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Comment by mort96 | Hacker News Reader

That's not true though. It's not like the people who currently spend lots of time watching niche videos on YouTube (myself included) would start ordering flash memory with those videos instead if only it wasn't for copyright. The case for movies is a bit stronger, but my family's movie/TV show routine is to figure out what we want to watch last minute, then find that on netflix or crunchyroll or piracy sites and then stream it.

I also think the current copyright system is insane, but streaming genuinely is more convenient than buying physical media. If anything, DRM makes media available through streaming _less_ convenient.

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No, but they would download their content once and store it locally instead of repeatedly re-streaming it every time.

IF you have children, you're probably familiar with the concept of streaming Frozen for the 50th time. If you're using netflix or spotify or similar, you're probably also familiar with the concept of something that was previously available just vanishing because of circumstances outside of your control.

Streaming is mostly a DRM/copyright enforcement tool. The only time streaming is actually adding value is live streaming.

Agreed. If 5G delivers as promoted, there is no reason to 'stream' any static content...it simply caches to your flash memory in milliseconds (song) or seconds (movie, Netflix already has mobile downloading). I can see a case for streaming in VR/AR or active content (live/multiplayer,etc), but streaming static content isn't efficient.

That doesn’t happen now though - the video doesn’t download comptlelty as fast as possible, it downloads 30 seconds or so ahead of the play position.

4G is perfectly fine for that, but if I Street watching a 40 minute video before I go on the tube, I can’t finish once underground

That is the promise of faster networks. Static content would no longer need 'streaming', as in caching these bit chunks...you would simply get the entire segment, and the device would deliver it to you at the appropriate 'speed'.

I don’t need a faster network for that - YouTube doesn’t download at line speed, it downloads in real time.

If it was line speed, a 40 minute episode would download with current 4g while I was waiting for the next train. On WiFi it would be down before I walked out of range.

As chipsets improve it also means the same download should require less power from the device’s battery, if you believe the race the idle argument, which has always held in the past.

I get that you would want something local if you happen to re-watch the same things again and again. I don't, and keeping local copies of something in case I want to re-watch it is a waste of space.

Stuff being available exclusively through streaming is certainly a way to enforce DRM, but that doesn't mean people wouldn't still largely be streaming even if stuff was available for download without DRM too.

If you choose to download and not store your copy after consuming the media, that's your choice.

Streaming takes that choice away from the user in the first place. With nothing gained in exchange.

> No, but they would download their content once and store it locally instead of repeatedly re-streaming it every time.

That's like saying "people don't need to listen to the radio for the same pop songs, they can just play a CD with them"

That was a multi billion dollar industry.

Which was killed by streaming, not by people storing songs locally.

No, it was killed by piracy. Streaming broke Apple’s dominance.

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