Streaming Video Will Soon Look Like the Bad Old Days of TV
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
By contrast the music industry manages to cooperate and get their content available across the various streaming services and consequently I haven't pirated music for a long long time.
I canceled Netflix because it got to having nothing I wanted to watch, and my public library network has a much better catalog of movies and TV series on Blu-ray and DVD.
Blockbuster didn't only stock Paramount pictures -- and people wouldn't have had much patience for rental groups that worked that way when there were alternatives that didn't -- piracy being the alternative here.
Keep in mind the this was only because of some monopoly busting decades earlier: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Paramount_Pic....
With Disney owning so much of the production and now entering the distribution/retail side there might be some more anti-trust cases coming.
Netflix can only stream what they are allowed to. If you want the convenience of the Blockbuster model there are always rentals from Amazon, Apple, Google Play etc. Yes I realize that some movies aren’t available for rent.
they used to (and still do AFAIK) have a pretty good selection of DVDs to have mailed though. I think people hoped that eventually the streaming offerings would come to be as broad as the mail-order selection, which doesn't seem unreasonable from the perspective of 2009 but obviously isn't happening today. there's also the fact that music streaming services have mostly succeeded at offering a very wide selection of music to their customers (even free accounts!).
frankly I don't know enough about the music, tv, and movie industries to tell you why it turned out this way, but to the layman it does seem like a perplexing "shut up and take my money" situation. if a service launched with a really good catalog that could at least match the convenience and quality of torrents, I would be willing to pay quite a hefty monthly fee. I have very little interest in paying for five different streaming services that will still inevitably exclude a couple of my favorite shows and movies.
- Netflix-like UI with integrated IMDB ratings, cast, description, cover, etc
- support for many devices and TV players/dongles
- unlimited concurrent stream count and full control over the streaming bitrate (as long as you have the bandwidth)
- remote access from any location/country
> Since 2000, the number of full-time songwriters in Nashville has fallen by 80 percent, according to the Nashville Songwriters Association International
https://www.tennessean.com/story/entertainment/music/2015/01...
> According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there were 39,260 people in the United States classified as “Musicians and Singers.” This is down 27% from 53,940 in 2002.
https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2015/07/16/if-you-think-pir...
> At the same time, consumers spent less money on recorded music (both physically and digitally distributed) than they had in the 1990s.[13] Total "music-business" revenues in the U.S. dropped by half, from a high of $14.6 billion in 1999 to $6.3 billion in 2009, according to Forrester Research.[14]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_industry
> For many musicians, the income derived from sound recordings is a small part of their overall revenue pie, and it’s decreasing. In aggregate, 88% of survey respondents derived between 0% and 10% of their music-related income from sound recordings in the past 12 months. Respondents who identified themselves as composers and/or recording artists were making a bit more, as were rock and hip hop musicians, but even when examined through various lenses like role or genre, income from sound recordings hovered under 15% of music-related income. Though differences exist by role and/or genre, the survey data suggests that income from sound recordings is a modest slice of most musicians’ income pies – a sentiment also expressed by a number of interviewees.
http://money.futureofmusic.org/sound-recording-income/9/
also relevant for the TV industry:
> According to the Writers Guild Association – West, screenwriters’ earnings were down nearly 25 percent in 2013 from 2009.
https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2015/07/16/if-you-think-pir...
Film isn't there yet. A solo director can't produce a Marvel movie on their own. But it's becoming easier every day.
Are there people living middle class lives in the music industry? Sure. Probably more today than ever before, and streaming (and possibly piracy) has a lot to do with that. Musicians don't make money from album sales, they make money from live shows. The middle class musician tours constantly because that's their full time job. It's not a 9-5, and you're not home with your family at night. I'm absolutely positive that this is the reason more people don't live middle class musician lifestyles.
Vanished? Nah. Never existed, at least not in any significant way. It's only now due to the Internet that small time niche musicians can make any money and get any sales without major labels. And major labels aren't in the business of making middle class musicians, as Jaron Lanier pointed out.
I'm also going to detour to your source... Jaron Lanier is famous for writing the story "Piracy is your friend", and a few years later writing "Pay me for my content". I would take Jaron Lanier's music industry opinions with a grain of salt.
It's a net good for culture in the grand scheme of things. I'm hoping most professions eventually vanish along with musicians, including my own.
But I'm still really glad it exists and don't really feel I have much right to complain about a free (for me) product.
(Edit: okay, to give credit where it's due, I just remembered they did actually fix my biggest annoyance with the iOS app -- previously when you deleted a downloaded video it didn't actually delete it from disk -- there was no way to recover the storage, other than deleting the app itself. So I'd have to reinstall the app every time I took a flight more or less. But they fixed that, you can actually delete things now.)
update - Kodi has an iOS application if you have a jailbroken an iPhone with iOS 8.
Sadly, the UI seems designed to force you watch Netflix content, and hide the fact the catalog is small (is it? I can't tell).
It's the number one reason I'm going to drop netflix, when I get too fed up.
Selling third party commodity digital content is a feature not a product. Apple always said that they use to basically just break even on iTunes music.
Your example is the world record at the box office... they don't all gain as much.
Plenty of movies and TV shows depends on the cash they make from streaming service. Hell it's not even yours to decide whether they made enough profit. Why not make your own movie if that so profitable? You know damn well it's not that profitable and most struggle.
Netflix back-doored and and muscled its way in, but it never had even close to a full catalog, so it had to compete with its own content. The other big difference is that we associate TV shows with their distributors (GoT was on HBO, House of Cards Netflix, Seinfeld NBC, etc.) Artists and labels? Unless you're looking at something indie like Fat Wreck Chords, nope, most people couldn't tell you who artists are signed to.
(typing this while rocking my Fat Wreck jacket and playing Direct Hit!)
It sounds like you're saying that if there's any video you'd like to see that's not available on Netflix, you have no alternative to pirating it.
What would be the fallout if you didn't pirate those videos?
A streaming service is attractive when the monthly cost is less than what you would pay for the seperate content you actually watch, and if all the content you want is offered on that service. Needing to subscribe to multiple services can quickly balloon the cost and inconvencience to the point where it's easier and cheaper to just seek out individual content - either legally or illegally, the result is the same for Netflix.
TL;DR: I'm curious if there's a way to make effective ethical arguments when people have fundamentally different world views, including whether or not morals have any solid grounding.
If nobody pirated anything then we would still be buying music for 99 cents a track (or more) and music streaming would have been quashed by the labels.
On the other hand if everybody pirated everything then the music industry would have collapsed.
I conclude that the world needs all sorts of people.
I honestly don't see how you came to this conclusion yesterday instead of several years ago and consciously chose to not share an account or ignore netflix completely
You can get pretty much any TV shows or movies on iTunes or Google Play.
For sure you won't be able to access every TV shows or movies for 15$ a month... that's just absurd.
I regularly suspend and resume Netflix, HBO Now, etc. based on what I'm currently watching. It's very easy to do this, especially if the service is paid for using Google Store / Apple Store subscriptions.
Compare to the hell you go through trying to contact Comcast and cancel service.
Maybe they "bundle" to avoid the constant cancelling.
I can't remember the show, but a year or so ago I saw like seasons 1 to 3 on Netflix, season 4 was available on Amazon for $1.99 an episode, and the current season episodes 8 through current were available via a cable subscription's on demand service.
So even if you paid for it all using multiple different services, you still couldn't legally watch the first 7 or so episodes of the show.
I'm normally very against pirating, but I had absolutely no qualms about doing it there.
We would have none of these problems if Netflix couldn't produce its own shows and Disney couldn't make its own streaming service
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Paramount_P....
Microsoft couldn’t sell third party software that integrates with Office. GCP and AWS couldn’t run marketplaces that sold services from third party companies like ElasticSearch and Mongo labs. Who would be hurt worse if AWS stop selling ElasticCo and Mongolabs hosted services and just sold their own ElasticSearch service and Mongo compatible DocumentDB?
Walmart couldn’t sell Walmart branded goods. CVS couldn’t sell cheaper versions of name brand drugs, restaurants couldn’t sell name brand sodas and their own food.
How far do you want to take it?
Seeing that if Netflix couldn’t create their own content and had to buy content from third parties do you think that would help Netflix more or give other studios even more leverage to raise their prices?
What if Apple said fine - we can’t offer Apple Music and Spotify so we will just kick Spotify off the platform and not allow third party games and only allow games through Apple Arcade.
They could also kick off Office and force everyone to use iWork.
But why stop there? Let’s also make a law that says Apple can’t sell third party accessories and Apple products in their physical Apple store and Google can’t sell Pixel devices along with third party phones on their website.
Your AWS example falls flat on it's face the product you're still buying is hosting, not an Elastic license. That's like suggesting because a television comes with a free soundbar it's illegal. No one is suggesting that. Stop using the slippery slope against common sense policies that would prevent the market concentrating on the hands of a few gatekeepers.
Because that law doesn’t exist.
If it did do you think that every media company could blatantly break that law and the government do nothing?
Microsoft selling their own product isn't an issue.
Microsoft also sells third party products that integrate with their offerings....
Your AWS example falls flat on it's face the product you're still buying is hosting, not an Elastic license.
That is also incorrect. AWS offers its own ElasticSearch hosted service where it can only offer the open source subset,
https://aws.amazon.com/elasticsearch-service/
but ElasticCo also sells the full license through the AWS marketplace where they host the commercial version on AWS.
https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace/seller-profile?id=d8f5903...
There is a problem when a store with significant market share starts paying to produce product it controls.
In that case neither should any other software company.
Are you also against Showtime Originals and HBO making “Game of Thrones”? Do we really want to go back to the era where all of the cable companies basically just showed reruns from network TV and a few syndicated shows?
Movies (or games, music, books) aren't commodities. When single vendors can get exclusive distribution rights, the space becomes much less competitive, and this removes the benefits customers are supposed to get from competition.
0. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20732231
1. https://www.androidauthority.com/netflix-account-sharing-100...
Viewers/subscribers get to watch what they want (and perhaps a bunch of other stuff from service A, B, etc.)
As time passes, want-to-watch lists get longer, or pruned, and recommendations of other shows to explore, like TiVo or Netflix, can improve.
May I ask, with netflix - do you cancel your account or just suspend subscription and just re-enable with your account later? Not used the service but trying to ascertain if it's a case of paused subscription or canceled account to achieve that. As if the later case, then I'd say it is due to your GDPR, data protection acts throughout the World and they are working with best interests, albeit against the grain in this instance. Solution would be the ability to export and import history - pushing the data retention aspect for the customer firmly into the customers hands. Again I see no business case for them doing this other than outlined and be more in there interest to retain said data in case you did resub.
EDIT ADD - had a look and you can export your viewing history, though no ability to import later that I can see, did raise it on feedback with them, maybe it will change. https://help.netflix.com/en/node/101917
> If you restart within 10 months, your profiles, favorites, viewing preferences and account details will be waiting for you.
I currently have Amazon Video, Hulu and Funimation
Amazon Video comes with my Amazon Prime Hulu comes with my Spotify Funimation comes with Hulu
I currently have access to Netflix via sharing
so for movie only consumption I only pay for HBO Now
for all media consumption I pay for HBO Now and Spotify
Now that every content owner is starting their own services, we're losing the thing that made Netflix revolutionary: loads of quality and diverse content under one subscription.
Personally, the shows I'm interested in are spread across a half dozen services... and only one or two really warrant full engagement (versus "background entertainment")... so obviously it's back to bittorrent for me.
The thing no one really talks about is that cable companies never really made (relatively) that much money. The content producers are the ones that have always made the real money. Most of your bill goes to them. Ultimately, Netflix is just another middle man between you and the content. You still have to pay for wires but now there's another hand taking their share. In the long term they can't be cheaper.
The reason it was cheaper was that for a long time they were seen as free additional revenue for content producers. Like someone making a living off of discarded garbage. Eventually the people throwing that stuff away wise up and want their normal cut. We are pretty much there at this point.
You are forgetting at a amazingly low price. People are cancelling Netflix because it's "too expensive now" while it's still quite a bit cheaper than cable.
People have an hard time considering paying 2 streaming service, while it is still cheaper than cable service.
Removing price and commercials from the discussion, the big benefit streaming brought was a way to overcome the technical limitation that meant there was a broadcast schedule. Instead, you can watch any show at any time.
The new services are much worse about several of these. Let's again assume price is a non issue so you subscribe to everything.
First, you have annoying problem of remembering which service or app to use for each show. If available on multiple services, you have to remember which one you were watching on so it preserves your place.
Second, you also have problems with availability: service x doesn't work on device A, but service y only works on device A. This means switching inputs, or limiting what show you can watch based on what devices you currently have available. There's even more frustrating problems with this, where for example, service x will work on PC, but not with surround sound.
Third, you have to use a different user interface and navigation structure for each app. Annoyingly, these will sometimes update and change their UI in radical ways without asking, and these changes won't happen on all devices at the same time, so you have even more interfaces to remember.
This reminds me of the old "pirate vs paying customer" infographic [1] where the overall experience is markedly worse for paying customers.
I haven't had cable for over a decade, and when I did, it was all PVR'd via mythtv. My tv watching experience has been via mythtv, xbmc, Kodi and Plex. I tolerate Netflix for convenience, and YouTube as a separate app because it's unique. I've tried having other services, but found them too annoying for the reasons I started above - and it didn't help that they all had significantly worse interfaces than Plex and Netflix.
On Apple TV this is pretty much solved by the os. You just tell it what you want to watch and it shows you where you can watch it. I believe it handles the resume use case as well.
Amusingly enough, Comcast solves this with their set top box and remote. They search across multiple providers, including major streaming providers, and return you a list of where you can watch a show at.
There are a few other players in this field (it is also built into some smart TVs I believe), but I was amused to watch my mother navigate streaming services with ease using voice commands.
It only required a $100 a month cable TV subscription!
With streaming I watch maybe an hour or two at most, then I stop, confident I can pickup whenever (and increasingly wherever I want). I don't worry about my wife deleting my Star Trek for her Firefly.
Unlike DVDs we can catch up on an episode of a shared show while traveling.
Though I did get hooked on a Netflix show in the UK that isn't available in Australia, four weeks later I can't even remember the title.
I checked Netflix, of course not there I should have known better, oh but it knew what I was looking for and showed me knockoffs "related to" what I was actually looking for. Having spent most of my life making fun of knockoffs, that was a bad move Netflix.
I checked Amazon Video, hey the movie is there, but not included in my prime subscription, and I can only stream it if I buy the movie for $20, no option to even rent the movie for 48 hours. Okay, thats a non-starter, I know Amazon Video just resyndicates from a shared catalogue of movies so that means every rent-streaming service will have it, but maybe under different pricing.
So I checked the unlikely Playstation Store. Not listed
Okay at this point I go to Google, because the "where can I stream it" sites have been replaced by a mere addition of a feature on Google where on top of the search results underneath the ratings it shows you where you can stream it. Exhibit A of features masquerading as companies getting replaced quickly by Google. Showed that everyone was charging $20 with no option to rent.
Well, I was going to rent it. Other interfaces should have an easy search that shows the availability of a title on multiple streaming services and its price. But after this bar, if you wanted me to stop worrying about who has a license for copyright distribution, thats how you get me to stop worrying about who has a license. The burden has never been on the consumer anyway, we've just been assuming Walmart properly secured the license, and that the person with DVDs on a towel outside doesn't. But we never knew and never had any liability, until we were distributing it ourselves. So fire up the dusty old torrent software and turn off the upload feature. Within 10 minutes I was watching my 4gb H264 1080P version of what I wanted to see.
That's sadly most likely the issue. I bet it was a big movie? Most likely they are just keeping the good old traditional schedule. Release at the movie Theater, few months later release for sell, few months later release for rental. They added a few months later a release on streaming platform but that's it...
That's absurd that they still do that but I guess waiting a few months isn't the worse to save a few bucks.
Netflix is another given. Do these content channels even release shows on Blu ray and iTunes a year later like they used to?
It's just awful. It makes me miss CRTs with rabbit ears and a VHF and UHF dial.
As far as apps that use your provider log in, with the Apple TV, you log on once with your provider and with your permission, all of the apps use your system configured login.
Cord-cutting accomplished exactly nothing. Streaming services copied the exact model of the satellite companies (willingly or not; I'm willing to bet the distributors squeezed the streaming companies just like music publishers, since they're holding all the rights). There is no incentive whatsoever to make a single show available on multiple platforms.
This also explains perfectly why piracy will never die. Consumers want access to the content they are interested in. They do NOT want arbitrary complications thrown in their way.
The day I have children I want to be able to share some sort of cultural archive with them, though regular tv might probably be dead by that time, who knows.
I've started hosting my own plex server, and using torrents and actual old backups to get the content. The sad part though, is that most of the major torrent sites seem really dead compared to the haydays. What are some good options these days?
It had hard-to-find shows, and it kept track of who downloaded what, so if there were no active seeders, you could ping some people to seed it so they could earn credits.
I'd be more than happy to pay good money for each movie/episode, and would regularly pay more than the suggested price to creators I especially enjoy, like you can do on Bandcamp.
This way I avoid paying for time during which I watch nothing, and I can easily activate a new month almost instantly.
Many streaming services are quite shitty, don't allow you to link directly to a show, and don't allow streaming on PC (or don't allow it any higher than standard def), and most people want to watch their TV on TVs, which means your service needs to work with the various services available on the various common streaming hardware.
I swear Google Play Movies is the most convoluted difficult to use UI to play video I've ever seen. I bought a show in it once, but I bought the entire series, which shows up in the UI separately from every other season. (So it shows as seasons "1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 1 through 6"). Every time I want to watch an episode, I need to open, go to my library, go to TV shows, pick the show, scroll to the "full series" season, then scroll from episode 1 to the episode I last watched to play it.
It's insane that it's that difficult! And knowing how difficult it is I absolutely will never order another show from that ecosystem again.
And the media companies did it to themselves...
Convenience has value. Even if tpb is easy enough, there's still friction. So long as streaming services stay convenient and cheap enough, they will keep customers. The interesting dynamic is that the more players enter the space, the less convenience there is. Justwatch.com is already trying to add that convenience back, but the fact that we need that meta step is already frustrating.
> The interesting dynamic is that the more players enter the space, the less convenience there is.
This is exactly what happened to me. When Netflix had literally everything, it was the only place I looked. Now that it doesn't have everything, I'm not going to go through the litany of Hulu, prime, etc, I just go straight to tpb. So I cancelled Hulu etc. And because tpb is second nature and it always has what I'm looking for, I just go there first... so I cancelled Netflix.
It's like watching the 2000 p2p shift all over again. The media companies don't understand how to build a business model that fits seemlessly into society.
That's only because they're allowed to have exclusive deals. If and when streaming services will get commoditized, this won't be a problem - much like having more grocery stores around you doesn't make shopping more inconvenient.
I know there are other torrent sites and probably private groups that are well curated, but I imagine you have to maintain some seed ratio to be in there and I'm not sure I could get away with that.
What hasn't increased? An individual's time and attention. There are a finite number of hours in the day.
Static demand, increased supply and an unwillingness to pay the asking price. That sounds like pretty simple economics to me.
If I really want to watch, say, Star Trek movies and Continuum TV show, then if CBS decides to pull the Star Trek movies from Netflix and spin off their own streaming service doesn't mean I'll just find something else on Netflix, or that I'll subscribe to CBS too; I'll keep watching Continuum on Netflix and head to TPB for the missing movies.
If movie studios want to stop piracy, they have to stop being so greedy. Streaming services shouldn't be allowed to get exclusive licensing deals on movies/shows. The market would sort itself out and people would be able to watch all they needed from one or two services whose UI they most like.
(And honestly, UI should be unbundled too. Streaming service's crappy four-button player can't beat VLC.)
I don't buy that argument. Its analogous to saying if Windows was not available on pirate platforms people would "just" switch to Linux.
People making content are very very good at keeping people hooked. It partially explains all the people who binge watch on Netflix..
By and large, people will obey when they consider it to be affordable and fair, and they won't when they don't. Just like every other rule in the world.
Really the issue is an issue of frontends. If there were a frontend that transparently handled all the different providers and let you pay for what you wanted to watch when you wanted to watch it, that would be much more pleasant to navigate.
But media companies want to control the frontend, for both lock-in and advertising potential. And don't forget DRM!
No it is not. I don't have to buy a separate car or a separate gas cap or whatever to go fill up my car with gas. There's a standard that car manufacturers follow and a standard that gas stations follow that allow them to interop without issue. I can stop at a Diamond Shamrock, a Wawa, a 7-11, a Sinclair, a Texaco, or a Phillips 66 and get gas at any of them.
And while I'm filling up that gas, I have to pay for it. At most places I can use my Visa, my Discover, my MasterCard, or walk inside and pay cash. American Express is of course the outlier here.
Competition can exist and flourish despite agreed upon standards. A standard to watch all your video from one app despite buying/renting/subscribing to multiple services does not mean an end to competition. To the contrary it would make me significantly more likely to try new services.
In fact Amazon's model for this proves it can work. It's just that their frontend is tied to their subscription service, rather than being its own entity. But I watched Ash vs Evil Dead on Amazon by buying a Starz subscription. I watched Game of Thrones by buying an HBO subscription on Amazon. It was seamless from my perspective and I was able to watch in my favored player.
Now we just need something that can do that but is not tied to a specific service. We'll call it MetaPlayer. I open up MetaPlayer and search for Stranger Things. Since I have a Netflix subscription, I watch it and that's it. I then search for The Simpsons. I don't have Hulu, so I'm prompted to sign up, preferably with one click, and then I can watch the Simpsons the exact same way I watched Stranger Things. And so on.
I have 4 or 5 grocery stores within a short walking distance of me right now. I can buy roughly the same stuff in all of them. I usually go to whichever is cheapest for the stuff I want to buy. They differ in sizes, so they don't stock all the same things, but there's nothing stopping any of them to sell any of the products the others do. This is how healthy competition works.
There's friction in the market that prevents all grocery stores in the area from having the same set of items at the same prices, but the situation is an order of magnitude better for consumers than what you have with video/music/game distribution.
You see this happen not just with movies and shows but any digital media that can be distributed across multiple platforms.
You have a central service that license holders contribute content to. The central service negotiates prices with the license holders and charges a fee to cover its aggregate expenses.
Although music is a different product than video content, I'd really like to see a model like this going forward.
Right now to watch the shows I want, I often have to: (1) Download and keep (multiple) apps installed / updated (2) Have several bills each month for each service (3) Wait a period of X days before the content is available post-airing (4) Watch ads before and during the content
I don't have any of these issues using a service like Spotify.
As long as the single price of Spotify-but-for-video is less than the sum of all the services I want, I won't feel like I'm paying for things I don't need.
Honestly people loved to pay $50+/month for cable before. If I could do that, except able to watch whatever I want, not have to suffer through ads, or be fixed to some viewing schedule, it would be pretty compelling.
All three also aren't producing good original content. Prime, HBO, and Netflix all have great shows to watch. Hulu even is getting in there. Now Disney will be soon. So the market is saturated, but there's also better content.
[0] I use Pandora because while I was paying for Spotify premium the interface broke on Linux and my phone. Not allowing me to create new stations. They told me to fuck off so I stopped paying them. Pandora isn't that much worse.
The single provider aggregating content from many rightsholders model seems stymied by rightsholders' inability to provide standardized information about their content on a consistent basis.
Which service does this? That seems quite crazy and you even define that as "often"!
> Honestly people loved to pay $50+/month for cable before.
That's the price of 3 services and more... people start complaining when they have to pay for 2... Netflix screwed people perception of content value.
Philosophically, yes. Vertical integration reduces competition, reduces standardization, leaves less room for innovative newcomers, and is ultimately bad for consumers.
Economically, it's plausibly more profitable to play the bundling and siloing games.
So if we want to make their content compulsory, are you okay with making software licensing compulsory?
There is no reason that the licensing would only apply when you do not choose your shows or movies. Internet radio stations currently pay 22 cents for every 100 "plays" by those paying a subscription fee. And the system works well, creators are compensated, streaming companies can run a successful business, consumers do not need to subscribe to 5 different services to listen to the music they want.
Movies cost a lot more than music and the price you site isn’t for on demand music - only for services where you can’t choose your songs.
https://www.vox.com/2017/6/15/15807382/spotify-revenue-2016-...
creators are compensated,
Not really:
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/01/26/how-spotify-apple-music-can-...
https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2018/12/25/streaming-music-...
streaming companies can run a successful business,
Not really...
https://venturebeat.com/2019/02/06/spotify-posts-second-cons...
Internet radio, and streaming music companies pay billions in royalties each year. For a variety of reasons about 75% of this does not go to artists and goes instead to record labels and other intermediaries, but this does not mean that creators are not compensated, or that they would be better off without internet radio and streaming.
Spotify becoming profitable amid a competitive industry is a great example of a successful business.
You can look at the different published Netflix deals and see how much they are borrowing to license content to get an idea of how much it costs.
Sure, if you're willing to pay $200 per month. (Which, frankly, would be a fair price to access all movies and TV ever made.)
Unfortunately it might be an uphill battle because Disney just won a huge lawsuit against VidAngel, who was providing a similar service. They are still fighting, and I think I'm different enough that I could survive even if they don't.
Would consumers like navigating a UI similar to Pinterest (boards) or Spotify (playlists) on your TV? It works well for images and music...
I've found myself scrolling for 20-30min sometimes just looking through Netflix, then Prime, then Hulu, then HBO... just to end up watching Friends again..
Disrupting an industry, is nothing more then bending the rules with technology as to avoid regulatory scrutiny. Long term, the disrupter needs to protect its userbase, and ends up becoming the monolith that it replaced.
History repeating itself is nothing new. Its a cycle every generation goes through.