaning "not available but maybe someday".

Oh well, I guess I can check the local library.

Redbox is good if you want one of the top 100 or so new releases that fit in the box, but a big point of the OP is that Netflix has 100K+ titles, obviously Redbox can't match that.

> a big point of the OP is that Netflix has 100K+ titles, obviously Redbox can't match that.

It would be tough to get studio buy-in, but it would be amazing to have a version or Redbox that burned DVDs in place.

From a logistics perspective it would be ideal if they could use disks that degraded after 5 plays, but they could also just accept disks back, read them, and destroy them.

What's the selection of Redbox DVD's at grocery stores like? I have a hard time believing it's anywhere close to Netflix's extensive DVD selection.

Also, Netflix has various plans: you could rent one DVD at a time, two DVDs at a time, three DVDs at a time (and maybe more). If you have three DVDs out at a time, and watch one DVD per day and mail it DVDs back as you watch them, you won't have to wait long before your next DVD arrives in the mail, possibly while you're still watching the rest.

In my own experience, watching a DVD per day is pretty ambitious. Odds are you'll be watching way less than that, and there'll be multiple days between watching DVDs, in which case waiting for your next DVD to arrive in the mail won't realy make any difference.

Yeah, no, Redbox selection is slim. Unless you're into direct-to-inflight slasher films. In that case Redbox is dabomb.

;-)

Netflix has done some work with their algos such that if you always watch your movie on the weekend and send it back Monday, they'll just start shipping your next movie out on Monday morning on the assumption that they old one will be back Tuesday.

They also have a deal with the post office that in some areas the post office will notify Netflix when they pick up your disk so that Netflix can send a new out before they get your old one back.

If your situation is seriously rural, it might be a few days between trips into town (or to your P.O. box), so while you could get different media at Redbox on every trip, you would have to plan to overlap returns and requests on Netflix (perhaps with multiple accounts?) to get new content on every trip.

I am extrapolating from seeing a number of battered rancher pickup trucks whose occupants are clustered around Redbox kiosks in small towns in the western US.

What does Redbox have that Netflix/AmazonPrime/Hulu doesn't? Redbox's selection is limited per their model.

New movies cheaper than iTunes.

immediacy

for some it is purely impulse renting. do not confuse the immediacy of the experience with the ability to find something to stream, it is a whole different experience

The latency for Netflix is longer but it means there's a DVD right there with zero effort that you can watch more or less whenever you get around to it. Even if the nearest Redbox is just 5 or 10 minutes away, that's one or two possibly unique trips you have to make. That's actually a fairly big barrier for me unless there's a new release I really want to see tonight.

>With that said, I'd think that Redbox basically does Netflix-by-mail more efficiently, no?

No, actually, because the killer aspect of DVD-by-mail is the depth of selection. Redbox machines are even MORE limited.

If you like / want what is in the Redbox, sure.

Not much there at any given time though.

Redbox selection is a vanishly small fraction of what's available from netflix DVDs/Bluray.

As usual publishers make everything they can to make experience shitty.

Before streaming became a thing, you could download movies and music through P2P networks. Streaming became a huge success, piracy became less of an issue, because many people didn't have problem with throwing $7 a month to use Netflix.

Now once again you get much better experience if you pirate. That's the only real competitor, can you imagine how bad it would be if there was no piracy?

It is getting bad though. Less piracy means it’s much harder to find long tail films. The number of seedless torrents on private trackers is much higher now than it used to be.

Long tail is a failure point of the torrent system. And it feels it's possible to solve, by someone with good programming skills , and some cooperation from a popular bittorent software.

How is it a programming issue? The content needs to be hosted (in a decentralized way). And, as a given title becomes less less popular--because it's older or people are just generally not torrenting as much--the odds that someone will have it available for downloading decreases. Essentially torrenting depends on people randomly making content available as sort of a quid pro quo and and streaming makes using torrents generally less interesting for a lot of people.

To my understanding, some torrent sites have methods to incentivize downloading (and seeding) torrents whose seed-count is getting low.

For example, one offers a multiplier on seed credit for low seed-count torrents, and another does the same but also prominently features a small selection of them in the front page (programmatically) to motivate users to preserve them.

The underlying issue persists, but there are some methods to address it, and perhaps more could be devised.

You're right. But:

The basic idea is this: Let's say i once downloaded long-tail file X. Me sharing it for years and years isn't the default.

But what if it was ? what if this was built into one of the popular torrent clients , and i would have to opt-out to change it ?

Well, in addition to using your bandwidth, it's exposing you to potential copyright claims through your ISP if the sharing is discovered. So there are good reasons why people don't necessarily want share files willy-nilly. I'd very leery of a torrent client that defaulted to potentially unsafe--for me--behavior.

Re Copyright claims: it's a good point. Some countries have tough ISP's and laws.

But in other places, this isn't a big issue.

But to share a file, usually you have to keep it in your file list - and that takes up visual space, attention, and bandwidth/storage, so you just delete it.

But what if the software limited bandwidth/storage for such files to 5% of your total, and managed that in a way that wouldn't clutter or take any attention ?

Maybe in a different tab - so you'd still have full control, if needed ?

One factor may be people making space for UHD discs, but unless you try requesting reseeds on the unseeded files I'm not sure you can read that much into it.

The last DVD I rented from Netflix was "Iron Monkey." This movie is very hard to get your hands on otherwise. (If you search for the torrent, there's a good chance you won't get any viable results!)

My Netflix DVD queue was 100% movies I couldn't torrent / find available to buy. They would be at the top of my list for years, presumably one copy getting slowly making it's way around the country.

Netflix even had a production company called Red Envelope Entertainment that did some really great alt comedy movies (an early Zach Galifianakis special with the Netflix exec sitting front row with his Netflix hat on like a nerd, for example).

> somewhere with shitty connectivity (basically the entire rural US)

So infuriating. We were surcharged and paid billions into fixing this. The universal service fund went into CEO compensation and not much else.

>We mostly use Apple's movie rental system, because the quality is better than Netflix

You might want to look into this again. If you can get Netflix's highest quality 1080p streams they have much higher bitrates than what you can rent or buy on itunes.

But you are 100% right about availability. Streaming is almost a myth if you're like me and want to watch a bunch of unpopular titles.

Most people don't actually care all that much what they watch. If one thing isn't available they watch something else. The (urban) people I know who have Netflix DVD subscriptions are movie buffs (ADDED: like myself). Others I know who have good Internet consider renting DVDs as something a bit weird.

This rings true to me. I wouldn't go so far as to say I don't care. But there is so much more content than I actually have time to watch that I can easily fill my watching time with something I enjoy even out of the fairly limited streaming catalogs available.

The limitations absolutely do bother me in principle, and on occasion I get frustrated about not being able to find something specific (then I have to decide if I care enough to go try to find it from another source). But in general I do not find myself suffering from a shortage of video content to watch at any given time.

It's true to me to a degree as well. There are streaming TV shows I'd like to take a look at but there is also a limit to how many services I'll subscribe to. At some point, I just say I can do without.

>Sometimes something won't be available for rental anymore, but remains in the list as a purchasable (ha) item. This is just straight-up rent-seeking bullshit

Wouldn't that be the exact opposite of rent-seeking? They explicitly don't want rent.

(Yes, I know the economic definition, I'm just punning)

That depends on who the "they" is. Movie distribution companies want to maximize the value of their product, and that means marketing and advertising, exclusivity periods, product tie-ins and collaborations with different streaming providers. They know that they can get the audience numbers from anywhere, but the question is how much a particular streaming provider will pay over a competitor.

So movie distribution companies are certainly engaging in rent-seeking behavior–only you're not the customer. The streaming providers are.

(Reasonably good pun though)

I guess it really depends whether you consider a DRM-protected digital asset to be something which is possible to own vs rent. The button might say "purchase", but it's really still a rental.

(Yes, I say this from the point of view of someone who has "purchased" dozens of videogames on PSN and Steam, fully aware that any of them could have the plug pulled on them at any time...)

Blockbuster had exclusive rental agreements where they could rent movies for weeks before Redbox. I'm not sure where the first-sale doctrine came into play there, but this was a reality of the time when Redbox began to make a big splash in the physical rental scene.

I think the fact that renters had more choices in 1999 is because Blockbuster was a near monopoly and nobody was really challenging their status quo outside of some regional shops. All of the price changes happened as Redbox entered the scene, not Netflix streaming (though Netflix mailers were a challenge as well). So even without these streaming services you'd be seeing the same BS with only being able to buy a film for several weeks before it would be available to rent.

> Blockbuster had exclusive rental agreements where they could rent movies for weeks before Redbox. I'm not sure where the first-sale doctrine came into play there, but this was a reality of the time when Redbox began to make a big splash in the physical rental scene.

First sale only works effectively once the studio starts selling copies at retail. After that, when anyone could go down to Target, or Walmart, or Best Buy and buy retail copies, then so could Redbox, and there was nothing the studios could do to stop them.

I believe that the way things like the Blockbuster exclusive deals worked is that the studios would make a deal with Blockbuster to sell copies to Blockbuster weeks before they released them for purchase at retail.

I would pay for a service where a company gives me a PO Box-like address, and I can have other DVD/BR-by-mail services target that address, and anything that gets sent to that address gets ripped to a server for private one-time streaming. ("one time" meaning you start a watch-session and can pause/rewind at will, but once you've passed through all the frames once and hit the-credits-minus-a-minute-or-so, you can't rewind any more—so you can't start watching from the beginning any more—and the movie will get deleted a few days later.)

Would that be legal? It's a lot closer to Pay Per View than to traditional streaming.

The closest analogue I can think of is Aereo and they got destroyed in court.

Why would you pay for this? What problem does it solve for you better than existing content delivery methods?

Presuming this company existed in many countries instead of just my own, and that I could get something sent to any of their receiving centers in order to stream it... this would enable me to watch stuff that Netflix only has available (on DVD) in countries that are not my own. It's a physical-media VPN.

If such a service also provided a more general permanent digitization service for media you actually own (where you would send them your own discs, or forward them any random CD/DVD/BR you buy off the Internet, and they would rip the disc out of the packaging it comes in, digitize it, put it on a server for you, and then destroy the original), then—in combination with the multiple-countries thing—I could use this to consume content that doesn't have a streaming version, only a physical edition; and where that physical edition isn't sold for export, but only in its country of origin. (Think: limited-release pressings of albums from indie bands; movies from film festivals that never ended up seeing general release; etc.)

Essentially, it's like getting some physical media sent to Archive.org for expert digitization+preservation, but without distribution to the general public, just to the person who paid to do the preservation.

(Though, they could certainly sit on their own copy of the digitized work indefinitely, never giving it to anyone or acknowledging that they have it, waiting for the day it either enters the public domain, or they acquire distribution rights to it, whereupon they can put it into a public catalogue.)

Ah, understood (TIL Netflix distributes certain movies physically only)!

You would get high quality, online access to the entirety of the world's movie collection for a reasonably low rate.

I understand, but it seems like an incredibly inefficient method of achieving that goal, no?

Yes. I regularly see failures and weird issues that are technically "impossible" according to the spec in things like TCP/IP, HTTP, as well as higher application layers.

And trying to convince someone like Google or Microsoft that their site or service is not very robust when things start getting lossy is a complete waste of time, even if you have a massive following on social media people who dare to complain about not having megabits of data are completely ignored.

Absolutely! In NYC I miss the great video stores of yesteryear like Kims. The streaming services don’t have depth and the problem is getting worse as they devote more spend towards building internal proprietary content and less towards renewing older third party content.

Agree, but population density is heavily skewed toward cities, which tend to have (though not always) better internet: https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=29072

https://www.networkworld.com/article/2345839/population-dens...

https://geoisp.com/us/ has some data about availability by population, but not a great map.

Just another reason why file sharing is popular.

I am also surprised it's not quite a bit higher.

There are many, many parts of the USA where the 'high speed' internet service is somewhere between 1mbps to 3mbps maximum, or slower, assuming there's any broadband at all.

Internet speeds plummet when you're in most rural areas, often even semi-rural smaller towns that are 30-45 minutes outside of major cities have comically slow internet.

What should an equivalent of the first sale doctrine for digital content look like?

It seems like we need something new here to cover things like streaming content, ebooks, digital delivery, drm, etc.

I'm sure I'm not the only one annoyed by how the world has moved from selling to renting, especially when services and the companies providing them seem more ephemeral than ever.

Something like movies anywhere crosses with iTunes Match, with a token that is owned by the consumer and available anywhere.

There is no reason why a license should be locked to a platform. IMO it’s a great area to regulate.

Cross-platform compatibility hurts exclusivity and revenue protection. Its why Disney et al are trying to claw back ground against the Internet with their own subscription based viewing platforms. Trying to get media companies to agree to almost anything that hurts their bottom line is antithetical to their corporate charters, they know lock in, exclusivity, and rent seeking done right is the maximal revenue model they can manage under modern cultural constraints, and they are optimizing for it - some will fail to implement it successfully, but those that do will probably reap the most possible revenue for their given library of IP.

The same argument was made against VHS. In short, I say too bad, copyright exists to promote the useful arts and benefit society.

IMO making Amazon, Netflix, etc even more of a commodity is in the interests of the producers and consumers of content.

I currently have a copy of Something Wicked This Way Comes laying here in front of me.

Most of the video rental business for new releases wasn't carried out under the first sale doctrine, because video stores worked out a deal where they could purchase videos before they were available for sale, at inflated prices.

Yup. I live in Canada and I was quite sad when RedBox left us because of the Target collapse. It was on my way home and was quarter of the price of a streaming rental, and full of new releases.

A person using the Pirate Bay 10 years ago had access to a larger selection than someone subscribing to Netflix today.

The copyright industry just has a different agenda than we do. We think when technology improves we'll get more selection, faster at higher quality. The copyright industry thinks when technology improves about what new ways they can restrict the public so that lawyers can continue to make money from the hard work of long dead authors and artists.

The last sentence is incredibly naive. The rural U.S. has great connectivity.

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