Disney Bans Netflix Ads as Streaming’s Marketing Wars Intensify | Hacker News Reader

Disney Bans Netflix Ads as Streaming’s Marketing Wars Intensify

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226 pointsAznHisoka329 comments

What I find especially annoying nowadays is that a lot of shows simply aren't releasing on DVD or Blu-Ray anymore, or if they do, it's in laughably small quantities.

For example; I wanted to buy "Final Space" on Blu-Ray, and it doesn't appear to exist. I then look for DVD, and the only place to purchase that is on TBS's website, and it's been sold out for quite awhile.

I really don't want to have to sign up for another streaming service, I just want to buy the damn show, rip it myself, and watch it on my server; sadly it looks like I'm somewhat in the minority on this, and I suppose I get it, but it does upset me that soon the only way to guarantee that I get to have something forever is via piracy.

EDIT:

I just checked, apparently the DVD for Final Space is back in stock. I think my point still stands, and I think that it's weird that a show that was broadcast in 1080p isn't available on blu-ray.

They don't like that you can rip it and then play it back on whatever machines you want, forever. They want to be able to sell you the same content over and over again... either via streaming subscription, or via a new format when it comes out.

There's that, but there's also the cost of manufacturing and distributing the physical media. It needs cover designs, labeling, menu design, people expect features like commentaries, etc.

Or, you can invest nothing extra, and the majority of your audience will still engage with the product.

The cost/benefit analysis doesn't point to physical media as worth it.

I never understood why they had video media ship their own UI. It’s usually annoying to figure out and sometimes absolutely idiotic (like The Fifth Element that forces you to “catch” menu entries by timing your keypresses). It’s like if music CD would have you argue with the band before you could hear the music, instead of just pressing “play”.

Oh, I can shed some light on that !

In another life I did a stint in the subtitle industry (right around the glorious DVD boom and before the arrival of Blue-Ray).

Execs from distributors would sit down in a room once a movie had been subbed and played around the UI to see if "every language can be selected". How to spice up that job and make it look like indispensable ? Become an UI expert in the shades of faux shadow TIFF pictures overlay and timing in sound loop in menus. The fact that magazines were grading DVD's menus and UI also helped. "It's part of the experience". From then on you could not not provide fancy menus.

The funny part ? We had to purposefully disable built-in functionalities (soundtrack switching, subtitles switching, scene skipping, etc.) to enforce some "entertaining" loading times (and the usual anti-piracy scheme). So that the exec can sit in the room discussing for three hours how a menu DVD should look and sound to "give a mood". Rinse and repeat, you got a job.

Fun fact: the whole operation relied heavily on DVD shrink which we used to remove those limitations. Some took the habit to introduce hidden code to disable stuff or still allow skipping.

I am a bit bitter about it but I acknowledge that for most people it's part of the experience and it's expected. But forcing it on people who don't like it ? Bummer.

edit: I don't remember the name of the major software used to produce DVD menus (it was a tool chain anyway) (sonic something ?) but it was horrible compared to flash and flash mx from the mid 2000's. Think: timeline, b-frame based loop, on a slow media, still frame for background, simple transparent overlay TIFF files to render highlighted menu items, the editor was basically a vid and audio track editor with loops and skip points. No code. Mac and Windows versions not compatible.

Adobe had a good hobbyist software but there were small showstoppers problems I can't remember.

Anyway, it went all downhill really fast as the money needed to get a studio on track to do the authoring went from hundred of thousand of euros for hardware to a PC with early NAS and cheap HDD. A guy could set up his own subtitling and authoring studio on a dime. But you needed connections with distributors to make some money.

I don’t think they care about ripping. So few people buy DVDs now and any that aren’t sold are returned to the manufacturer.

Why is this even a concern? You can easily find it all online on torrent sites anyway.

Not saying you're wrong, I just don't understand.

I guess that's possible, but I've bought 100s of videos and movies online and never lost access for a second. Probably bought my first one 15+ years ago. I've probably lost half my physical media and hard drives, however.

Sounds like you have been lucky picking retailers for your online purchases... there have been numerous stories about retailers going out of business and taking their DRM servers offline.

Interestingly, I have never lost hard drive data in 25 years or so... I am pretty meticulous in my backups.

There is only one digital video store that I’m aware of that went out of business and they allowed you to transfer your content.

If you buy movies from the four major studios that support Movies Anywhere and you connect your accounts, you can purchase on Google Play, Amazon Prime, Apple, or Vudu and they are credited to each of your accounts.

That being said, I wouldn’t buy digital movies either. I will rent them.

Yeah, I did the math on backups and it doesn't make sense. I had a terrabyte or so of my Blue-Ray backups and even using Glacier it was enough to just buy a digital movie every month or so. Now I probably have 5-10 terrabytes in digital products.

Just checked prices again and it's at $4 a month for a terrabyte, which is less, but I'd still just rather rent/buy than pay for backups.

Several music streaming providers have trimmed their catalogs and then I discovered that songs in my playlists were removed. I never got a warning saying by the way these x many songs you like and pay a monthly rent for are being removed, they just did it.

That’s a completely different scenario. You aren’t paying to own the music you are paying to “rent it”. Digital music you buy hasn’t been DRM encumbered for a decade.

When have you “bought” digital music or movies and lost access to them?

Yeah but has iTunes ever done that to you for music you bought? Streaming catalogues aren’t the same thing.

If they don't sell it, torrent it. Artificial scarcity is a joke that only works as long as you keep shaking your head and going along with the system.

This. Respect is a two way street. I have zero problems pirating content from companies who don't respect me.

Refusing to pirate from shitty companies on ethical grounds is like refusing to switch from a shitty job to a better one based on loyalty to the company. If loyalty meant anything the company wouldn't be treating you so poorly in the first place. Same goes for Disney or EA or whoever else.

You are not alone. I buy the physical media and then rip it for personal use. For me, the practice started when they tried that copy protection system that was little more than 'reduced quality'. Unfortunately, it meant it didn't play on my DVD. But the ripping process has jitter and error correction which means no more missed frames.

Signing up for streaming drm only content is a lose lose for me, especially when the bandwidth and speed in my country is rather dismal.

With the landscape of streaming-only future, I am more and more interested in collect and watch good old movies from around the world. I like cinema, but I don't want to subscribe for every service out there.

Isn't iTunes and friends is more convenient and there are no subscription.

Regardless of your feelings on DRM or access on preferred devices, I think another issue that often gets overlooked (or people just don't know about it) is that you end up forfeiting a pretty nice consumer protection. One of the benefits of a credit card is if a charge is made in error and the company doesn't want to make good on it, you can issue a chargeback and your credit card issuer will intervene and either side with you or the seller. You might not win, but at least you get a chance to make your case. With many (all?) of these services, the moment you issue a chargeback you lose access to all your legitimately purchased (actually, licensed) content. And since what they really do is ban your account, if you have a balance from one of their gift cards, you lose all of that as well.

Another factor is that if you move countries some of your "purchased" movies disappear because you only "purchased" the right to watch them in territory X. While DVDs also made a half-hearted attempt at artificially preserving market separation with "zones" (I guess to continue the natural market separation that came from NTSC vs PAL and friends in the VHS days?) that could be worked around easily enough.

I’ve never heard of Apple banning an account. My experience is that they have never denied a refund request.

I can't speak to Apple specifically, but a refund request and a chargeback are different things. If you receive an unexpected charge, you may request a chargeback without even realizing what is happening. It's not exactly incumbent upon you to spend time with a CS rep. trying to work out why they charged you for something they shouldn't have. The most common cases I've heard are around compromised accounts, regardless of which party was responsible.

You don’t talk to anyone. You click on “request refund” and give a reason. You’re much less likely to have negative consequences from requesting a refund than a chargeback.

Avoiding a chargeback would avoid a ban for a chargeback. That's not really in dispute. My point is it's a legitimate consumer protection that you unwittingly forfeit when you buy into a provider's digital ecosystem. Given no one actually reads a EULA, I think it's safe to say they don't realize what may happen to their licensed content if they do initiate a chargeback. A quick search suggests Apple is no different in this regard [1].

[1] -- https://discussions.apple.com/thread/6474540 (But, it's old, so may be out of date? I didn't spend too much time looking into this one provider.)

And on down - Apple only said that he couldn’t use his Amex because of the chargeback. Not that he couldn’t use his account.

Just for the record I found out why my it would not accept my updated AMEX information. Because of the charge back due to a dispute that I put through my AMEX card when the app company never got back to me on unauthorized charge AMEX was able to get me my credit but then Apple has the right according to them to no longer accept your AMEX card as form of payment. Well this is another reason why I hate APPLE period, I only own a iPad and will never own a iPhone. I told them they have lost me as a client. It's ridiculious that they are going to tell me that I cannot use my AMEX because of a $7.99 charge back. PLEASE don't insult my intelligence.. I am done.

Are you able to stream videos from any of those services on Plex, or similar servers? And if so, is it hassle-free?

No.

iTunes DRM can be stripped quite easily. I do it to everything I purchase through it.

Define “easily”.

This is why I'm so sad digital rights, proof of purchase systems like UltraViolet never really went anywhere.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UltraViolet_(system)

Nowadays‘ digital locker is “Movies Anywhere” and it mostly works across iTunes, Amazon, Google Play, Disney/Marvel, and various other movie retailers.

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

Oh, that would be great! I've never heard of that before.

This is exactly what we need, removing the lock-in. I could buy something and then watch it on netflix or on amazon prime, doesn't matter! I would love it. Sad that it's going to be discontinued.

It was quite big in the UK, mainly due to BBC involvement, I guess. As you say - shame it has failed.

How is ripping from web vs dvd different?

Web is usually very compressed, to save on the amount of data, although compared to 512x384 resolution of a dvd even compressed 720p stream would be superior.

Then I would wonder why it would still be called "720p streaming" anymore if compression that is being used is not lossless..

Well enjoy it while it lasts at all.

I predict that as content producers attempt to exert more control over how people consume media they will be met with a new "cord cutting" movement that will circumvent the systems put in place to exert such power. We will eventually settle on slow burn for everything with a value added fee on a per-show basis. A mix of the Spotify and the iTunes model, if you will.

Unless, everyone gets so used to pirating things that they ignore the evolutions in pricing models and find it easier to just pirate content.

Here's my reaction: I just stopped watching for the most part and started doing other things instead.

If I'm not doing something active now and I just want to sit - I read the funny pages (reddit), I read hacker news, I find questions in my mind to research, I play video games, read a book, start a side-project and/or listen to some music.

My wife still watches all sorts of garbage TV and if not for her I'd have cancelled cable a long time ago.

I made a tool which wraps around youtube-dl to manage fine-grained subscription and automatic downloading of various youtube channels. When I want passive entertainment, I have a directory full of interesting, high-quality videos that cater to specific niches I like. The end result is much better than TV ever was- no ads, access whenever I want- even offline- and content made by passionate hobbyists rather than mass marketers.

I feel much happier paying a handful of content creators via Patreon than spending money on a cable or streaming service subscription.

I like your approach! Mind sharing the tool ? Thanks

That sounds really interesting. How do you manage the library, especially in regard to storage limits, expiring old content, etc?

So far I just handle it manually. I've dialed in pretty good preferences for incoming content, (for example, using regex-based whitelists and blacklists to weed out material I'm not interested in from channels that aren't already organized into appropriate playlists) and when I browse the videos directory to find something to watch I delete things that have been sitting there a while which I don't expect to get around to.

There would be a lot more work to do if I wanted to "product-ize" the tool, and periodically youtube breaks it by adding a new feature or moving something around. For personal use, though, it's very needs-suiting. The whole approach is also less of a tempting distraction than browsing youtube itself, so it's easier to manage how much time I spend watching videos. If I ever run out of content, I just go for a walk, or read a book!

I'd be curious to see it as well, sounds good/useful even in its nascent state. I have something similar-ish in that I have a makefile/script setup where all I do is dump a file of url's/playlists/people and let a cron job download updates to things on a 12 hour basis.

Then I just have a setup in plex for youtube videos and I have plethora of content to watch when I have time.

Its jarring to use "normal" youtube now and all the ads after using this setup.

Also really nice for archiving channels and/or preparing for when youtube randomly decides to throw strikes on videos and not being able to see them anymore or people setting things to private etc...

You might want to give Plex a try. As long as you use a preset pattern for folders/filenames, it can automatically load any arbitrary set of videos as "series" in the UI: https://support.plex.tv/articles/200265256-naming-home-serie...

The only people complaining about having to "subscribe to multiple services" are the power watchers. I don't follow series. I let series finish, then watch them... If you do this, its actually much more enjoyable (no waiting for next episode, or next season, and no stressing out about spoilers online). And this way you can just subscribe to the services for a single month.

Same here. I never had strong feelings about streaming services or TV, but a year ago or so I realized I was rarely watching Netflix much and cancelled my subscription. Other activities had implicitly filled in the time.

These days it seems people are doing one of two things:

1. Sharing account details. eg four people in a circle of friends, one will have Netflix, another Prime Video, someone else will have Now TV and so on. And each of them will use the others account so all of them get access to all of the services.

2. Some of the more well off individuals or less socially connected will sign up to two or three services and pirate everything else.

Whichever way you look at it, basically consumers have gotten fed up with the vendor lock ins and have gone back to sharing content.

It has always been this way though. Even when VHS's were a thing, you'd get families which would share videos with each other. Sometimes those films and TV shows were just recorded straight off the TV. This is also why I think there is a culture where people don't care about downloading content because there has always been an understanding that it was fine to record stuff on the TV and radio for personal consumption back before the internet was in every home. The daft thing is the TV and film industry had a massive opportunity to disrupt this culture but instead their own greed has just encouraged people back into old habits.

I know regulation isn't a popular topic on here but I do wonder if it's time someone stepped in and said "You guys need to start cooperating together!"

> 1. Sharing account details. eg four people in a circle of friends, one will have Netflix, another Prime Video, someone else will have Now TV and so on. And each of them will use the others account so all of them get access to all of the services.

Sadly Disney is now lobbying to make that a crime

Sadly that doesn't surprise me. :(

How does one share Prime Video credentials without giving blanket access to one's Amazon account? Asking for a friend.

You can add a “child” to your account and set it so you have to approve all purchases.

I have a couple primary services (Netflix, Hulu), then I will cycle through something else to binge-watch a season, cancel it and sign on to another service for other content one month at a time).

We'll have another "piracy epidemic" where streaming services have hysterics and try to ban piracy. This will predictably not work as it hasn't the last few times. Someone will make purchasing content easy again and everyone will use that.

Corporations will get involved, jack the prices up, throw in ads and try to invent cable again.

Repeat.

I wouldn't mind going back to buying stuff a la cart if it weren't for the fact that buying access to an individual season of an individual show costs more than an entire month of service at the buffet.

Piracy is the ultimate cord cutting method

When the product is better (easier, cheaper, higher quality) it's bound to happen.

When Netflix streaming (and Spotify, Steam) became popular it made consuming your favourite content easy, cheap and decent quality.

Now, with so many competing platforms, watching your favourite shows is more expensive and more difficult (having to have loads of accounts and remember which show is where, etc). Piracy will bloom.

As a Canadian, it's definitely hte "remember which show is where" part that has me really disliking where streaming has gone in the past year. Time was I'd open Netflix and my shows were there. Now I have Netflix, Prime, and Crave, and sometimes I'll have the same show on two of them, but different seasons. Maybe I'll start using an aggregator that will launch the streaming service that has my show, which seems like what Netflix was originally supposed to be.

https://www.justwatch.com may be close to what you are imagining, though it's a bandaid over the problem you describe.

Getting more and more tempting over here. I am tired of my monthly video bills going higher and higher just to watch a couple of shows I like.

I used to pirate a lot but I just ended up finding a streaming site to watch the 5 or so movies that I like to watch. Just make sure to wear your internet condoms (VPN, Ublock, Ghostery)

That is still piracy: you are knowingly taking part in unlicensed distribution. The networks don't care if you are downloading for later watching or streaming live, they just care if you are paying or not.

Uploading is a criminal offense. Downloading is just civil (for now, that is).

I've been pirating since age 11. You can have it set up so that it is essentially as easy as streaming netflix.

Pirating is possible, but IMO takes a bit of work.

Out of curiosity I looked to see if there were any bootlegged Beauty and the Beast (original) available for my kids to watch. Couldn't find anything that (1) worked and (2) worked with Chromecast.

Content producers have no voice, unless they are the owner which in many cases they are not.

Case in point: all I want right now is to stream the award-winning film “Give me Liberty”. It is over a year old and available precisely nowhere.

And when it comes available, the chances are high it’s not on one of the several competing services I pay for on a monthly basis.

I'm myself going back in time and just last week got my first Blu-ray player. They, and the discs, are quite well priced now, often below streaming prices. I'll keep Netflix though, but won't be getting another service.

The movement towards streaming exclusively is probably intended to eliminate ambiguity and traceability from the pirated sources. I wouldn't be surprised if PII is/will be encoded into the content. Once media ownership has been phased out, content owners will start going after infringers.

It just feels like the various streaming services are morphing into everything that we hated about cable television.

There are differences: no commercials, shows on demand, more shows, and higher quality (arguably) shows. Additionally, it’s possible to just subscribe to the one service you really like because they all have a lot of content.

> no commercials

Anyone who watches Hulu has heard "will play with a commercial before and after the show". Hulu has been increasing the number of ads they include. It used to be ad free for many shows. Then they went to 30 second ads. Now they're stuffing 180 seconds or more on many shows.

> higher quality (arguably) shows

Definitely arguable. My feeling is the quality is going down quite a bit, but I think that's because the demand for content volume has increased (in the era of binge watching, a single TV series is started and over in one weekend).

> Additionally, it’s possible to just subscribe to the one service you really like because they all have a lot of content.

This might be true now. But there are multiple high profile streaming services launching in the next year (e.g. Disney+), which is prompting Disney to pull all content off other platforms.

> Definitely arguable. My feeling is the quality is going down quite a bit, but I think that's because the demand for content volume has increased (in the era of binge watching, a single TV series is started and over in one weekend).

Which is sad because there are plenty of better things to do than TV. I love shows as much as the next person, but if streaming really does morph back into Cable, I will just end up watching little to no TV and pirating anything I must see, which is rare. I'm already most of the way there anyhow. Life's too short for modern brainwashing via advertising. Vegetation is death.

Quitting TV may exactly be what people need

Ever since I started paying for Hulu years ago, I have not seen a single ad while watching it.

A few shows still have ads even with the paid option. I know Grey's Anatomy is (or was at one time) one of them, but I believe there are a few others.

Every time I’ve looked it’s fewer shows, though - last I checked it was only 3. They were popular ones but nothing I had any interest in, so I switched from Netflix (I was done waiting for them to let me turn off that horrid auto-preview misfeature) and I have never once seen an ad on Hulu.

FWIW, the Hulu package associated with the Disney+ option is not the "commercial free" package. So you'll have to pay a bit more with the Disney+ to retain your ad-free experience on Hulu.

Disney+ will be that one service for a lot of people. And the places they are pulling from will still have a lot to watch, e.g., people who like Netflix shows could still only subscribe to Netflix. I’m not saying that people will only subscribe to one service, just that they could get away with one $5-15/mo payment and have more good stuff to watch than they have time for, on demand. That’s really different than cable.

Ad tiers of streaming services are really cheap (approaching zero over time), so if we are looking at those, then the cost of a bunch of them is less than cable equivalent and don’t need to be better (even though they are.)

I’m pretty excited for the Disney+Hulu bundle. That and the content I get from my Prime membership (not to mention the ability to rent the odd movie/show from Amazon) is pretty close to everything I want.

Marvel/Disney/Star Wars/Simpsons... I’m good for awhile.

> no commercials

And yet Amazon Prime insists on showing me ads for their other shows before I can watch the one I actually tapped on to watch. Or the next episode of the show I'm watching. It really diminishes the value a lot.

Amazon's streaming platform feels like being at a used car lot, lots of dark patterns trying to get you to buy or rent, steering you away from included content.

I vastly prefer the experience of Netflix.

On my TV and Chromecast the audio is also not in sync with the video. The user experience in regards to currently watched TV shows is extremely weird and I have to search them all the time with my TV remote on a bad, full-sized on-screen keyboard.

Prime Video simply feels like a bad Chinese knockoff of Netflix.

HBO does the same thing, for every single episode you watch.

It only shows ads on programs that aren't theirs which is even now nefarious.

Hulu shows commercials even if you pay.

I'm sure Netflix will start once revenue starts slipping.

Netflix shows commercials right now; they’re just commercials for other Netflix shows. I doubt they’ll start selling the post-roll space to third parties, though, as it’s evidently more profitable for them to use that space to keep you subscribing to the service than to make a few cents for an ad placement.

As for cable-style interstitial commercials, though, the only way I could see Netflix ever doing that is if the company were to enter a Blockbuster-level tailspin. It would be selling off the core Netflix experience just to stay afloat.

It bothers me how many people think I’m psychotic when I express this opinion. Frankly, I don’t care whose content they are promoting - SOMEONE please put a fucking price tag on a service that plays exactly the content I select AND NOTHING ELSE.

Stupid semantic arguments about whether it is an ad are not are completely irrelevant to the fact that I don’t want to see content I did not pick.

> Hulu shows commercials even if you pay.

Hulu has literally half a dozen old shows that they are contractually required to show an ad in front of or take down entirely. The vast, vast majority of users on the service will never see one.

It's a very different scenario to a company actively looking to increase advertising.

Hulu does offer an ad-free tier, it's like double the cost of the basic plan. I haven't sprung for it yet, but I'm sorely tempted.

I can see Netflix looking to a similar model in the future. What are they at now, $12.99? I can see the current base subscription going to $14.99, while simultaneously launching an ad-supported version priced around $7.99.

Edit: Netflix actually DOES offer a cheaper $8.99 plan currently. This one is restricted to one screen at a time, and does not offer content in HD. So if they stuck ads on it, maybe they could bring the price down to like $5.99.

YouTube 30 second preroll ads cost currently around $ 7 per 1000 views and it's decreasing. So to take Netflix from $ 14.99 to $ 7.99 per month they would have to show you around 500 minutes of ads every month. That's 33 of those 30 seconds ads every day, without skipping a day. While you still pay $ 7.99 per month as well. I don't expect consumers will accept that.

So the only way they can make an ad-supported Netflix work is to create some form of much more effective ad (which usually means taking more of your data) or attract a very specific high value audience (makes them too much of a niche player for their size)

I pay for the ad-free tier but I still get ads for their live streaming service (and for their DVR, every commercial break gets replaced with 3 minutes of non-fastforwardable commercial content), which is why I'm probably going to stop using their streaming service. I really only wanted it for sports channels anyway.

Netflix already does, they have pretty obvious product placement.

Julian's glass of rum and coke in trailer park boys? Is that reason why I always have the urge for a glass of rum and coke when I watch tpb?

I feel like this is some sort of maxim/law: Its inevitable that any product which currently does not include ads will eventually include ads.

Advertising is a disease, it infects and corrupts everything it touches. Often it starts when a company realizes it's another revenue stream, and adds commercials to a product people already pay for. And when there are competitors, this lets a company undercut them.

Well, that will be the moment I leave Netflix.

If we’re talking subscription tiers with commercials, the cost per month for a bunch of services is much cheaper than cable equivalent.

Netflix starts rolling commercials the minute you open the website or app

Netflix has experimented with it. They do product placement still, but the show disjointed has plain commericals. They are a tad unusual for commercials, in that they share the theme of the show.

When the content and the advertisement have fully meshed, only then does one reach true nirvana.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b9hepxidZyo

> no commercials

No, but instead a pretty bad attempts at suggesting content because you happen once to watch xyz out of no reason.

> more shows

If you live in country that happens to have license agreements done well - there's still lot of content I am unable to see on Netflix in Poland because someone holds license rights for the show or movie. I'd like to see older movies, tv series - things I grow up with but instead I'm being constantly flooded with new stuff that I'm not fond of (not mention that damn autoplay preview in "header" part of Netflix in both site and applications; I really wish there would be a way to disable that "feature").

> no commercials, shows on demand, more shows, and higher quality (arguably) shows.

Ohh you sweet summer child... Cable was the same way when it launched. Everyone knows how this ends.

The history is quite different, the biggest difference being that there is (effectively) no geographical impediment to selling a streaming service, allowing for much more competition. Additionally, global scale allows budgets for much more content production per service/media company than used to be possible.

There's no need to be so unnecessarily condescending. Customers are used to the ad-free model and will be unlikely to accept a return to the 1/3 ads 2/3 content model of cable without significant customer attrition, which streaming services can ill afford in the current competitive landscape.

There are commercials on all of the "cable replacement" steaming services. I use YouTube TV and it's worse than cable. They prevent me from watching my DVR content for certain content, instead forcing me to watch the "on demand" version with unskippable ads. Comcast/Xfinity DVR never did that. The only real benefit is that it's slightly cheaper and supports multiple "profiles".

> There are commercials on all of the "cable replacement" steaming services.

No commercials on Netflix.

I"m sure they do product placement and other marketing stuff, though.

Netflix is not a "cable replacement" streaming service. Those services are the so-called VMVPDs such as PS Vue, DirecTV Now, SlingTV, YouTube TV, etc. The key characteristic of these services that differentiates them from Netflix is that they have some coverage of live TV, local TV, and/or sports.

Satellite service has, in the past, failed at local TV - but most folks view that as a cable replacement.

And like others have said, people are using Netflix to replace cable - and as such, it is a cable replacement. It isn't difficult to get some live news from major services (BBC, for example) or get some local news from local sources. I don't know much about sports as I've never really watched them - but I know in some places, you need a fairly special cable package to have good access and that sometimes, a disagreement between the networks and the cable company will keep them from you. Using sports as a marker seems pretty flimsy.

The parent comment is about "streaming services" not just Netflix.

DirecTV did this on their cable boxes for a few channels. I would schedule a show to record, and it would record the show during the air time to the hard drive. While the show was playing it would play off the hard drive. When the show cut to an ad break, the cable box would connect to the internet to show an unskippable ad.

I'll admit this was only on a few networks and maybe only certain programs, but overall it was a pretty poor experience.

The difference this time is that there's no artificial limit on content volume. In other words a tv channel can only deliver 24 hours of content a day, a streaming service can deliver an unbounded amount. This is going to change the dynamics severely I think.

With Comcast cable TV we had a rather large "on demand" library of content. Almost every network offered their content in this manor.

There's been one great outcome of this: me discovering my city's library. It has an incredible film and tv collection. Anything newer than 2016 is also on Blu Ray. If you're a big cinephile like me, having thousands of free rentals at you're disposal is like being a kid in a candy store. Plus, hundreds of Criterion Collection editions for us film buffs.

Even worse! There's a factiod tv in my office building's elevators, and one of the news items it showed was Comcast was shipping its customers a Roku-like streaming device. The catch? It won't work with Disney Plus. There have been various wars on other devices (Chromecast/Apple TV/Fire) where certain streaming channels don't work.

We got a la cart purchase power. Now we just need to bring our own devices for each service.

I've been a long time Roku fan, and for now it can stream everything I want (though there was a time where I needed a Chromecast to get YouTube). When will the battling streaming services change that though?

This. Cable television at least has bundling economics going for it [1]. In most cases, streaming services don't. (Save, perhaps, for the forthcoming Disney+ bundle with ESPN+ and Hulu.)

[1]: http://cdixon.org/2012/07/08/how-bundling-benefits-sellers-a...

I'm having a hard time understanding the argument being made in that article. If I only want the History channel, then paying for the bundle means I'm paying for a channel I don't want. Given that I only want about 20 channels that my plan offers, but I have to pay for 500, I'm paying for a lot I have no use for. There's even a specific charge for sports channels that I have _never_ watched even once.

Well, why wouldn't it? Cable TV's various irritations occurred because of the economics of their business; at the end of the day, they want to get paid too.

Now that streaming has gone from experimental status to mainstream adoption status, it now has the same pressures to deliver profits above all else. What is the customer going to do, go back to cable TV?

The cable industry spent decades discovering the absolute maximum value they could extract from the consumer.

Netflix/Hulu have become successful in part because they undercut cable with lower subscription fees and fewer commercials.

It makes sense that once streaming becomes the dominent mode of television consumption, with traditional cable pushed out, that they begin to adopt some of the more aggressive value extraction mechanisms as did traditional cable service.

I predict the same will happen, or perhaps it's already beginning to happen, with Amazon in the retail sector (Amazon is providing more value for less money compared with traditional retail, which is causing retail chains to close shop, which will lead Amazon to discover new ways to extract new value once brick/mortar chains are gone and no longer competing).

But, that is capitalism.

> It just feels like the various streaming services are morphing into everything that we hated about cable television.

Why is that?

For years, I heard people saying "I just wish I could get ala carte cable". Well, the future is now.

How is this ala carte? they meant specific shows, or in some cases specific channels. Not just "this random conglomerate's licensed properties"

There's a few products or there that do just this. Not a lot, but one or two.

Not exactly. Being able to choose "Netflix" is a lot different than choosing a specific channel which is what people were referring to at the time.

It's still closer to it than cable was. And people hate it.

> Well, the future is now.

Really? How can I buy the shows & movies I want and literally nothing else?

What? You've been able to do that for a long time on Itunes, Google play, and Amazon. You have also been able to buy individual tv shows and movie physical copies at stores for decades.

>and literally nothing else

Why is this a need? The minimum unit you can purchase is a month of service. You are free to subscribe and unsubscribe as many times as you want. I'm not aware of a single service that costs more than either a single movie theater ticket or a single newly released Blu-ray/DVD. So you are free to subscribe to HBO watch Game of Thrones, cancel HBO, subscribe to Netflix, watch BoJack Horseman, cancel Netflix, subscribe to Amazon, watch Marvelous Mrs Maisel, cancel Amazon, and so on. That is much more control and choice than cable subscribers had a decade ago. We don't need to make perfect the enemy of the good.

Services such as Google Play, iTunes, Vudu, Amazon ("non-Prime") Video, Fandango, etc., satisfy this use case, at least in certain geographies.

iTunes works OK for me :P

Try it on Windows. Or in an unsupported device. Or anywhere they don't want you to see it. You own nothing with digital. It's a long term rental. Also try passing it along when you die.

Try passing along a vinyl or CD or VHS or DVD collection when you die. See how fast it ends up at a flea market, or on the curb waiting for the trash truck. ALL digital goods are ephemeral one way or the other, unless you're an actual archivist. That's why archivists are important as their own discipline.

Nah, a lot of people actually do maintain vinyl/DVD collections. CD/VHS sure they may discard but that's because those forms of distribution were inherently flawed and degrade much quicker - VHS tapes stretch out, CDs get scratched up like crazy.

iTunes has worked on Windows since 2003. If you buy a movie on iTunes from one of the five studios that support Movies Anywhere, you can port your purchase to Amazon, Google? Or Vudu v

With digital you own a license to an intangible good you can view on multiple devices.

The license generally does pass along with your purchase account when you die.

It is not yours. The only reason I ever buy digital products is because I'm prepared to pirate them back if the service is yanked off of me.

If this is over public airways (like ABC) then Disney should loose their rights to that public space. Netflix should be in court yesterday over this. And the public should be up in arms over this as they are using our PUBLIC airways. For steaming fine but not on PUBLIC spectrum.

Wait... is it normal for TV channels to show ads for competitors? (Not owned by the same conglomerate?)

Like... I've never seen an ad for Fox on CBS, or for ABC on NBC. Same as I don't think I've ever seen ads for the NYT inside of the WSJ.

I don't have a strong opinion on the matter... but is a policy against Netflix ads on Disney properties really something new and newsworthy, or just par for the course for companies in the US which compete generally?

So lets say you have a public airway to provide TV on and let's say you also own a cable company. Should you be allowed to show ads for that cable company and block ads for commercials at the same rate you charge some soda company for the same time slot for an ad from the satellite company that happens to compete with the cable company you own? Your method of broadcast is over a public owned spectrum. That is the issue. Even for cable, the rights for you to deliver that service is over public land.

Honestly, I don't see what public transmission has to do with it.

Either "advertising" should be considered a "free speech" issue from the point of view of the broadcaster -- that they have the "free speech" to allow/disallow whatever ads they want -- whether because of vulgarity, quality, competition, political alignment, whatever they want, including charging different ads different rates if they so choose.

Or we consider advertising space a "free speech" issue from the point of view of advertisers, that any and all advertising on TV, cable, newspapers, magazines, etc. should be equally available to the highest bidder. Thus a newspaper should not be able to discriminate against an advertiser because of vulgarity, competition, quality, brand alignment, etc.

It's actually a really thorny issue because there are really good arguments on both sides.

Not taking into account market power and anti competitive behavior is a mistake. This is about something other than speech -- the right for firms to compete with each other on a level playing field. When these types of actions are allowed, our economic system deteriorates. But regulatory capture is so strong in the US that Disney and many others will skate by.

In general I agree. However let us say I own a website that I put ads on. It is my site, I pay for it. Should I have to allow ads for things I disagree with? I am not saying I know the answer here. It would be simpler to say "if you take paid for ads you are not allowed to turn down any ad that does not violate public guidelines". Does this apply to penis pills during kids cartoons? It is not an simpler answer.

> It would be simpler to say "if you take paid for ads you are not allowed to turn down any ad that does not violate public guidelines". Does this apply to penis pills during kids cartoons? It is not an simpler answer.

Seems to me it IS a simple answer:

"If you take paid for ads you are not allowed to turn down any ad that does not violate public guidelines"

What if someone wanted to run an ad against vaccinations? Or the post very ad that you quoted - should Disney be forced to advertise penis enlargement ads during a children’s show?

"that does not violate public guidelines"

Set guidelines.

So can one of those guidelines be “we don’t advertise streaming services”? Who gets to set those guidelines? Do you want the government deciding everything that can and cannot be advertised?

As presented, this isn’t a thorny issue.

Forcing a company to run any ad based on nothing more than who pays the most money is not only a terrible idea, but effectively compelled speech.

“Free speech” doesn’t include a guarantee that someone will publish it for you. It just means no one can stop you from publishing it.

The public airwaves argument is the only argument that makes any sense at all, but it’s a weak one in my opinion; and that’s now how it currently works in practice.

The public airwaves have slightly modified free speech constraints because they are a finite commodity. If a station chose to, for example, just broadcast white noise, the FCC can yank their license and give it to someone broadcasting content.

And for the past two decades, the amount of viewing that has been done over the public airways has been declining precipitously. There are more ways to advertise than the networks.

There are regulations that exist for public broadcasts that do not apply to cable.

Yes they are here:

https://www.fcc.gov/media/radio/public-and-broadcasting#BUSI...

But they explicitly state broadcasters can mostly choose as they like:

> Except for the requirements concerning political advertisements, the limits on the number of commercials that can be aired during children’s programming and the prohibition of advertisements over noncommercial educational stations, the Commission does not regulate a licensee’s business practices, such as its advertising rates or its profits. Rates charged for broadcast time are matters for private negotiation between sponsors and stations. Except for certain classes of political advertisements, STATION LICENSEES HAVE FULL DISCRETION TO ACCEPT OR REJECT ANY ADVERTISING.

(all-caps added for emphasis)

The article even said that it is not abnormal for networks to not allow rival networks to advertise on their channel if they specify a time.

ABC pays for the right to rent the airways and do with it as they please within certain parameters. When you rent an apartment don’t you have the expectation of being allowed to do what you want within your apartment within certain constraints?

It wouldn’t really hurt Disney that much if they couldn’t reach the relatively few people who watch TV over an antennae.

> For steaming fine but not on PUBLIC spectrum. I have to call BS on this. I'm paying for the service and the bandwidth. It often goes over public land or utilities, or at least not over pipes owned by Disney, so if the ad is loaded client side, then Disney is SOL and shouldn't have a say in it.

That said, ads suck, blah blah and I personally don't care.

I agree. I have not had TV service for 10+ years. Amazon and Netflix and VPN (from USA) so we can watch BBC. Dear BBC if you read this - allow non-UK to pay the TV license even at 4x the cost. You will sell it.

Shhh... don’t force us back to piracy iPlayer is nice.

Oh trust me they know, but their rockstar Red Hat infrastructure can take it! (and I believe there are legal complications in the UK for them to sell that otherwise public TV access abroad)

Cancel your $100/m cable service, and replace it with 10 different $10/m streaming services. Progress.

Indeed, it is progress:

- No ads

- You can watch on demand

- Orders of magnitude more choice in what to watch

- Writers have a lot more flexibility. They don't have to be advertiser friendly.

- Writers don't have to write cliffhangers every N minutes so you come back after the ad break.

- Writers don't have to worry about sequence like they did with TV/Cable, because they know you'll be able to watch the show in order. Meaning that their worlds and characters can change and have real consequence.

Just pick your favorite 2 or 3 services. You don't have watch everything.

No ads is not always true, but otherwise I agree with you.

Another benefit is less shitty pricing models, none of this first year pricing after which it goes up 50% that Comcast loves to do, and no year-long contracts.

Hulu has ads. Any others?

Hulu is the only one with ads, and that's if you get the 5$ version. If you get the 10$ version as implied in the post above, it has no ads.

There are a few shows which have ads regardless of plan (Grey's Anatomy is one of them)

> - Writers don't have to write cliffhangers every N minutes so you come back after the ad break.

yes!, and am I glad about it, we have more paced stories

The first two are already worth it alone. No ads double the monetary value in my mind, and on demand is by far the most important part. Sure you can sorta fix that with a DVR but not even really.

Say what you want, but ten streaming services aren’t the same as a cable subscription nor obviously better. Different things are different. Sure I can dial up what I want to watch of the provided content on demand with streaming services. But that’s not the same as turning on the tv and switching between curated content.

I think the biggest advantage is that you can share accounts with your friends.

I wanted to watch Borat this weekend because the Spy came out and Netflix, Hulu, and HBO Now didn't have it. Big fat meh.

Disney Plus will have ads

I cancelled my cable back in 2008 and while I agree with some of your points, the industry didn't evolve into the thing I envisioned when I did it.

> - No ads

Not really, Hulu still has ads for the TV stuff, even if you're on Hulu plus. But yeah, overall, way WAY less ads. For now. But I foresee this is more of a capture strategy. After most of us cancel cable, I think we're gonna see a lot of ads on streaming services. Greed is good. In the meantime, product placement galore. Stranger Things was IMO disgusting from this perspective. Ads just moved from interrupting you to basically taking over the shows.

> - You can watch on demand

I agree, this is indeed a good thing

> - Orders of magnitude more choice in what to watch

Yes, but no. Most streaming services have a lot of filler. A lot of garbage is counted against the 'we have a 10k catalog of movies' but in the end, you have a lot of choice, between a douche and a whole bunch of turds.

> - Writers have a lot more flexibility. They don't have to be advertiser friendly.

Nope, nope, nope. Yes from the show's structure perspective, but in general, It's the exact opposite. Now, they have to write in way more product placement pieces.

> - Writers don't have to write cliffhangers every N minutes so you come back after the ad break. - Writers don't have to worry about sequence like they did with TV/Cable, because they know you'll be able to watch the show in order. Meaning that their worlds and characters can change and have real consequence.

While it's true writers don't have the same problems, they have different problems. Now they have to pander to specific user-research needs, they need to create season-wide cliffhangers and because they know you'll watch the show in order, there's way less shit they can get away with.

It's more likely that I turn back to pirating. I'll lazily buy 1-3 services and whatever else I really want, I'll just rip those from the interwebs.

Streaming is only convenient when products aren't siloed. If I need to keep track of more than n services (different n for different people), piracy just becomes the more convenient option.

I'd like to pay the hard working people that produce shows I really like. The middleman is just making it really difficult to do.

Anyone imagining they were gonna get all their favorite shows for less money was likely delusional. Especially if that includes sports.

It costs a certain amount of money to make these programs, if everyone is paying 50% less to get channels/services 'a la carte', then there's not enough money to make all those shows anymore.

Have you done a cost breakdown on cable budgets?

How do you know 50% of this money isn't going to executives,shareholders, and bloated corporate hierarchy...and the actual budget for the shows is the same no matter the pricing.

Streaming services charge way way less than cable with much better content.

> then there's not enough money to make all those shows anymore

But now that you have a more complete picture of the lifetime value of a show you know which top 50% (or top XX%) of shows to keep producing in which to cancel.

Watching the content on 10 different services sounds like a full-time job. Who could possibly have time for that?

You're acting like you need to watch everything on each service

The hidden point here is that with cable, you didn't really have the option but to get a 100$ package, and especially with the lack of on-demand, it made it much harder to watch all the shows you wanted.

Here, you can pick and choose much better, and even if you have shows you want on every single service, you can very easily rotate with on-demand.

For a family of 5, it is just 2 services each.

For myself, I would stretch to even get to 2 services, although it's not hard to imagine. The part I have difficulty with in this scenario is that this hypothetical family of five is all watching completely disjoint shows, and none of them even happen to be on the same service. Birthday-paradox-type calculations would show that's pretty unlikely. Not to mention this family sounds... very isolated.

>The part I have difficulty with in this scenario is that this hypothetical family of five is all watching completely disjoint shows, and none of them even happen to be on the same service.

I am trying to understand what you mean by this. Why cannot the shows you all watch overlap? Pretty much every streaming service allows for sharing accounts by allowing multiple user profiles.

Across me and my group of friends, we have all major streaming services, with one person paying for one, another person paying for another, etc. Each one of us has their own personal profile on each of them, so when I watch something, it gets added only to my own profile without messing with my friends' profiles.

All of us have our own preferences, but a lot of popular shows we watch obviously overlap, and I don't see what issue that could cause. We just use our own profiles and have had zero issues with treating those as our personal ones.

My family really was that hypothetical family.

My parents overlapped on some shows, but could have highly different tastes. I'm 6 years older than my sister and 11 older than my brother. We had a little bit of overlap, but not a lot simply because of maturity differences. If you are looking at the same amount of money, streaming would have seemed better simply because of less actual crap, more convenience, and increased satisfaction.

And no, we were not isolated at all. Public school and everything, though the city sizes changed. We were never that far from a somewhat bigger city, though.

We use Amazon Prime Video, and plan to rotate through other services with the goal of never subbing to more than two (including Amazon).

Though lately after recently canceling Netflix we haven't subbed to another service. We are planning to do HBO next but haven't felt the need yet.

Including cable internet we're paying around $107/mo for 4 services. For cable and internet it would be nearly $300/mo when all the taxes and fees. Not sure it's not a deal to cut cable. We might add sports for another $10 a month.

And none of those $10/m services provide local news coverage, so give over to social media to find out what's going on in your community. Or pile on another subscription for your local newspaper.

And that's not even getting into sports.

> And none of those $10/m services provide local news coverage,

Your local news coverage is probably already streamed on the web for free already but if it's not, they definitely stream it over the air.

All you need is to buy a 15$ antenna and you should be able to receive local news in HD to your TV.

I bought one specifically for that. I see this as just as important as having a battery radio for emergencies. We never know whether the internet will be up, but the antenna will certainly mostly always works as long as I can power my TV (and I'm equip for it).

Free OTA TV channels still exist. I get local sports and local news on those channels fine and they even come in 1080i now. Most TV still have digital tuners, so you just need an antenna. I use a HDHomeRun tuner hooked up to my network so I can watch and DVR it myself

Also YouTube TV has local channels and sports I believe. But that's 50$/mo

We use basic cable for that -- it is thrown in for free with our the internet package. Otherwise, it seems like most local news have free roku channels.

Do/did people regularly pay that much for cable without live sports? My understanding is that it’s usually the live sports channels (or HBO, etc) that would bump the cost into the higher tiers.

It is if you're someone that only wants 1 or 2 of the services.

Just rotate through the 10 different $10/m streaming services

I kinda prefer that... it's not ideal, but I like it better.

The day that I see "Netflix Animation Studios" in the Cinema or online is the day that Disney Animation and Dreamworks will be shaking in their boots.

Why exactly? Netflix churns out more original programming than most TV networks, but like most VC plays, most of them fail and a couple become huge. Netflix has hit originals like House of Cards and Stranger Things but that's not exactly hurting HBO.

Ignoring the superior content quality of streaming services, lack of ads, and on-demand model, having 10 different content streams is still better than one even if only because you have finer grained control over the content you watch. I don't have to pay for a bunch of reality TV, sports, soap operas, infomercials, etc when the only content worth watching is a handful of shows scattered across 5 or 6 channels.

Assuming you’re writing sarcastically, I don’t understand how that isn’t improvement.

Get real-debrid + cyberflix android app + Nvidia shield. 16e for 6 months

or don't. decisions decisions. if netflix can get a few good shows every month or a few movies... that's enough value for what they are charging and about the amount of free time i have to invest in watching tv.

I would short Netflix at this market cap...

Even if you don't think Disney is a serious threat, they are losing at their own game to Amazon, which is producing objectively better quality content given their dominance at the Emmys over Netflix (which was nearly shut out).

They have resorted to overpaying billions for old reruns like Seinfeld. At some point people will wake up and wonder why they're paying $15/month to watch reruns and return to actually buying content again for things like that.

Fleabag is a spectacular show, and deserves every accolade. At the same time, it has a limited appeal market.

Outside of that lucky pick up, Amazon really hasn't done all that well. Many of their big hype shows have been abysmal. That Jack Ryan one is just terrible -- I had big expectations for it, but it's so poorly acted, and so bizarrely edited, that I still marvel that it was released as is. If I actually had to pay for Amazon's offering, instead of it being some bizarre throw-in with Prime, I wouldn't.

At the same time, Netflix has had a lot of fantastic, and fantastically successful, shows. Shows with enormous appeal.

So I wouldn't start shorting Netflix because Fleabag won some awards. Indeed, the trope that Netflix is so over has gone on here for time eternal.

In general I have found Netflix's in house shows to have a higher production value and better writing then Amazon's in house shows. Amazon has a few gems, but Netflix has been more consistent. For many people with Prime accounts though, the streaming service is a bonus on top of additional services they are using their account for, such as twitch prime. I think that Apples new streaming service in the long run will be the competitor to Netflix, but only if they are able to create a library of content that is compelling.

The fundamental problem for Netflix is they have to make money from their subscriptions. Amazon can fund video production at break even or a loss indefinitely. Apple might be able to too, but their shareholders won’t be happy. Google+YouTube is another potential problem, at some point if they so choose to be. For certain demographics, they are fine just watching YouTube all day and not wanting a Netflix subscription.

Disney appears to be another big threat for IP reasons, but we have yet to see how their rollout goes.

Netflix probably has to sell ads and/or do something else to remain independent, if the other big tech companies are going to continue to desire to be media companies. If Netflix’s stock drops a lot, they’ll be a big acquisition target.

Time will tell. Apple undercutting Netflix in price may convince people to switch platforms, but if Apple does not have a good library of content they will likely struggle to retain users. Although user growth has slowed at Netflix, user retention has remained high. Netflix's stocks have dipped, but it is expected considering all the recent news. I am not a trader, but people often buy on rumor and sell on news.

> Fleabag is a spectacular show, and deserves every accolade.

And it hardly has anything to do with Amazon, they just helped fund some of it with BBC3.

The latest Emmys resulted in 27 awards for Netflix, second only to HBO. Amazon won 8.

It took me a minute to remember what the Emmy's were. They don't strike me a good means of measuring quality... they kind of just seem like a nepotism/popularity contest.

>they kind of just seem like a nepotism/popularity contest.

EVERY award is just a nepotism/popularity contest. Nothing is done via merit anymore. I don't know about the Emmy judges but the Oscar judges have gone on record to say they don't even bother watching the vast majority of submissions and just go by "buzz".

Look at the Hugo sci fi book award's being gamed for political correctness.

Obama won a Nobel peace price for...what exactly?

The internet has levelled the playing field but somehow a show produced by a multi billion dollar corporation always wins awards over a net original on Vimeo

> I would short Netflix at this market cap...

Netflix has $12B in debt. Subscriber growth has slowed a lot (2.7M per quarter). They're competing with big players with deep pockets, and sometimes large content libraries.

Services are getting so fragmented that I could see that being a net loss for the industry. Maybe people would have paid $20 per month for Netflix with 95% content coverage, but I cancelled my subscription because $12 per month wasn't worth it for the three shows I watched.

i think a mistake netflix has made is to encourage exclusives.

When netflix had marketshare and somewhat a monopoly, they should've pushed for laws to prevent monopolies/exclusive content (or create deals/made agreements for such). Instead, they leaned in to making content the main attraction of their service.

I want streaming service to be content agnostic, and that studios making the content are mandated to allow all streaming services to serve their content. Streaming services should compete on speed, convenience and other non-content related features. Imagine if DVD/tape players were content exclusive - you'd have to buy a differently branded DVD player different shows from different studios!

> you'd have to buy a differently branded DVD player different shows from different studios!

You mean like having to go Blu-Ray for shows/movies from some studios, and HD-DVD for shows from others? https://www.engadget.com/2008/02/20/two-years-of-battle-betw...

Yes, I want this as well.

In the beginning I liked netflix because it felt as if everything was there, like on spotify. I always saw netflix just as a distributor of content produced by others.

Then they started to make all their own shows, and I found less and less of the stuff that I wanted to watch. It's as if my ISP would stop to serve me google and facebook, and instead made their own homemade replacements and served me those instead.

Do you want to force Disney to allow streaming its own content to rivals? Who should decide a fair licensing cost? Commodity products don’t make money when they can’t differentiate - see Spotify, Android manufacturers, and PC manufacturers.

Yes.

> Who should decide a fair licensing cost?

the cost is the same - the studio decides it, and any streaming services gets to use the IP if they pay the studio.

> Commodity products don’t make money when they can’t differentiate

that's absolutely not true. They can just charge X% above operating costs (where X is usually 10%). It is true that they cannot make exorbitant amounts of high margin profit. But that's a good outcome.

That's great though. Everything should be a commodity, easily available and with profit margins nearing zero.

So streaming as a commodity?

Perhaps if Internet service were regulated like a utility then paying for fragmented streaming wouldn't be so bad. As it is just a few hundred megabits per second rivals the cost of television cable in my parent's time.

Amazon's UX is horrible though. Having to access it through the amazon.com storefront is like having to walk through a crowded gift shop to get into your movie theater.

And then they mix "Prime Included" content with stuff you have to buy - directing you away from the content can access to continue upselling.

couldn't have said it better.

I think Netflix is in a lot of trouble. For years, their catalog has been shrinking, replaced with Netflix Original Series/Movies. For a while, the Original Series were actually good quality.

Then this past week, watched "The I-Land" which was heavily advertised on Netflix. Watched 1 episode, and then started episode 2, and then quit. It was basically a pile of garbage.

Apparently, I am not along in my assessment.

https://www.tvinsider.com/815148/the-i-land-netflix-reviews/

https://qz.com/quartzy/1712203/the-i-land-on-netflix-is-the-...

Basically, I use Netflix mainly for entertainment for my children. Since they are huge Disney fans, I can't wait for Disney to release their streaming service, so I can cancel my Netflix subscription.

The fact that their autoplaying trailers are still blasting in every one of their apps despite vocal outcry in tech press and all over the internet should be enough to let you know that they are circling the drain.

When you ruin your product in effort to game your users, you've already lost.

Don't you think maybe Netflix knows something you don't that led them to make that decision despite the "outcry"? They HAVE to have validated the autoplay approach with some data that proves it achieves some goal of theirs.

The fact that they have enough conviction in their data to stick with autoplay despite the bad press should be a very good sign about a company's culture (and therefore their future).

Autoplay smells very much like a Netflix vice president's pet project. Everybody hates it but it's politically impossible within Netflix to kill it until that vice president leaves. See Google+.

Mcdonalds knows that the VAST MAJORITY of the populace goes to McD for fries,nuggets,burgers and shakes but still has salads and healthier food on it's menu now for people who don't want to.

I don't see how putting a toggle in their app to turn off all these things is such a major change. This is like snapchat "i don't care about android" levels of tech stupidity/laziness

> They HAVE to have validated the autoplay approach with some data that proves it achieves some goal of theirs.

I don't necessarily agree that they're "circling the drain" as GP put it, but hitting a goal can definitely be a sign that a company is in trouble. Autoplay videos might net them some short-term viewership at the expense of long-term goodwill and engagement.

Maybe they validated the autoplay approach and it won on some metric, but I think it is the wrong metric to optimize for. I don't think it the one which counts, monthly renewals. I seriously doubt there are people who stick around because of autoplay, but there are certainly people who quit because of it. Maybe the people who stick around do manage to find the next show to watch a few minutes faster with autoplay, but it isn't worth losing paying customers over.

> When you ruin your product in effort to game your users, you've already lost.

Yep, they do this in all sorts of ways. It feels exactly like you're getting gamed.

- Rotated order of shows / movies in all categories

- Rotated images for the same shows and movies

- It doesn't show you that you've previously watched something while browsing

- UI will show "in watch list" label over expiration times so you can't tell when it'll disappear

- DVD listings (and even the details page) stopped showing that you already had this movie shipped to you in the past

They do everything possible to make it as hard as possible to get a scope of their catalog size and to avoid re-watches. If you've been subbed for 10 years it's sometimes hard to remember you watched something 8 years ago.

The most surprising part of this comment is that you made it through an entire episode of “The I-Land”. I had to turn off episode 1 about 10 minutes in before my brain went into involuntary self-destruct mode.

The weird thing about "The I-Land" as well as their other recent fail "Another Life" is that in both cases it's the script that fails horribly. Ok so "Another Life" had a limited budget and most of it went to Katee, but "I-Land" has very high production value. So why didn't they spend more than $5 on the script in either case?

edit: The really annoying thing about "I-Land" is that it has an interesting premise at the core. They could have done so much better with that, it physically hurts.

Disney Plus will show ads to children. I don't want corporations adversarially manipulating my children. Unfortunately piracy is the most ethical option.

Did you ever watch He-Man, Transformers, or GI-Joe growing up?

Disney* is ad free.

I just cancelled Netflix this month. If they're gonna be throwing down $100 million a year for Friends they can be doing better with their catalogue than what's there. I'm out.

> return to actually buying content again

It's a nice thought, but lets be honesty piracy is coming back for round 2 off the back of the splintered streaming ecosystem.

>It's a nice thought, but lets be honesty piracy is coming back for round 2 off the back of the splintered streaming ecosystem.

Movie / TV streaming & PC gaming. It's really a bummer, because I don't mind subscriptions, but I will not subscribe to everyone's.

Many of us don't care about original content. I joined Netflix for movies, not original TV-style shows. Their movie catalog has become abysmal. The only reason I keep my account is because I shared it with my parents and they use it for my nephew.

Their movie catalog was always abysmal.

Ya, but $15/m isn't a whole lot. I hardly watch Netflix anymore, and there are certainly bigger fish to fry when it comes to saving money or maybe spend more time trying to make more money.

It adds up when people start having to choose among Netflix, Disney, Hulu, HBO, Apple, Amazon, etc. When it was just Netflix agreed it's not a lot, but the big threat of the existence of these competing services is that it forces people to budget.

Right now, it still falls under the typical cable bundle pricing. However, there is definitely a finite supply of good actors, writers, and directors in Hollywood (demonstrated by the quality of recent releases). Netflix is also competing with gathering attention as a whole, so the growth of podcasts, Instagram, YouTube, or Twitch eat at the value of Netflix's all you can eat buffet style approach.

The two wildcards are Apple and Amazon. I don't see either company competing directly, but they could lower the cost of customer acquisition (especially internationally) for HBO Max, Comcast, etc. and take a cut of the subscription. If that doesn't work, I think these other services will have a hard time competing internationally outside of Disney.

I don't think many people will cancel Netflix, but right now, it seems the content needs and costs scale in proportion to subscribers, which isn't ideal for them. I could see Netflix struggling over the next couple of years, but Comcast and AT&T struggling, even more, to get their services off the ground. At that point, perhaps AT&T and Comcast go back to selling content to Netflix, or perhaps Amazon buys up the content rights cheaply after everyone else is decimated.

I'm at the point where I'm considering rotating services every few months... HBO in the fall, Netflix in the winter, Hulu in the Spring, ... I already cancelled HBO, and Netflix is barely keeping my interest right now.

Something is going wrong with the streaming market. In Germany, nobody is streaming Seinfeld!

Amazon stopped a few months ago. You just cannot watch Seinfeld online.

I use Netflix for my Office player and that's about it.

The one thing I enjoyed with Netflix's original shows was that they weren't held back by these archaic regional deals. A show released by them releases globally. Netflix going global was the moment I jumped on. It still irritates me that the major film studios lag in releasing stuff on Netflix worldwide. There's no regional advertising deals to cut. What's the hold up??

Amazon has a similar problem of having a worthless catalogue where I live. Every movie I clicked on during my prime trial said "not available in your region".

HBO was possibly the biggest disappointment where despite not having to cut deals for ads in their shows, their steaming service is still not available globally.

With Disney talking ads in their offering, I have zero hope that they will launch worldwide at the scale of Netflix, and certainly not in Sri Lanka. Maybe India. But not Sri Lanka.

Funnily enough, google play has been the best option for me. I have various networks' TV series purchased on it. And movie night usually means renting the major movie studio produced stuff from Google play. I hope they stick around for a long time to come because they somehow seem to be the one globally available neutral ground left. Weird how that works.

Amazon prime in Germany has many movies where the only available option is dubbed. The original audio is literally impossible to watch. And this together with Germans' total aversion to subtitles, makes amazon prime almost worthless for non German speaking residents.

Google shows gmail at the top. Lawsuits!

Disney won't show competitors ads at all. Meh.

These cases aren't identical, but the difference still feels weird.

Yes, it's almost as though the traditional media likes to paint a bad picture of tech companies specifically.

I think the copyright lobby is too strong, but it would be a very positive move to change tv/film licensing to mirror radio's royalty model. Let the best service provider win, with a (more or less) complete catalog.

The “radio royalty model” doesn’t pay singers but does pay writers. Also, it’s only for non on demand music. There is a similar model for programmatic internet streaming like Pandora that doesn’t apply where you get to choose your music like Spotify.

Even with that model, the government decides how much is paid and every song costs the same amount. Should studios be forced to license a movie that cost $120 million as one that costs $3 million.

Also, in that case should software developers be forced to sell their software at one government regulated price? Why stop there? Why shouldn’t we just let the government set all prices?

that's a slippery slope fallacy but movies are generally all priced the same and make up the difference in volume.

Nobody pays different ticket prices at the box office for blockbusters.

They charge the distributors more at both the theaters and for streaming.

Also, you didn’t answer the question. Are you okay with the government mandating how other products are distributed?

like alcohol, pharmaceuticals, weapons, etc? or like copyrighted works, perhaps?

Generally I support a free market approach except for where it's been proven that a free market approach alone won't suffice.

This is a perfect sweet spot at the moment where I will happily pay for Netflix at 15 bucks a month and Spotify for 10 and not pirate anything.

The issue with the large congolmerates like Disney taking over is that I worry they're going to return to the 'Cable pricing model' except delivered via internet, and consumers will be back to being exploited for as much as possible with as many Ad's crammed into the content as possible.

Then we'll start pirating again and have to listen to the big conglomerates complain about how much piracy is hurting their business...

It's already happening. Office being pulled from netflix is the most recent victim of corporations realizing it's not hard to just clone netflix in house and keep all the profit.

I'm not really sure what's going on with Netflix and DreamWorks, but Netflix has a new kids show that looks oddly like the "How to Train Your Dragon" shows that recently weren't renewed.

I dunno why they just can't follow the music streaming model and put all of their content on the different streaming platforms like Spotify, Apple, Amazon, Tidal and let the market decide on the differing features.

I guess Hollywood and the movie/tv studios need to have their own Napster moment.

This has been said many times but it's worth repeating it. Piracy is coming back and is coming back hard.

The last piracy boom didn't have highly scalable clouds, gigabit download connections, mobile, commercial VPN services, mainstream machine learning, etc. This fragmentation is going to lead to a situation with a high demand for pirated shows and movies and there are plenty of folks in this world willing to capitalize on that.

I know a friend who pirates movies they physically own because it's easier to download a torrent than to wait 2 hours for Handbrake to do a rip that won't be as good quality.

Can they spell "anti-trust violation"?

I don't see the trust issue here. Indeed, upthread I saw somebody complaining about there being too many services, which would seem to be the opposite of a monopoly (to my not-legally-trained mind).

Good point if they had a dominant market position. According to https://csimarket.com/stocks/competitionSEG2.php?code=DIS their share is around 10% which I don't thinks qualifies as dominant.

How many politicians have the balls to go after Disney? Not many.

They don't need to; they already know how to buy congressfolk.

You don’t even need to buy them anymore. The current Senate would block anti-puppy murdering legislation if it suited their agenda. I mean, truly, I have no faith that any sensible regulation for this would make it through Congress. It’s inconceivable, and that’s sad.

On the other hand, we don't allow radical legislation to go through and that's a huge positive in some cases. We would never let a Brexit/secession go through because we'd never be able to agree on it.

Tangent: Why do we value dogs and cats more than pigs and cows?

It’s pretty impressive that Disney would make a pretty penny off their Netflix deal, while Netflix did (IMO) an admirable job with the Marvel IP, and even then at the end the relationship gets described as “adversarial” — by Disney, not netflix. Don’t get me wrong I’m gonna watch the shows, but this is some cutthroat stuff.

http://archive.is/xvHsX

I wish that Netflix was the sole dominant market player in this space such that for all intents and purposes it was the place to get streaming content so that I didn’t have a hodgepodge of services to subscribe to with different interfaces and user experiences and content. As the silos of content increase piracy will as well.

I’m tired of my favorite shows being kicked off of Netflix for seemingly arbitrary reasons so I keep local copies around or buy shows on iTunes but as costs rise to own instead of stream I think piracy will increase instead of decrease as it has in the heyday of Netflix.

Makes sense. Broadcasters don't allow ads from their competitors on their networks (you would never see an ad for a CBS show on Freeform),so idk why they would allow ads from streamers. Probably thought it was incremental dollars when it just basically meant Netflix was stealing subscribes away from them.

At the end of the day, Disney is still gonna sell that inventory (maybe at a slightly lower premium). So I would see it's worth it to lose $5-10MM a year if it means slightly cutting off the reach of one of your biggest competitors.

Ultimately we’ll end up at “choose your own channels” but at the cost of 15$ per channel. If you subscribed to all of them you’d be right back at cable prices again, minus sports content.

Then ultimately piracy will once again proliferate.

Why minus sports content?

> Why minus sports content?

For some reason, people really care about live sports.

It doesn't really fit the streaming model.

It does, it just exposes how expensive it is and the sellers don’t like that because it will reduce the number of viewers, and then that starts lowering the value of the ads that are paid for, hence lowering the value of the sports teams themselves.

Bundling sports with other media allowed for price obfuscation.

yup, a lot of sports streaming companies have gone on a anti-piracy bend recently. a couple of sport streaming subreddits got the ban hammer for eg. RIP r/nbastreams

https://melmagazine.com/en-us/story/nba-streams-reddit-banne...

Oh boy, I can't wait for regulation here.

This is strictly worse than cable (with on demand) now. We went so far we slid backwards!

I don't care what company made what thing. I just want to be able to consume the content in an easy way, not have go juggle five different apps.

We need multiple providers that have all the content and that you pay a simple flat rate. They should be indistinguishable commodities like Spotify, Google Play, etc.

It amuses me to hear you say that, since for years people complained about bundling from the cable companies. They wanted to pay a la carte for exactly the channels they'd consume, in the belief that the price would be lower by removing the channels that they didn't want.

The situations aren't exactly parallel, but in a lot of ways we got what many people always wanted, but that doesn't make everybody happy. I draw no conclusion from that observation, other than to note it.

I think that is the problem with using "the people want X".

I always complained about bundling, and I am very happy with the current situation (yes, even considering that in the next years I will have about 10 services that I could subscribe to).

I would assume that GP might not have complaining at all about bundling and is now unhappy with the current situation where they would have to subscribe to a lot more channels to have the same value for him.

I apologize. I hadn't intended an accusation of hypocrisy. I'd tried to phrase around that implication, but I see that I didn't do a very good job of it. I'm going to edit to (hopefully) make that clearer.

They almost certainly would be lower as the aggregate demand curve for individual products is lower than the aggregate demand for a bundled group of products [0].

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Product_bundling

Nobody cares about channels (ok probably some people do)... they care about the content. The a la carte would be for a single show, not a whole channel.

Netflix is no different than a cable channel with on-demand access that happened to be essentially the first so they had a lot of stuff on the channel.

This is the exact opposite of what I want. I want to watch Star trek and on CBS and not pay for 500 CSI like crime dramas, but here I am paying for all the BS again.

I agree! We've already been down this road so many times.

There's a regulation that Movie Studios cannot own Movie Theaters. You can go see movies from every studio at any theater near you, which makes them compete on the quality of the experience and price instead of just movie selection.

Online streaming needs that same regulation. Disney should not be allowed to operate a streaming service. Netflix/Hulu/Amazon Prime Video would all need to be broken up into the studio and the streaming platform. They should have to distribute their content to streaming services who then can compete on cost and UX. Then the studios would WANT to maximize the number of platforms their content appears on.

This would be a huge win for everyone involved except Disney/Netflix/Amazon. Consumers would get true competition between platforms on price and experience. The content producers would get a lot more reach for their content. And Disney doesn't get to yank all their movies off Netflix to seek rent on their own platform.

So if Disney should not be allowed to sell their own product over the internet, does that mean that you also believe that software developers shouldn’t be allowed to sell their own content? Should no one be allowed to sell their own stuff over the internet?

> This is strictly worse than cable (with on demand) now. We went so far we slid backwards!

What? $100/mo with ads? On demand on cable has ads, and almost never has full seasons of even moderately popular shows.

I didn't have cable TV for the past 15 years or so. Just didn't need that all that garbage for the occasional thing I really wanted to see.

Netflix was the simple aggregator through which I could watch what I liked. Hasn't been for a while, though. There are better things to do with my life anyway than consuming movies and shows.

Lots of people saying about moving away from regular TV to streaming, but it depends how I want to watch. Sometimes I want to select an episode and sit down to watch it properly, which streaming is good for. But sometimes normal TV fulfils my needs to drunkenly half-watch a random Top Gear.

Agreed. There's something to be said for coming home from work and just doing random channel surfing where you stumble upon a show 15 minutes into a Season 4 episode.

With the streaming services, there's no such equivalent, so if you want to watch something new, you have to start at Season 1, Episode 1. It feels like too heavy of a commitment. In my experience, many shows don't get good until after 6-7 episodes, and I will often start at Season 2 just so I can skip the "character development" arcs and go right into the plotline.

This has completely obvious anti-trust implications. How many major networks are there - 4. And all of them except fox either have streaming services or will have them soon (nbc's peacock, disney/abc whatever its called, cbs has streaming, and fox will have one I'm sure).

Or, you know, just don't waste your time/money subscribing to any service at all. I don't have a TV and have never subscribed to a streaming service. My life is perfectly happy and full of entertainment outside work, and my wallet says thanks.

This could backfire spectacularly if Netflix retains enough content to remain a viable option for most parents with small children.

But what do I know, I prefer Shaun the Sheep to Mickey Mouse so don't listen to me.

that's the problem, I'm not sure I'm finding Netflix interesting these days. I've been finding more variety @ Hulu

It seems strange that all these streaming services are spending so much on advertising.

Fantastic way to bring back piracy, they really don't learn do they.

Why would Netflix even need to advertise? Everyone knows about them.

I'll be pirating any Disney movies that I need to watch, Disney is behind the vast over-expansion of copyright law in the US, and I believe it's unethical to fund their lobbyists.

I'm pretty down on Disney, seeing what they have done to Star Wars, and how they are so imaginatively bankrupt that all they can do is mine their successful animated legacy by reworking live-action/cgi remakes. They have also driven ESPN straight into the ground, relegating the flagship sports station a hotbed of woke nonsense and grievance politics.

Much of Disney's most valuable IP was taken from the public domain and privatized. They've never been good at creating original stories.

Everyone knows about them because they advertise. Same as Apple and every other brand in the world.

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