HBO Max pulls nearly 200 ‘Sesame Street’ episodes
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
I assume that Sesame Street must have received a significant amount of public funding over the years, from governments, while it was being broadcast on public television.
As such, it seems like there should be some kind of legal obligation to keep it public.
This is one of my pet peeves — when a project receives significant public funding and then it is just essentially reverted into an entirely private benefit. It shows up in a number of domains of activities (telecommunications, research grants, and so forth) and always seems to me that there should be significant legal consequences for not maintaining public benefit or access in some way.
I might be wrong in this particular case though — maybe the public funding was always indirect, through the broadcasters?
The challenge here is royalties. You have to pay people royalties for broadcasting their work. You could take the position that publicly funded media should be in the public domain, but then it's going to cost considerably more because you'll have to compensate people for the royalties they won't receive.
> I might be wrong in this particular case though — maybe the public funding was always indirect, through the broadcasters?
Yes, Sesame Street wasn't commissioned by PBS, it was originated by the Children's Television Workshop which was funded via grants (some from the state, but mainly by non-profits like the Carnegie Corporation). And originally it aired on the precursor to PBS (National Educational Television), which was funded by the Ford Foundation.
Might be a dumb question - but is this a contractual thing? Why do people still need to get royalties for broadcasts of something made 40 years ago vs just paying them for it back then?
Yes. In general the content owners (less often so actors, screenwriters, etc.) work on a combination of upfront fees and royalties. This is true of book authors as well who typically get an advance against royalties. Purchasers generally won't pay a fee commensurate with "if this is a big hit" so the content owners are willing to accept a smaller fee in exchange for a cut of the big hit proceeds--even if those often don't come about.
Notably, live action productions covered under SAG-AFTRA and WGA get residuals while animated works under IATSE did not until very recently.
This is simply untrue. Private property proceeds the existence of the modern state.
Many parts of the world have extremely weak states, yet a distinction between private and public property remains.
Arguably, the states role is to ensure private property protections are available to the weak and the powerful, not just the powerful.
“The commons” - in the European and British sense were/are public property long before a meaningful state became involved.
Both s public and private property proceed modern states, and can have their origin in customary law as much as legal statutes.
“The commons” is/was publicly owned, but without any real threat of force behind it.
And government was often involved in managing them historically.
Hence the poem:
>The law locks up the man or woman
Who steals the goose off the common
But leaves the greater villain loose
Who steals the common from the goose.
https://mainlynorfolk.info/folk/songs/thegooseandthecommon.h...
and wikipedia on the Enclosure acts: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inclosure_Acts
Stop intimating that private and personal property are the same. Private property is enforcable only by coordinated violence. Its manifestations in the past (serfdom, slavery etc) have been universally agreed to be negative.
> Both s public and private property proceed modern states, and can have their origin in customary law as much as legal statutes.
You're still conflating personal and private property here.
That’s backwards, all income belongs to the people who earn it by default. We agree to use a portion for the common good to fund the government. Since a nonprofit is presumably already working for the common good, there is no reason to take any of their income to fund the government.
Any way money can be extracted from a nonprofit to create private IP is dubious be that a University or public television.
What the revenue was used for is irrelevant. If I pay an employee a salary, I dont get part of their house. If I pay a Mcdonalds for a burger, I dont get shares of the corporation.
Where the close relationship comes from may differ. It may even be from trying to avoid conflicts of interest (e.g. an agency whose policy forbids holding assets, and therefore has been the sole funding of a nominally independent production company). Requiring publicly funded would to enter the public domain would be a way to prevent this entire class of misdeeds.
A much simpler definition is if all the stakeholders were aware and consenting of the contract, and did you deliver on your obligations.
Are you insinuating that the producers of Sesame Street failed to deliver or tricked those purchasing the broadcast license
Sesame Workshop did nothing wrong, public TV did by agreeing to such a contract at the beginning of their relationship.
PBS has been licensing Sesame Street since before digital distribution was even a “thing” to put into a contract. PBS can certainly be licensing those rights now but they’d have to pay more, not less. They paid for the broadcast rights and still do.
There’s always been rights they’ve left to Childrens Workshop such as product licensing which subsidizes the production costs making PBS’s outlay less, not more. PBSs mission is to broadcast public interest programming that’s it. They license all their content similarly.
Let alone the fact that Children’s Workshop is a non-profit with public reporting requirements so it’s not like they have something to hide.
Seems like a working symbiotic relationship.
An AIDS research nonprofit shouldn’t be handing lots of money to Wikipedia just because Wikipedia does good work. I think Childrens Workshop has done great things and they should be creating and licencing content for around the world. However, my point is simply PBS has it’s own mission and could have been a more effective steward of it’s funds.
Similar arrangements are quite common in the startup world were you invent something novel. You then make a second company with a license for a specific purpose and sell the second company with the license and retain the core IP. There's nothing fraudulent about it as long as the buyers know they're getting a license and not the core IP
That’s making a lot of assumptions, imagine the CEO of IBM set up his own company which he the sold to IBM. That kind of transaction is just ripe for conflicts of interest.
Now to be clear Sesame Workshop is a nonprofit so this specific deal is less of a concern. However, public TV didn’t get the better end of this deal which is my concern as it demonstrates the obvious loophole.
Why do you consider it a loophole? It seems like a clear win win in retrospect? They got decades of high quality licensed programing that they wanted.
Why do you think they didnt get the better end of the deal, or at least a good deal? Maybe they could have payed more for more rights, but that doesn't account for other shows where full rights are worthless. Should PBS have done the same for every show they contracted with where the IP ended up worthless?
Companies don't acquire every vendor or contractor they work with for good reason. There is a reason that Netflix or HBO dont buy perpetual IP to everything they air. You dont know what will be a winner or loser, so you pay less and license opposed to buy.
It is easy to armchair past decisions with future knowledge, but those making the decision didn't have that knowledge. You and I should have invested in apple, google, amazon, tesla, ect for pennies. however, we would be broke if we invested in every company that could be worth something.
But, that's not what is happening HERE, which is closer to IBM still contractually paying patent royalties to a former employee of the purchased company.
Sure but it illustrates things are complex. My personal belief is PBS should at a minimum have gotten perpetual rights to the episodes inside the US for any purpose.
PS: IMO, toy sales is somewhat sketchy because the show acted like a commercial in the same way Transformers or My Little Pony did, but that's a different issue. Should they include shows with a toy line is more a question of their mission than how cost effective the deal is.
Though it can be used as a quote, it can also be adjusted to make a point as people can just look up. Anyway are talking about a 50 year relationship not just what happened recently.
As to why PBS should have negotiated, they where getting well over 100 new 1 hour episodes per year as PBS was also running a lot of reruns. I am not saying very young kids don’t deserve that much new content but PBS would have been better off owning fewer episodes they could rerun than paying for that deluge and then also paying to rerun episodes. It's one thing not to negotiate after year one, but by year 30?
If they make millions or billions from licensing to HBO then they don’t pay taxes on that. They can also distribute those gains to employees and management in the form of bonuses or featherbedding.
And they don’t pay taxes on the sale.
So it seems more like a tax dodge than just a moral argument that government shouldn’t fund private enterprises. Or at least claim that it’s for public good.
I think this misunderstands that the entire point of having a non-profit tax status is to create a tax dodge.
We want them to avoid taxes because we want to promote the products they generate.
>If they make millions or billions from licensing to HBO then they don’t pay taxes on that. They can also distribute those gains to employees and management in the form of bonuses or featherbedding.
Why should we care that they don't pay taxes? If they give it to employees, then they have to pay income tax at a much higher rate than a for profit would.
At the end of the day, the public wanted high quality educational content produced, we set up tax incentives to support it, and the content was made.
Can you provide a source for this? I'm not finding anything that suggests that an employee of a non-profit organization would be taxed at a higher rate than an employee of a for-profit organization.
Why should the Sesame Street production company get tax benefits over any Hollywood production?
>Why should the Sesame Street production company get tax benefits over any Hollywood production?
Specifically because we decided as a society that we wanted to encourage companies making educational content and not Hollywood blockbusters.
There are strings attached to being a nonprofit. These include limits on employee compensation so that the CEO of a nonprofit can't take a billion dollar salary as a workaround for corporate profit. They have to be paid a salary that the IRS thinks is reasonable, and any excess Revenue made by the nonprofit has to go back into its beneficial purpose
But agree in general. US 501c3 status is based on a variety of things that the federal government has determined are worth encouraging--including education--that it has historically deemed the private sector was not sufficiently interested in funding. This in turn comes with strings. Which is not to say there aren't large and wealthy institutions that benefit from this status or that donors to those organizations don't benefit as well from certain tax benefits such as donating appreciated assets.
Can you sign elaborate because I'm generally curious. I run a business and and my portion of employment taxes, and all of salary including their taxes, are discounted before corporate profit and taxes are calculated.
If this were not the case, I would be paying taxes while my bottom line is negative
You can easily get to a point where public funding can’t buy anything and can only be used to produce things directly.
However when it comes to creating IP that they don’t own it gets tricky because the IP owner also benefits from the exposure of being on public TV and can then turn that into toy sales etc. On the other hand if the IP flops then public TV has taken all the risk. In many other contexts having a nonprofit take in the risk while a for profit sees the profit is illigal. Just imagine doing this with startups rather than childrens TV shows.
However, how do you guarantee that public television or other none profit is actually getting a discount in such deals?
Why are you bringing it up in the context of PBS negotiating licenses of Sesame Street?
PBS doesn't control congress, it's the other way around!
I don’t know the degree to which it applies in this specific situation.
For higher education the rule is 100%, even when the funding isn't supposed to be buying anything in particular, or going to the organization which becomes attainted.
There’s actually a push for all custom developed code for the US government be open sourced, even if produced by a contractor. Seems reasonable to me.
It isn't something to blame a vendor for several decades after you agree to a contract when you feel like you missed out.
I understand why they do it as I like money too.
There is also donating to something because you want a for profit service to exist as something to buy.
Keep in mind there is a balance where the "ask" for receiving government funding may prevent the creation of the work in the first place.
Sometimes, the right balance may be to require the work to contractually enter the public domain in return for receiving funding. Sometimes, the government could negotiate something less than in order to get a net benefit.
The Republican party has been battling to keep that significant amount of public funding as close to zero since PBS was founded. There was the famous Mr Rogers testimony in Washington DC (where the Corporation for Public Broadcasting managed to prevail) and there was the Gingrich era where the stated goal was to shut down CPB:
https://www.nytimes.com/1994/12/17/us/gingrich-foresees-a-wo...
It sounds like you think it should, which is a fine position to take, but odds are that the contributors of the other $9,999 have a different opinion and may make different choices about contributing were that the case.
So — assuming that the public can’t justify the entire production cost of all grant-worthy work — what ends up happening is that you have a negotiation of rights and contracts and lawyers and all that banal, complicating stuff.
...if Sesame Street were 0.1% public funded.
This allows private businesses to seek out solutions that are in their best interest, while also offering some protections to consumers. I don't see it as any different from the way we regulate other public utilities, like not allowing power companies to shut off service during the winter.
Note that I specifically used ambiguous language so that a wide range of uses for the content are possible. I don't necessarily have a problem with Sesame Street being behind a paywall, provided that the service isn't priced in an absurd manner.
You'd be surprised by how little it is. Most pbs and ctw funds are derived through nonprofit foundations and "viewers like you" (and corporate sponsorship), NPR likewise has relatively little government funding. A good chunk of what does wind up coming from government gets earmarked for things like rural media access.
While it's not zero, lots of things like science research, military weapons, get a much much bigger relative slice of their r&d funds from the public purse and still get to keep their IP.
There's plenty of ideology sunglasses people wear to prevent themselves from seeing this.
It's hard to convince people of a reality wherein their identity demands them to oppose it.
HN has been more reasonable recently but there's still threads mobbed by Hayek and Rothbard partisans.
The giveaway is they have an unfalsifiable ideology. Bad results are because they didn't adhere enough, every problem has an identical solution, any purported tests aren't true tests, examples given aren't real examples so it can't be observed, it's just pure rhetorics and pseudo-intellectual dogma
Don't bother. It's team sports to them. See y'all in the replies with whataboutisms and personal attacks.
IIRC, Sesame Street has thousands of episodes. At some point when I was watching as a child, they would display the episode number on screen at the end of the intro song, and it was huge.
Where can someone access all of that cultural history?
1. https://muppet.fandom.com/wiki/List_of_Sesame_Street_episode...
2. https://muppet.fandom.com/wiki/Lost_episodes_of_Sesame_Stree...
Someone, somewhere, probably has nearly every episode on slowly deteriorating VCR tape.
I love reading into this sort of thing. Media can be so ephemeral unless the creators are careful.
Hollywood should have had an archive.org sort of organization since way back.
In 2022 this is obvious, where we can economically store vast amounts of digital data. In the 20th century, the cost to store all that media would have been far greater, and they had no way to know the internet would come along and radically change the means and cost of distribution. From that perspective, I think the decision to not invest as much in archival is not surprising.
Suddenly there will be monetary incentive to copy and distribute old content rather than keep it locked up forever.
No, It was super common for studios to tape over old content during the early years of television. Plenty of stuff literally doesn't exist anymore.
"In the earlier '70's, the Dumont network was being bought by another company, and the lawyers were in heavy negotiation as to who would be responsible for the library of the Dumont shows currently being stored at the facility, who would bear the expense of storing them in a temperature controlled facility, take care of the copyright renewal, et cetera.
"One of the lawyers doing the bargaining said that he could "take care of it" in a "fair manner," and he did take care of it. At 2 a.m., the next morning, he had three huge semis back up to the loading dock at ABC, filled them all with stored kinescopes and 2" videotapes, drove them to a waiting barge in New Jersey, took them out on the water, made a right at the Statue of Liberty and dumped them in the Upper New York Bay. Very neat. No problem."
-- Edie Adams, widow of Ernie Kovacs (largely forgotten extremely famous comedian) testifying before the National Film Preservation Board of the Library of Congress.
https://web.archive.org/web/20070927072638/http://www.loc.go...
Old tapes don't last forever, even the fancy professional ones.
> Street Scenes — Mr. Hooper hands Js out to the kids
Early Sesame Street seems a lot more exciting
All things Lost: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SKk_MAmT2Uc
The actual episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=21btSNc6tIU
I watched that witch episode (skipping through the non-story segments), and I'm not sure what to make of it. What an odd storyline.
Here's what I kept expecting to happen: the witch asks nicely for her broom back, the man says "well of course, since you asked so nicely", and they all live happily ever after.
In a way, that's exactly what happens, but in a bizarre fashion and minus the happily-ever-after part. The witch does ask nicely and the man does return her broom, but then the witch turns around and is like "aha, I tricked you" (through the power of appealing to his basic sense of decency?) and flies off—only to drop her broom again during the final moments of the episode. What?
One thing I appreciate about Sesame Street is that it generally doesn't talk down to kids too much, and perhaps this exchange is an example of that. Kids aren't stupid—they realize that not all misunderstandings are easy to resolve, or worth resolving.
But I still can't figure out what Sesame Street was hoping to teach here!
> As part of Sesame Street's 50th anniversary, it was announced that the Sesame Workshop would be donating almost 4,500 episodes across 49 seasons to be preserved by the American Archive of Public Broadcasting
The episodes are available to members of the public in-person at the Library of Congress or at WGBH Boston.
Yes, it would be much better if they could be streamed over the internet, but I'm really glad to learn they're publicly available in some form.
The high seas of the internet is the only place where gate keepers hold no power
Though, if I remember Sesame Street correctly, those episodes heavily reused content between episodes (e.g. I probably saw this segment literally hundreds of times as a kid: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZQ_MEFVx5jM), so that might be less work than it seems.
As soon as I clicked it and saw the girls sitting at the table, I remembered the swirling orange colors.. and sure enough, next scene.
Thanks for this. I'd guess it's been at least 30 years since I'd seen it.
Well, not exactly. Just watching it again as an adult, I just realized that I don't really know what the man is dumping into wax mixer at 0:26. I'd always assumed it was wax, but now I think it's probably orange pigment.
It is if the question is if the video shows you exactly what is going on.
It's not if the video is meant to mostly be just interesting pictures that give general sense of what a factory that makes crayons is "like."
DVD box sets.
Pirate sites.
"Thousands of hours of historical Sesame Street" is exactly the type of content that streaming services should be making economically viable for the first time.
Broadly, it does, but the countless historic episodes (of many things) are not sitting there as nicely encoded video files with cleared distribution rights.
Much work will not have been well-archived in the first place (if at all), nor catalogued well (if at all), and there will be performers and musicians and other contributors who may have various rights that need to be identified and negotiated before a legitimate streaming site can air it.
In all, it makes the per-item preparatory effort quite high and means that most old stuff will be left to volunteer, underground distribution for a very long time.
For example, there are pretty well-known TV series like Northern Exposure and WKRP in Cincinnati that are only available in essentially bowdlerized form because the music that was such a key part of the shows was never licensed beyond original TV use.
I see what you mean, but if we are at all concerned about preservation of old media, a streaming platform is useless unless we are able to download it without any form of restriction. I doubt most platforms would be okay with that, because it would remove part of the incentive of continuing to subscribe to their platform.
If I recall correctly, Netflix and Hulu both have some form of "offline access" to certain content that their studios produced, but I wouldn't be surprised if there is some sort heavy handed DRM associated with that.
To make things more frustrating, consider this: Plenty of streaming services that have already come and gone. Most of those platforms had some amount of original content on it. Once the platform shut their servers off, viewers lost any form of access to it (assuming that there wasn't a workaround to download a local copy.) Theoretically, that media could pop up on another platform in the future if some deal is worked out between studios, but, I find it extremely unlikely, and even less likely that all of it would ever be available on a singular source. That is to say, there is a near guarantee that there is a growing amount of media that we will never have never know about, let alone have the chance to see.
Technology seems to rotate through various trends. The only realistic possibility that I see of us finding any kind of long term solution to this issue is if there is a sudden, overwhelming shift back towards physical media (DVDs, Blu-ray, etc.) Without unrestricted physical access, the ability to access "lost" content is merely a expiration date, either by a subscription ending, or a platform dying off.
The less likely alternative that I can think of would be some kind of gentlemen's agreement. Each time a new piece of content is created, a preserved copy is provided to a third party source, to be made public if that piece of content is no longer accessible. Something along the lines of how the Library of Congress works. I just don't see any studio being particularly interested in humoring that type of arrangement, unless it was a legal requirement, or something that was demanded through unions like Screen Actors Guild, Writer's Guild of America, etc.
Elmo is kind of awesome, perfect, full of energy, unflappable. And he seems to know it.
Sesame Workshop and HBO Max/WarnerMedia/Discovery+ could better serve the public and their markets by committing to metered access to the full library. Two episodes a day should be enough for anyone...
r/datahoarder
And yes, HBO Max is merging with Discovery+ into a combined platform. It will use the Discovery+ software (which is presumably better because HBO Max is terrible), but will offer all of the content that remains on both platforms by the time this happens, likely next summer.
https://www.boisestatepublicradio.org/2022-08-19/hbo-max-cut...
i know the new leadership claims Discover's tech is better, but i wonder if that is true. i wonder if it is PR-speak for creating some picture of reciprocity ("yes, HBO has content-- but discovery is bringing something to the party too!)."
i know the HBO Max app gets a lot of well-deserved flack. still, i imagine the underlining infrastructure is much more robust than anything discovery deals with in terms of load, scale, and internationalization.
dropping a new episode of House of Dragon tonight, or the new Wonder Woman movie in 4k HDR/etc. at a specific time must require far more interesting tech than whatever usage patterns the latest episode of 90 Day Fiancee necessitates.
This has been going on for a couple weeks. It's not stopping me from watching, but it is an obvious bug that should have been caught by any testing at all, and should be a P0 fix this tomorrow production bug.
I'm glad they did eventually fix the last bug: It was impossible to select a profile and start watching unless you resized the browser window down to half size. I can't imagine how they accomplished that one!
HBO Max crashes for thousands during ‘House of the Dragon’ premiere: https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/08/22/hbo-max-c...
as a Person that only has Discovery+ and has no interest in HBOMax I hate they are doing that. Discovery+ is a great low cost streaming service that I get a ton of value from.
Discovery+ is our “white noise” streaming source to put on when we feel we need to have “chatter” and “activity” in the background during a WFH workday.
Pull up any of the hundred generic home improvement shows, hit play, leave it on all day. Stuff goes on you don’t need to pay hard attention to, or can pay soft attention to if you’re trying to think about something else to trigger a lateral thought, just like looking up from a laptop in a cafe or open plan office.
With HBO content, you might accidentally feel you should watch something. Never happens with Discovery+!
Re-watching Dirty Jobs or Mythbusters, or watching Good eats, or Worst Cooks In America....
They are reducing redundancy, getting bad assets off their books, and reducing costs. These streaming services (minus Netflix) are not profitable.
Some of the Hollywood trades reported that HBOMax Kids programming isn't highly watched. Let a service with better kid viwership numbers license it instead.
That was addressed 17 years ago! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cookie_Monster#Development
I can definitely see the appeal of watching those old episodes for nostalgia's sake, but presumably HBO weighed up viewership numbers on old vs new episodes and decided they weren't worth the licensing fees.
I wish there was an obvious solution for this kind of niche viewership stuff that isn't just "pirate it", because that's what I usually end up resorting to for older shows.
What streaming service is going to go through the effort of licensing every mildly popular 80s crime drama I want to check out after a wikipedia binge?
Almost as in “hey, this was my favorite thing as a kid”, cue counting to 12, the yip-yip aliens, and silly Super Grover.
The fact that it was broadcast on public television is why I naively thought it could be excluded from pure business decisions.
But I as others are realizing: nothing is safe, not even public television.
How about they start dropping all those crappy reality TV shows instead? They have a few hundred of them that nobody watches.
But that still lets people wait until the whole season is over, watch it, then cancel. To avoid that behavior, IMO streaming will move more and more to the TV model: it's available for a limited time, maybe 1 week, maybe the last few episodes, then it's removed. If you want to watch the old stuff, pay more, either by the episode, by the season, etc. Amazon is already doing that with Fringe for example: you can watch Season 1 at no cost, but the other seasons will cost you.
Media companies are gross. It's a damn shame the media producers didn't just put all their shit on Netflix for one low price, but greed all around would have likely never let that work either.
When a lot of people are paying for content, media companies look for ways to wring more money out of them. This degrades the quality of service and drives customers away.
When few people are paying for content, media companies look for ways to get paid. They become more open to offering discounted rates to platforms with new ideas, distribution models, etc. This improves the quality of service, and draws in more customers.
We fled from the sinking ship of cable to the HMS Streaming, like our parents fled the sinking ship of $20 CDs to the iTunes buffet. I'm excited to see what comes next - maybe a way to pay $5 per DRM-free downloadable episode? Sadly, it will probably be a painful decade until the winds of user experience finally change.
kind of regretting it now
Private trackers aren't necessary 99% of the time. Set up Jackett, point it at all the big popular public trackers, and you can find nearly anything.
Prowlarr is the new cool kid in town
Business Man, business man. Extracts all the value he can. Residuals to pay, for old shows: no way! Business Man, businessman.
Why is the world in love again?
Why are we marching hand in hand?
Why are the ocean levels rising up?
It's a brand new record for 1990
They Might Be Giants' brand new album Flood
With movies/shows however it's the other way around. You get a better experience if you pirate. You get all the languages and subtitles. No ads. No annoying autoplay of other unrelated content. You get the actual video file so you can watch it without internet connection, on other devices, you get to keep it forever, etc. No invasive DRM. Much faster playback because it doesn't need to buffer.
Top Tier Gasoline Worth the Extra Price, Study Shows: https://www.consumerreports.org/fuel-economy-efficiency/top-...
Top Tier gasoline is a standard supported by an enormous number of fuel sellers, not a brand per se.
I assume Google has a similar situation in the YouTube app?
I am apparently your parent now.
No. Only those people whose income high and work and leisure time is valuable like to pay. I find that all of these condition have to be met and not just one. I know enough people who with their high IT salaries still share Netflix or other service accounts among multiple families. And as expected they are ever ready with righteous explanation on how this is correct thing to do.
Then there are billion plus people in third world who can't pay whatever lowest price content owner might decide. So piracy is not second thought but like most natural first option to watch content.
With the increasingly saturating mix of content with ads, the future I see that there will be plenty of "cheap", "unlimited" plans to consume content for some definition of these terms.
When I lived in a third-world country there were loads of people with Netflix accounts. I didn't have one, but I did have Spotify which was significantly cheaper than Europe (~€1.75/month). Steam games are cheaper too, although I don't recall by how much as I never really use it.
This is why these platforms are so hawkish about regions, because otherwise everyone would be living in Africa or Asia to pay the cheaper prices.
As Gabe Newell famously said about Steam, the solution to piracy is not DRM, it's making a service which is better than piracy. Hence, the success of Steam, and the iTunes Store, and so on.
The above model is not better than piracy. It's far worse, and it costs more, and so the return of popular piracy is inevitable. Snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.
1 - All streaming providers had a public API for show/movie listings. Apple manages to aggregate most content across providers, but I think Netflix refuses to play ball, making search harder than it need be.
2 - there isn’t really a 2. I rotate services regularly as shows go in and out of availability. If shows get yanked quickly, I just won’t subscribe to that service.
Streaming has done wonders for my consumption. It’s a fraction of what it was back in the cable TV days. I can’t tolerate ads any more, so don’t get cable and refuse to subscribe to services that inject ads into their content (even after a subscription). If they all are ok with losing me as a consumer forever, at this point in ok with that. I’ll just rent the odd movie or show and be fine.
And having stale search with "Show XYZ On-demand", and when you get there, it disappeared last Friday. That's never good.
Yeah like someone else said earlier. Welcome to HN where everyone makes half a million dollars a year and no one wants to pay $50/mo for content.
Zero sympathy for the companies that seem to be burying content for tax benefits or residual avoidance, just saying the price for someone to watch video content has dropped in a pretty remarkable way, especially inflation adjusted, over the last few decades (theaters may be the exception), though people rarely “own” their copy of content these days.
My DVD collection of maybe 40 movies & shows will last as long as I don’t get rid of my PS3 but in 10 years I haven’t watched any of them.
There need to be legit competitors so the creators of new content can negotiate deals that don’t allow or incentivize the shelving of content. Currently if someone offers someone who isn’t a household name any contract to make their dream project they probably accept it with no redlining. Meanwhile John “Jim from The Office” Krasinski posted 8 episodes of maybe the dumbest, most tone deaf slop to YouTube in March of 2020 before immediately selling the “show” to Viacom and walking away.
The “golden age of TV” ended super suddenly, hopefully this is the end of the re-bundling and we’ll see another unbundling soon!
Instead of writing compilers, I'll make people click ads then, I suppose.
You're going to be staring at the compiler output anyway, potentially for minutes at a time waiting for the build/tests to fail. Throw some ads in the progress bar.
Living even a half full life is still expensive before you dump fifty to a hundred bucks a month to Comcast, Disney+, Hulu, YouTube, Spotify, and Netflix for access to entertainment on their timelines.
And if you don't watch enough to justify 50 bucks, then subscribe to one service. Each one has more than enough content to keep a viewer busy.
As you might know (AYMK), the new trope is that TicTok in one country teaches study methods, while TicTok in the west teaches ???.
It used to cost like $3 1999 dollars to rent one VHS for 3 days, now it’s $14.99 for a month of watching as many of hundreds of movies / shows as you have time for.
The prices are going to get weird soon though! Amazon Prime is weird because it’s “free” with Prime shipping, HBO is free with AT&T’s main mobile phone plans, Disney+ (and some others, $20/mo max) are free with AMEX Platinum card.
The difference is, I picked the $3 movie to watch. The streaming services are limiting what I can watch for $15. If I want something really good, I have to pay for it, individually.
I have long theorized Amazon Prime releases shows that are free on Prime until they are rated enough to decide whether the show is any good. If it's good, it's no longer on Prime and you have to pay. If it's shitty, okay, we'll leave it on Prime. I quit using Amazon's Watch List because I spent a significant amount of time scrolling through shows to add them to my watch list, only to find later that they were no longer on Prime and I'd have to pay for them individually. Fuck that.
It's sad, because things like the despecialized editions of certain "Disney" movies will never see large scale distribution.
The world of bit torrent + the world of copyright / residual payments doesn't seem to meld well.
If they made a player that was "legal" and any content you played would pay residuals back to the creator, they could just normalize views and make it fully "not for profit". Seeders would be purely altruistic. You would pay for the residuals you watched, and there would be no middle men making billions (NFLX making 1.5B per quarter).
Side note: Is sesame street highly pirated? Are you really looking forward to more seeders of sesame street? ... why???
I hear that since Netflix came up. I'm pretty sure it'll be there long after Netflix is gone.
With all those 1-click-hosters it's easier than ever today.
It's as much this as it is keeping discourse alive. A week of reaction and speculation on social media is just free advertising.
I don’t see Sesame Street’s audience as prone to binge watching. It may be a way to avoid paying for the material.
I hope that, in that case, the rights revert to the original owners (be them PBS or Henson) so they can make the material available elsewhere. HBO may keep the deal for the most current episodes as they have now.
BYW, since the current government seems sane, shouldn’t they properly fund PBS as something of strategic interest?
Would have to rename it to Propaganda Broadcasting System.
This is inevitable.
> using clear competency measures
I.e. meet the politically correctness criteria.
> Absolutely not.
Read history books :-)
> the same model as the SCOTUS
Which is clearly political in their decisions. Consider Roe v Wade. Either its enactment, or its overturning, is political. Can't both be apolitical.
I'm shocked, shocked I say, to hear that these companies are acting according to their own self interest.
> It's a damn shame the media producers didn't just put all their shit on Netflix for one low price
Except it wouldn't be 'one low price', it would be 'whatever Netflix feels like charging' because in that situation Netflix would have a monopoly on media distribution. And for the same reason, media producers would get paid whatever Netflix deigns to give them.
That's a non-answer. Media companies could act in their own self interest and also not be gross. Instead of taking things away (i.e. removing stuff that used to be available) they could offer extra benefits to subscribers who stayed long term.
Is it hard to think of these benefits without screwing us over? Maybe, but I don't care, they should move their asses or get the hell out of this business. I've zero sympathy for their "plight".
Because you know, us consumers always have the option of piracy: free, high quality, available whenever we want, and it's never going away. So media companies better shape up and offer us the better product.
Indeed! That's partly the model of many game subscription services (PS+, etc), where (simplified description) each month you're subbed you can add a few games to your catalog, and you can only play your catalog while you're subbed.
I might be going against the grain but I actually like this... I prefer being able to digest a show at a slower pace so it can have more of a cultural impact. This allows me to talk to my friends about what we just watched and follow along, plus get other people to join us in the watching experience. It makes it a much more communal activity that helps us connect with others.
Plus that’s how disappointment and resentment are formed. You wait a week to watch the episode and then they kill off all the WW in a single episode, makes the years of build up feel like shit. If I could binge the season from the start I might not have stopped watching it because you are not sitting there almost expecting a letdown for the next week.
Wordle would’ve fizzled out without a sense of anticipation.
Steve Jobs was able to pull this off for music (iTunes). Netflix folks should have tried harder to become the default streaming platform.
Netflix briefly enjoyed this width of content solely because it was viewed as an additional revenue stream and not the primary one. As soon as streaming became the default, it was necessary to actually bring in enough money to make multi-million dollar episodes, and that means not selling content to Netflix for pennies on the dollar. Netflix wisely used the interim to build it's own first party content library (which everyone else already had), while everyone else had to build the distribution network (which Netflix already had). While they did it in a different order, they ended up placed about even with other TV companies in the long run.
A hypothetical all non-live available digital content for one monthly price would probably be over $200/month.
The good news for someone like myself is that I can get tons of content (and access to more a la carte) for under $50/month. I could add a live streaming service and I'd still be paying less than my cable TV bill used to be.
The sports surcharge model I'm especially glad to get rid of. During the pandemic, the Chicago Cubs decided to launch Marquee Sports Network, and require every carrier in the Chicago area to subscribe all customers to it for roughly $7 a month... or not be able to carry it at all. The ridiculousness of it is like if you were forced to buy HBO by your Internet provider.
IMHO, the city of Chicago should've kicked the Cubs out of the city over it, but sports teams have too much power over municipalities.
(Note that the carriers are presumably contractually required to deny you are being forcibly subscribed, but every carrier's sports fees uniformly went up approximately $7 a month when Marquee launched.)
I'm a big Vudu user, which used to have a much wider variety of temporary deals for first episodes for free, but any time I look at a show and see the first episode is $1.99, I'm just... confused, like the folks making those decisions missed Marketing 101.
I have HBO Max and it's worse than HBO go. I can't find anything there. And the stuff that they have is all negative mood or lbgtq crap that doesn't interest me, or superhero bs, which also doesn't interest me.
.. I dunno lol, I'm going to look harder at apples one
Seasons 39 though 52 are still available.
I’m willing to bet very few of the people complaining actually ever watched any of the cut episodes which is probably why they were dropped.
This just seems like a good opportunity for people to be upset about something, but it doesn’t make any sense.
Go buy the DVDs if you care so much and stop acting like HBO reducing the number of seasons available to 17 is like they canceled it.
In the case of Sesame Street, at least the missing episodes are available on Youtube. That mitigates things somewhat. But it's a shame the other shows were removed completely with no legal way to find them. I hope the resulting blowback is enough to keep streaming services from doing this again.
All you said was:
>I keep seeing this and people griping about it so much bothers me.
Why does someone griping about the fact that their expectations of a service (especially one you personally aren't providing) doesn't match reality bother you at all? Why do you have an opinion on their opinion of a third party that they pay money to for a service?
What we're seeing is a strong reaction to that promise being broken. It's not about whether you're in the audience or even if you have young kids (or may some day) who might want to watch the archives, it's that the vision of the great comprehensive virtual library is dead.
There's nothing you can do about this except start building private collections again. If you want to make sure you can still have access to something in 35 years, buy it in either a physical medium or a digital medium you can download without DRM.
https://www.amazon.com/Best-Sesame-Street-Collection-Various...
I looked for sesame street for years, and HBO Max was the only source I could find for the old critically-acclaimed / educator approved series.
And, to be honest, whenever I've given into the temptation to buy a DVD collection of some favorite old TV series, I usually watch a few episodes for nostalgia purposes and then it gathers dust.