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Comment by prirun | Hacker News Reader

Streaming services have already stopped publishing entire seasons, going back to the TV model of an episode a week. This is to prevent people from subscribing to a service, watching a whole season, then canceling the service.

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.

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The media market seems to be cyclical. Piracy is always an option, but most people prefer to pay for content if it is reasonably priced with few strings attached.

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.

The point is that I don't know when I have the time or the will to watch a series. I watched the sixth season of The Expanse only this month. I think it was released close to the beginning of the year. While I was writing this comment I had to think about who streams the show. It's Amazon. In a perfect world I'd go to YouTube or any other similar service, look for the series at any time and watch the episodes by paying them 1 Euro each (or whatever.) Who cares who makes it, it's like gasoline's brand.

> it's like gasoline's brand

Top Tier Gasoline Worth the Extra Price, Study Shows: https://www.consumerreports.org/fuel-economy-efficiency/top-...

>Top Tier Retailers: Retailers include 76, Aloha Petroleum, Arco, Beacon, Breakaway, Cenex, Chevron, Citgo, Conoco, Costco, CountryMark, Diamond Shamrock, Express Mart, Exxon, Fast Fuel, GetGo, HFN, Harmons Fuel Stop, Hele, Holiday, Kwik Star, Kwik Trip, Marathon, Meijer, Metro Petro, Mobil, Ohana Fuels, Phillips 66, QT/Quik Trip, Reeders, Road Ranger, Rutter’s, Shamrock, Shell, Simonson, Sinclair, Sunoco, Texaco, Valero, Value America, Wow, and Win Win.

Top Tier gasoline is a standard supported by an enormous number of fuel sellers, not a brand per se.

I can open up the TV app on my phone or laptop, search Expanse, and it gives me option to open Amazon to watch season 6. Or I can buy seasons 1 to 5 in the TV app itself.

I assume Google has a similar situation in the YouTube app?

Not in the YouTube app (random videos about the series) and not in Play (nothing about TV or movies - don't they sell movies?), but I'm always logged out so I might be missing something and/or don't know where to find it.

JustWatch is a great app for this, and they do content discovery / suggestions really well too. Also they launched as a Show HN here eight years ago.

I don’t even know how I’d get back into piracy. I used to have a seed box, accounts on all the big trackers, then it just became less hassle to sign up to streaming services and I let it all lapse

kind of regretting it now

I often see the intros of shows like Foundation and The Expanse and imagine all of the particles are there as a big F.U. to pirates trying to reencode their paid stream.

Particle Man, particle man. Does whatever a particle can. File size bloat on a pirate boat? Particle Man, particle man.

Business Man, business man. Extracts all the value he can. Residuals to pay, for old shows: no way! Business Man, businessman.

Reminds me of a Princess Chelsea song

https://youtu.be/vOLivyykLqk

  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

Oh heck that's 32 years old

You can grab the encoded but decrypted video out of GPU memory. So pirates usually don't need to reencode anything.

> I don’t even know how I’d get back into piracy. I used to have a seed box, accounts on all the big trackers, then it just became less hassle to sign up to streaming services and I let it all lapse

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.

> Jackett

Prowlarr is the new cool kid in town

There are an endless number of websites that stream virtually every show and movie for free in HD that you can access simply with a websearch and the proper ad blockers.

I don't know anyone who pirates on torrents any more for things other than video games, just streaming sites. Use yandex and search for the show + stream. Google works too honestly but isn't as good since they respond to dmca requests

In my experience it's the other way around. Most people I know just buy the game on steam because it's a much better experience overall, you get updates, you don't have to worry about malware, etc.

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.

you can also, uh, pay for music. I subscribe to three streaming services, buy vinyl and cds, and buy digital files as well.

> Piracy is always an option, but most people prefer to pay for content if it is reasonably priced with few strings attached.

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.

> 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.

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.

> 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 am apparently your parent now.

"our parents"? you can still buy CDs.

Yep. I’m slowly canceling all of my streaming services. If I can buy an entire show from Amazon, I’ll do that. Otherwise, back to piracy.

> it's available for a limited time, maybe 1 week, maybe the last few episodes, then it's removed

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.

I’d be happy if…

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.

That Netflix refuses to play ball with apple is why I unsubscribed from them. Who do they think they are, preventing their content from being findable via a global search?

Given how fast that rights-owners are delisting things from Netflix, my guess is that Netflix doesn't want people to know just how fast they're failing.

And having stale search with "Show XYZ On-demand", and when you get there, it disappeared last Friday. That's never good.

The searches seem to be up-to-date. Or rather, I’ve never used Apple’s search and found removed-but-listed content.

If Apple tries to get 30% of subscriptions when done through an Apple device, then I guess it makes sense to ignore Apple ?

Netflix does not need to allow in app purchases to be indexed in TV app.

> Media companies are gross.

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.

Plenty of people here don’t make that much but the sentiment is largely true. Lots of hand wringing in a thread a while back about the tragedy of paying like $14.99 so a family of 4 could watch the newest Spider-man movie I think.

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!

Optical media doesn't last well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disc_rot

My CDs from the 80s and burners from the 90s are in excellent condition:

https://imgur.com/a/I7fokrx

Contrasting point: lots of non-functional PlayStation games at this point, which despite not being scratched, have suffered disc rot. Buying them is becoming difficult.

Oh snap maybe burned ones last longer than stamped ones? I should rip all of mine but as one might expect I no longer have a DVD drive on a computer hah

$600/year isn't nothing, even if you're pulling in a half million a year. After taxes, it's $300k, and after the cost of life it tends to get chipped away. Insurance and co-payments, food, shelter, car registration, rent or roperty tax+mortgage, clothing, internet, mobile phone, computer, children and their care, pets and their food+insurance+care, utility bills, property upkeep, auto purchase or repair, and on and on. Even without stepping on the hedonistic treadmill, it's crazy how much life today coats compared to a hundred years ago.

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.

What? It’s like the only thing in your entire list that has gone down in price over time (computers & mobile phones probably count as “up” since not everyone needed them 30 years ago when they were expensive as hell).

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.

> 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 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.

600 dollars a year isn't nothing, but TV is essentially the number one entertainment / pastime for the average American. It's a good bang for your buck.

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.

It is weird that we are willing to spend $600 a year on something that is essentially a distraction, really a negative influence on our lives (not to get on a soap box, though, I do it too and I also buy alcohol and junk food, similarly bad for you and costly).

> essentially a distraction

As you might know (AYMK), the new trope is that TicTok in one country teaches study methods, while TicTok in the west teaches ???.

I find it more shocking that everyone wants great developer tools, but nobody wants to pay for them.

Instead of writing compilers, I'll make people click ads then, I suppose.

You're missing the obvious business model: ad-supported compiler.

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.

I remember that Caddy (web server) tried adding ads to their HTTP headers, and even that didn't go well with some non-paying users:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19741730

Some folks included ads in npm postinstall scripts, til they were outlawed.

I know it's hyperbole but do you seriously think that the average HN user makes anywhere close to that?

I certainly dont. I've spent too much time on blind though where I think that idea came from.

I'm looking forward to find more seeders on Bittorrent.

The age of downloading content to your device is largely dead mon frère!

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???

Downloading is still very much possible. The number of seeders is down since a decade ago, but the content is still there. You just have to wait a bit longer in some cases, that's all.

> The age of downloading content to your device is largely dead mon frère!

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.

Netflix deleted 36 shows. The merger is destroying a lot of stuff, as they do.

Tip: private trackers are better at rare content retention.

> Streaming services have already stopped publishing entire seasons, going back to the TV model of an episode a week. This is to prevent people from subscribing to a service, watching a whole season, then canceling the service.

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 think this is by far the more natural reason. It's just more engaging to wonder what will happen next when you have to wait. Binging content all at once is a great way to feel like the platform has nothing.

But it also leaves you hanging, I bet more shows get dropped because people watch a filler episode and feel like they spent a week getting excited for no reason, or worse the anticipation creates a recipe for letdown. Like watching porn before having sex.

Yes. I suspect that if binging + streaming service hopping becomes more of a thing--it's probably an outlier today--companies might shift to weekly drops more frequently. (Or doing annual subscriptions.) But, for me, I prefer that complex serialized shows are dribbled out. Otherwise I feel I have to stay away from any online discussions because some people will have binge-watched the season in a day.

It's made me sit back and wait until the season or series ends. I prefer to watch on my schedule rather than theirs.

This is why I still torrent, and never managed to hop on the streaming bandwagon.

How about just not watching TV?

Personally, I think this is a reasonable proposition, but I am afraid most people would respond to this by thinking, "How about just not living at all?"

Take their TV away and I'm sure most of those would discover reasons to keep living anyway. Responses like that shouldn't be taken seriously.

It would be great to see a resurgence in reading, or other forms of entertainment.

How about just torrent the shows worth watching?

> Streaming services have already stopped publishing entire seasons, going back to the TV model of an episode a week.

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?

> fund PBS as something of strategic interest?

Would have to rename it to Propaganda Broadcasting System.

You joke, but PBS is exactly that - when other countries adopt its programming, it's helping push Western/American culture. I grew up in Brazil and we had a local licensed version produced with Brazilian actors interspersed with dubbed original material.

My point, which is not a joke, is any media funded by the government will soon find itself pushing only the point of view of those in power in the government.

This is inevitable.

Absolutely not. You can make funding independent from government (see BBC's TV tax, for instance) and have a board of trustees that cannot be nominated by any government (more or less the same model as the SCOTUS, or make it so that the board can't be changed by more than 25% of its members over an 8 year period), and create clauses that ensure it represents various groups of society, in particular the underrepresented. While you are at it, make some bylaws that the entity can't change itself that ensure the board can't hijack it. Hire professionals using clear competency measures and give them tenure.

I've heard that before. The only things that get funded are whatever is currently politically popular.

> 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.

> Media companies are gross.

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.

> I'm shocked, shocked I say, to hear that these companies are acting according to their own self interest

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.

> extra benefits to subscribers who stayed long term.

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.

> This is to prevent people from subscribing to a service, watching a whole season, then canceling the service.

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.

Thinking back to shows like Lost and Walking Dead as examples. The community aspect of episode based shows is better IMO.

I think this was very important for the success of Games of Thrones. If everybody could watch it at any time and at any rate, we would have had not only spoilers but there wouldn't have been all the chatters at the coffee machines the day after the show and no buildup of expectations for the next episode. Probably nothing changes for not great series.

Gross. Individuals are responsible for avoiding spoilers, not the community. Having a fixed time when episodes become available probably causes more spoilers anyway, once that time passes it’s open season.

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.

Why not throw in 15-minutes or 30-minutes of adds in certain part as well. To slow it down and allow the watchers to take to social media upon release.

What if it wasn't ads? What if it were short "stretch break" clips that you could skip if you wanted to.

It’s like once a day Wordle.

Wordle would’ve fizzled out without a sense of anticipation.

You’re not alone. I’ve spent more time talking about _Better Call Saul_ and _She-Hulk_ in the last week thank I have about _Stranger Things_ during the entirety of its run. Zeitgeist conversation is both enjoyable for many consumers and free marketing for streamers.

That's your choice, which is 100% irrellevant to those who prefer to bulk-view. You can freely stop watching after one episode and return next week if you want. Your preference holds zero bearing on whether you can still do what you want, so you should fairly and similarly do nothing to interfere with others getting their way too, regardless of your choice being different. Rather, unless you want your options constrained by others, do not support, encourage, or permit the constraint of others' options, then deign to imagine that your preference matters one iota to them.

My thinking is that it will circle around to that. Meaning one or two streaming providers will remain and all content will be published there and likely the producers and studios will make the same amount of money regardless. Might be even more given no overheads of technology build and maintenance costs.

>> It's a damn shame the media producers didn't just put all their shit on Netflix for one low price

Steve Jobs was able to pull this off for music (iTunes). Netflix folks should have tried harder to become the default streaming platform.

I find this entire idea absolutely hilarious. That anyone thinks they would've been able to watch everything on TV they wanted for $15 a month or less when the cable industry was charging well over $100 a month prior. Anyone who believed this would be the case is... well, HN rules would rather I not be that blunt.

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.

The cable industry admittedly also included sports and some other live content--some of which is on various streaming services. And some other content is only available a la carte. But I agree with your basic point.

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.

There are definitely some efficiencies... and inefficiencies of the new model. Used to get 200 channels for $100, and now I can get like 6-8 streaming services for that. But since it's a la carte I can pick which ones I use, including spinning down to only one or two.

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.)

How?

Downloading content from torrents will persist until the torrent service operators will continue to provide a better service. Better service includes no regional restrictions and more complete content catalog.

The first season for free for many network shows has been going on for years and years. They're trying to get you hooked and then pay for the production X upgrade (Starz, SHOWtime... etc.)

I am actually still totally blown away I can't watch at minimum the first episode of every TV show on any given app or streaming service for free. The format absolutely begs to use the early episodes to hook viewers so that you can charge them to continue/finish the show.

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.

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