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Comment by msluyter | Hacker News Reader

"1. You can’t have enough new content every month, subscribers therefore don’t keep the subscription year round."

For our household, this is true of all streaming services. We rotate them, or subscribe for short stretches. For example, I got Paramount+ for a couple of months, watched all of the Star Trek content, and then cancelled. Amazon Prime is the exception (because free(-ish) shipping.)

I wonder to what extent the big streaming services are aware of this phenomenon and how they hope to mitigate it.

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The services definitely know about this and to a large extent they build it into their model. Every subscription service has a churn model being accounted for.

The services also know that the only thing they can do about this is release enough new content to keep users engaged, or bundle the subscription with other ones.

Or rotate what parts of the library are available each month.

Or each day! And we are back to where we started.

Hear me out: what if we had like...an hour block where EVERYONE streamed one of the same 15-20 shows at the same time?

Obviously, we'd also need to have a few random catch-up blocks for older shows, maybe in the mid-afternoon. Perhaps we could even do it over the air wirelessly, with no ISPs involved.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pluto_TV

Of all the competitors to Netflix, Pluto tv (owned by Paramount) is the most interesting.

Precisely because they built, and continue to optimize, their product around profit:user.

If they can get favorable licensing deals by broadcasting as linear programming... they do it.

If they can get good deals around on demand... they do it.

The end result seems to be that they have many more options to minimizing cost of licensing content, and therefore maximizing the amount of content they can offer a user, versus a pure-play on demand provider.

If Netflix added linear programming "channels", I'd buy their stock tomorrow.

Or offer discounted annual subs. Or partner with credit card companies for statement credits. Lots of ways to fight churn.

> I wonder to what extent the big streaming services are aware of this phenomenon and how they hope to mitigate it.

I suspect that not many people do this.

It it becomes a problem, they can always bring back the old weekly episode model.

Since I became a parent, waiting for weekly episodes to completely release and then subscribing has become immensely favorable since it turns out I can easily live without being a part of the internet discussion of whatever.

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