Indeed, this would make me way less annoyed at the thousand and one streaming services popping up like mushrooms after a rainy day.
I tend to care lot less on keeping something like dropout even if I don't use it all the time (I like to think I contribute keeping it afloat, and watch it whenever), but I cancel other subscriptions a lot more aggresively (I've unsubbed/resubbed to Gamepass plenty of times specially when playing random stuff with friends, there's something nice of the exploratory playing you do when you don't need to care who has bought which game)
On the pattern I use dropout, they'd get a month or two of revenue out of me (Binge a couple of their limited runs and catch up on their staples) and zilch for the rest of the year even if I'm a happy customer
Are they upfront? Or do they pay per view royalties at the end of a streaming period? Or likely mix of both, varying by each piece of content terms?
Hypothetically, if a streaming service structured most of their obligations in the form of post-view true-up's, they wouldn't have any problem doing this. And could make bank on the float between customer payment (first of month) and paying for their content (end of period).
For sports it's different, typically you bid for the right to own a geographic market and the games are sometimes split into bundles where you can bid for one or all bundles depending on how deep your pockets are. You'll then get to keep exclusive or non-exclusive rights for a certain number of years. You'll then pay annually/quarterly for that right at the total bid package for the term of the deal (e.g. 5 years). Depending on the contract you might be able to re-sell that right to other companies as well, which dilutes your audience, but may increase the distribution overall.
Then aside from the rights, you end up paying infrastructure costs both fixed and variable. You also generally commit to CDN capacity for distribution based on a forecast of how much you think your customers will watch in any quarter.
I was flummoxed the other day when I talked with someone who was a content equity trader -- I didn't even realize that class of finance existed.
A change I think is necessary for consumers however is deduplication of content payments. If you subscribe to multiple services, youre paying for a license to some content multiple times, sometimes many times.
What I would like to see is more like Kagi Fair Pricing, a master payment account (like prime or movies anywhere) that has access to all your accounts, cross references where you are paying for a title multiple times, and offers a refund or credit.
Largely this breaks down into two salient factors:
- the friction of the transaction itself, which you largely shed when the consumer already has already agreed to be billed on usage, and
- metering aversion, which can be alleviated with a wide range of cheap tricks, e.g. using very coarse quantization: think not "rent this episode for just $0.99", but "rent up to 50 episodes this month for just $9.99". But the extreme of this is what you actually see: one price for any usage of the service at all, which ... is a popular pricing model at consumer scales because it works?