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Comment by CabSauce | Hacker News Reader

I don't disagree. However, you can buy/rent movies and shows on an individual basis from amazon/google/apple now. The prices are just higher. There seems to be some benefit to bundling shows together into a service. You can also just jump around from service to service, which is what I do.

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I don't "rent" anything online because the price is insane.

Let's talk $1 to watch something once. That's reasonable and a price I'd pay. $4-5 to watch something in my own home is not.

Ahh, but “buying” streamed content is a fool’s purchase. If the streamer loses the rights to film you “purchased”, you lose your purchase. This happened a few years ago with Disney content on Amazon.

Better to buy a physical media.

I wonder if this is different based on number of people in the household. On amazon, I think it’s usually $3 (fucking $2.99 penny tricks), which amounts to $1.50 each for the two of us watching. In a family of four, it’s sub-dollar each. Which as a percent of the dinner you’re probably eating while you watch is very little. But renting for yourself alone feels at least twice as expensive!

I don’t want to assume anything about your financial situation but I just don’t believe most people would find 2 hours of entertainment for $4 unreasonable. Like that’s just silly cheap.

We live in a world where 90% of the entire catalog of movies ever filmed are available to be instantly delivered to your home in 1080p for less than the cost of a Big Mac. In the 90s it cost about the same not even taking into account inflation or gas to drive to blockbuster and rent a VHS. We are living in the future!

That might seem silly cheap, but compare it to going to the cinema. The dining has a huge site to pay for, projection equipment and staff, cleaning and a million other things.

So if I watch it at home and remove all those costs from the cinema, surely $1 is going to be closer to what the film studio would have got if I went to the cinema?

Sorry, but no. That’s what I find difficult to understand - let’s say I want to watch a movie and ready to pay 5$ for it - why would I watch it in Hd or even 1080p if I have 4k TV? I understand that Google has only HD option for me, but why would I want it if I pay? In my mind if I pay - I should get every technical option possible to watch it, otherwise raw files are just few clicks away and I already paid for my broadband.

As simple as that.

The problem, for me at least, appears where some legal rights damage technological usage.

How many times my Netflix downloads will “expire”? Is this milk or something? Why do they need to expire? Sorry, but I refuse to understand…

Those are just excuses to justify your piracy. If you have a decent 4k TV and are sitting more than 5 feet away from it, the 1080p stream will upscale to "retina" quality and you won't be able to tell the difference.

> We live in a world where 90% of the entire catalog of movies ever filmed are available to be instantly delivered to your home in 1080p for less than the cost of a Big Mac

Yet whenever I want to watch something, I have to look up which service it's on, see if it's available in my country, sign up for a subscription, possibly download an app.... Or, go to the high seas and be watching it in 4k resolution within 2 minutes.

It's cheap in terms of absolute dollar value, yes. But it's also an EXCEPTIONALLY shallow form of entertainment that I can easily approximate for free by just streaming some different movie off Netflix.

I'd much rather go to the movie theater and pay the even higher price for admission, because that's an actual experience. You can't replicate "going to the movies" at your house very well.

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