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Comment by coldtea | Hacker News Reader

>It's not "easy" on mobile

Short videos maybe, but I don't think I know anybody, young or old, who cares of streaming full movies on mobile. Maybe some outliers who watch their series on their commute...

The vast majority watch movies when they are at home...

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So are you saying that all of the media streaming companies are wasting money creating mobile apps based on the "people you know"? Is the whole industry under the delusion that their apps are needed? Should they focus on just “people you know” or the entire mobile market?

People like the ability to stream from the phone, but the same mobile apps also target tablets, which are very much used as portable TVs.

Still, I don't see your problem. Given how good browsers are on mobile, a pirate streaming site isn't that much worse or less convenient on a phone than Netflix or YouTube app. You select the video you want to watch, tap Play, tap "full screen", and enjoy the show.

Well, we also have statistics on the number of phones sold per year and the number of tablets. People are buying fewer tablets than phones and that is attributed mostly to people buying larger phones.

Also, it takes some amount of extra work to create an iPad app than an iPhone app. Once again, is the entire media industry delusional or should they be taking advice from HN users?

Why do you think them making apps implies they're used a lot? It's enough that they're used some of the time by some subset of users to make it worth it to them - they get to have more control over experience, more ability to scoop data, and they can offer the ability to locally cache whole movies, which they can't do in a browser.

So in other words people pay for the convenience of streaming services and most people don’t want to carry around hard drives, use torrents, etc.

Just like I said....

Yes, and I keep telling you that mainstream movie piracy nowadays isn't torrents but streaming websites operated by pirates, that look and work similarly to YouTube or Netflix, except all the videos are pirated.

Is this what you call “working similarly”?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21005204

No. What I call "working similarly" is the following:

- I type "fili.cc" in my Firefox on Android

- I don't like anything currently in suggestions, so I tap on the search box, type in "Avengers", and press Search

- I tap the first result, as it is the movie I'm looking for

- On the move page, I tap on one of the players listed

- A video box loads, I press its Play button, then Full Screen button, and watch the movie

It's literally one tap more than Netflix; since this is a site curating pirated streaming sources, I have to pick one of the "players" (each representing a movie source with a bundled JS player).

fili.cc is one of many of such sites; different people I know have their own favorites.

And I get a blank screen on ios -- you know the platform that close to half the US mobile phone population in the US use and way more than half of middle and upper income households use.

So do none of the "people you know" use iOS devices?

Perhaps one or two of the people I know personally have an iPhone; I'm in Europe, and here Android is the dominant hardware. I do sometimes see people with iPhones as I take the bus, recently increasingly often, but it's still far from dominant platform here. As I said, there are many similar sites - this one is primarily targeted to Polish audience, where Android is dominant. Maybe a different site works better on Safari. Maybe US equivalents care about iOS users more.

According to the stats -- iOS has a 25% market share in Europe. (https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/mobile/europe). If it is the same trend as in the US, iOS is more heavily represented by the more affluent population.

More affluent population is more likely to just pay for half dozen streaming services, forgetting they're even subscribed to some of them. But all the remaining majority of the population is both price-sensitive and more likely to use Android.

Anyway, I'm not sure what's your point here.

That the people who are willing to jump through hoops to save $8.99 a month are not Disney’s or any other services target demographics. You can make quite a bit of money ignoring poor people and staying out of the race to the bottom. See Apple.

Or more relevant see Disney. Disney makes a killing with its resorts where the price per ticket is $100+ per day and most people pay for more than one day, but souvenirs, and stay at one of their hotels.

>And I get a blank screen on ios -- you know the platform that close to half the US mobile phone population in the US use and way more than half of middle and upper income households use.

The US is like 4% of the planet. The world is much bigger than New York, North Platte, Dallas, and Des Moines combined, and there are many countries where what the parent said is common place...

To put it in perspective, Netflix has something like 151 subscribers worldwide. The other 7.3 billion people use something else, and it's not Hulu or Disney...

That’s s very simplistic way of looking at the market. That’s like saying the total market for people who may buy tampons is 7.3 billion.

Do you really think the total addressable market for people who might buy a streaming service is 7.3 billion?

>So are you saying that all of the media streaming companies are wasting money creating mobile apps based on the "people you know"?

You make it sound like they waste some fortune on those, so it necessarily has to have a huge market to justify building one.

On the contrary, regardless of whether they have a big mobile watching userbase (and I'm wrong) or not (and I'm right), it still makes sense to have a mobile app.

First, the mobile app budget is a drop in the bucket compared to their operating costs (bandwidth, marketing, offices, license deals, etc). So there's not much of a waste even if nobody uses it, which makes making a mobile app available a no-brainer.

Second, it would bad (competition wise) not having one anyway, even if few really use it...

Third, even if it's just e.g. 10% that watches movies on mobile, why not get them too?

Fourth, it's note that they actually invest specially in their mobile apps to begin with. Usually they use some cross platform framework they use for their web and/or desktop version.

Fifth, do you have better numbers, or some other empirical observations from people you know? Do you see rampant movie watching on the go?

Well seeing that there is no “cross platform framework” to support AirPlay, integration with the TV app, integration with cable providers single sign on authentication that’s built into the OS (you add your TV provider to iOS and most apps use that with your permission) that’s obviously not the case.

As far as the direction that video viewing is going.

https://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-ct-people-spend-more-...

The difference in time was even more pronounced for younger Americans, with people 18 to 34 spending 1 hour and 51 minutes on live and time-shifted TV and 3 hours and 25 minutes on the web or apps on smartphone and tablets in the third quarter of last year, Nielsen said.

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