- ¿could we watch x movie? - let me see. no, it in this other service beside the 3 we are paying.
Not its exactly as you say, you want to watch something but its not on any of the streaming services you're already paying for. I've started to just think of a movie I want to watch, go out to Pirate Bay, download it and then stream it. When I'm done? Delete it.
Its good to know I'm not the only one who has gone back to downloading movies.
I always thought Netflix probably could have made licensing deals on their CDN. Lots of early streamers had issues (still have) with their CDN. Then again, the studios would probably want a clean break because they are so good about every thing they do (yes, that's sarcasm).
I think when they first started, they tried the HBO strategy of putting big money into big shows that try to win over broad audiences. But over time shifted to focusing on low budget shows that appeal to specific, smaller audiences. Which makes sense, if your goal isn't to have 70% of the total market as paying users but rather 90% of the market as paying users.
devil's advocate. what's the point of a producer expending money to have a premium version made? it takes money to go back and rescan film to higher resolution, and the rest of the work flow involved to create that new final version.
sure, it's easy to not have sympathy for hollywood producer types, but to meet modern standards for legacy content takes time/effort/money. of course they are going to want to get a bit of that back.
Give me $2 or $3 movies with a huge catalog and I'll watch several.
That's precisely my point.
Even for these $2-$3 dollar non-premium movies to be digitized and made available for streaming costs money. Let's just say at a minimum $50k (which is on the low end), 50,000/3 = 16,667 people willing to rent/buy that movie for that $3. Is that a guarantee? No, especially when it is not "premium". Out of curiosity, how many movies do you rent/buy through Apple/Amazon type rentals? There are many times where the math of renting from a platform is much cheaper than going to the movie to see it. It is still hard for me to do it since I'm already paying Apple/Amazon a monthly fee. That's for the "premium" content, so it would be hard to convince me that 16k people would be willing to spend for non-premium at all.
Edit to add more food for thought. Let's take a non-premium feature film as an example. Let's assume that the title you've chosen has a decent copy of the 35mm film available. To have it scanned at 4K is going to be the first expense. You then have to decide if you're going to clean any of it up with and post production. Color correction will be necessary as well. Something else to consider is do you have any the clips with text on them have and are textless clips available. How much will it cost to get a textless version. You will need to see what audio is available. Hoepfully something other than mag. Do you have just the final mix? Is it stereo/mono? Does it need to be remastered to deal with expired music rights? Do you have elements to do a new mix? Do you have any subtitles available for it? Captioning? Those cost to have made too. Do you have rights for the international versions, and is that content available? Does your streaming platform really want the dubbed audio available? Subtitles for that too please.
They don't have the production costs, obviously, so there are some numbers to crunch there. And I don't have answers to any of your questions, because I am not in the industry. I suspect these are a whole bunch of trade-offs, as in most technical questions, and there is a version of these trade-offs that are economically viable.
But people are willing to pay to view stuff, and willing to take risks to view stuff. There is a market there, there's money there. We know this because there are people making money on this.
I counter that I can go and see anything I want, if I'm prepared to accept a bit of risk and some morally dubious justifications.
The reality that the content owners face is that there are people making money off their work because they're not giving the paying customer what they want, and those other people are. That's a viable business that they're not profiting from. That's the reality. I'm not sure why it's not visible from the content owner's perspective.