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Comment by coldtea | Hacker News Reader

Why don't major services (Netflix, Disney, HULU, etc) come together to build a best of breed shared service, that operates vendor-neutrally, and each gets to keep all the profits from people watching their stuff?

Each could still have its own promotions, bundles, etc (e.g. pay X more to watch new movies from Disney), but at least the base proposition can have a single subscription price and some pay as you consume more scheme, single analytics, etc.

In my ideal autocratic regime, they'd be forced to work under such a scheme, like power companies are forced to ultimately connect to the same grid (at least in some countries).

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You just invented the Cable TV network.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cable_television_in_the_United...

This is what confuses me about the current conversation around streaming services. It seems like everyone just wants cable again.

Why is it confusing? Having content fractured across 10 different services each at $10.99/mo is a pain in the bum. Just finding a movie under this setup is hard. I either have to bounce around from service to service, or start googling on my phone to see where it is actually streaming -- and probably find out its exclusively on some _other_ streaming platform.

It's only a matter of time before some clever MBA comes up with Cable2.0, which bundles up all the streaming services under one roof (or series of roofs (cable packages!)) for 60% of the what it would cost to maintain subscriptions to all of them.

...Then the ads will come back

And we'll have gone full circle.

Finding movies is easy. I just googled "Avengers Endgame" and it told me it's available instantly for $5 from Google Play, Youtube, Vudu, and Amazon. I googled "The Graduate" and it told me it's available for $4 on various platforms and free on Netflix with a subscription. I google "Seinfeld" and it told me it's availabe on Hulu and TBS with a subscription.

I would much rather pick and choose which entertainment I actually want to pay for than pay a large monthly fee for everything. It saves me money.

"everyone" in this instance being "parties that stand to profit from this business model." I don't think consumers want this at all, and I'd even go so far as to argue the only reason cable still exists as a service is that no company has found a cheap way to stream live sports.

Reading this thread, and other similar ones on different platforms, it seems like people definitely do want to pay one monthly fee to a single company that provides all of their entertainment needs. That's just on-demand cable.

Ironically, some of the cable companies have figured out how to stream live sports for cheap. I pay my cable company $25 a month for live streaming of ABC, Fox, NBC, CBS, ESPN, ESPN2, NFL Network, Fox Sports, NBC Sports, TBS, Food Network, National Geographic, and CNN.

To my understanding the cable tv network

1) wasn't on demand 2) there were competing cable networks not a single one sharing profits based on which production network's shows people watched

They could create a new company to keep track of who is watching what so each content creator gets paid accordingly. And it would be one company to pay for the per view option you describe. I could see this growing to 100s of different content providers and available to nearly every home!

It's interesting that we've come full circle. This seems like an opportunity for the tv streaming services to add streaming content from different providers and eventually we end up with a 150/mo for streaming TV with premium channels like HBO, NETFLIX, DISNEY, ESPN, etc.

I'm guessing they don't do this voluntarily because they've seen how the music industry had its revenues eroded by Spotify/iTunes (where mostly the user can pick one and get pretty much everything). They're probably ignoring the fact that music piracy is presumably lower than ever because of this.

Additionally there must be 'big fish' within their market. People who spend $1,000s on consuming viewing entertainment and would go whatever the 'preferred/legal' way to do it was.

Because no one forced them to :). I think they'll get around to working on that later on, but first they'll ruin the whole streaming space in an attempt to capture all the value they can from their IP directly.

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