But if I want to watch something specific, 50% of the time I still can't get it on any of the stores.
I don't understand why video seems to be so much harder than music? I can legally stream almost any song I can think of from any streaming provider, or I can buy DRM free albums! But for video, the pirate bay is often the only place you can get something.
Most of what a label does/did for musicians is marketing and distribution of physical copies. Sometimes a label organises a producer/engineer, but often bands do this themselves, or bring one along. With physical copies dying and the ability to self-promote on the rise the labels were looking less and less relevant.
Movie studios on the other hand coordinate an insane amount of people (some credits sequences run for at least 5 minutes now) and legals, something that is out of the realms of possibility for indie film makers - if you want to make a "big" movie you pretty much need a studio, even to this day.
So my understanding is that the record labels saw the writing on the wall, tried to fight the tide with the whole napster thing and ended up accepting reality and looking around for another way to remain relevant, which ended up being negotiating deals with legal music streaming services. Movie studios never felt that pinch.
The other difference, at least for the artists, is that musicians don't make much money off recordings - many are happy to break even - where the real money is for them is in live performance and (in some markets) merch sales. The recordings almost act as ads for the "real" product. With movies, the movie is the product (although admittedly merch, theme park rides, etc can provide an even bigger revenue stream but those cases should be treated as outliers).
I guess the difference is that the Hollywood studio model is still so entrenched with the massive PR/media industry built up around it and reliant on its survival that indie releases get drowned out in the noise.
Another thing to consider is that niche content is just that - if a filmmaker decides to distribute direct to fans (or along some other indie avenue) it's likely you'll never hear about it unless you are one of those fans and regardless of what your definition of "success" is.
The model for selling music is pretty solid, and there are services like Bandcamp that will do the hosting & Transaction processing for you at minimal overhead. Even platforms like Patreon will let you do this directly attaching the file to a post.
People have little issue getting the downloaded music onto whatever device they want to play it on.
Video is harder: filesize and codecs are one issue, convenient playback is another. You can't just use YouTube unless you want to give it away for free.
Vimeo is an option, but the overheads are higher and could easily eat any potential revenue. Playback is a problem - lower device support. It doesn't allow users to download and play offline either, and that would be harder for casual users.
I believe you can actually.
YouTube has a section where you can pay for movies here: https://m.youtube.com/channel/UClgRkhTL3_hImCAmdLfDE4g
And here is a discussion on how indie filmmakers can get into it: https://www.reddit.com/r/Filmmakers/comments/c01kyd/how_to_r...
There's definitely a higher barrier for movies, but it does seem possible.
The links you provide show that it's still a huge barrier. The requirements for getting onto youtube arn't something you can just do if you have a movie you want to sell.
Even with the unknown ($1500? according to that comment, but no links to back it up) payment to a distributor, there's still almost certainly more hurdles and time/etc.
Compare that to the experience with, say, Bandcamp - their [pricing is transparent and up-front](https://bandcamp.com/pricing), and you can go ahead and sign up with minimal fuss. From a customer perspective, it's equally as pain and hassle free.
Before the internet, people consumed music without buying it all the time. People consumed movies first solely at theaters, then at home from VHS and DVD. Some movies came to TV occasionally, but it was never a guarantee for any given title.
So there was already a centralized way to pay record labels for music, and the basic idea of licensing it all to be played in a streaming format was well-established.
The movie industry, on the other hand, still wants to make you pay every time you watch, like back when it was still just theaters.
Pre-VHS, as you say, there just wasn't the same casual consumption of video content--and, even then, it was mostly private consumption for a long time.
You even see differences between music and live theatre licensing. Music has mandatory mechanical licenses for cover. Whereas, with live theatre, a playwrite/copyright owner can refuse to allow a performance based on their work.
By contrast, pirating video didn't come until later, when it was more technically feasible (downloading music over a modem already took forever, can you imagine downloading full length movies!?) and by that time, the likes of Spotify had already made legally consuming music so convenient as to make piracy obsolete.
Even now, the pirating of PC games is being made more common by the introduction of the Epic Store, which, regardless of your feelings on it, has added friction. Games promised to Steam users are being delayed or going full Epic exclusive and many users are saying "fuck that, we're not getting railroaded into using a launcher we didn't like" and turning to piracy instead.
The video landscape is even worse, where it used to be only a select few providers had their own bespoke services (like HBO) now every channel is looking to make their own damn subscription happen, which is adding tons of friction, causing the boom in piracy.
The music companies learned, and the video companies haven't, that the main way to counter piracy is to make the legal way to get something as easy as possible, so easy that customers don't mind parting with some cash. And streaming right now is anything but easy.
A lot of people said that about Steam and yet it became what it is today, with many titles that now require Steam (unless you pirate).
If it weren't for the Fiance / Kid factor, I'd have already gotten rid of them all... I don't like having to jump between all the apps/services to watch something... it was easier to once a day, hit the torrent site, download new episodes of whatever and start watching shows from the day before. Trying to remember what service has Show X, or whatever is a PITA.
Hulu's model is about as close as I've seen and Amazon has similar for more bundles. I'd much rather if I could just integrate Disney into the Hulu or Amazon Prime UI and search. Netflix will probably never allow such a thing.
You must be young. We did. Fully. With aMule/eMule. They took days, but we got them.
For purchasing films, stuff like iTunes & Google Movies are still pretty good bets, they do have quite a lot.
Streaming often falls under public performance and a few other more restrictive contracts, making it harder.
As to why a mass-streaming service like Netflix doesn't offer both, usually, then it's simple - you want people to continue paying. The business model depends on people not signing up, downloading, and then cancelling.
In my experience a surprising number of people are willing to do that. (Doesn't stop me offering it, however.)
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As for DRM with videos... Hollywood truly, truly despises the idea of DRM-free. I've looked at few contracts for film collections recently, and every contract I saw _required_ the use of DRM. It wasn't a negotiable point.
Which is mostly theatre. Bypassing DRM does not take significant effort. It can never truly prevent theft (ignoring any definition of theft), and is massively anti-consumer in the way it breaks. It hurts real customers and doesn't hurt pirates.
All the same, it's a hard rule with most national film associations.
Yes it does. We bought a lot of kids movies on iTunes, and then I couldn't play them back because a device was not authorized (I bought it on my iPhone, so it doesn't work on my girlfriends iPad), or because the internet didn't work, or because iTunes was broken after upgrading to a new OS, ... it's so frustrating when you have a collection of video files on a USB stick that you paid for and you can't watch them.
Download of software without license/approval (so illegal download) is prohibited.
I think it seems immoral but the more I think about it, it's not.
A corporation (like a studio) and capitalist system (like hollywood movie making) doesn't operate with morality. It seeks to gain the largest profit without regard to morality.
If these movie companies reached a fair profit point and made the movie free afterwards you could make the point they acted with balance. If they shared profits with society morality could be an issue.
But they try to make as much profit as the market will allow. They act without morality. Therefore you cannot assigned a morality value to your interactions with such entities.
It is not immoral to pirate (even if it is illegal in some places).
It isn't definitive that piracy actually causes any significant or definitive harm to large organisations. It fact in many circumstances the effect can be reversed - those who pirate films are also more likely to watch them and to encourage others to watch them.
Without a definitive answer to the harm question, you can't definitively assess the morality side of the question.
I only had this happen a long time ago with a iTunes code-provided copy of Shrek. Every other movie I’ve purchased has worked across generations of devices and stuff since the first iPad. I’m curious if I’m just lucky?
Ah, isn't DRM beautiful. I'm reminded of a time when a man sitting next to me on a flight couldn't play any downloaded content on his tablet he was not in his home region. Gee, people fly to places outside their home, what a surprise!
Of course, a somewhat surprising to me number of people will also subscribe to a service, binge-watch a show, and then cancel.
Nothing wrong with doing that of course and I imagine for most people, subscriptions are pretty sticky. (That assumption is probably bolstered by the observation that Netflix and HBO don't offer annual subscriptions at a discount AFAIK.)
For purchasing films and TV series I just buy a DVD a lot of the time. With Blu-Ray, the quality is probably better and I can lend it, etc.
The download & cancel combo is more surprising, because it takes significantly more effort, and people prefer less friction.
Binge & cancel is the least friction for most people, so it makes the most sense for them. Especially when they don't want to track your subscription along with the rest of their bills.
I do note that the music industry has leveled out. You basically get the same deal from each streaming provider for the same price.
Maybe the movie industry saw the music industry as a cautionary tale and doubled down with DRM and exclusivity. The difference is bitrate and music sharing happened first, giving the film industry time to react.
I agree, though. If PLEX or someone offered a subscription that gave me consistent interface to access all the streaming services, I'd probably pay a few hundred USD a year.
It's all down to convenience again I guess ?
One big difference is how you're going to replay music & video games multiple times, but are going to play/read movies/shows & books only once.
This is a very good point. Just look around in a public space at everyone wearing headphones, and you can see that music is almost always not consumed in isolation but as a background. A movie or book requires more dedicated attention; I don't see people watching a movie or reading a book while doing something else.
For TV/movies the video content is the primary revenue stream. And for most content the only revenue stream. Only a few IPs sell action figures and lunch boxes.
It saddens me, as a musician and producer, how YouTube is the go-to for listening to music. We put a lot of effort into audio engineering, and the flow of an album, only to have a ton of that work degraded by YouTube’s shitty compression or ads that interrupt the intended experience.
Regarding quality, most music is listened to in traffic, or on the bus, or while working, or as background in a store, or while exercising, or.... I think it should be pretty obvious that the majority of the time, quality is just not a factor.
The compression was terrible. The ads were unstoppable. I love music, but for decades before we all fell in love with music despite the poor medium we listened it to. YouTube isn't any different.
I guess in the same way that we used to buy singles, although I never bought that many because you got more bang for buck buying the whole album.
Where I did draw the line was when I heard them start asking each other if they had seen the latest song from so-and-so.
At which point they both got an MP3 player and a bit of a lecture about how music is audio and everything else is marketing
But to be honest, if I really want to listen to a whole album then I use YouTube Music, which is included in YouTube premium. What I like about it is that if the song isn't available then it offers the video instead so I can listen to it anyway.
I use iTunes for most media, precisely because I see it as a way of cutting through all the BS—it has just about every movie and every show—including series from Hulu and HBO. (The sole thing I can't get are Netflix exclusive shows, which is annoying.)
(And then I run my purchases through TunesKit to losslessly strip the DRM)
https://archive.org/search.php?query=Bergman%2C%20Ingmar&and...
It's also really bad with kids shows. Netflix and Amazon have a lot of them, but the selection keeps changing, and once something disappears from the streaming catalog it's often gone for good (ie. you can't get it for download anymore either). For one show (Lego Chima) I ended up buying used DVDs because I couldn't find it anywhere to download / stream in German. I have no idea how it makes any business sense to stop selling a TV show just because it's a couple of years old.
Sometimes it's weird meme stuff like vaporwave.
Sometimes it's less weird modern "classical" music.
Sometimes popular stuff disapears.
Usually it's because the artist can't afford to upload it
I have read places where if they can't secure the streaming rights to the music in the movie, they can't stream the movie. Also, if any other rights holders can't be found to secure streaming rights, they can't be streamed.
Maybe your taste in music is more mainstream