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Comment by toyg | Hacker News Reader

> Ghibli is preserving the "value" of the film by not allowing it to be made into a commodity.

I guess I disagree in the sense that it already is, and this restriction is actually devaluing the material. Ghibli DVDs are everywhere; a lot of them are not official, and make money for pirates rather than for the studio. You can only artificially restrict demand for so long, in the digital world, and that boat sailed for Ghibli productions a long time ago.

IMHO making the movies easier to distribute wouldn't impact the quality of presentation or remove the space for artistic and sentimental engagement with the material. The fact that mainstream movies are on dvd and streaming did not destroy the market for film festivals - the opposite is probably true, in fact.

One can go about "not being greedy" and enhancing experience of the material without being precious for preciousness' sake.

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> Ghibli DVDs are everywhere; a lot of them are not official, and make money for pirates rather than for the studio.

See, the point is that it's OK. You are thinking about money, Miyazaki is thinking about what you'd call the UX.

It's better that someone picks a pirated DVD off the shelf, inserts it into the player, and watches the DVD deliberately, in their perspective, than mindlessly clicking on a "suggested next movie" button on a streaming service, and abandon the film half-way.

Even pirating the movie is better, since it's a deliberate action, a choice, and an effort.

>IMHO making the movies easier to distribute wouldn't impact the quality of presentation

Well, that's where you and Studio Ghibli disagree.

The idea of getting more satisfaction from getting something if it's a reward for an effort, however minor, is not new. That's why games have achievements, for example.

But there's nothing stopping me from stopping the DVD halfway through.

And who's to say I'm being drip-feed these movies on autoplay? What if Ghibli had their own service (please no, not another one lol). I would have to make the deliberate action of going to their platform, searching for the movie I want, and clicking play.

I don't see the lack of streaming as preserving value, the value should (and definetly does imo) come from the movie itself. The animation, the story, the colors, the music.

>And who's to say I'm being drip-feed these movies on autoplay?

Statistics! For Netflix, 80% of subscribers’ watch choices come from their personal recommendation engine.[1]

>But there's nothing stopping me from stopping the DVD halfway through.

Yeah, but you are less likely to do so given the effort it takes you to start.

Same with vinyl disks: I rarely don't listen to an entire side if I start playing a disk.

>I don't see the lack of streaming as preserving value

It's not the lack of streaming, it's shaping the experience.

As an analogy: Michelin-star restaurants probably don't have delivery. It's not that "lack of delivery" is driving their value, it's that sitting down there allows you to experience the food more fully.

[1]https://techjury.net/stats-about/netflix/

> Statistics! For Netflix, 80% of subscribers’ watch choices come from their personal recommendation engine.

That includes the cases when the recommendation engine just provides the easiest UI to select what you already wanted to watch.

> Michelin-star restaurants probably don't have delivery. It's not that "lack of delivery" is driving their value, it's that sitting down there allows you to experience the food more fully.

Very salient point. Fully agree.

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