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Comment by ocdtrekkie | Hacker News Reader

Ugh, I am so sick of the "if all of the content I ever want isn't available for less than a single $10 a month sub, I'll pirate it" nonsense. Netflix was never going to be the be-all, end-all of content and its time our generation grew up a little bit.

For the amount of content you could get in a traditional cable package, you should expect to pay about as much as a traditional cable package.

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Why?

A subscription to Netflix already grants me access to way more than I can reasonably watch. If my tastes were perfectly aligned with what Netflix offers (or Disney, or Amazon Prime, et cetera), I could live this exact scenario of everything I could want for less than $10 a month (and some people do).

But if my interests are even slightly more eclectic, I get to pay for each service separately, which is silly if we assume that the production costs are equal for the sake of argument. And even then I would miss out on lots of content because it is being kept in a vault until copyright expires, or because it is geoblocked because the content owner is fishing for exclusive deals, or some-such nonsense.

So economically, $10 a month seems perfectly feasible.

Also, keep in mind that the outrageous costs of the US traditional cable package are very US-specific. In many countries cable television never got that expensive and broad. For those consumers the notion of paying more than $30 a month just for television (no internet included) is absurd.

> A subscription to Netflix already grants me access to way more than I can reasonably watch. If my tastes were perfectly aligned with what Netflix offers

Your primary issue here is referring to volume. Netflix has their own content, then pays for a small handful of extremely popular/valuable titles (see the recent Seinfeld and Big Bang Theory streaming deals, as an example), and then the rest of their content library is cheap trash they got for pennies on the dollar. Entire markets now exist for making cheap movies just to fill out streaming catalogs. (Check out the business model of a company called The Asylum[1].)

Most of the value you're getting is in a very small portion of the overall library of any given company. People aren't going to stay subscribed to Disney+ because it has some old Disney shows which are $10 one-time to own on DVD. They're going to stay subscribed because it has the very latest handful of Disney titles.

[1] https://www.gq.com/story/sharknado-atlantic-rim-pacific-rim-...

But we removed the entire cost of the physical cable network from the equation. Unless you mean the cost of your internet service PLUS the cost of the streaming services should be about equal to your "traditional cable package" ? If so, then you're probably not far off. Except that the cable providers don't also get some margin off delivering the programming anymore.

How did we remove the cost of the physical cable network? They still have to support all of that bandwidth, just over a different format. Plus, most people today also demand these services are without ads, so what traditionally paid for more of the content side has to be made up on the subscription side.

Somehow it worked fine with everything under one roof for low price, until Netflix streaming contracts expired. Something tells me that the change has nothing to do with true costs, and everything to do with an attempt to extract more short-term profit from the IP, regardless of the ultimate damage it will cause to streaming space.

> Somehow it worked fine with everything under one roof for low price, until Netflix streaming contracts expired.

a) That literally never, ever happened. b) Netflix has to take out billions in debt bonds every year.

When all of that content was already paid for via traditional networks, sure. But when everyone is transitioning to streaming, stuff's gotta get paid for.

Woah, free markets balancing themselves...

Crazy

Piracy isn't a "market", it's theft. The free market isn't "balancing itself" when everyone's using an illegal hole in that market.

But it is an imbalance in the market, though. You just have to add the hidden costs of each alternative.

Pirating has costs: financial, legal (chances of getting caught times expected fine), and personal (hassle of hunting down the right torrent). Netflix managed to strike a balance point: you had a higher monetary price, but the legal and personal costs were now gone from the equation.

With all the new competitors, both the price and the personal cost of watching the content you like has risen. The return of people to piracy is then a previsible result of this imbalance.

Quite. Legality is really not that relevant when you look at the problem from pure market theory.

The legality aspect does mean the piracy as a competitor has a weakness that can be exploited by other competitors — e.g., by lobbying for stricter laws or suing individuals, or by appealing to morality — but it is a competitor nonetheless, and acts as one.

Market theory must accommodate things like piracy, just like google considers fines just some risk in their practices.

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