Hacker News Reader

Comment by tomnipotent | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

View on HN

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com