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Comment by mtlmtlmtlmtl | Hacker News Reader

The streaming space desperately needs consolidation right now.

Every rights holder having their own service has killed a lot of the convenience because you'll now need several different services to go through an entire TV show, for instance. And also because all services other than maybe Netflix have garbage software for your various devices. Because every service also has to support 8 different platforms. Video playback and scrubbing is buggy and laggy, the GUI for finding stuff is sluggish. On one service(I don't even remember which, they all blur together in my head), I tried to watch some House MD and half the episodes were missing the English audio track.

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Consolidation, or interoperability.

Somehow any radio station can play any song they want (or seemingly any), for a standardized set of fees. And there is plenty of competition among radio stations. Couldn't we get the same setup for on-demand streaming of music and video?

Hell no -lobbyists

Too bad for them. I would assume that getting a royalty off my streaming of something earns them more money than my piracy of something, but I guess they don't want my money.

That state of affairs was created by compulsory licensing. I'm not sure that really makes sense for TV/movies, since it would also mean a fixed royalty price for everything. But it sure would be nice.

> I'm not sure that really makes sense for TV/movies, since it would also mean a fixed royalty price for everything.

Any reason why you think it would be a problem to have a fixed price?

I think the studios would have to swallow it if it was compulsory, no?

Because there's much more variation in what it costs to make a TV episode or movie than what it costs to make an album of music.

If there was one fixed royalty for every movie, it would presumably be too low to recoup the cost of blockbusters, so we just wouldn't get those anymore (I know some people wouldn't care, but most people would). And low-budget stuff would get "too much" (maybe less of a problem ;) ).

Then again, most successful blockbusters make back their budget and then some from theater ticket sales. But there's a lot of stuff out there that goes direct to streaming, or that doesn't find a following in the theater. Not to mention TV shows never end up in theaters, so they rely a lot more on streaming revenue to pay the bills, since selling television advertising is no longer as lucrative as it once was.

I do agree that compulsory licensing could work, but they'd have to come up with royalty tiers, or some variable pricing that depends on some objective measure that is difficult to game, if such a thing exists.

This is interesting. I'm just coming from the perspective that when I go to the theatre, there's just one general admission price regardless of the picture I'm seeing.

But I understand how TV is very different. You have "prestige" TV and you have your network sitcoms.

It kind of exists for renting/buying. If a movie is available to rent digitally, it’s normally on multiple platforms.

If Netflix had seen themselves strictly as a distribution service, they might have taken an open-to-all, low-margin, high-volume approach, which had a chance to become ubiquitous and unassailable. Basically, they could have been the Cable-over-IP provider for everyone. But it's a lot harder to get there, from here.

They did that, and for a few years their catalog was total crap and getting worse. Then Stranger Things came along.

Did they? I thought pretty early they saw the writing on the wall given the low barrier to entry for a juggernaut like Disney to compete with them, and went hard at their "Originals". I remember an interview with Hastings saying as much, that "in the future we won't have all the content, just the best content."

It would have been bold of them to essentially pull back and try and broker a deal where they accepted lower margins as a mere distributor rather than doing what they did and seek safety with their own library of IP.

Did this not work because Netflix didn't want to or because the producers decided they wanted to do distribution themselves?

It's called "value-chain climbing."

Spotify has the same songs as Apple Music, Deezer or whatever.

Everything should be everywhere. Let the services compete on something other than content.

Qobuz has the same songs as everyone else, but in higher quality.

Because when you compete on content, piracy always wins

Some things they could compete on, just because I'm overthinking this:

- price (do I have to pay or do you offer free with ads?)

- content quality (do you have 4k movies?)

- organization (can I filter by director? Do you have a collection of all the Oscar-nominated movies from this year?)

- advanced controls (can I make a playlist of tv episodes? Maybe I want to watch a series in a different order than it was broadcasted)

- accessibility (do you have subtitles in this language?)

- extras (does this have a commentary? a trailer? the cut scenes?)

- more extras (can I pause and get the name of the actor that's on screen or the name of the song that's playing?)

> content quality (do you have 4k movies?)

No, that arguably makes it even worse. You're adding a whole new dimension to the problem of "where can I watch this".

Remember, the UX you're competing against is: 1. Open Kodi, 2. Open a 3rd party add-on that shall not be named, 3. Pick any movie or show that exists, 4. Select any available quality, from 100 GB 4K HDR releases to 1 GB 480p transcodes, 5. Play, anywhere, on any device, at any time

I was drawing a comparison with Qobuz and the lossless tracks.

So maybe everyone has 1080p movies, but that streaming service has 4K.

Also having to look for the hardware that has the right DRM support to be deserving of 1080p streaming rather than 480p.

My fear is consolidation will lead to a nightmare scenario where they will push prices up and up until you literally cannot afford the no-ads version and we'll be right back where we all started, paying for access to shows but still seeing ads every 10 minutes.

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