Comment by basch | Hacker News Reader

Comment by basch | Hacker News Reader

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I think the bigger issue than paying for multiple services is duplicate licensing. If I sign up for DirecTV, Amazon Prime, and CBS how many shows am I triple licensing? If all these companies want me to sign up for multiple services, there needs to be a way for them to pass "already licensed" information to each other, and pro-rate their bills accordingly.

ATT, Comcast, Disney, CBS already own almost all the historical content. Id rather pay a small licensing fee to those 4 and then be able to watch their content on any platform, rather than deal with multiple middlemen that have CBS, Comcast, Disney, ATT licensing costs built into their product price. IF I select DirecTV/ATT as my "licensing manager" then any time I sign up for Disney+, Peacock+, CBS All Access, I want a discount off one of the two ends (would make more sense to give all my subscription info to DirecTV and get a DirecTV discount. Then DirecTV can go to Disney and say "17% of our customers dont need to pay Disney licensing costs, weve adjusted our payment to you accordingly.)

While I see your point, that's never been how media is served up - you're not given license to shows, you're gaining access to what they want you to have from their license. Your cable bill was never reduced because the same show was playing on two channels at once.

A cable bill is a bit like insurance. They dont expect 100% of customers to watch ESPN, 100% of customers pay Disney for access to ESPN, but they pay less than the full cost each. People not watching cover the costs of people watching.

Theres two models of TV. Live and On Demand. In the On Demand world its much more "am I licensed to start this stream" vs "can I tune into this broadcast in progress." Especially if the broadcast is adding any value, like tv hosts interjecting fun making of movie facts at commercial breaks.

Idiotic. A few years ago you could say that on demand streaming over the internet was also “never been how media is served up”... engravings on wax cylinders was “never been how media is served up” was also true.

Obviously things are different in this era then they were 30 years ago during peak cable.

What’s your point that meaningfully responds to the gp?

Shouldn’t it be the way that media is served up though? The status quo serves the interests of copyright conglomerates, not consumers. Surely there must be a more efficient way to channel money from consumers to producers, without forcing them to pay, sometimes more than once, for shit they don’t want. Why hasn’t the market achieved that outcome?

This is actually really important. While it's immoral to take the results of someone else's work without compensating them, it's also immoral to charge your customers multiple times for the same product.

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