The golden age of streaming TV is over
businessinsider.com
businessinsider.com
In ~2008 Netflix delivered DVDs by post, and the only people getting their video online were pirates and anime fans. So when Netflix approached Starz to license streaming rights nobody else wanted them, and Netflix got a great price for loads of content like recent Hollywood movies. Allowing them to offer a huge catalogue to US viewers for $10/month.
By 2012, when the contract came up for renegotiation, Hollywood had worked out that streaming rights were big business - and they figured their output was worth way more than $10/month. There were $100/month cable packages that got you less than you got from a $10/month netflix membership, that's a lot of money left on the table - so of course the deal didn't get renewed.
And Netflix has never been the same since.
[1] https://money.cnn.com/2012/02/29/technology/netflix_starz/in...
10 years later, why can't Netflix or a competitor work out a deal to do the same thing but streaming instead of DVD?
For example, a plan that let's you stream one new release per week.
If renting out physical media were considered a right of the copyright holder under US law, you can bet that Netflix wouldn’t have been able to come to a deal on that either.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aereo#Service and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FilmOn#Legal_issues
Then Netflix had to make a deal with with the studios to delay new releases on DVDs for 30 days on their rental service. So, when we were desperate to watch any new release on a Friday night, we would just go to Redbox and rent it. That made it pointless to keep the Netflix DVD service and we canceled the subscription.
Then I think Redbox was also forced to delay new releases. I’m fuzzy on timing, but I think the Redbox restriction came much later. So, no new releases on Redbox DVD either.
Now, we just rent or purchase any movie we want to watch on Prime. We’ll do a quick search if the movie is available on the other platforms and then just pay for it on Prime. $19.99 is our limit for a brand new movie. I’ll even instinctively start to just pay for a movie before I remember to check the other streaming services.
I still get the Redbox emails about new releases hitting the boxes and I always think, “We watched that a month ago.” I worry if Redbox will survive.
So it's not just about a slowdown in new shows coming out, but also the loss of access to existing shows. For example HBO Max has entirely removed Westworld, a show that's not that old and just completed it's 4th and final season this year.
So the whole idea of "I'll watch this series later when I have time" that came with these large libraries is going away.
Are we heading back to syndication? Or a more generalized version of the "Disney Vault"?
That or this will just send everyone back to piracy.
No, but then neither do we deserve to watch their shows. Just as they have no inherit right to our money, we have no inherit right to their product.
It’s easier to see the moral case for this if we think about cases other than the simple “pirating” of a show. For example, preservation. Doctor Who is a popular show that predates the practice of saving the original tapes. There are several episodes that have been lost forever because the BBC did not routinely record (or did routinely record over) their own broadcasts. Many other episodes were thought to be lost, but thanks to enterprising individuals who made unauthorized copies, have since been preserved. Is the world worse off or better off with those people?
Or take Star Wars. George Lucas famously hated that anyone could prefer the pre‐Special Editions of the original trilogy, and only grudgingly allowed it to be released once afterward, in a highly compressed anamorphic format on one set of DVDs. No other version has been released since. People who like the original special effects, dialogue, and editing have since done 4k scans of original theater prints from the 70s and 80s. People don’t deserve to be able to watch copies of those—legally speaking, the copyright holder Lucas (and now Disney) is the arbiter of that. But would a world without the option be better than our world today?
And remember, laws are capricious. The movie industry was terrified of home video. They thought it would materially damage them by removing the desire to watch movies in theater, where they made their money. (Remember MPAA president Jack Valenti testifying before Congress? “I say to you that the VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone.”) The VCR came within one vote of being outlawed as a piracy tool by the Supreme Court. A 5–4 decision. Because it survived, though, the people received a huge benefit from the new capabilities (like time shifting and media shifting) provided by this technology. And the movie industry benefited too, earning billions of dollars by embracing this new market… after they had tried to murder it in its crib.
How would today’s world look if one justice had voted the other way?
So is physical property ownership. Someone not walking up to your car and taking it from you at the end of a shotgun is a restriction placed on everyone by law. The only natural right you have to your car is whether you can keep it from everyone else by sheer force.
And yes, just like piracy, people can still break the law and take your car regardless. But you at least have the force of the state on your side.
Possession grants no "natural" rights by itself.
Good point. Property implies violence.
Point for the pirates, I mean.
Case in point, AFAIK the most recent craze on TikTok (and subsequently, on Instagram, Facebook and YouTube, as these days they're downstream from TikTok and just rehashing or commenting on it) is "Wednesday dance" and other memes related to the new Addams family show on Netflix.
Compound this with ever more streaming services, and it is an easy bet people will turn back to piracy. In this case, I think it is an ease of access issue vs a cost issue. Having 3-4 streaming subs is still vastly cheaper than cable, but when shows start vanishing and libraries become smaller and smaller or filled with junk, people will look to alternatives.
These days, VPN's are cheap and it has never been easier or better to set up a media streaming app in your own home. I've seen one that automatically downloads shows and movies with no input from the user. That is the type of ease of use coupled with the notion that content will always be available is likely to be a draw for a lot of people.
I know some people swear they can never go back to anything less after watching one 4K show, but I, for one, have no problem watching lower-quality media when there's no convenient way to get a high-quality version.
Some of us lived through the RealPlayer era.
My DVD player requires a separate input on the TV, controller, and wall socket. The player needs to be physically accessible too, and you need to store physical discs.
Changing DVDs is significantly more involved than changing a movie on Netflix, and finding something that you know you have on DVD Vs on Netflix required someone else to have correctly put the disk away.
Lastly, those things are just noisy as hell.
And anyway, it’s not really competing with Netflix since I sort of gave up on Netflix because it didn’t reliably carry most of my favorite movies and tv shows. It’s a choice between loading a dvd or not being able to watch it, not between loading a dvd vs clicking on Netflix. I’m in Europe so the selection is even worse.
I understand you're using "everyone" in a rhetorical sense but just to level-set about the real difficulties of piracy for non-techie viewers:
- downloading videos via bittorrent or visiting dubious warez websites of illegal videos with the risks of javascript popup malware
- downloaded videos (e.g. .mkv files) not easily playable on smartphones, tablets, or TVs that have the built-in "smart os" such as Android TV and Amazon Fire Stick.
A lot of viewers don't have media computers or laptops hooked up to TVs to take advantage of downloaded pirated videos. Even fewer will set up a DLNA media server so that their tablets can stream self-hosted videos.
This leaves only the computer-literate geeks as the group that can substitute paid streaming with piracy. This small subset is irrelevant to streaming companies. For everyone else, they just pick 1 or 2 streaming subscriptions (e.g. Disney+ for the kids and HBO MAX for the adults) -- and just live with the fact that their choices of shows are more limited and the existing ones may even disappear.
So "everyone" switching to piracy is a really small group of people.
More recently, there's even a new kind of piracy that has arisen: pirate streaming websites, where you just go and watch whatever shows in the browser, and as long as you have a decent adblock, you proooobably won't get a nasty virus.
Where there's a will, there's a way, and there's a lot of will among younger people who aren't already indoctrinated into the idea that we must accept what shows our corporate overlords give us.
These existed a decade ago too, yo be fair.
In reference to the computer literate part of your comment, my parents aren't tech savvy at all, and probably never pirated a movie in their lives until some guy came along with a £200 android TV box that just worked last year.
> there's a lot of will among younger people who aren't already indoctrinated into the idea that we must accept what shows our corporate overlords give us.
This sort of dismissal of "it's the young people" and talking about "corporate overlords" having some kind of magical control is getting tiring here. It's not a meaningful discussion, it's just navel gazing.
And then there's the young ones :)
You missed one item on your list:
- Any of the free video streaming sites. There's almost always one up at any moment, and all you need to use it is a web browser, and perhaps an adblock to remove the noise (and avoid an occasional crypto miner). These sites tend to disappear after a year or two, but are always replaced by new ones.
(As I understand it, they don't even host the content themselves - they're just a frontend with a search engine, aggregating links to multiple third-party players and video files.)
You might not get 4K quality there, but you'll usually get 1080p, which is more than most people get from Netflix anyway. Such sites are stupidly easy to use, have been popular with non-tech-savvy users for over a decade, and (AFAIK) in plenty of jurisdictions, they're 100% legal to use.
You probably can't get them working on a smart TV (I don't own one, so I can't say), but I guess that's just another reason to buy a dumb TV and a Chromecast instead.
Anyways, appreciate the different perspective, and the alternate use of "everyone". ;-)
Sure.
Will they?
No. Given the obvious counter from a studio is "sure, but we won't pay any residuals on that given we can't commit to a blank cheque for seventy years. And you'll have to be liable for the music rights."
For a moment, Netflix was so great because they had "all" the stuff! (not all, but a lot of good stuff). Now every company and their mother are retiring their contents so they can have their own smaller subscription service. I have a couple of them, and that's my limit on all these companies' greed; for anything else that happens to not be available, I feel no issue with appealing to Jack Sparrow.
Problem with piracy, torrent at least, is that finding older stuff tends to be difficult. But that's exactly the kind of contents companies are removing, so there would be not much to gain by going with them.
1. weekly releases of shows (episodes) instead of the whole thing
2. creep of advertising, including 'watch this rubbish trailer before we play your choice'
3. studios pulling their series/movies from netflix and trying to launch their own
The last one really annoys me. In the UK there is, last time I looked, apparently 70+ streaming services. I'm not paying 70x £8 per month for TV. Even just netflix, disney, and amazon is £30 or so a month. Now there's Paramount trying hard as well by pulling Disco off netflix. Well, sorry, that wasn't enough to make me pay for Paramount. Similarly with Disney pulling all the Marvel films off netflix.
It's as if the movie studios haven't learnt from Spotify/Apple Music/Napster etc. One service with all the things.
They have learned from those services - none of those make any money.
They'll all be available to those who pirate.
When Netflix first started its streaming service it obviously couldn't compete when it came to the amount of content, but it did a fantastic job competing in terms of convenience. This is gone now. Netflix and all others are competing with each other now. They all have their own subscription, their own crappy apps, login forms, VPN blocking mechanisms and whatnot. It's a nightmare. Maybe they'll offer something better in the future when they notice that they're not really competing with other legal streaming services anymore but with piracy.
One would demand active change and interest in the user, the other is easy scape goating. The ugly truth is, the state has no interest in preventing piracy. Piracy keeps the poor dormant and busy. Piracy reduces other crime and works like paracetamol on societal problems. The glowy rock shall distract them from the end of the world.
Though if you look at the resulting basement culture aka quanon, gamergate etc., this "cure" has run its course.
Literally nobody considers this aspect, at all, ever.
Content providers compete with each other, yet all of them think watching something without paying is taking money from the mouths of their babies even when that content is already ad-supported and shown free on OTA (over the air) broadcasts.
Depth of government thinking on this is inversely proportional to depth of content lobbyist pockets.
I do want streaming without ads. I just don't want multiple subscriptions and apps etc that are all not really good.
It's not as if Spotify et al. provide particularly good services, but they're convenient enough for most people.
Making life less convenient for users in terms of streaming video is going to be a hard sell. No one wants to pay more for a worse service with less choice, more restrictions and adverts.
> One thing that we have learned is that piracy is not a pricing issue. It’s a service issue ... The easiest way to stop piracy is not by putting antipiracy technology to work. It’s by giving those people a service that’s better than what they’re receiving from the pirates.
~10 years ago Netflix was superior. With the shifting catalog and the pricing tiers for high-quality streaming, the value proposition is not as clear today.
When I want to watch a movie I buy a DVD from eBay for a few bucks. Same with music.
No one can take it away, it’s cheap and convenient enough… I’m happy to wait a couple of day for delivery.
There are real market pressures working against physical media. Live digital copies are easier, faster, more flexible.
Right now I like YouTube premium. Although YouTube is making big mistakes like removing the downvote count. Gaslighting your users to appease creators and control narrative is not good.
I'm about to cut YouTube TV though. Its all commercials and bad content. Even CNBC is unwatchable to me.
Bloomberg as well. I have a $400 subscription to Bloomberg and they're still showing me commercials its absurd. How greedy can you be. I cant take that repeating chime and same 3 commercials hitting me in the head in the morning. Going to have a seizure.
It would be nice to have access to a big catalogue without pirating, and I don't mind waiting 2/3 days.
I would not consider the golden age of streaming over, btw. I'm not sure that ever existed. The entertainment industry is constantly being churned by economic conditions, trends, tastes, technology, etc.
I still think the og (Hbo) has the winning combination.
"Had"
Thanks to a past life making all this streaming stuff work in the first place, we still subscribe to “ALL THE THINGS!!!”
We also tape[1] the shows we like, to more easily watch time-shifted. We could rely on provider DVRs, but when we first set this up, most didn't offer that, or only offered in terrible quality.
In recent years, we nearly stopped. In 2021, for example, I didn't tape anything. In 2022, I did again because not all brands' DVRs supported offline viewing, and we're happy about it as we now find ourselves having taped things that have been taken off the services we pay to make their libraries available. We can still watch these, even though they've been memory-holed by the brand.
If they keep this up, it will create a new market for an updated TiVo, at least as easy to use as a VCR (which the linked item is not).
PS. Note that in US, time-shifting is fair use. Getting it to work is unreasonably difficult. A consumer product that simplified this would be cool but if too easy (a) would need a war-chest to defend itself, and (b) in that defense could put fair use itself at risk.
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1. i.e. https://www.silicondust.com/product/hdhomerun-scribe-4k/
In all honesty, I'm pretty burn out by how much content is out there. The most enjoyment I get from tv these days is watching classic drama 90s movies (Denzel Washington, Matt Damon, etc.)
The more money the streaming companies charge, the more they can spend on bigger productions.
Imagine the level of content you could produce if every subscriber paid $50?
Edit: changed 1 million to 10 million after I actually googled their budgets.
Rings of Power and Wheel of Time is the level of content you can produce if you have unlimited budgets.
It would look like Netflix of the past. Some IP was pulled because the owner didn't want it on Netflix at any price. Most was pulled because Netflix couldn't afford the rates, which they could if they had 10x revenue.
There comes a point where having more money adds nothing, and in a lot of genres that point is quite low. I'd imagine CGI/SFX/animation is the biggest scaling cost, very few genres use it that much to justify it.