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Comment by parliament32 | Hacker News Reader

This is precisely the problem, and the whole reason why we still pirate TV/movies. I would have no problem paying $XX to a unified service that has basically everything; I have no interest in paying a dozen different streaming platforms for effectively "cable packages" that often add/remove/shift content around.

The music industry figured this out: I pay Spotify, they have 95% of music content I could ever way, the UX is good enough. I have no reason to pirate music anymore.

Why is this so hard for the film industry?

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> The music industry figured this out: I pay Spotify, they have 95% of music content I could ever way, the UX is good enough. I have no reason to pirate music anymore.

> Why is this so hard for the film industry?

My theory is that the United States has compulsory licensing for music, but not movies: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compulsory_license#United_Stat...

To my knowledge, a radio station or music streaming service doesn't have to negotiate with the record label to play a given song, they just have to pay a small royalty as defined by law. However, that doesn't hold true for movies. Each video streaming service has to negotiate the right to carry a given movie with the film studio that owns it. Those film studios play the streaming services against one another, often allowing the exclusive right to offer certain content for a limited time, after which they then lease the rights to a competing service.

>To my knowledge, a radio station or music streaming service doesn't have to negotiate with the record label to play a given song, they just have to pay a small royalty as defined by law.

The copyright holders can legally prevent their recordings from being streamed by Spotify. Famous examples were Taylor Swift and Neil Young withholding their music from Spotify.

For extra nuance, copyright holders can't stop cover songs from appearing on Spotify. So the Taylor Swift cover songs do have to pay compulsory license fees to her and her record label.

Swift withheld from Apple Music because they were giving it away for free and not paying her (or anyone); I don't recall it being kept off spotify?

Source for the Apple Music claim?

Here's info about how and why Swift pulled her music from Spotif: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/arts/taylor-swift-yanks-music-s...

Perhaps you'd mixed the two up?

https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-33220189

> Those film studios play the streaming services against one another, often allowing the exclusive right to offer certain content for a limited time, after which they then lease the rights to a competing service.

Even worse, a lot of the big studios have their own streaming service (Disney, Paramount, Peacock, Canal+ in France, etc) and have no incentive to have lease the rights to competing services.

That's ultimately what pushed Netflix to focus so much on creating their content, they knew that at some point the original content owners will realise streaming can be lucrative, and just build their own services.

Yep. This kind of exclusivity agreement should probably be illegal across the board; they basically exist to make competition legally impossible. Great for business, sucks for people.

I dont know, that means if a streaming service created a show they would be forced to share it meaning no incentive for them to make their own content I prefer a limited time exclusively of 3-5 years for first party content then compulsory licencing of content. That would incentivise creation of new content as a positive market differentiator but also decincentivise removing old content as it would in effect be a negative differentiator.

> The music industry figured this out

> Why is this so hard for the film industry

Music industry runs on barely paying any artist that cant fill a stadium. Movie industry runs on constantly re-licensing content to min-max their returns from IP. Music industry can happily barely pay musicians via the spotify model, but the Movie industry can't continually re-license their stuff to a higher bidder if it's all on one site.

If you have Indie artists on the music side of the comparison, you should have barely paid tiktokers and YouTubers on the movie side.

I broadly agree with your assessment, but I think the important takeaway is that these situations are created artificially, usually by dominant market players for their own benefit. There is nothing natural or neccesary with the way these markets work, and it's certainly not unchangeable.

>but I think the important takeaway is that these situations are created artificially

Are they really though? It's easier than ever for an indie creative to create and distribute their works through the many channels. Problem is, people don't spend as much money as a whole on indie works compared to focus-grouped blockbusters.

> Are they really though?

Yes, in the sense that at one point IP laws didn't exist and then we made them up. It stands to reason we could make up something better - maybe something that doesn't routinely banish media from public access.

Honestly I dont know that I believe that narrative, music labels have been cheating the talent out of the proceeds of their work since Edison phonograph. Labels claiming to the artist that they dont make any money while they use creative accounting to charge any and every expense to the artist and is a long and storied practice in the industry. Artist are expected still to pay x% of sales revenue for "breakage fees" on digital downloads example. Breakage fees having been introduced to cover the loss to the breaking in transit of early brittle shellac phonograph records. ID dont know about you.but tje think the breakage cost of a mp3 file should be on the scale of negligible to nonexistent.

>Why is this so hard for the film industry?

It boils down to money.

Movies & tv have higher monetary value to the studios than songs to the record labels.

So the ip owners of video content get more revenue by restricting it as exclusives to their respective platforms rather than licensing it out to everybody and get a smaller fractional payment from an everything-unlimited-catalog video streaming service.

E.g. HBO would rather get 100% of their own $16.99/month subscription -- vs -- licensing entire HBO catalog to Netflix and getting a fraction% of $17.99/month.

How much extra would Netflix conceivably have to charge per month such that the fractional amounts to each movie studio (HBO, Disney, etc) would be enough $$ that the studios wouldn't bother with their own exclusive streaming platforms? $99/month? $149/month? Right now, there isn't a number that Netflix + all studios + subscribers can converge on so instead, we get the current fragmented streaming platforms of video content.

For more evidence of how video content is more valuable than music (in terms of digital streaming platforms), consider that tech giants like Netflix, Amazon, and Apple -- all created their own movie & tv studio business to produce even more exclusives for their streaming platforms. But none of them have started their own record labels to sign musicians to get exclusive songs or albums.

Games make way more money than movies but it also seems to be solved for games in the form of steam

Except there are times when exclusivity deals have games launch on other platforms first, and then get to Steam sometime later. Therefore, more like the movie model than the music model.

Only if you consider availability on release more important than availability later. Personally, I don't.

If its so valuable why are HBO and Disney killing already produced content making it unavailable (legally) on or off their platform. Why is the Willow TV show (sequel to the classic movie) removed it was one of their flagship early offering when they were starting their streaming service. Why is HBO killing finished movies like Batgirl and Wiley Coyote v Acme for the tax right off if they are such precious valuable content? Why is classic Looney Toons being broken up and sublicensed to everchanging array of shit tier streaming services. none of these moves makes since with the reason given

I only understand the frustration with finding any legal avenue at all to see certain films. I don't really understand why disparate services are a big deal. You don't need to subscribe to multiple things all at once, and it's all done in a few clicks in the convenience of your own home.

I'm concerned and curious about one thing, which is that tech giants have a monopoly on renting. If you want to rent a digital movie that isn't otherwise available from subscription, you might be able to get it from MSFT, Google or Amazon. Meanwhile the telecoms only seem to offer this through cable machines, just new releases at that.

I'm interested in seeing a few Korean films, the kind that aren't on criterion or mubi. Basically no legal way to see them.

Why not have some platform that lets users to actually buy the movie and download/stream it as a file at full quality on their device?

Renting is sucky compared to just buying things, you could watch any movie you want and have unlimited access to it instead of juggling 5 subscriptions and get frustrated with shitty products. And publishers that make actual good movies that people want to watch would be rewarded

Probably owing to the legal/licensing constraints other users brought up.

I don't want to buy movies, 99% of the time. Renting is cheaper, and I don't care to rewatch most things.

Games we used to rent those too, before they got to be 50-100 hours long. For several reasons it's no longer practical.

> Why is this so hard for the film industry?

The logic is pretty simple:

* It has been widely demonstrated that, in the US, many consumers are willing to pay more than $100/month for cable TV, with ads.

* Netflix costs $8/month with ads.

* Why leave that money on the table?

Music recording copyrights have a single owner, and can be licensed for streaming by that owner. Older movies have a lot of IP owned by various entities with licensing to allow for theatrical and home release, but all of which have to cooperate to make the movies available for streaming.

Old media competes with new media.

If you, as the rightsholder can just eliminate that competition without any further effort, it makes logical sense to do so.

Excessivly long copyright is what enables this.

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