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Comment by nicholassmith | Hacker News Reader

I know a few people who use Usenet (I did as well for a while), mostly as they weren't cheapskates who were out for free alone, but as it was the fastest way to get something they wanted in a format they wanted. Most of them dipped off a bit when NetFlix came in (UK based) but as the catalogue quality isn't amazing it's still there as a good choice.

Makes you wonder why someone in the studios hasn't sat down and gone "There's nearly 10 million people paying $15 a month to get hold of movies, we could charge $20 and it's legal and get even more people and we'd be filthy rich", but entrenched behaviour is tricky to shift.

I don't bother with it now, it gets to a point where you're trying to manage data in the terabytes and it's just more of a pain than it's worth.

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Because 10 million times $15 is $150 million, or tiny chump change in the grand scheme of their industry.

If you could ensure that only Usenet converts could use it, or pirate converts, that might be one thing.

But chances are, their average revenue per traditional customer is >$20/mo, and thus this kind of service would cannibalize their traditional business.

Reminds me of Windows discs. I never felt that Microsoft took fighting non-business-based piracy seriously, just did their due diligence because the problem was small enough to be nearly irrelevant and the solution would disrupt their normal business.

> and thus this kind of service would cannibalize their traditional business.

Which makes you wonder. Since such a service would largely kill piracy over night, do they not do it because the profit margin lost is actually greater than what they loose to piracy? Evidence they're really not loosing as much as they lead us to believe.

10 million is the amount of Giganews subscribers.

There's probably double that in users of alternative Usenet providers (including ISPs). Then consider that there's at least 10 times as many people who don't know about Usenet that would use it if they knew. So the potential global amount they could be making is 200 million times $15.

Three billion dollars. Think the grand scheme might be interested now?

How about $150 per month from only 20 million people? And then $50 per month from another 20 million people and leave the rest out in the cold?

HBO (a single content creator) is looking to pocket ~4 billion by itself (http://www.variety.com/article/VR1118042241) why would the entire industry be interested in splitting 3 billion

$4B is the yearly revenue for HBO (or at least it was), while the $15 per usenet user is monthly.

They'd make even more money with five billion people paying $1.

I guess, one problem is that it is really hard to get contracts with all studios or even just the major ones. If one studio does it on his own, everybody would just complain about the lack of many films. If you do not care about legality, it is equally easy to get stuff from Universal as from some afghan studio with two movies.

And this is where serious politicians should step in and, next time the movie mafia come knockin', tell them that there won't be any more copyright-maximalism craziness until they clean up their shit and offer a common platform which is on par with Usenet. Worse, he would threaten to reduce copyright terms and "free" all XX-century content "for the public good".

I know, I know, a guy can dream.

Tell me about it, usenet becomes more of an addiction and less of a service. I spent more time cataloging and organizing me collection than watching any of it...

Access to [American] Netflix has made it so much easier to view the content my family and I want with out the need to queue terabytes of data.

Which has made it even more interesting, as people are finding ways to pay for an American subscription service and open a VPN endpoint in America to get access to the content. They seem happier to complain about pirate bullies taking their lunch money than to actually take advantage of a giant financial opportunity.

I know people like this to. I think it is kind of a waste of time given you will often watch something once and if you really want to see it again can redownload it and be good to go in about 20 minutes.

I download things, chuck them on a hard drive that is only 1TB, if it starts to get full I just delete a chunk of stuff.

Tell me about it, usenet becomes more of an addiction and less of a service. I spent more time cataloging and organizing me collection than watching any of it... Tell me about it, usenet becomes more of an addiction and less of a service. I spent more time cataloging and organizing me collection than watching any of it...

LOL, I know exactly what you mean. Except in my case, it's bittorrent and not Usenet. And it's not even entertainment, it's more like business related books / audio / video, and/or self-help / pickup / NLP / etc. stuff. I probably already have more stuff downloaded than I'll ever have time to read/watch/listen to. And now I spent more time than I should, on moving stuff from one portable drive to another, backing stuff up, reorganizing, etc.

I've always been of the opinion that there aren't any tech minded people making those types of decisions for publishers in Hollywood. Also, I'm sure there are a fair amount of contractual issues that prevent the open distribution of content using a paid model.

No doubt the licensing and contractual issues are a thorny problem, but the licensing and contractual issues are generally from the studios who created them. If they wanted they'd be able to get around it, or find a compromise or similar.

Especially considering 95% of the content they resell is making them pure profit. By now, even the shittiest movie produced in the 90s has had so many tv runs, so many VHS and DVD units sold, that all production losses and fixed fees have been recouped.

There is absolutely no excuse for not having a cheap platform streaming every pre-2000 movie, except pure greed from the copyright mafia.

By now, even the shittiest movie produced in the 90s has had so many tv runs, so many VHS and DVD units sold, that all production losses and fixed fees have been recouped.

I'm not so sure about that. The movie business is notoriously crappy - most movies never recoup their costs. It's the few wild successes that keep the studios afloat.

On the other it is true that the marginal cost of selling digital downloads of back catalogue movies is close to zero.

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_accounting the movie studios can have a movie that "never recoups their cost" and yet they somehow make money off the enterprise. I am not saying they don't occasionally take a bath on a bad bet, but they do well most of the time (the percent of break even or better is much higher than they like to admit).

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