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Comment by xiaolingxiao | Hacker News Reader

What's interesting is that the government had to step in and break the movie theaters from the movie studio in a famous anti-trust case. I wonder how it'll play out in this case. Presumably Amazon may still license Bond movies (for example) to Netflix. In fact Netflix is included in my Prime bundle I believe...

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That Supreme Court case [1] stopped the vertical integration where the studios signed actors under exclusive multi-year contracts, made the films, and will only release them in their own theaters. It was overturned by new legislation in 2020.

1- https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Paramount_P....

Yes - and this is by far the strangest aspect of it all. My local telecom advertising that Netflix is bundled into the cell service. Netflix licensing shows from BBC or ordering content from other outfits. Netflix being built on top of AWS infrastructure. Streaming brands being available as “apps” on AppleTV. HBO becoming a property of Paramount, and both being owned by ATT. So many examples of complex relationships and weird inter-dependencies.

All this superficial cooperation is a front to hide the anti competitive and price gouging that’s happening. Joe average doesn’t understand that the marginal cost of delivering a 4K stream is a few cents, nor does he think critically about why it costs 9.99 to “buy” a decade old movie that’s liable to be removed his account at any time.

Well, this is showbiz. The whole idea has always been to advertise an exciting show that “you absolutely must see today” and place it behind a barrier that you must pay to cross. How much you are willing to pay for it, what “it” is, not to mention if you will be happy with the entertainment is a very old question. “Joe average” has never been in the position to fully comprehend the economics. And those have always been very difficult to understand even for all the people involved in the production. There are always periods in which a select few acquire a superior understanding of how to extract the most value from that transaction for themselves. Today most of these people are software visionaries who realized ahead of time which way the wind is blowing. Is it a “front” is a tricky question because this has always been the way. Twenty years it was cable TV infrastructure and physical media. Decades before that it was a film distribution and theatre network. And then earlier it was having a theatre with troupes of actors and lighting/stenography technicians. And for most of human history, it was traveling with an exciting minstrel show from town to town. And it was always to some extent a rip-off ;)

Low marginal costs presents an economic conundrum in general: it's expensive to produce material and yet cheap to distribute it, so how do you fairly divvy up the cost? If each viewer only paid the marginal cost ($0.01), it no longer makes sense to invest in production; and in the success case, once the production money is recouped, one could certainly argue that charging $9.99 for a $0.01 stream is difficult to distinguish from price-gouging (or more formally, "rent-seeking" [0]).

One answer to this is "club goods" [1]: bundle large collections of content together for a fixed price so that per-unit access is zero-cost, but every participant pays their share of the whole; this is the model of both cable packages and streaming services. It's hardly perfect (especially in that it centralizes both data and power), but it's arguably a better win-win than arbitrary unit prices.

I do think it's shady that vendors are allowed to sell content using "buy" and "ownership" metaphors of physical goods, when in fact it's a limited license that can change or disappear at any time. I'd love to see some regulation in this space, to the effect that content can only be labeled "buy"/"own"/etc if the content is DRM-free and carries a permissive license for backups, remixing, transforming, etc.

And of course, there's an excellent case for reforming copyright laws more generally, such that content that has already had plenty of time to recoup its costs enters the public domain. I think the original duration (14 years) struck a reasonable balance; and on a cultural level, there's a great deal of value in each generation having unlimited access to the previous (still-living) generation's culture, in addition to culture of dead antiquity.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Club_good

“Had to”

They did not have to. They could have let market forces dictate how it played out.

The market is currently "dictating" that I have to do business with Amazon no matter how odious I think their practices are. They're almost as hard to avoid as Google at this point.

People seem to like them. And what a wonderful service they have done for society.

But I guess Walmart is always available, or boutique stores if you don’t like big box.

They are much harder to avoid than google:

Look at this list: https://www.contino.io/insights/whos-using-aws

Amazon, and their primary revenue stream (AWS) is *immune* to boycott because it's so diversified. The fact that a company is immune to boycott is alarming.

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