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Comment by martindbp | Hacker News Reader

> The services have taken the piss and now they'll get the repercussions of it.

Whose fault is it really that all content is not available on a single service? It's nobody's fault, it was inevitable given how things work.

How could you "fix" it? You'd need legislation saying that all content must be made available for licensing at the same price for every service. But that's not enough, because why would HBO sell their content to Netflix and vice versa? No, you'd have to force them to make it available. But that's not enough either, as they could just set the price extremely high. And at this point what would be the point in having multiple streaming services at all? Perhaps we need legislation that enforces separation of content producers and distribution, like the Glass-Steagall Act but for TV, or Net Neutrality?

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There was a wonderful point made by Gabe Newell a few years ago on this. He said the only thing you need to do to “beat piracy” is provide a better service than piracy offers. And that’s pretty easy, for all manner of reasons. I thought he was way too optimistic at the time - but here I am years later with hundreds of games in my steam library. I haven’t pirated a video game in years.

I think Gabe’s rule is like gravity. It’s inconvenient for space travel, but what are you gonna do? You don’t get to space by complaining about it.

It’s the same in streaming. All the streaming platforms need to do is provide a service that’s better than piracy. And I really do feel for the streaming platforms here. That seems like a hard ask for them. Netflix rarely has content I want to watch any more. Shows I do want to watch are often on a different competing service. And they often remove shows and movies from the platform that I might have otherwise enjoyed. Im not subscribing to multiple streaming platforms at once - that’s ridiculous. I’m not surprised they’re complaining about piracy - they’re rapidly becoming a worse service than piracy and gabe’s law is kicking in for them.

But at the end of the day, like space companies, complain if you want but it’s not my problem to fix. And there are plenty of fixes - make it easy to have a grab bag of streaming services which swaps streaming provider every month. Or give me access to every platform for my $10 and distribute the money based on what I actually watched.

I dunno. Figure it out. Or don’t, and watch piracy eat your lunch. Your call, Netflix.

I think media like TV/Movies might be fundamentally different than games because of how easy it is to serve pirated content. With games there's a lot of friction with getting cracks working and risks with malware while with TV/Movies you just watch them in your browser. Recently my friends showed me a pirate site that I'm in awe hasn't been taken down. Don't think I can post a link here but it has all the things I'd expect from a paid streaming service (slick and fast ui, large catalog with good discovery options, high quality streams, no lag, random ui niceties like a dimmer switch, skip op/ed and multi language subs). Being honest as long as something like this is available I don't really see what a site like netflix could offer that would convince me to pay.

Actually the more I think about it the less I understand how it hasn't been taken down.

> Being honest as long as something like this is available I don't really see what a site like netflix could offer that would convince me to pay

Most people are honest, and will do the the legal thing when faced with two equal options. If the choice is between that UI but it's illegal, and a reskin of that UI but it's £30/mo, I'd pay.

But it's not, as the other comments here said. It's a choice between that for free and a limited catalog of region restricted, ever changing, poor video quality streams spread of multiple services, and given the choice between paying 4 providers for a poor service and getting a good service from one location, people will pick the latter.

You wanting everything for £30 is just not a sustainable cost though. They would lose money like that.

Why? If I watch 2 shows from Netflix, it costs $10. If I watch 2 shows from Disney, it costs $10. If I watch a show from Disney and a show from Netflix, why should that cost $20? And if I pay $10 for that, why would that be uneconomical?

The way licensing and streaming costs work is super arbitrary and wacky. There’s nothing fixed and eternal about it. If the fee structure isn’t working (and it’s not) then it should be changed.

The movie industry can get a reasonable amount of my money or none of my money. Their choice.

That’s their problem though :) bet they lose more money from the $0 they get from pirates - or so they whine.

Replace 30 with 60/80, whatever. The entire rest of the post is my point, not the specific number.

There is a very simple thing that I would personally want that would make piracy not worth the bother: disentangle the content and the platforms.

I don't want to have a dozen different apps with different (but equally crappy) UX, and I don't want to track which megacorp owns the license to my favorite movie to know what subscription I need this month to have access to it. I want to go to a single marketplace (like e.g. Steam), pick the titles I actually care about, and have access to it. I don't want to care who gets that money, and the platform and the rights owners can and should figure this out between themselves. If prices for that particular piece of content change next months because it changed owners, let me know and approve the exact amount by which my combined subscription will change next month.

Note that this doesn't imply that there should be just one marketplace. Let there be many indepedent ones, all participating in the same system that routes the money from consumers to rights owners, and providing the same catalog and pricing, but different UX etc.

But that would kill lock-in. And lock-in is how they can squeeze the most out of us. So it won't happen, and piracy it is.

I think TV and games are meaningfully different. Most people tend to watch way more number of shows in a year than buying/playing video games. Video games have more replayability, so it's something you need to "own" rather than stream. Therefore, subscriptions for games are not a big thing yet (I doubt it will ever be). As it stands now, if a game I want is not on Steam, that's OK, I can just install another game store. It's a bit inconvenient but not too bad. The problem with TV is cost. I'm OK switching between Netflix, Disney, HBO, Youtube, whatever, but I'm not OK with paying $70 a month,

> Therefore, subscriptions for games are not a big thing yet (I doubt it will ever be)

World of warcraft has had a subscription for 20 years and is wildly successful. PSN has a monthly subscription where you get 2-3 games per month added to your account that you can play as long as you're still subscribed. Gamepass has 25+ million subscribers [0]

> I'm not OK with paying $70 a month

Honest question, why not? That's what cable TV cost 15 years ago, and $70 now has the purchasing power of ~$50 then.

[0] https://gameworldobserver.com/2023/09/15/xbox-game-pass-30-m...

> Honest question, why not?

Value for money. Most households don't spend their lives watching 4-8h of content every day, I'd think.

I'm likely to watch maximum 12h a month. So 6$ an hour? No thanks. And I'm talking maximum. Most months I spend 6h watching in total. That brings it up to $12 / hour.

Pay-what-you-watch sounds better to me and many others. Show me a gradually increasing bill in the top right corner of the UI and I'll manage. Or give me only one subscription -- much less than $70 though -- and then you distribute my money to the proper rights holders. I shouldn't care who owns what, nor should I be bothered switching services.

It doesn't matter if I'm a billionaire as well. Again, value for money.

I have been thinking of something similar Pay-what-you-watch with a twist. You have to top up a minimum amount ( Say $20 ) and not charged per view on credit card. Think iTunes Credit.

The Video should also last for at least a week once you borrowed it. ( Which is similar to 5 days old DVD rental except the 2 days postal time being instant. )

I wonder if it is a business model worth exploring.

But didn’t the cable TV cost include the content delivery and hardware? You need to add the cost of your internet connection on top of that, plus whatever box you use to play to the TV etc.

Kind of - the content delivery for Cable TV was basically free. It all just gets blasted down the cable and the box filters out what you're not supposed to have access to. So arguably, you were paying to have a restricted service.

The hardware was often subsidised (although I recall at one point having to pay an extra €99 for a sky box), but assuming a set top box cost €100, that's 1.5 months of payments to pay for the box, the rest is the subscription cost.

> You need to add the cost of your internet connection on top of that, plus whatever box you use to play to the TV etc.

Only if you exclusively use the internet for this content. And the vast, vast majority of TV's come with apps for Netflix, Prime etc these days. Those that don't, a streaming stick is ~£35.

$840 a year just on watching TV is heaps. $4200 over 5 years. That's a fair wack cash.

No it isn't. Compare that to any other activity and the price would be similar for how often you do it. If you eat out once a week you'd be paying a similar amount if not more. Most people watch things more than once a week.

Yeah I get to eat out on date night with my partner maybe twice a year if we are lucky. We get takeout maybe once a month. More likely once a quarter. This is a huge amount of money for entertainment.

It's not just TV though, it's TV & movies. I used to go to a blockbuster equivalent with my parents most Fridays, and we would rent 3-5 movies. Usually it would be 1 new releasae and some from the back catalog. I was only about 14 so I don't know exactly how much it cost, but the "New Release, only €5.25" poster is etched into my brain. I'd guess we did that 3 out of 4 weekends, spending probably €10 each time, which is about half of that cost.

> That's a fair wack cash.

I never said it wasn't, but (I would wager) it's most households primary form of entertainment. It being ~2% of the median household's income it's good value.

It'll be naturally fixed by economics. We'll reach an equilibrium point where offering an exclusive streaming service becomes less profitable than simply licensing your content to another service or services. Obstinance will probably drag out the timeline, but it won't change the outcome.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons

Those media conglomerates are very stubborn though, they care more about keeping their rights than money itself.

Let them be stubborn. They can't outlaw everything that they don't like. They'll die a slow and painful death.

> It was inevitable given how things work.

It's like every technology: if this is how things work, and they are suboptimal, the optimal solution will be applied. If we say "oh to bad, it's how it's established", then people will go against the establishment if that means better capabilities.

> How could you "fix" it?

Take a look at the music industry, they have solved it pretty well. I can stream everything on Spotify paying very little, I get everything that I want and I don't have to pirate it anymore. So maybe fostering independent creation? Forbidding "exclusivity" clauses? Fostering independent studio creation?

> They could set the price really high.

Prices are elastic: bigger price, less demand, same benefit. So that doesn't cut it either.

The reason it works for spotify is because musicians get fuck all on it. This doesn't work with film and TV because they are unionised and have to be paid a certain amount.

Then what are you claiming the difference is? Are music labels inherently less greedy? Is it harder to build music streaming vs video that leads to a monopoly?

Is it because labels have ownership in Spotify? I don't think the HBOs and Disneys will give up their streaming platform unless forced to do it.

I’d say the key difference is the sheer amount of artists and styles. I’d argue it’s “easier” to make music than filming. That’s why I would foment independent creators.

You might be right on HBO and Disney not giving up their service, until customers don’t want to pay for it anymore, and they’ll seek other ways. That’s capitalism after all…

Music has compulsory licensing, and yet we have different radio stations, and multiple streaming services (only some of which is covered by compulsory licensing).

If compulsory licensing for tv and movies also implied the service was picking the episodes, you'd have potential for competition if service A just played all of the episodes in order and service B only played the good episodes. Etc.

The way you fix it is through piracy. The media companies then either solve the licensing issue among themselves or go out of business.

> How could you "fix" it?

The larger a company is the more it falls back to "let the market decide." In this case the market is starting to decide (again) to bypass the poor user experience the big players offer and just steal the content. This is the point where it's time for the market to adapt (again) if they want to keep revenue.

FRAND licensing is a thing. And forcefully splitting playback/delivery and content creation would create a much healthier market where content companies have interested in distributing their content to as many streaming services as possible to get revenue - e.g. see the situation with audio playback. With Spotify/YTM/Tidal being separate from music labels, there's much MUCH less of this exclusivity BS.

Came here to say this.

People don't care about multiple services, they really care about the hassle. Cable TV sort of already solved this with how they handle movie packages like HBO or Starz. You pay your cable company a little more and you can watch those channels (or stream them). No need to worry about logins, accounts, separate apps/interfaces, etc.

Digital sort of has this, at least on Amazon. I can watch Paramount or Starz or HBO Max content via Amazon Prime if I have a subscription to them, for example.

But not Disney or Netflix or ...

And so many things are platform-exclusive these days.

> It's nobody's fault, it was inevitable given how things work.

Then the video stream vendors must find a different way to make things work. If their goal is to be user-friendly, which I highly doubt. Only in marketing-speak (err, marketing lies) they claim "The experience of our user is our utmost goal". But it really isn't.

One of the possible ways of "fixing" it is natural evolution and selection, the way it happened with communication networks. They once ruled, but eventually the shifted to being "dumb pipes" (leaving aside for a moment how exact that moniker is) and the end-user device manufacturers taking over as the point of delivery of paid services.

The same could theoretically happen for entertainment content, in one way or another. A popular scenario present in a lot of sci-fi is that people subscribe to "channels" or data streams or whatchacallit, and the point of access is actually working as an aggregator and single point of payment. I can see no valid reason why big outfits like Sony or Samsung couldn't do that, effectively defragmenting the subscription craziness and easily dealing with backoffice negotiations on licensing and whatnot (Sony could probably do that without leaving the building).

Again, it doesn't HAVE to be the end-user device manufacturer to present such a single-point service, but I think they are best positioned to be first movers for such a paradigm. And not saying it would be easy, because they are subject to the same brain-dead enshittification attempts in their "smart" devices as anyone else, and that is a habit that is hard to quit.

It's type of licensing called FRAND. Has been utilized with success.

The same price is doable, they just can't be bothered to lift their ass.

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