Now that the future is here, people are complaining that they need to sign up for too many streaming services. Why can't I just pay once for a bundle and get everything I need?
I'm just as guilty as everyone else, I don't have a good answer...
But that is still the case. If I could only pay for the shows I watch, I would not complain. But if I watch one Netflix show, I can't just subscribe to that show, I must pay for a ton of stuff I'm not remotely interested in.
You still have Netflix, Disney+ and all the cable channels you need to subscribe to if you want their shows, how is this better for the consumer ?
An actual 'A la carte' situation is that of the consumer being able to actually handpick the shows they want and only pay for those. This will never happen due to the industry being absolutely hostile to the idea, second best from a consumer standpoint is a single huge distributor like Netflix where you would pay larger fee but have access to practically everything you want, that is now pretty much a pipe dream since every major player wants to run their own streaming platform. This is not the way to beat piracy.
When I want a song, I've always just bought it. I still do. I can do basically anything with the file other than redistribute it. I can even play music while offline! I only use streaming services like Spotify and YouTube for songs I don't regularly play.
I'm very frustrated I don't have the same option for movies and TV. Sure, I can buy the physical media, but there's all sorts of legal shinanigans when it comes to ripping blurays and such. My ideal solution isn't one big streaming service that has everything. I want an "iTunes for movies".
You... know that iTunes sells movies, right?
As a broader matter of principle, it proves your property rights over a DRMed ebook are weak compared to a regular physical book; if you had a physical book, the seller couldn't barge into your home and remove it, refund or no.
What commercial video from the major studios have not had copy protection?
Either there was no copy protection, or the copy protection was so trivial to circumvent that I never even knew it was there.
I never said that the copy protection schemes weren’t easily circumvented. I said that commercial video has always had copy protection.
You’ve never been able to buy commercial video without copy protection. Even in the VHS days you had Macrovision.
That statement is factually correct.
The reply:
Not true. Perhaps you meant to say that copy protection has existed for a long time. But plenty of commercial video has been available without copy protection.
Which is factually incorrect.
The reply:
I copied in the 2000s using whatever generic DVD ripper was available for windows at the time. I recall once or twice being unable to rip a DVD for copy protection reasons but it was rare.
Since even the oldest Windows dvd copy programs like DVDRipper could crack DRM doesn’t prove anything...
Are you now saying that being factually correct is “irrelevant”?
But using programs and devices that removed copy protection somehow proves that it didn’t exist?
Since it is only available in the US, I would suspect that it would be centered around US releases.
Even if Disney later shuts down Movies Anywhere, you’ve already “purchased” the movie according to Amazon/Apple/Google, etc. You can disconnect from Movies Anywhere once you sync the titles between services.
We've been able to do this with a substantial number of shows for years, though, by buying individual episodes or "season passes" on Amazon and iTunes. Maybe people just don't know, maybe people think the prices are too high, but more than likely the market has just largely moved on from this model for much the same reason that it moved on from CDs: the rise of streaming. (But put a pin in that for a second...)
> ...second best from a consumer standpoint is a single huge distributor like Netflix where you would pay larger fee but have access to practically everything you want...
This is what we all want price-wise, but would we really, truly want to turn Netflix into the equivalent of the iOS App Store for essentially all legal streaming movies and television?
Everyone blames the proliferation of streaming services on rapacious greed, and, I mean, sure, the profit motive is mighty. But it's also a matter of keeping control. Broadcast networks and cable companies are middlemen who not only take a cut of the profit but who also act as gatekeepers; it's a little mad to think that producers would want to free themselves from that system only to rebuild it with a single all-powerful company in the command seat.
Sure, not all the streaming services will survive, especially at the prices Netflix is currently charging. But I'm not convinced that the world is really going to rise up and rebel against having to pay $50 or $60 a month total to a half-dozen providers for commercial-free, on-demand access to hundreds of thousand of shows versus paying $100+ a month to a single provider.
They're usually not available until well after the season premiered (12+ months later), roughly at the same time that the DVD/Bluray comes out.
The quality of them is iffy, at best - SD or HD at poor bitrates. Fine for watching on a tablet or laptop, marginal at best on a TV/Surround system.
They're tied to watching on that specific platform, and you're fucked if you wanted to watch on another platform, and if that platform goes away so do all your purchases.
They're region locked, so if you went overseas for a bit, you can't access them.
They're often either as expensive, or more, than the physical Bluray.
Sometimes people on HN might have to accept they are not typical users a bit.
They quite obviously don't. Perhaps most notably availability at premier, which tends to matter a lot for TV shows if you have any desire to be part of the conversation about them.
Just provide something that isn't worse than torrents and reasonably priced and I'll happily buy the content I'm interested in.
For example: https://store.steampowered.com/app/468060/PADAK/
The rest of your complaints are certainly true, though. As I mentioned in another reply, I think it's possible that if this a la carte model had taken off, there would have been successful pressure to go DRM-free just the way that there had been for music, although your mention of region-locking brings up that whole "international rights" folderol that's still with us even in the streaming world, so...
If I want to watch something else, those hours are away from my Netflix usage and I get less for my money in those cases. I don't think that a large offering is what should raise the price, rather the hours I spend watching. If I only watch an hour a day Netflix and Hulu for 3, I think the 10USD or so should be split into 25/75 between those providers.
Splice kinda has a pricing model for their samples and presets that could be applied here. A fixed monthly cost will give me credits with which I can purchase what I want and leftovers from that month gets rolled into the next month. If I could pay 10 dollars and get 10 hours of any content on any provider, I'd buy it. I'd most likely end up paying more each month but at least I wouldn't feel like wasting my money paying a fee for content I'm not gonna watch and feeling like needing to have multiple subscriptions rolling all the time.
You mean like the music industry has Spotify, Google Music, Deezer, Tidal, Apple Music and many many more, and everyone has a 99% full catalog?
You better motherfucking believe it.
This is the only thing people want in the ultra laggard video-streaming market.
You know what Spotify thinks is the way forward for them? Exclusives. That's why they've spent hundreds of millions of dollars on podcasts. You may love it if they're functionally undifferentiated from their competitors, but they don't. Apple and Google can slide because they're Apple and Google, but services that actually need to pay their own way need to give you a reason to pay them, not Apple or Google.
So, sure. Consumers love "pay $10 a month to whoever you want, eh, it's all the same, tomato, tomahto." But it's not at all clear to me that it's a sustainable model in the long run. And I'm pretty sure the reason the video streaming world didn't even pretend to take a stab at that business model is they don't think it is, either.
Absurdly high. Game of Thrones costs $167 on Amazon, which is more than binge-watching it eleven times using one-month HBO subscriptions.
People just like to complain. It has never been cheaper or easier to instantly consume media, yet there is no satisfaction (because they’re comparing it to stealing the media, which is illogical of course).
Of course, there are legitimate issues in countries that have BS licensing restrictions forcing people to use a middle man such as cable or satellite TV providers. Also, copyright terms are far too long in the US, so there are valid reasons to pirate. But price/availability in US usually aren’t it, in my opinion.
That's exactly the thing though. It has been easier. We all remember it being easier, when we pirated something.
The actual sentence should be "it has never been easier while also getting to pay for it". That's just not a very compelling case.
Today, I have a single device (AppleTV), a single remote, and can stream just about anything I want. And that content is either bundled with Netflix or Amazon, or available to rent for $5 or so. And I don't have to break the law to do it.
Also, you are comparing effort it takes to set-up something, with effort it takes to use it, which I'd argue isn't entirely fair.
Using is as easy as a smart-phone. Click the search app, find content, hit play. Everything auto-updates, so there's no maintenance. VS a HTPC + NAS which take (slightly) more care+feeing to keep current on software versions.
I thought you were talking about setting up some sort of torrenting/media server system with this part of your comment.
I agree, using a browser is easy enough. But, why would I when the AppleTV is already connected to my TV and I can do everything with a simple remote and voice commands?
There is no purpose to comparing pirating with legal means.
That's not relevant. The simple fact is that $167 for a season is well beyond the budget of the average person whose opinion you're considering. "Hours of entertainment" is (always) the wrong formula, by the way. Nobody needs to steal anything to enjoy hours of free entertainment doing a myriad of activities. Most TV shows simply make no effort at all to price either episodes or full seasons for a wide market.
Compare two ABC shows on Amazon Video, General Hospital and The Bachelor. General Hospital is a daily soap opera with 36 minute episodes and modest production value. The Bachelor has 2-hour episode with higher production values. A full season of The Bachelor is reasonably priced at $20. Individual episodes are $3.
Individual General Hospital episodes are also $3 each. This doesn't seem too crazy if you're talking about someone who might otherwise miss an episode because they are traveling or something. It's probably steeper than it should be, I imagine most soap fans will just read up on what they missed if they care enough rather than shelling out money to watch. But regardless, the full 241-episode season is $735.00. This is quite obviously not priced to sell as a package. No one would buy that. It is simply 241 episodes times $3.00 per episode, which is a generic Amazon price for an HD episode of anything. In fact you can buy the SD version for $15.00. It is clear that no real thought at all has gone into the pricing scheme.
If the media owner determine there is insufficient revenue and more can be had by lowering price, they can do that.
What is relevant is that it used to cost much more to get the same product, and it’s up to the buyer to determine what they want to spend to entertain themselves. There’s so many options nowadays, if GoT $/hour is too much, then choose something else.
That's true in most markets, but also totally irrelevant to the point. If a seller has no idea what the market will pay for something, and so just slaps on an absurdly high price because they don't actually care about this secondary (a la carte) market at all, that's almost the same as not offering the service at all. If an a la carte service is prohibitively expensive, it might as well not exist for the purposes of this discussion.
They've offered the very show we're talking about, GoT, for $15 per month, when you want to watch, on pretty much any device you want to watch it on. Included in the $15 is pretty much the rest of their award winning content. If buyers think they can get a better deal elsewhere for their entertainment, they are welcome to patronize other businesses.
And also likely with layers of bureaucracy, internal and external politics, complex business relationships, and other avenues for dysfunction.
> They've offered the very show we're talking about, GoT, for $15 per month
Sorry I'm not trying to be offensive here but you are losing track of the discussion. My entire argument is that many distribution companies evidently do not care enough about offering a la carte consumption alternative to make the effort to price it reasonably, although the situation is improving as companies get their act together and actually decide to act on the market data they have. (Game of Thrones for example is now $25-$30 per season on Amazon Streaming).
As such, the fact that anything might be available for a subscription at a reasonable market price is not relevant.
That's true, but the number quoted by the previous poster doesn't match what I'm seeing right now on Amazon, where each season tends to run around $25 on Blu-ray.
> Most TV shows simply make no effort at all to price either episodes or full seasons for a wide market.
I'm not sure I agree with "most." You even cite one example of a show that's priced reasonably and one that's, well, not. The "one size fits all" model of pricing that was adopted years ago seems to be built for weekly-at-most shows, not daily ones. I do think the pricing model was too high, though. (I'd have probably tried $2 per show for HD, not $3, and given tremendous discounts, like 50% off, for season passes. But I don't know whether you can feasibly make that model work for a show like General Hospital at all.)
I have a box set of the old NBC sitcom Frasier. 11 seasons, 264 (!) episodes, probably $200 total. I've had it for over a decade, and it's been a great thing to have while traveling, or moving to a new home where I won't have Internet set up for a week.
I'm happy to pay a one-time fee for content I'll own forever and can watch in whatever delivery method I want, be it Plex, Kodi or ripped to my phone's SD card. Netflix, Amazon etc can pull these shows off their catalog whenever they want, and shove some unrelated show in my face when their search results don't show what I'm looking for.
Overall, consumers preferred the subscriptions. They’re a better deal if you watch more than 5-10 hours a month.
Though there are some things you can only purchase a la carte.
A la carte is significantly more expensive in literally every industry, globally, for a reason.
True, but clearly not the case with most TV shows. It's not an a la carte premium. It's either targeting a niche market like collectors, or there's just no attempt to set a market price whatsoever as the example here demonstrates: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21682892
So, assuming there is 250 channels, and everyone watches 5, but a different 5, it costs the same to let everyone watch all 250, or exactly 5 of them.
Also, no Dolby Vision in piracy atm.
Obviously cost is a factor. But more important for me is ease of access and best possible quality. Let‘s take Disney+. In my market it‘s not available yet. I will absolutely pirate The Mandalorian. The fact that it would surprise anyone that it would be a heavily pirated show is laughable. It‘s 2019 and you expect people to wait on a show that‘s available elsewhere? I would pay for it. But they won‘t let me. Their fault for not launching globally .
Anyway with these streaming services, it's not so much that people want to pay for a bundle. It's more that micromanaging a lot of subscriptions is a chore. If they could all be integrated in a smooth manner ui-wise, but still paid separately, then people would be happy I think.
Like imagine if adding Disney+ was just a manner of clicking a button that made money flow and content available in the app you were already using.
Let me try to make an example. Let's say there's one popular streaming platform, that is $5/mo. They mostly just aggregate and license content. Later on, content owners want to skip the middleman so they start making their own streaming services. So now you have 3 streaming services, which are each $5/mo.
So you are now paying 3x as much. But you don't watch 3x as much. You pay 3x as much for the privilege of being able to watch a wider variety of things. This is actually pretty similar to the problem of cable, just split in a completely different way. You still can't get the stuff you want 'a la carte,' but now you have to pay three different entities anyways.
Of course content owners will end up making out well because they make money whether on an aggregator or on their own platform, and because people now pay much more per month on average.
In the end - just pick a tomato sauce and try not to think about it too hard. If you don’t like it, pick a different one next time.
I strongly disagree with this.
Netflix previously had much more diverse content. It's currently (as of the last few years) banking on that their own content will substitute the licensed content disappearing on their platform. That The Witcher will satiate your Game of Thrones itch, that "superhero show #1" will be good enough over whatever Disney/Marvel puts on Disney+.
This might work for a few people, but I believe/hope it won't work for most. Chatting about the latest episode of Twin Peaks or the new Nolan movie by the water cooler doesn't work with a pale substitute.
The entire premise of the linked article is based on that cable packages survived and thrived as more players entered the market, and so should streaming services. What it ignores is that "alternative sources"/piracy didn't exist at the time, and does now. People will pay for as many services as they're comfortable with and with as much hassle as they can handle switching apps, and no more.
They should take a hint from music streaming platforms, and let the services compete, and spread the content over all of them, otherwise they will face the reality that people will pirate their service while paying for others.
Sorry for the long rant
Signed
/ Multiple service subscriber
Incidentally, after you paid for cable TV had better UX than streaming services today. You had one universal interface - your TV and its remote - and the UI was decoupled from channels and movie producers.
There is a sweet spot users want: one subscription and one UI, and for the two to be decoupled from each other.
Second, cable channels had a genre. If you like food, you might want food network. If you like music, you might want VH1 and the MTV's. If you're into cartoons, there's Cartoon Network and Nickelodeon and Disney Channel. Bravo has lifestyle stuff, Lifetime is "womens content", G4 was tech stuff, Weather Channel is weather, etc. With the streaming choices...they all serve all kinds of stuff, so picking and choosing makes way less sense. Instead of picking interests, you're picking brand loyalties, and that sucks.
BitTorrent and VLC.
Content providers licence their content to all the streaming services, they all have the same catalog, and customer pick once based on the UI, pricing, service. etc.