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Comment by bastard_op | Hacker News Reader

This goes to show people are sick of having to buy 5-10 services just to see all their things, they'd rather get a single pirate stream with them all. Just if you watch US football, you have to subscribe to no less than 5 services to get them all, and international sports are even worse for their football or whatever. Even one of the Seattle Seahawks players got caught watching his own games on a pirate source because even the rich ballers are sick of the all services.

It's just far too easy for me to go download whatever I want to even pay for services, pirate or the real media cartels.

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There'd be a market here for a single service for which you could add individual shows from any other streaming service. You'd pay more per show, but that would be perfectly ok for many people.

Unfortunately vested interests within each service would make this impossible due to the level of cooperation required.

I mean it makes sense. Everyone can see what ridiculous power apple and Google have gained over "their" developers and the steep fees they demand.

TV content producers wouldn't want to put themselves in a similar position if they can avoid it.

YouTube does this as a feature that randomly gets advertised hard, then completely disappears into Google idiotic GUI design.

There was a brief period of time where Netflix was the absolute peak of online streaming. Most of the major studios were putting their movies and shows there, Netflix was starting to dip their toes in creating original high quality content, and all of it was available for a reasonable monthly price.

Now when I want to watch something I don't even bother trying to figure out what service it's on (if any), I just grab a torrent. Managing subscriptions for a dozen different services and trying to keep track of what I'm subscribed to and why is laughable when it's so easy to get it for free.

These days it's automatic too, the episodes just show up on your hard drive as soon as they're released for whatever you subscribe to or put on your wanted list.

If more people did that, maybe the media cartels will humble some.

"Why can't I just buy cable channels à la carte?!" - everyone circa early 2000s

We got exactly what we begged for.

Except we didn't. Instead of 500 channels we don't want, we have 10 services with 50 channels. We've managed to actually find the worst of both worlds, which in of itself is an impressive accomplishment.

Most of those 500 were paying to be carried, not the other way around.

We wanted a cheaper cable bill when they were 100-150/mo usd, and as you said we got them in the form of all the media cartel services for $10-20/mo each + 50-150/mo internet data. It's still the same problem.

Cable is nothing but a streaming service itself, a cable box is nothing more than a cable modem getting online the same way your data modem does, and streams video the same way as streaming services do, but it's 1000 channels of random crap full of commercials instead of just one media brand in streaming.

Cable tv sucks. It still exists and still sucks. I don’t think anyone was begging for the fragmented options we have now.

Ideally people want to buy what they want to consume/use. Instead they make us pay fees for a bundle of garbage product rather than sell us the actual product we want. Everything as pay per view would be great. Maybe even include dynamic pricing.

> Everything as pay per view would be great.

I really really don't want this. I want a flat monthly rate for all the things.

“shall we watch that new show?”

“which one”

“the Papacy one”

“you mean pay-per-view”

In 2008 it was about $60 for ~118 channels ( my source is https://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/24/technology/24cable.html which isn't very good arguably).

So lets round and say $0.50 a channel.

If netflix et al only cost $0.50, i'd have no problem subscribing to 10 services.

Really, the whole cable a la carte thing was really a response to false advertising. Cable liked to advertise each channel as being equal - as if you were spending $0.50 per channel when really you were spending $50 on the good channels, and the other junk was free.

I realize this is ancient history, but prior to cable people got Big Ugly Dishes aka C Band dishes and at the time you could subscribe ala carte. When cable came along they practically doubled prices when they also bundled channels ostensibly for convenience but also allegedly due to bundling/license agreements with content providers. The grumbling about unbundling then was due to the price hikes.

I do remember a lot of people complaining about paying for all those channels when all they really wanted was sports. Without realizing that sports was what cost so much, the rest of the channels were almost free.

Yes, true today and the opposite for many: they don't want an expensive bundled subscription to subsidize sports when they don't watch sports themselves.

people begged for 1 streaming service

that had ALL The content

instead we got ~25 different streaming services that varies from country to country, and end up costing more than cable tv, if you want them all.

I dont know why consumers have such a hard-on to blame other consumers. Are you, brandonmenc a cable CEO? Are you make $$$ from gouging subscribers? I highly doubt it. So why the affinity?

Certainly you can see that the cable channels were overcharging, we had 100s of channels like the 'golf channel' with useless programming that were part of 'bundles' you couldn't unbundle and frankly, there were multiple lawsuits of cable companies overcharging incorrectly, not letting people out of contracts etc.

Consumers wanted more choice and control. For the briefest second they got it, but at that very moment when Hulu was independent and Netflix was streaming and GoogleTV was just starting to make a run for it.

At that moment, before Google even thought of chromecast and ABC couldn't give a shit about buying Hulu and telecom executives couldn't not understand dual screen viewing (where you're on your phone and watching TV at the same time) there were massive consulting and strategy meetings about not only recapturing the 'wallet' of spend, but increasing it. Discussing how to bring the spend of a household on cable (say 45-100/mo) to a higher number, to a per person segmentation rather than household.

Even if we did 'beg' for it. I dont think we begged to sift through titles and memberships in a way thats worse than blockbuster some nights.

Source: Was responsible for defining the second screen experience, merchandising shows in real time, etc.

> we had 100s of channels like the 'golf channel' with useless programming

Hey, I like the golf channel.

I'm not sure what the complaint is here. People wanted individual channels.

Now at last they can buy just the Disney channel for ten bucks a month and get all the latest lame Star Wars miniseries without yucky sports.

How is this not a deal? Is that not what everyone wanted?

If people are now saying they want to just like, pay a dollar for a single Star War, well, good luck.

Exactly, on average I watch a movie per week, if not less, I'm not going to spend $25-100/month and sacrifice a goat in the hope that whatever I want to watch on that specific day is available in my region/language. I could rent them but most providers either don't have what I want to watch or only provide it in my local language, which is neither the original version nor my native language.

Sometimes I meet with friends who have all the services and we still end up torrenting because there are issues 50% of the time (technical problems, availability, geolock, subtitles only available in local languages, &c.)

even worse than that is how the sports get blocked out depending on who has sold what rights to who.

Eg . the uk premier league has sold the rights to uk teams to sky and bt but sky and bt won't always show all 10 of the days games.

so you can be in the situation where your team are playing a game you can't get tickets to[all sold out] that you can't pay anyone legally to watch. yet you go on holiday to Europe and every bar will have Bein or ESPN or whatever showing every.single.match. live

These takes are so overly simplistic. People like free/cheap stuff, no shit. I'm not saying that having lots of subscription services isn't annoying, but your argument could easily apply to lots of things that people pay money for that they would rather get for free if they had the chance.

What I think bastard_op means is that more people would be more likely to pay for a legitimate services if it was a better aggregator of content. Navigating between the X services available to find 'thing you want to watch' is frustrating, time consuming, and expensive.

You appear to be simplifiying it down to only the 'expensive' aspect. And more than likely that's the primary motivator, but the other factors aren't nothing. Additionally, the customers are paying at least something for this service, so it's not free.

In this instance there happens to be an (illegitimate, but still) alternative that's easy enough for 22 million customers to have worked out how to set up, operate, and prefer.

> Navigating between the X services available to find 'thing you want to watch' is frustrating, time consuming, and expensive.

Apple TV and other TV boxes have aggregated services for a long time now. You can search for content across providers from one interface.

Pirate streaming sites aren’t exactly known for their quality, consistency, reliability, and ease of use. I bet it was more frustrating to use the pirate service, especially for those dealing with subtitles and alternate audio.

This really does come down to expense.

> Pirate streaming sites aren’t exactly known for their quality, consistency, reliability, and ease of use.

The great ones, that gets a lot of word of mouth recommandations, are definitely better in my experience.

Steam/GoG and other services disprove this quite clearly. You can pirate games sold on these platforms trivially and safely. In the case of GoG you can often even get signed installers given the trend against drm.

Nonetheless these services are highly successful and profitable. I think one problem is this weirdness of the 21st century where many companies, especially in media, are seen as antagonistic towards their own customers - this provides a major motivation for piracy.

For games, particularly from smaller studios, it's the exact opposite. They generally seem highly concerned with the interest and satisfaction of their players, and so you want to pay them. Many of these studios even sell things like soundtracks (already available in the install folder) as 'pay more' buttons, and plenty of people buy them.

People can pirate games easily, publishers hate paying Steam their 30% cut. However despite this, people still spend a lot on Steam, and publishers still put their stuff out of Steam.

Even though it could be cheaper buying direct, or free by pirating. Turns out the publishers were just either greedy or naive and didn't split the 30% savings to encourage people to move off Steam, and the Steam pricing is low enough that people preferred it.

The same cycle is happening with streaming services, they didn't learn that there is a cutting point where people just dont want to deal with your high priced, abusive shit. Netflix make almost $34 BILLION a year, and yet the most important thing for them is making it really hard for me to help my elderly parents from just using one of my many unused Netflix profiles.

"Nickle and Diming" drives a lot of these folks to figure out an alternative. Because the pirate services aren't going to turn around and restrict my ability to watch on location, or number of streams or decide that they don't like my TV manufacturer anymore and disable the app.

> This goes to show people are sick of having to buy 5-10 services just to see all their things, they'd rather get a single pirate stream with them all.

I don’t understand this desire to do mental gymnastics to ignore the elephant in the room:

The primary driver for these people was not convenience. Pirate services are flakey, don’t always have the content you want, have quirky content, and generally require some work to navigate. These people weren’t seeking convenience.

They signed up because it was cheap. They wanted to save money and they’d give up some of the polish and convenience of a mainstream app and service to save that money.

You're missing a case where the paid option just isn't offered. Sports events in particular are often blacked out in certain areas. Other content is also blocked by region. There are thousands of people who would gladly pay to watch this content legitmately, but it isn't an option. So you find them on a pirate service.

Nope, I've seen these services. You get a box, it has basically every channel imaginable, thousands of movies and shows, and is always available. It's super convenient, and much better UX than trying to find things in the Netflix ribbons that are designed to make you think they have 10x the content they actually do.

You can trade money for convenience. People that simply want stuff for free can waste 5 minutes to figure out how to use a torrent client.

Hell, 20 years ago I had to invest time and trust to get the connections to proper IRC distribution channels to get releases as soon as they were made available by the scene. Yeah, I was a teenager without money to pay for a proper Usenet subscription to download Linux ISOs. :)

As soon as Netflix entered the streaming market in my country, it didn't take long for me to stop sailing the seas.

I bet these pirates got a nice and shiny app to make official streaming platforms envious.

Pirate services are laughably better and easier to use than anything else. No tech skill required.

I don't think you (or anyone else) can speak authoritatively on why people were flocking to this particular service.

It could be a thousand different reasons

- As somebody who HAS ACTUALLY lived abroad for years, paying for a streaming service and still being region locked is pretty damn annoying

- Quality of the service. Some pirate sites are flaky, but seedbox style or popcorn time style services are pretty solid. Maybe you're thinking of just a random streaming website?

etc. etc.

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