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Comment by CJefferson | Hacker News Reader

An official and legal version of this wouldn't be $50/month, it would be more like $200/month. It includes movies from every major company, and films while they are still in the cinema.

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Streaming music has set the price floor. For the price of an album a month you can stream all the music you want, even new releases.

What makes you think movies should have a multiple of 10 instead of 1 for a monthly subscription fee?

I'll attempt an answer, the cost should be whatever the market will bare. The market could likely boom at $50/mth, but at $200 it would be niche. The industry seems to even be coalescing around $30/mth (my guess) through consumers paying for multiple services.

I'm fairly certain that movies are far more expensive to produce than music albums.

True. Now, compare the number of music albums produced per studio to the number of movies. We’re explicitly talking about paying per time rather than per work here; one movie versus one album is misleading and/or irrelevant.

To me, $50 seems more realistic because of data caps. You simply cannot stream enough content nowadays without forking over more money to ISPs. Pricing would become a balancing act. It’s an interesting thought experiment to wonder how those two giants would battle out the responsibility of bandwidth.

I think this is dependant upon your country. Most ISPs in the UK are unlimited.

If you can get up-to-date movies still in the cinema, you would pay $50 just to take a family to the cinema once.

That isn't far off what cable costs...

I'm not sure what you're getting at. First, when I had cable it was more like $100/mo, which included internet access. I also didn't get films still in the cinema with my package.

For that price it would be cheaper for me to “buy” the movies I want to watch outright. You’d have to watch a lot of movies to recoup the cost.

I don’t know what things are like in other parts of the world, but the US market has shown a preference for renting large-library access over buying individual works. There are exceptions, when the costs got skewed too far and the perception grows that the “large library” is actually a small library plus a lot of dross (see Cable TV), but even then it took decades of Worst-in-the-nation service issues, billing ‘hijinks’, and predatory pricing to convince Americans to start cutting the cord.

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