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Comment by joshspankit | Hacker News Reader

Too bad they’re unwilling to seriously consider P2P distribution for streamed media.

Would cut costs way down.

My residential wired home internet in Silicon Valley has an unreasonable data cap that I hit every month, so I would not be able to use a service that also requires upload.

(Which is very intentionally anticompetitive because they will happily sell you access to their streaming service that doesn’t count towards the cap).

They would have to make allowances for people with data caps yes

Isn't the content and licensing costs are the majority of their costs? Honestly asking, I never assumed infrastructure and bandwidth might be the majority

It depends on the service. For Disney and Paramount+ they already own the IP and the costs then would be storage + bandwidth + metadata/transcoding servers + engineer time. Of those, the bulk would be bandwidth.

Similar for content that’s owned by the platform. Netflix, Apple, and others invested in to original programming and in those cases there’s again no need to license.

However the prices of all those are similar. By this interpretation, either Disney does a very bad and expensive engineering job, or Netflix is losing big money. And I don't think either is the case... so there must be something else (and I can't tell what).

In this case you can’t look at prices as an indicator of profitability. Pricing is all marketing right now, and only barely connected to real business numbers.

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