Hacker News Reader

Comment by parliament32 | Hacker News Reader

The funny thing about the streaming wars is that the music services somehow figured it out. I can pay for Google Play / Spotify / Apple Music and get literally all the music, for a single fee, from the same place. No content appearing/disappearing, no regional BS, no outrageous fees, it just works. Music piracy has basically died over the last few years cause of this -- I can't remember the last time I wanted to listen to something that I had to pirate.

What's so different about TV/movies?

View on HN

I generally agree though I will say that platform exclusive music still exists. I’ve seen this primarily with hip hop, especially when Tidal was trying to break into the streaming scene. Apple Music also occasionally has platform exclusives. Usually the way I’ve seen it work though is that these new releases are initially exclusives for something like one month and then become more widely available.

Apple happened. When iTunes was new, the music industry was more than happy to give up digital distribution, because they were more interested in selling discs, and any revenue they captures from Apple was extra. The movie industry saw what Apple did to music and so movie licensing and distribution became an entrenched mess.

Movies are at least one to two orders of magnitude more expensive to make than entire music albums.

So what? The number of albums available to stream is a few orders of magnitude higher than the number of shows/movies available.

It matters as the total budget of a movie needs to be recouped. The vast majority of albums are likely made using a few thousand dollars [0], if there isn't a break-even the artists potentially have other avenues of making money such as gigs/concerts if not making the limelight in the future.

Movies such as that of the Mission Impossible series and the Avengers series cost $150M-$350M per movie to make [1] [2], without a theatrical release and/or a temporary pay-per-view model via Apple Movies or Amazon Prime (or most of the world being on a $20-30+/month Netflix, Disney Plus, etc. subscription, which is not the case yet), there wouldn't be much interest in financing such movies.

[0] https://sonicscoop.com/2017/05/25/budget-record-album-2017/

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mission:_Impossible_%E2%80%93_...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avengers:_Endgame

One significant difference is the sharp decline in value per watch/listen. Your favorite songs in your music library probably have hundreds of listens; how many times have you seen your favorite movie?

No one signs up for Spotify to binge listen for a month and then unsubscribe. In video, that's not uncommon. I heard of people who would wait for Game of Thrones to end the season, then buy a month of HBOGo and watch the whole thing, then unsubscribe. Likewise for movies; if you're okay not being up to date with the latest movies you could just buy a subscription for a month once or twice a year, watch the things you've missed and then unsubscribe.

I think that's a big part of the reason movies don't go in that direction. Most of what you're paying for in a movie is novelty: a novel plot, novel characters, novel setting, etc. Music is effectively the opposite; you find something you like, and you listen to it all the time. Their model works perfectly for a "pay per view" system.

As for the fragmentation, I suspect the amount of money that the rights owner gets to keep is higher on their own system. I.e. Netflix gets a flat $X/month/user, which they have to split among all their publishers. If you're a large enough publisher the math on what Netflix will pay you versus the number of subscribers you can get yourself probably works out.

The only better, yet still tenable, model I can think of would be for Netflix to go to a model similar to cable. I.e. you pay $10 to get access to Netflix's library. If you want to access Disney content on Netflix, you pay $8 for a Disney upgrade. If you also want WB, you pay $6 for a WB upgrade (in addition to the Disney one).

It would likely be cheaper than paying for Netflix and a separate Disney+ (I have to believe the marginal cost for distributing a movie is lower if we centralized on Netflix than it is for them both to have their own CDNs, etc). Publishers still get paid per-user, so they don't have to worry how big their piece of the Netflix pie is. Users get a single interface to stream all of their favorite stuff.

Piracy is always going to be more prevalent for movies for two primary reasons:

1) Movies are ephemeral for most people. You watch it, and you move on. You don't need something like Spotify to manage a massive library of content, you can download stuff and delete it. Keeping it involves a lot of storage

2) Music has a much larger convenience factor. I'm fairly often doing something else (driving, working, exercising) and think "dang, I want to listen to this thing I've never listened to before". Movies are typically something I plan more. I would like to see a particular movie, but not right this second. I can wait a few hours or days for it to download, no biggie. Discovery is the bigger issue with movies, and that's already provided by third party sites like Rotten Tomatoes or IMDB.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com