You can rent all of these for sub £5 on amazon (probably itunes as well).
There isn't a world where you can pay $20 a month and get everything, every movie, every tv show, ever, the finances just don't work.
There isn't a world where you can pay $20 a month and get everything, every movie, every tv show, ever, the finances just don't work.
I don't want the content for free/bargain prices. I want the content in a reasonable format, that I can play legally on my TV, phone or laptop, and that I can discover easily.
Compare that experience with something like popcorntime, where a user can type in a movie name, and have it streaming in 1080p/4k/highest available quality in under 30 seconds.
I want that, but paid.
People didn't like cable bundles. Now it's a la carte in various ways and people are realizing that it's not only not cheaper if you want "everything" but it's a fragmented mess.
As an example: I'm paying for Netflix and Amazon prime. I'm not going to pay for more services because I don't value watching TV more than that.
We buy or rent a specific movie maybe once a quarter at most.
So total expenditure on TV services is around $20/mo.
Almost everyone I know is in a similar situation. Some swap one of those services for something else, many are sharing subscriptions with other households.
So right now most people are paying a fairly fixed amount for access to a portion of TV and film. The total money flowing in seems to be enough to support the entire industry.
If a service that cost $20/month for access to everything came out, I'd definitely switch. I imagine most of my friends would as well.
Then the total money flowing into the industry would be the same, but everyone would have access to all the media.
For example, many people have either a cable TV or online streaming subscription that's another $50-100/month. HBO would be another $15 or so. And so forth.
There is an argument that, at some point, there are only so many hours in the day and a Spotify for video (i.e. most content for one monthly fee) makes sense but that's probably a $100-200/month fee in the US (assuming you could get most players to cooperate). YouTube TV alone is $65/month these days.
I feel like outside of the rich, $10-15 is about all you can reasonably ask people to afford for a pure luxury like this.
"According to a Nielsen report, United States adults are watching five hours and four minutes of television per day on average (35.5 h/week, slightly more than 77 days per year)."
So $40/month. I'd add to that whatever the average blockbuster price was $5 * 4-weeks (quick googling didn't give me a great answer, but I found 2.18 GPB for 1995, so probably $3-5 with conversion and inflation).
That makes roughly $60/month for the average American at-home tv/movie spend in the 90s. I suspect that still is the rough tolerance.
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/cable-tv-prices-inflation-ch... [2] https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/
I expect that typical other streaming spend (Netflix, a la carte rentals, maybe a premium Print add-on or HBO, etc.) probably don't add up to more than $30-40 a month or so.
And, as I said in another comment with respect to streaming, YouTube TV alone is $65/month.
So, yes, many normal working people do pay on the order of a couple hundred dollars a month for video entertainment.
"Normal SV developers spend 4 to 5 hours a night coding on personal projects"
The normal people watching their TV would think those devs spend a ridiculous amount of time coding.
TV stands alone where people do it 4-5 hours a night and its not considered being super in to that thing. People in the tv watching category don't see it as choosing to do a thing. It's just part of what you do. Sleep, work, then tv. Repeat. They don't identify as a tv watcher any more than they do as a sleeper.
Our friends have recommended over 200 hours worth of TV since the pandemic hit, and everyone is quite horrified of how big our things to watch list has grown. It's months worth of spare time where we simply wouldn't do anything else.
For shows, it seems to be in the $0.5-10M per hour range. I'll wave my hands lazily and call a season $5-100M.
If about half of US households spend $20/mo on these services, that's $16B per year. If half of that went to making movies and shows, it could make something like 500 median movies per year, 100ish average movies, or 40 avengers-caliber movies. For shows, it'd be 80-1600 seasons per year.
Apparently something around about 500movies and 500 shows come out each year.
I'm sure these numbers are way off, but the orders of magnitude are probably reasonable and suggest to me that $20ish/mo for everything ever is likely a little low, but not insane.
It is the promise we were sold on when Netflix first started online streaming: without the costs of distribution and physical media creation, it would actually be possible.
Netflix has never had a great streaming movie catalog. As a senior Netflix exec told me, "people come for the movies and they stay for the TV." So, to the degree Netflix streaming ever claimed to be about having all the films, it was always something of a bait and switch.
Theoretically, a fairly good subscription video catalog plus live TV is probably possible. But as I said elsewhere, it would probably be more like > $200/month than $20. Recreating the cable bundle streaming is already pushing north of $100.
Did anyone seriously think just because you don't need to make blu-rays any more a 50 million dollar TV show or movie can just be sold for next to nothing? It's probably not even 1% of the production costs.
Even weirder because I've never seen anyone think that Red Dead Redemption would coast 5 bucks if they only sold it on steam
I'm surprised, thought, that there's no service that offers a lot of old movies. I get it - the Avengers movie that was just released cost a few hundred million to make, so it would make sense that it would be harder to find on a streaming service than something that came out in the 80's. What I find is the opposite, though - it's easy to find recent big hits online than it is to find, say, Bladerunner or Bill & Ted.