Hacker News Reader

Comment by data-ottawa | Hacker News Reader

I had Prime Video, and when searching for content I would get told to subscribe to some channel within Prime. Now Crave (in Canada) does the same thing. Netflix doesn't bother integrating with Apple TV's search or aggregation features to try and drive you into the app.

The end result is searching for legitimate content is a terrible experience. If it's a result from Prime, I just pass. If it's from Crave, I pass. If it's on Netflix, I don't see anything at all.

At least a decade ago streaming boxes had one search box and it would return results from all the sources, and if it appeared you knew you could watch it.

What the streamers provide today is a significantly worse experience than piracy, and I don't know how they haven't realized this.

View on HN

If HBO and all the other content houses would all go to Netflix and say we'll close down our streaming service and license you all our content, and take our share of a household $60/month, everyone would all make more money, but there's negative infinity chance of that happening; on top of Netflix making their own content, so what's the way forwards? He government could step in and say that online distribution platforms can't also make their own non-self-marketing content, but there's also zero chance of that happening either, so it's a tragedy of commons until someone goes bankrupt, and it's not OnlyFans that's going to be the content farm to fail here, so someones is going to have to buy everyone else until the DoJ gets involved for antitrust reasons, and then we're left with two subscription services (US consumers aren't properly able to count higher than that. Apple vs Google, Democrats vs Republicans, McDonald's vs Burger King, CVS vs Walgreens, AT&T vs Verizon, etc)

> McDonald's vs Burger King

Yum! Brands (KFC, Pizza Hut, Taco Bell, etc.) is slightly larger than Restaurant Brands International (Burger King). McDonald's is larger than both of them put together. Or if you want brands rather than corporations, there are a zillion burger chains.

> CVS vs Walgreens

Rite Aid and Walmart, among others.

> AT&T vs Verizon

The US wireless carrier with the largest market cap is T-Mobile, with only slightly fewer users than Verizon. There are also many smaller ones.

> Democrats vs Republicans

This isn't a result of consumer preferences, it's a result of the first past the post voting system creating a powerful incentive for the most similar parties to merge until there are only two left. (Score voting fixes this.)

> Apple vs Google

This is the only real market duopoly here, and it's the one they have to worry about.

Either they can license their content to multiple services so it's convenient for customers to subscribe to one service and get everything, or those two companies will eventually figure out a way to get the same effect and most likely end up sucking in 30% of their industry's revenue in the process.

> If HBO and all the other content houses would all go to Netflix and say we'll close down our streaming service and license you all our content, and take our share of a household $60/month, everyone would all make more money

That's how it used to work. They all started making their own platforms and pulling content off of Netflix because they thought they could get the same numbers as Netflix and keep all the payments instead of whatever slice Netflix was giving them.

And now prime wants another $2.99 to stream without ads. Something I had previously included. Nickle and diming also drives customers away.

Drove me away. Increasing the price on my yearly renewal wouldn’t have been noticed. Sending me adverts means Amazon have lost out on far more than my cancelled prime subscription - I haven’t bought anything from them, and that’s over $100 a month revenue lost.

You can make the ads go away by paying more? How? Seeing ads on my paid for service is driving me absolutely crazy.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com