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Comment by sek | Hacker News Reader

I think it's a combination of things, but primarily we are in a low interest environment.

Money is looking desperately for something to invest in and the problem of Hollywood and cable companies was that they made too much money. Netflix was a distributor who figured that out and was creating a low subscription model for content.

When the content producers realised this Netflix was exposed, they knew they would not renew their contracts and as a defensive measure just started producing content like mad. They had all this leverage because the market is flooded with money and they have a pretty stable revenue stream.

Netflix is what Napster was for music, because movies were always too big to pirate it took a little longer. Now it's too late, people don't buy a CD with one song for $12 dollars and they won't pay $100 for a cable subscription any longer.

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The lower cost vs cable is a mirage. Once TV is finished balkanizing into separate streaming services, expect the cost of signing up for everything you had on cable to add up to about the cost of a cable subscription.

Most people I know cycle through the streaming services instead of subscribing to everything on the market. Streaming video is a very different product than cable. A single service gives you more on-demand content than you could ever watch. There's no particular rush to see a series since every season of a show is usually available. With cable you need the hundreds of channels to have any chance of finding something to watch, and if you miss it when it's live then too bad.

So people keep repeating that we're going to end up paying $100 a month for our subscription services, but I am going to happily keep paying about $12 a month. A quick google found an article from 2015 that Netflix is estimated to have about 35k hours of content. Another article claimed that Netflix adds an additional 3k hours of content each year. Do you really need to subscribe to 2x, 3x or 5x that amount all at once?

Everything is distributed in my family. I'm on my parents netflix, my brother's hbogo, and I offer my hulu account. There's probably another half dozen close friends who've ended up with these passwords one way or another as well.

Pretty much all my peers are bumming someone's password, too.

The problem with cable is that the lowest subscription amount was highly priced. Even with Balkanization, you can now simply choose to get less and pay less.

I have stayed with Netflix since it became available in Denmark and have been on/off with HBO but now that I have seen chernobil and finished got I have cancelled it.

Perhaps I will sign up for something else later or even return if something else comes on.

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