Sometimes I think these people live in an alternate universe. last time I did that.
Lol, no way in hell that was the average. That was the high end dream consumer that very few of the people I knew matched even back in cable’s heyday.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/680645/number-of-cable-s...
In my family we would rent lots of movies each week with an 2-3 times a week ritual trip to the video rental store to pick something out for $2 or so.
Movies we liked were bought when they went on sale at the cheap DVD trough at Walmart for $5.
I don't think that was unusual, either.
Sounds like a ridiculous waste of money to me, but then I'm firmly at the other end of the spectrum. I finally cancelled my £30 a month TV package, I've not rented a film for over 10 years, and would buy blu-rays or DVDs only for things I thought I'd watch more than once, or where buying them was cheaper than renting (common in the case of box sets).
1. traditional patriarchal setup, male parent works, mother at home, watches some cable during the day.
2. Kids come home from school / kindergarten at 4, watch some cable.
3. Eat dinner at 7, watch movie.
4. kids go to bed at 9, folks watch cable for couple hours.
5. Kids at age where they have their own tastes, 3 kids, buy 2 movies for adults 3 movies for kids or variations thereof.
I mean obviously the time to do this stuff is a waste of time, but often families waste the time because parents are burned out from various things and the easiest way to get through the time is to give everyone media to consume and forget about them.
Nowadays I'm a big /r/financialindependence guy, and I was shocked recently to find out that a lot of my lower-middle class friends and family are constantly ordering food with those ripoff delivery apps. It's completely insane IMO to pay $50 for cold, soggy food that should have cost 25, but I guess people do it. They buy new top-end smartphones every year or two, lease cars, and do all sorts of other ridiculous money-wasting stuff.
They had a moat that let them gouge consumers for years, but the moat dried up and now they're throwing a tantrum because they can't continue their outdated and overpriced business model.
Yes, and average cost and risk exposure that family sees is higher now, wages down or flat.
First order realization:
I've long maintained most families have a fixed entertainment budget. They have their monthly nut to crack, and entertainment falls into that somewhere, with a little flexibility here and there.
Say that's a few hundred dollars. Might be $200 or less, depending.
The various entertainment forms compete for those dollars, and sometimes compete to stretch the amount a little too. Something really special might displace some other spend, or warrant a draw from savings, use of credit, whatever.
This was my experience bringing up a family through the 90's and 00's. I had a few hundred bucks for entertainment, special spends, and that was basically it, unless there were very compelling reasons, say getting a new game console, or special event that warranted some other adjustment to allow for greater entertainment spending.
There is a near infinite demand for entertainment! Maybe not infinite, but it's a lot higher than the budgets would fund at the generally accepted market prices. This demand is both material, in that real, liquid dollars are there to satisfy the demand, as well as demand not backed by liquid dollars. (the latter being an opportunity to build relevance and sell through later, whether that is recognized as marketing efforts tend to be is another discussion)
Second order realizations:
The entertainment spend is made each month and every month overall, and that's true whether there is massive piracy, or not.
Additionally, content that is pirated hard also earns well. Content that is lightly pirated also tends to not do well.
Entertainment forms compete. Video game vs movie vs whatever. There is a little flexibility, but overall the dollars go where the value perception is highest. Basically max entertainment per dollar. How people see this is all over the map too.
Pricing up can be the right move, as can pricing down. Depends on value perception, relevance, and how that stacks up to the entertainment budgets out there and the different forms.
Third order:
Piracy =/= a loss.
Infringment is weird. It's not theft in that no one is denied property or rights. It's all about people doing or experiencing something they were not supposed to.
There is value created via infringement too. A lot of the sales opportunity boils down to personal relevance. When a content creator is irrelevant, they must somehow reach potential consumers, who then become opportunities for income.
Infringement builds relevance the same as licensed users do, and it all works the same, personal recommendations, sharing, all that stuff people do in order to trade on and participate in culture and relevance applies when people use the content whether it's infringing use or not.
All this suggests a strategy allowing infringement as investment in relevance which will deliver returns in the form of high value license rental or longer term media entitlement purchases later. Higher quality, greater availbility, as in "I'll buy this and share it with the others on my subscription.
Many people subscribe and share with parents, friends, family making good use of both the profile capability and device allowances. This is "infringement" in a similar sense to piracy, but different in that it's not a high priority for enforcement.
Finally, pricing / piracy / competition with other media forms tend to make pricing self-correct and settle in to maxima. There is a right price to capture more value with material demand backed by dollars. Too high, and other forms will garner more of the entertainment dollars, or other works in the same form may do that too. Too low, and value perception may be impacted as well as leaving money on the table.
Subscriptions / content distribution agreements are a way to leverage many works and secure a more consistent share of the entertainment spends without as much risk and costs associated with going solo against high value, easy access, players.
See HBO MAX and how it's basically owning the new release. Used to be going to a theatre or buying a first release media copy was the way to go on a new movie. HBO MAX subscribers get it on release day, and it's great, easy, you name it. Tons of revenue locked in, forecastable, and so on.
The more of this we see that adds value, the less piracy will matter because that will be satisfying demand not backed by liquid dollars, but will still contribute to relevancy and can be considered an investment in the future as those people may change socioeconomic status and be able to meet demand with real dollars in the future.
Where it does not add value, say exclusives to drive new subscriptions, like we see with Paramount+ carving out a new service for "Star Trek" essentially, piracy may well be a response as will other higher value subscriptions and purchases win out over the arguably crappy deal required to see what is compelling, but not worth the hassle production. Basically, the program was used to add value to the basic subscription tier, then elevated to a new / higher service level without adding very much other value.
As examples:
Our family loves HBO MAX for the no bull shit, flat fee get new movies deal. We watched the new Matrix movie on release day, as we have others, and gladly buy this service.
We hate the CBS games being played. Do not gladly buy. Would consider just waiting and pirating the Star Trek, because it's a PITA now, or too expensive / time consuming to sign up, watch, then cancel because there isn't anything else, blah, blah...
Prior to these common sense streaming services, our family would pirate quite a bit, while buying quite a bit with the problem being unable to buy in ways, and on time, to make sense. It was often unavailable, or painful, or way over the top expensive...
as a child I knew a guy that knew how to make the recording VCR record those properly, though I don't know how it was done.
Cable TV "scrambling" was similar back in the day as well. It wasn't so much that the signal was "encrypted" as it was "modified" in such a way it wouldn't play on a normal tv anymore. Over time they could modify the scrambling technique so that any box you did buy to descramble a signal would be worthless in a few months when they changed the method.
The only way to really descramble Pay TV was to be an electronics guy who could reconstruct the video signal. Usually you needed the minimum of an oscilloscope to analyze the timing signals, and then the ability to create a circuit to fix it -- it wasn't exactly easy.
I don’t know if it was a filter really. It was just an electronic component of some kind that screwed on/off.
When you ordered HBO, someone visited your property to remove this thing.
By the way this worked just as well for audio cassettes tape.
And you could simply use masking tape to bypass it, because it was only designed to stop unintentional overwriting, not intentional overwriting.
I'm pretty sure as a kid I wrote over a few (bad) retail VHS movies this way, tapes that served more value as blanks.
Now that I think about it, I've never gotten a Blockbuster/Hollywood Video rental that was damaged in this manner. This method of property destruction never even crossed my mind. It seems so obvious given how easy it is to disable write protection. Was I just lucky or were people more considerate back then?
I recall rental shops would have rewind machines, but I don't remember them ever checking the content of the tape.
Maybe people were just considerate. Maybe the threat of having a whopping fine when the the next unhappy renter returned and complained about the tape, causing the shop to check the rental history, dissuaded such behaviour.
Or, maybe people respected the institution. I used to really like video stores as they offered affordable access to entertainment and were just nice places to visit.