Hacker News Reader

Comment by lotsofpulp | Hacker News Reader

How many hundreds of hours of entertainment for $167? Granted it has almost no marginal cost for the seller, but as you said, you can buy HBO for a fraction of $167 and still watch it.

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.

View on HN

> How many hundreds of hours of entertainment for $167?

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.

In discretionary entertainment goods, there is no “should be” price, other than the price a seller is willing to sell at and a buyer is willing to buy at.

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.

> there is no “should be” price, other than the price a seller is willing to sell at and a buyer is willing to buy at.

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.

The sellers in this discussion are multinational organizations with very well educated people working with access to tons of data. I'm sure that for their own compensation's sake, they are busy figuring out how to extract as much value from their content as possible, which means figuring out how to get as many people to pay as much as they can for it.

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.

> The sellers in this discussion are multinational organizations with very well educated people working with access to tons of data.

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.

> The simple fact is that $167 for a season is well beyond the budget of the average person...

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.)

> It has never been cheaper or easier

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.

Is pirating something really easier? Maybe I've been out of that game for too long, but between finding good/complete torrents of content, avoiding my ISP finding out I was doing it (and sending me nastygrams), needing to keep a server up and running to download/store media, juggling front-ends as they evolved (Plex hasn't always been around), ...

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.

Here in Germany, Torrenting legally is distribution, so I don't do it. But find yourself a decent streaming link aggregator, install an adblocker and you are golden. Anything with a webbrowser can play it. No major legal streaming platform can claim this.

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.

Setting up my Apple TV took 5 minutes. Plug in the power, set up the wifi, and add a few apps. Much easier than buying a HTPC + NAS + finding the best software to install.

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 feel like you are being dense on purpose here. I talk about anything with a webbrowser and you argue about the complication of htpc and nas.

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.

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?

Then don't if it's easier for you. My usecase is I want to watch things on a reltively low powered Linux laptop. They have nothing for me.

Pirating is easier in the same way an FTP server is easier than Dropbox.

It’s easier to walk out with groceries than stand in line and pay for them also.

There is no purpose to comparing pirating with legal means.

Try walking out with your groceries sometime and tell me again it's easier.

I think I'm with allstairSH here, sorry; I just didn't find piracy to be easier than paying for content. Your "all you need is a web browser" case is fine as long as there's something you can browse to that has the content you want -- and as long as the use case is something like what you want, which I think you said was watching stuff in a web browser on a low-end Unix laptop. My use case is very often watching on a 4K television in my living room. And, frankly, I'm not sure what piracy method is easier even in the only-web-browsing case for me compared to "browse to streaming site with desired content."

I'm sure their approach is either for a lot of people. But it is a huge burden for me. And if they just gave me access to the files and maybe an api, it would work for both of us, instead of just for you.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com