Hacker News Reader

Comment by costanzaDynasty | Hacker News Reader

Because its alway been cable. Just Youtube, Sony, Fubo etc are the cable provider. Yes it streams, but it was never the same as a streaming service. Something like PlutoTv or the soon to be oversaturated FAST market is just rabbit ears. Mono culture is coming back big in the next couple of years, and this is how.

When our streaming forefathers spoke of a la carte as the future, they should have specified each individual piece of content and not a la carte channels. It would have saved us all a lot of money.

View on HN

The dream of a la carte (before streaming was even a remote possibility) was to choose which channels you actually watched and which you didn't want and you would be charged accordingly. It was a reaction to too many channels that people didn't want but were charged outrageously for anyway. Cable was highly priced back then as I assume it still is today. Instead of all-or-nothing, people wanted to pay only for what they wanted in the hopes of reducing their overall bill.

But why would à la carte be that much cheaper? If a user watches a certain amount of streamed video, it doesn't cost more to stream it if it comes from ten different channels than if it comes from a single channel.

It's not. But the branding works because Americans are socialized that "customization" must be good. And because changing things often temporarily makes things better.

(Liberty Mutual Insurance takes this to the limits of absurdity by advertising "insurance customized so you only pay for what you'll need to use".)

Why would it not be cheaper?

I have no interest in paying for sports, so I do not buy sports. I can buy individual episodes, seasons, or month to month subscriptions within seconds now.

I now wait until all the episodes are out, and word of mouth from multiple sources has established quality of the content, to purchase it. I can then consume it within a month or few months, and cancel the subscription. Or rent the movie for a few dollars.

I probably pay $150 per year at most. Before a la carte steaming, that would have easily been $75+ per month with contracts and equipment fees or whatnot to Comcast. Mostly to pay for other people’s interest in sports.

Ala carte was most certainly not the streaming dream; in fact it's the exact opposite. The selling point of early streaming Netflix was that it had everything for one price - i.e. more bundled than cable.

The current situation of having 10 streaming services exists because Netflix wouldn't raise their prices to become cable. Netflix's business model only worked because the people making the content undervalued streaming rights. When they started asking for real money, Netflix balked[0], so they pulled their shows to their own service so they could charge users directly.

[0] Because $9.99/mo is a more attractive price than $72.99/mo

The issue is is that all the big networks still own all the rights. Initially they sold them for cheap to vMVPDs but now the networks are charging more so YouTube fubo etc have to pay more leading to these price increases.

But as prices go up customers cancel, and so then there is pressure to decrease prices.

The networks can’t achieve economies of scale with independent apps so they have to cave to price pressure too.

I think you're pretty right, but that we are currently in a boom time for standalone streaming apps, where in addition to the big guys (Netflix, DisneyHuluESPN, perhaps another 1-2 who do have both access to huge amounts of owned content and great scale) we also have every other video content producer (Warner Discovery/HBO, Paramount, NBC/Peacock, etc) currently trying to make a go of keeping as much of their content exclusive to their own bespoke paid streaming service as they can. Many of these will probably fail and hopefully resume licensing things to streaming platforms that are bigger and more appealing.

> when our streaming forefathers spoke of a la carte as the future, they should have specified each individual piece of content and not a la carte channels.

https://itunes.apple.com/us/genre/tv-shows/id32

Previously, this wasn't cheaper, you could get basically all the things with 2 subs, e.g. Netflix and Hulu Plus w/ Live.

Then there was a sort of golden age where Apple TV or Amazon Prime offered brand umbrellas as individual channel subscriptions. You could even add/cancel them right in the iPhone's subscription list (a few are still there).

Now most shows are congregating back under brands, each wanting full freight as if they had it all, the combination adds up.

Doing the math, if you watch specific named shows instead of background TV, it's to where season purchases might again make sense for individuals or DINK type households that only watch prestige TV.

Monoculture won't be coming back since a part of it was everyone watching or listening to something at the same time. If you missed the finale of Seinfeld or Cheers you'd have to wait a long time to see it again. No one is keeping their calendar open to watch any sort of media these days.

HBO begs to differ

Reply on news.ycombinator.com