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Comment by DrBazza | Hacker News Reader

> Piracy is competition to bad content behavior

I really wish we had the bandwidth we have now, back in the Napster-era.

Napster, and others forced, persuaded and cajoled the music industry to consolidate, whether they liked it or not, on Spotify, and iTunes.

If we'd had easy free sharing of movies, it's not hard to envisage something similar to what we see now in the music industry forced on the movie companies. Now it's honey pot torrents all over the place.

No customer wants to spend X on Shudder, Y on Netflix, and Z on Prime, plus Hulu, HBO, and your cable/satellite fee either. Paying 200 GBP/USD a month is utterly absurd.

Frankly, I'm glad I have a waning interest in modern movies as I get older, and I'm actually more interested in watching old black and white movies that are "free to air" in my country.

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We have not yet approached the pre-streaming willingness to pay (WTP). People used to pay $150 to $200 plus onDemand for the whole package with their cable provider. Today you can have YouTubeTV, HBO, Netflix, Prime, AppleTV+, Disney+, and Spotify for less than that. So perhaps the average will hover around $100 with many paying closer to $200 a month. We are creeping back up to those numbers because people will pay.

I have a hard time believing that that was the average monthly cost of a cable subscription. Mine was never more than $30-40 when I needed cable for the internet.

I saved about $120/month starting late last year when I dropped cable TV and landline from my cable package. (This is in NE US.)

My current monthly cable subscription is $135 (plus "fees"). And when people say, "cable", they generally mean TV service. For many, that may mean a pricey satellite TV service (very expensive back in the day). Basic cable is likely what you are getting, but many people want to watch sports or movies, which requires premium subscriptions and it adds up quickly.

That's an insane price, and hopefully you can shop around or change packages.

> hopefully you can shop around

i.e., if you're lucky enough to have more than one alternative (if any).

There may be places that have only one provider with only one option in that provider, but are those places really $135/month with all the TV channels? The issue might be paying for things that are already free over the Internet.

In the U.S. the vast majority of places have only only provider, there is no shopping around. $135/month sounds about right for the complete package. If you're lucky that includes a "special" on including HBO.

Virtually all places have "specials" on the first year of service, wherein the price will increase 50% or even 100% after the first year, which will almost always put you well into the $100+ range.

I understand. For myself, I chose to solve that by not purchasing any TV, cable phone, or any other package and only getting Internet. Internet is the only useful thing for me from all of that, anyway.

If the prices get too high I call them up and cancel. At that time, they try to keep me as a subscriber by giving me lower rates. If they don't have any available I ask when their new packages are coming out and call back a day after that time.

I can assure you there are.

Comcast hides their real rates as well as they can but in some places they are required to publish them. In my rural area (where they are the only real option):

$139.99 gets you "Select+ Includes Limited Basic, Expanded Basic, Digital Preferred Tier and HD programming for primary outlet, 20 Hour DVR Service, and Blast! Internet"

You can't buy ALL the channels as s bundle but the top tier bundle is $189.99/mo (plus fees)

The prices don't sum reasonably at all and it's not really feasible to calculate a price for TV without internet (and its very difficult to order such a thing)

Source: https://comcaststore.s3.amazonaws.com/prod/wk/urc/585bc33c5b...

> There may be places that have only one provider with only one option in that provider, but are those places really $135/month with all the TV channels?

Yes, I've lived in places where there is one cable company and they abuse their monopoly position with predatory pricing like this. When you're a new customer, they offer you a deal at maybe ~$60/mo and then over the course of a couple years raise the price to over $120/mo, with price increases every year or two after that, as well.

There may be places? Try half of America.

There’s one wire going into the house usually that carries media, a coaxial cable. Hence, your options were always Dish or DirecTV satellite or the cable company.

Being able to buy and cancel on demand streaming for $15 or less per month is a massive improvement over the previous situation.

It has never been easier, cheaper, and more convenient to consume basically all content and yet people still find ways to complain.

Half the country can't really shop around they need to buy internet alone from the same cable company and then replace TV with netflix hulu etc but long term there isn't much stopping the cable provider from jacking up the price of just internet to what you are paying for TV and internet and claiming to offer you a deal for just a little bit more if you pay THEM for tv.

Hi we've noticed you used to pay us $200 for internet and tv but now pay $100 to use and $50 for streaming services. How would you instead like to pay us 200 for internet and 220 if you want TV too. our $20 tv addon is cheaper than netflix because its subsidized by the monopoly rent we are charging you on internet access! Also we have noticed that despite bandwidth being cheaper than ever we can also discourage your netflix use by also charging extra for using "too much" data.

When I had cable the $30 plan was the "just the stuff you can get OTA plus some shopping channels" plan. If you wanted actual cable channels you had the choice of:

1. "Basic" bundle, $60 + $20 in fees + $8-15 per set to rent the box. Got you ESPN, Food Network, SciFi, Cartoon Network, USA

2. "Complete" bundle, $100 + $20 in fees + $8-15 per set to rent the box. Got you BBC, a bunch of foreign language channels, Starz, and a few more.

You could also add HBO to either plan for $15 a month. I think they may have had a few other premium channel options as well, but I never paid that close of attention.

We cut the cable because the price had crept up from about $50/month total to almost $100/month over the course of a few years. It was just unsustainable. Now we pay about $40/month for streaming services, and the streaming services don't have ads.

> You could also add HBO to either plan for $15 a month

Please note that that was only a channel (or two). You still had to tune to watch the movie/show you wanted! For the same price today (not even adjusted for inflation), you can watch any of this content on demand, on any device, but it has waaay more content available.

> and the streaming services don't have ads.

Yet. IIRC, when cable started, it didn't have ads either. It was its selling point.

Advertising is a cancer on society that infects and poisons every communication medium available. It has already metastasized to streaming platforms, though it's not conspicuous yet. You don't have to watch interstitial ads between episodes of your favorite show on Netflix, but if that show is a modern production, it's likely overflowing with product placement ads. When that and other means of making easy money get used up, you can be sure that overt ads will follow.

"All this has happened before, and all this will happen again." And that's a salient argument in favor of torching the whole advertising industry to the ground.

When cable started, it had ads. Cable was just a bunch of broadcast stations pushed over a coax wire to your house so you could get stations that were pretty much impossible with an antenna from your location in pretty much perfect signal quality for the time. There weren't even "only cable" kind of channels when people started paying for their television to come over wires to their homes.

The price for essentially just 120Mbps (sold as 200) down and 6 up is over 100 for internet + 15 for the box if you don't get your own. With TV and a few premium channels it would easily be $200. They are also have only one competitor of note in the downtown of a city of 50K people, a DSL provider offering a service slow enough that its not technically considered broadband anymore by present standards.

I heard Comcast (Xfinity) business model is forget about the threat of Cordcutters, and just keep raising prices, hoping the consumer doesn't notice the costs.

I head this from a Xfinity employee.

My mom showed me her bill and it was $240 month, for basics channels, internet, hbo, and one other lousy feature she doesn't use.

I trying to get it down, but their contracts have early termination fees in the contract.

They offer reasonable packed rates only to new customers. They know most people won't take back their equipment, and go a few days without service, in order to save $100 plus a month. I don't know how they legally get away with their business practices.

She has bern a faithful customer since 1972.

She is in Marin County, USA.

If anyone knows of a different company please give me some advice.

(I looked into AT&T, but they have almost the same business model as Comcast.)

Sure maybe some are willing to pay, but finding what you want to watch across 10x different services is obnoxious. Signing up for a particular monthly service just to watch a single show is also not ideal.

I've never paid more than around $150/month for internet+tv.

I switched back to cable TV a few years ago. It's just cheaper for me now. The price of streaming has risen, and the price of cable has fallen.

Instead of having cable, I used to rent or buy movies. It’s no fun to rent now and the terms and duration suck and it’s hard to get a physical copy now so you’re tied to some service for life if you “buy”

Netflix still offers their original service that got them started and helped them wipe out Blockbuster and other competition: DVD's in the mail. https://dvd.netflix.com/

Interesting; I didn’t know that

Did we just have a poor DVD player or are scratched disks a problem for everyone using this service?

You can still buy physical copies. BR are actually super cheap now that nobody buys them. I'd rather pay to truly own my movies.

I know a few people that pay $200+ for cable, PLUS all of the streaming services...

That's a good point, though I think the time/generational factor may cause it to trend downward. My parents unhappily paid cable prices their whole life. I've never once paid for cable TV and never will be willing to pay that much for subscription entertainment, but I'm willing to pay for one streaming service and have considered a second at times. Anecdotally reading places like here, I don't think I'm an uncommon case. Again to your point, even though there's fuss every time a streaming provider raises the cost (especially Netflix being one of the larger players and who has been around long enough to have increased prices more than once), it seems each service is viewed as cheap and well under what people are willing to pay.

Isn't it an issue if "willingness to pay" drops too much? In the end, content costs money to make. If money coming in goes down, then there might not be enough money to make all that content.

Big budget content is usually the worst. There were many pieces of indie media that had heart and shoestring budgets, that have been pushed out the market.

> If money coming in goes down, then there might not be enough money to make all that content.

Content will be made, it just won't be the same content.

Production budgets expand to consume available resources, but there is a very non-obvious relationship with quality.

Distribution costs have decreased greatly, while markets have grown remarkably. Looking at inflation adjusted cost of blockbuster movies today, film company revenue or indie scenes across the globe, I find it hard to argue that the last 20 years have been bad for the industry. Disruptive, for sure, but this creates winners and losers.

You still get advertisers willing to pay to put their stuff in your content

>We have not yet approached the pre-streaming willingness to pay

Even if that is true, I am pretty sure it is specific to US only. I dont believe any other place in the world are paying that much for monthly TV content, where Free ( paid by Tax or not ) OTA TV are the norm, and paid are mostly for Live Sports Content.

In US it seems you need "Cable" for everything.

Russia and China are paying almost as much(adjusted to income)

Fragmentation across streaming services may do more to increase piracy than overly-expensive cable packages. Even if the total monthly cost is lower with six streaming services, there is a higher likelihood to look at each of the $10/mo services and say “not worth it” than a single $100/mo cable subscription. The music streaming industry was smart enough to avoid primarily competing on catalogue exclusives. When all services have near-identical catalogs, they are forced to compete on price & UX.

Amazon did not take over online shopping because it had the lowest prices at any cost. It grew dominant because it was the everything store and any higher prices they charged were not higher enough to make it worth the time to comparison-shop or look for specialty retailers.

> Frankly, I'm glad I have a waning interest in modern movies as I get older, and I'm actually more interested in watching old black and white movies that are "free to air" in my country.

My mother recently gave me a sub-account to Netflix and while I was thrilled to rewatch some shows I liked (like the OA or good old star trek) I was quickly submerged by the sheer amount of YA novels adapted in TV shows or movies that are really mediocre. Now I see there's a lot of content on Netflix but I feel like I am swimming in an ocean of never ending content produced with the same recipe.

Netflix is terrible if you have good taste in movies.

I'm with you on the old black/white movies.

I actually think Amazon got a great deal buying MGM.

If TCM was available, Nefflix should look into buying it. They have a great library of old movies.

TCM was available (alongside all of Warner Bros. Media, Turner Media and DC Comics)... It's getting absorbed by Discovery [1], I imagine that a competitive bidding process must have taken place, presumably Netflix didn't see the benefits.

[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2021/05/24/john-malone-sees-warnermedia...

TCM content is mostly available on HBO Max.

Well Netflix formula is throw a bunch of stones in the ocean and see what sticks and then make more of it. Its a bad strategy because users waste time watching content they would rather not watch. HBO imo is the only platform that focus on quality rather than the number of shows.

Yep, HBO is the only streaming platform with consistent quality. It’s also the only one I pay for. There are approximately 0 Netflix originals that are on par with the ‘good’ HBO series, same for amzn and Hulu.

I would argue Apple is trying to follow the HBO formula. They are not quite there yet, but the Apple shows I have watched have all been good, with Ted Lasso being great.

> Well Netflix formula is throw a bunch of stones in the ocean and see what sticks and then make more of it.

I read it was more than that. Shows have to bring in more customers, keeping them hooked to a show (or the platform) is not enough now. They will more and more invest only in content that bring in more customers, not just keeping the ones they already have. I read that's why the OA got cancelled: it wouldn't bring in more views and the show would have been more expensive.

> I feel like I am swimming in an ocean of never ending content produced with the same recipe.

This is what machine learning, pattern recognition will get us.

I watched one show in Amazon prime. One shocking thing I noted besides repetitive plots every few episodes, is that one character say something and after few minutes or next episode another character spoke exactly same sentence in different situation. And it happened so many times I thought I knew what is about to be said.

I think the machine learning part in that is massively exaggerated, perhaps to avoid personal responsibility. Detecting the patterns in commercially successful movies hardly requires complex pattern recognition algorithms. I would claim that most movies made in the past decades were copying ideas that had turned out to be successful earlier. Maybe machine learning can add some tiny extra on top of the recipe, but I think it's still the producers who are to blame for the lack of creativity.

Not just the producers but the overall strategy. Right now, these media companies are competing on quantity because it's a numbers game and a marketing gimmick to showcase your "vast" collection, however mediocre.

> I think the machine learning part in that is massively exaggerated,

You are right of course. I said that in half-jest. It is like at work where every product/project is working on something next generation. Irritates the hell out of me. So in morning meetings I so often ask "Are we fixing it now or it will be part of our next gen product?"

The Criterion collection is a good choice for those with a more discerning taste in film. Well curated too. But expensive.

Criterion Channel is a great, lower-budget streaming option ($11/month)

The ML lays out the broad strokes of what it thinks will perform thematically which coincidentally is what uncreative producers have been doing for years.

(see Avatar is Dances with Wolves with Blue Aliens)

> No customer wants to spend X on Shudder, Y on Netflix, and Z on Prime, plus Hulu, HBO, and your cable/satellite fee either. Paying 200 GBP/USD a month is utterly absurd.

When we’re done talking about the quantity of movies, let’s talk about quality.

If an awesome movie goes to the cinema, like Twilight, you’ll be able to watch Werewolf on Netflix. With abysmal plot and acting. If you type Mission Impossible, you’ll certainly get Suits.

The search is so abysmal, always suggesting the same 40 series on and on, that people exchange numeric codes which allow them to discover new categories (but half the titles will be already seen). A/B testing probably shows that after seeing a title for 6 weeks and dodging it, you end up watching it, because, there’s only that.

It’s not that I don’t want to pay $40 a month for 4 services, it’s that even at that price, I still can’t watch the quality movies.

And let’s not even start with ideology-pushing in movies.

Imagine, people making art because they have something to say. The horror. The horror.

... this comment reminds me of something about the smell of napalm, and victory ...

My rule of thumb regarding watching content is: if its only 1 movie or tv show I want to watch just pirate it, if its more than one on a streaming platform subscribe to it. I subscribe to netflix just once a year to watch everything I want to watch and then don't bother subscribing again for a year. I guess eventually I will do the same to other platforms if they have enough content in them.

I can't fathom how someone can pay to streaming sites month after month unless they have quite a lot of stuff they want to watch.

>I can't fathom

A lot of people just can't be bothered tracking their usage over time of a bunch of services and keeping track of what lives where. I don't have a lot of services so it's not worth optimizing to save $10/month or something like that.

> I'm actually more interested in watching old black and white movies that are "free to air" in my country

My experience has been that old (black and white or otherwise) movies are hard to find now. Especially if you just want to watch it once and don't want to buy an old DVD or VHS.

In the UK, a lot of channels still play these old films. In fact over the pandemic, there's actually a channel that was set up to specifically play these films:

https://www.filmstories.co.uk/features/talking-pictures-tv-t...

Why do you need cable/satellite if you're playing the a la carte game of streaming? I feel like the world where you have cable and streaming services is ending and you either live in a world with cable and maybe or two streaming services; similar to paying extra for HBO and Cinemax with your cable service in the past, or you cut the cord and manage bundling the "networks" yourself. Netflix+Hulu+HBOMax+Sports/Local News subscriptions all tally to less than cable used to, you get more content, and all that content is on demand and free of commercials. This notion that service has backpedaled is nonsense. It baffles me why people still cling to their cable service and then expect "premium" channels be free and also share their content with one another. Which cable networks did that? When new episodes of Seinfeld were airing which networks could you watch them on? Just one? So unfair! I prefer the commercials on ABC! Perhaps you felt differently because you had no alternative to buying all the "streaming services of the day" under a single bundle. Now you do. You don't like TNT? Don't pay for it. ESPN never get turned on? Now you can drop it from your bill.

For many people in the states it is difficult or impossible to get internet without cable bundled in.

And your argument assumes that the shows you want are clustered into one of the providers. But what if you like one show from Netflix, one from Hulu, one from HBOMax, etc. You still have to pay for all the shows you don't care about from each of those providers. The different streaming services is roughly equivalent to the different channel bundles that cable companies offered before.

Sure, the streaming situation isn't any worse than cable was, but it could still be a lot better. Imagine if streaming services had to compete on the quality of the service itself instead of the content available on the network. If you are ok with ads if you get a lower price, use one service. If you are willing to pay more for 4K content for everything, use a different service, etc.

Maybe there could be a standard industry fee paid based on number of users and resolution instead of exclusives. This is kind of how radio works.

In the UK at least, it's Sky (satellite) or Virgin (cable), and they both bundle internet access with the service. Often it's more expensive to get the internet service on its own (Virgin) than getting the 'bundle' (tv+internet).

Also, the free-to-air reception in some parts of the UK is still so poor, you need cable or satellite to watch any TV at all.

On the FTA point, Freesat is the satellite equivalent of Freeview and needs no subscription. Many TVs have Freesat tuners built in so you just need the dish.

But that's the thing. You don't have to pay for cable anymore. And if you want to watch a show, you can subscribe for a month, get your fill, and then unsubscribe. You couldn't do that before.

You can't do the pop in/pop out thing anymore, because they've (Amazon) started posting only one episode per week instead of a full season at once.

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