Comment by Goladus | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Goladus | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

> 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.

> 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.)

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com