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Comment by briffle | Hacker News Reader

The whole move to streaming is going to not live up to it's promise. I have no intention to sign up for multiple services, and figure out which one has the content I want. I got rid of cable because I was tired of 500 channels and nothing is on. I can't wait until some of them consolidate.

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>The whole move to streaming is going to not live up to it's promise.

It's already ruined.

Gave it a chance. Forked over more and more for subscriptions and still the content fragmented. Cancelled everything and went back to torrents and media servers. A VPN connection costs me less per year than I was paying in subscriptions per month.

Best of luck Hollywood, this time it's for life.

This was always going to be the outcome though? Every company knows that content is king, and wants to control their own content. Netflix jumped headlong into making originals because they know each time they went to renew Friends NBC would just squeeze them for even more money based on the increasing demand.

This is exactly how it was going to play out, and there will never be one catch-all service, unless you want to pay $150 a month because hbo will charge that service $20, Showtime $20, Disney $20, BBC TV $8 and so on....

If you're outside the US it's often a matter of forking over for multiple streaming subscriptions and a VPN thanks to crappy regional availability.

I think it’s fine. I can choose what content I want a lot more than I could in the days of cable and I can rent any movie or show (for the most part) for a couple dollars if it isn’t on one of my subscriptions. And if I want to watch a new show that bad I can subscribe to a platform for a month.

> move to streaming is going to not live up to it's promise.

What is this "promise" you're alluding to?

Are you willing to pay a company for the privilege of consolidating this content? I have no interest in returning to the days of cable companies sitting between me and content creators.

In the Apple ecosystem, Apple TV is doing a pretty decent job of working with the different streaming services to incorporate their catalogues into the "TV" app experience (which then launches into the different streaming apps). It's not perfect, and many services are fighting against it because they don't want to train customers to once again rely on a middleman.

The promise of streaming was releasing us from bundled cable TV contracts and letting us pick exactly what we wanted to watch, paying for it and nothing else.

We came close for a time, but I think everyone realised it wasn’t what they wanted after all. You could buy standalone episodes of a ton of shows on iTunes, but the calculus changed: sure, you enjoy watching Wheel of Fortune, but are you really going to pay a dollar for every episode?

> was releasing us from bundled cable TV contracts

Was it? I just remember it meaning we could subscribe directly to content creators, which is what the current environment looks like. No one was ever promised both 1-on-1 relationships with content creators AND the value-add of a consolidated service provider, which is just unrealistic to have.

> We came close for a time

When was this, exactly? The PPV era? Things have never been better than they are today for content consumers, we have more options than ever to customize what, when, and how we consume.

I wish everything was PPV so I could à la carte my heart out, but subscription revenue guarantees are what make the current landscape tenable for the investments we're seeing in new content across all the streamers. It used to be cable companies taking on the brunt of the risk of cash flow management, infrastructure, customer acquisition, and marketing. Now every streamer has to do everything themselves.

It still just boils down to: People are cheap and want unlimited everything from every media company for $12 a month on a single service, which was never realistic unfortunately.

While there would be challenges to doing it, if mainstream consumers were screaming for a content aggregator that brought together expanded cable content, everything on Apple/Amazon PPV, everything on the streaming services, plus maybe some more back catalog content for one low price of $250 (or whatever) per month, I think it would probably exist at some point. But very few people would be willing to pay that for the convenience of everything being available through a unified interface at a predictable price.

For people complaining about fragmentation and going to the torrents as a result, it's about price not convenience.

I've cancelled all my streaming subscriptions and found better things to do.

Perfect! Cancelling TV and these streaming services are the BEST thing I have done. Allows for more real life interactions and focus on friends and family!

Personally I’d recommend finding better things to do and then canceling your subscriptions when you’re no longer using them. Ripping out a big part of one’s life without a healthy replacement can be suboptimal.

For sure for sure. Make sure you find some other more interesting hobby and friends. Don't mean to do a dry cut. However, TV/shows are just another addiction! But like cutting all other addictions do it wisely.

Most importantly don't replace that with real human interactions.

I tend to watch TV at night when I wouldn’t be interacting with anyone but HN and a few forums anyway.

No way, it's already lived up to it's promise! I can't even watch cable any more, it's 8 minutes of programming followed by 5 minutes of commercials. Why pay to watch advertisements?

Hulu didn’t have ads. Then it did but you could pay more to avoid them. Then you paid more to avoid them but due to “agreements” some content still had commercials.

Amazon Prime is showing more and more ads - for now, it's just previews for other Amazon Prime content and only before the movie starts, but knowing what I know about the entertainment industry, I'm sure it's only a matter of time before those become McDonald's ads and in the middle of the content.

I can't remember the last time I saw something with a commercial on Hulu.

https://www.cnet.com/news/hulu-ads-vs-no-ads-plan-should-you...

> However, there is one caveat: A few shows will still have ads, even on the ad-free plan, due to licensing issues. Hulu says the list is subject to change, but right now it includes the ABC shows Grey's Anatomy, Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. and How to Get Away with Murder. It's also worth mentioning that Hulu with Live TV's ad-free option also shows ads with some on-demand titles.

I remember that season 2 of Rick and Morty seemed to as well, at least when it first came on Hulu

To be fair, music streaming is still pretty decent. Spotify has almost everything, and it's just a few major artists that hold out for a 'Tidal exclusive' or whatever. But generally I think that however much upfront revenue the service provides is probably to the detriment to the bigger picture of 'let people listen'. But for £10 a month, the reality is it's pretty phenomenal, especially for someone that (previously) bought a lot of records. I hope this doesn't fracture, or we'll be back to MP3s and Napster.

But yeah, TV and movie streaming is a shambles. Exclusive licensing is terrible - they should move to the same model as the music, licence to everyone and let us all pick the service we prefer. But I don't think it's ever going to happen.

Business idea: Distrokid but for SVOD...

That's because music streaming services are rarely (never?) also music producers and exclusivity agreements are rare (though not unheard of - see Garth Brooks). If the goal is consumer choice, it seems like a bad idea to allow streaming services have vertical integration with content production.

The killer feature of streaming is ad free, on demand content imo, not great content or accessibility to all the content. Netflix is replacing cable TV not all the great / transformative movies / tv shows you've watched in your lifetime.

That's what Netflix has been forced to become. It started out, however, as an extremely convenient movie library with basically anything you'd ever want to watch that cost substantially less than the ticket price of even a single movie per month. It was exactly what many people were looking for, and they flocked to it, but its success led to many content licensers ending their contracts in the hopes of offering their own streaming services for which they would get a bigger cut.

I think a lot of people look at the history of Netflix through rose colored glasses. I remember talking with a senior engineering exec I knew at Netflix quite a few years ago now and he made a comment along the lines of "People come to Netflix for the movies and they stay for the shows." (This was before House of Cards etc.) It may have once been better than today, but Netflix never had a great (streaming) film catalog.

There's also the fact that there are relatively comprehensive film catalogs on Amazon and Apple modulo streaming service exclusives and various older content. You just have to pay for it. The financial reality is that you're not going to get all the video content ever created for one low $10/month fee.

In 2012 I deliberately watched a new movie every night for the whole year on Netflix, and I never had to scrape the bottom of the barrel. There were thousands of good films in the categories I enjoy, and vastly more titles that just weren't my cup of tea. What catalogue has ever been greater? What catalogue has ever even come close to it?

My thoughts are that there's a lot of overhead in that $5, and that streaming services should pick 2 (3 at the most) payment processors and consolidate that billing. So now I could pay $10 and get access to 3, maybe 4 or 5 streaming services each month.

It's like they're using pricing to force a zero-sum ecosystem.

I'd argue it already has. I picked up Sling for a month to try it out and even with the ability to start any live program from the start and the built-in DVR, streaming services are way more convenient than being stuck to a schedule and an arbitrary DVR storage limit.

It's not exactly rocket science to say, "Oh, I want to watch this thing -- let me search and find out which service it's on and sign up if needed." You'll still save money 99% of the time over $100+/mo cable bills. It sounds like you just don't care, which is fine.

That simply won't happen. The sheer size of the international streaming market combined with the sheer volume of existing and original content (no matter what quality!) and the natural state of competition between legacy and disruptive players means we'll never return to a period where television content had to be high-quality because there was only enough signal bandwidth for 4-5 channels.

We need a Criterion Collection but for streaming TV services.

I have multiple streaming services and sometimes I can't figure out which show is on which service.

The services with smaller content libraries are the first on the chopping block (sorry AppleTV, I'm not renewing once the free trial is up).

I just Google the show or movie and it lists services where it is available. There are also dedicated sites for the purpose.

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