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Comment by jadams5 | Hacker News Reader

10'ish years ago I remember people being mad at the cable companies for bundling all the channels together into all-or-nothing options. Why did I have to pay for ESPN when I just want the SciFi channel? Here we are today with lots of options where you only pay for what you want and now people want them all bundled back together again!

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People are still complaining about the same thing. Instead of "why do I have to pay for ESPN when I just want the SciFi channel?", it's now "why do I have to pay for the whole catalogue of yet another streaming service, and deal with its idiosyncraticly broken UI, when I just want to watch that one show that one time?".

People still want the same thing: to have all they want to watch available in a single place, through a single interface, and for a flat price. Without ads, market segmentation, or other exploitative trickery.

That's why I don't really believe people who claim that having to pick a streaming service is a burden too great to bear and can only be resolved through piracy. I don't think the issue is too little choice, too much choice, too much cost, or two much mental overhead—I think they just want to pirate and find a reason to use for the moment.

Because you think exposing yourself to higher risk of malware, financial punishment and possibly jail time is something thrilling that people like to do for fun?

Truth is, because of greed of the IP holders, the existing legal avenues of getting media are garbage and, on top of that, subscribing to several services costs more money than reasonable - all that starts to outweigh the aforementioned risk. And the risk is going down now that pirates run streaming sites too, which shield viewers from liability.

See also Steam, and how game piracy dwindled down thanks to cutting out the bullshit. And wrt. mental overhead, just look at how unhappy gamers are now that more companies are trying to compete with Steam by launching exclusives, making it necessary to install additional game launchers (which are almost universally garbage).

People are not lying in their complaints.

Why is that hard to believe? If you only have a few shows that you want to watch, and each is on a different streaming service, is it unreasonable to balk at having to pay for several different services (each at over $10 a month) just for a few shows?

Technology has advanced, but the product has changed little. I don't want to pay a monthly subscription and pay for all of the content on 300 channels, 280+ I will never ever watch. Despite paying $200 a month, I still don't even have the option to watch Spaceballs (substitute any particular movie here) on demand any time I want even if I am willing to pay for that privilege.

We have the technology to make the content of those 300+ channels available to me in a piecemeal a la carte fashion, but cable companies say if I want to watch ESPN I have to pay for 100 other channels. If I only want to watch Game of Thrones, I have to pay a bit under $20 a month to get a whole bunch of other stuff from HBO I will never watch.

I want to pay for only what I watch, but the cable and streaming services want me to pay for whats available to me. That is the big disconnect IMHO. There is no technical reason we can't have one service (like netflix) that has the world's digital content on it, and I can search and pick what I want to watch on it and pay for it and have the content owners get a cut of it. Netflix was kinda close for awhile, but then due to their licensing deals started pushing and pulling titles at random, and then different studios are now trying to put up Chinese walls to ensure that they have exclusive rights to content. I feel everyone loses here, and I myself can't imagine ever paying for a separate service just to watch star wars or Disney movies. There seems to be a real network effect here of just making everything available.

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