Comment by fxtentacle | Hacker News Reader

Comment by fxtentacle | Hacker News Reader

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My take: "The purpose of DRM is to give content providers leverage against creators of playback devices and their own consumers."

How have I regretted purchasing Blu-Rays in the past. They require an update to the drive firmware, they require their own GPU driver version, they require an update to the player software, and they try to sneak spyware onto my PC anyway. It is almost impossible to legally watch an authentic blu-ray on a Windows PC.

Similarly, how have I regretted allowing my TV to connect to the internet. The first thing that happened was that it started shoving ads into my face. So I did a factory reset and disconnected it. Now, Netflix and Prime TV are unusable. Plus the YouTube app never managed to play back 4K videos on a 4K TV without crashing.

I don't quite know why they hate me so much, but whenever I try to be nice to movie companies and purchase their stuff, they treat me like shit. And DRM is their legal whip to fuck me over. Blu-Ray? doesn't work. DRM. Offline iTunes? doesn't work in 4K. DRM. Prime TV? mandatory internet for DRM. Then ads. Netflix? mandatory internet for DRM. Then ads.

On the other hand, an mkv file on a USB stick "just works", has exceptional audio and video quality, doesn't buffer, and I can skip all the ads.

My personal favorite example right now, having three smaller children, is amazon's "expiration" of videos installed on their kindles, that we don't find out about until we're on a trip somewhere. How do I explain to a kid that they can't watch their favorite movie that worked fine last time, or that they can't download any more episodes of their favorite show because someone decided they could only have 20 videos regardless of storage capacity?

It has been like that for a long time. The non-skippable intro screen warning viewers of the evils of unlicensed copying was only ever seen by people not watching an unlicensed copy.

FWIW, I think movies need to take the same route music did. Ever since I found out I could just buy DRM-free high-quality audio at a reasonable price, I have happily paid for the music I like, because it was so very convenient. If it was as convenient to legally buy copies of movies / TV shows, I'd be happy to spend some money for that.

Where do you buy audio? I don't use apple (itunes) and only some stuff is on bandcamp...

Mostly on Amazon. When possible on bandcamp.

Primarily bandcamp, since I can get flac and support artists directly. But I also use 7-digital for more mainstream releases (they also offer flac and some releases as Hi-Res 24-bit flac if that is your thing)

Netflix & Spotify are currently worth $275bn & $45bn. I think it's quite unlikely that such results would be achieved with a pay-x-get-y store model.

Even Disney & Universal, themselves enormously valuable companies, are greedily eying the platform model. It has everything they want. Recurring revenues. Content pushing abilities, which is usually the most strategically important asset. Platform monopoly potential, where most artists/studios take your take-it-or-leave-it terms.

They don't hate you. They just do whatever is most valuable to them. They don't care about you. They may or may not value your custom, but that's about it.

275 billion? Seems overvalued as we enter a new cycle of more services going online.

You are probably right, but remember that Netflix is essentially a worldwide leader in producing and distributing movies - something we really haven’t seen before.

You’re severely discounting the value Netflix and Spotify provide in discovery and ease of access.

I vastly prefer those services because I don’t have much interest in managing my own library.

>You’re severely discounting the value Netflix ... provide in discovery and ease of access.

What the what? Discover on Netflix? If you mean accepting what they think you want to watch based on their curated lists of what they want you to watch shoved into your face in their carousels of boredom, then I'm going to have to disagree with you.

You don’t have to like Netflix, but as far as the UI goes, where are you finding better content discovery for shows and movies?

They all suck. Look at each platform's verion of "Trending Now". It's just a rehash of titles in the other categories prominently displayed in "Just Added" or other some such listing of 10 to at most 20 titles. Of course those are trending because discovery of titles suck and people just give up and choose something that's right in front of them.

I want to "discover" by browsing not the most current titles available in this current licensing window. I want to be able to browse from the evergreen catalog. I want to see the things that don't have a high dollar marketing campaign guaranteeing prominent placement. Maybe these platforms don't have a large inventory of evergreen content??? There are times I want to find some title that is older. The content that wasn't along the outer walls of Blockbuster.

I would agree with you that that all suck, and the quality of Netflix has certainly gone downhill.

But you pretty much answered your own question. The platforms don’t have giant catalogs of evergreen & niche content, because that is extremely expensive to license. That’s not really a discovery problem, though.

The trade off is of course, the old buying/renting model. But that’s oriented much more towards the enthusiast consumer, which I am not and it would seem you are.

The evergreen titles are usually the back catalog of the various studios. However, since all of the various studios seem to be creating their own streaming service, I can see how Netflix might be short on that content.

However, finding these titles on the various studio services is also not as easy to discover. Mainly because these nascent services know they have to get their A-list content out first to attract users. The process of bringing the back catalog stuff onto these new services will take time. In the meantime, we're just stuck being force fed what the studios want us to see.

Yeah it’s a content ownership and licensing problem more than anything else.

Chromecast is better, even if it didn't integrate multiple streaming services.

It would be trivial for Netflix to show imdb/rotten tomato scores, but they don't want you to easily see the masses of mediocrity in their selection.

Netflix "discovery" often feels no better than the ads before the DVD menu. Their own productions featured prominently even if they are absolute garbage, the rest is just a vague list of what's popular.

I think the parent meant that he favors convenience over tinkering.

Download Netflix app on pretty much any device, subscription is affordable, scroll and click to play. New content gets added each week or whatever which is more than one can consume.

it's a bit like cooking vs going to a restaurant. how can someone with a sense of real taste and care for health/nutrition understand the millions of people who regularly hit fast food chains. Convenience. It simply has to be 1/ affordable 2/ saving time, and bingo.

of course learning how to cook, going shoping to 7 different local suppliers, having a large range of stocked spices and other condiments, spend 1h and half putting things together and appreciate a great healthy meal is a better approach to eating, but not everyone accept the burden, some don't even understand the actual pro/cons of each option.

I like this metaphor, but it breaks down in one aspect: the notion that it’s akin to eating junk vs healthy.

At the end of the day I can hunt around and curate the perfect library of movies and shows, but I can also find plenty of good content on streaming platforms. It’s not like I’m eating empty calories at the end of the day.

I'd go out on a limb and say if you're watching reality TV shows like Housewives, Kardashians, Bachelor/ette, etc, then you are very much eating empty calories. But it's your body, and you can do with it whatever you like. Just be honest about what you are consuming.

Huh? How was that the implication?

Netflix has reality tv, but that doesn’t mean you’re watching reality tv on Netflix by default.

To people like me, "discovery" is worthless. Most of the day we do things together in the real world as a family. Like building a Lego marble run for the umpteenth time. Kids have a lot of energy. That means us parents are willing to "waste" maybe 1 hour every evening to watch TV together.

My wife's friends watch Emily in Paris. My friends watch Expanse and Silent Sea. So I already know the 3 series that I'm watching in the near future so that we can gossip about them with our friends. And if I want a movie, I can ask that one friend who has been giving me great movie recommendations for the past 10 years...

When I think about using Netflix discovery and going down the rabbit hole of watching random stuff recommended by a robot, it kind of makes me feel pity for the lonely people who have nothing better to do than watch TV alone. I really can't imagine how that could be beneficial to the human doing it.

Netflix and Spotify don't model their service as a purchase, though. Netflix in particular is very clearly still shaped like a rental with their DVD service. I think of them as more convenient radio and TV: I can choose the thing I want, but I don't expect that it's portable.

This is sharply contrasted with the so-called "purchase" model of Amazon or iTunes video, and even more with the way physical media works these days (comment above about Blu-ray).

True, but I think the parents point was that "buying" media was essentially dying anyway. Disney will still sell you a BluRay of Frozen if you want it, but they really want to sell you 65 dollars a year Disney+.

Not sure if this is what you want, but I occasionally "buy" a TV show from Google Play. There's no forced ads.

I mostly do it because it's cheaper than a cable subscription, and the player is easier to use than Kodi.

I mean, it might not be legal where you live(definitely not illegal here) but MakeMKV takes about 20 minutes per disc and you can just watch the movie in VLC, works 100% of the time. Why bother with any special players.

I believe it's a legal gray area where I live, but I have also done that many times. Purchase the blu-ray, rip it myself. That way I feel like I did the morally correct thing by supporting the people who made the movie. But it might still be technically illegal because I circumvented the DRM.

> I don't quite know why they hate me so much, but whenever I try to be nice to movie companies and purchase their stuff, they treat me like shit.

It's called "paying the Danegeld".

That's a great Wikipedia rabbit hole. And I like this quote with s/dane/DRM/.

"if once you have paid him the DRM-geld, you never get rid of the DRM".

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