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Comment by benbristow | Hacker News Reader

Too many services nowadays. Was fine when it was just Netflix, had mostly everything, no ads, full quality. Nowadays Netflix price has gone up, additional plans for 4K/no-ads, anti-account sharing and less content as content now has gone to Amazon/Disney+/Hulu/Discovery+/Paramount+/Peacock/HBO etc. etc.

Even if you subscribed to them all you'd still not have everything. Sailing the seas, you get everything for free or for a couple dollars a month for a more premium experience.

Time for change.

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> Even if you subscribed to them all you'd still not have everything

And even if you could get all the video itself, it's not guaranteed you'd get the right video+audio+subtitles combination that you want, as everything seems to be negotiated separately.

So while one service could offer the right audio and the right video but not the subtitles you want, another service could have the right video and the right subtitles but instead be dubbed without original audio.

It became a whole mess for people and eventually it was again simpler to just resort to piracy for the even the slightly technical consumers.

Man, jellyfin is shockingly absolutely killer for subtitles. I don't remember if it's a plugin or built in, but there's a subtitle search option that cross-references your video's filename into some database that usually gives you a workable set of subs.

Plus it respects your options to default subs on or off, in a language you choose, in a style you like to see. I don't think any streaming services do it this well honestly

Kodi has this as well. I wouldn’t be surprised if similar functionality was also in plex/emby too

Plex also has this

"Some database", could it be opensubtitles.org ? Sigh, if I were them I'd be annoyed that my work is hidden away behind the words "some database".

The plugin does name them, but that's the nature of work so good as to become invisible, you don't actually see it unless you already know (Or care/need to look into it)

Higher price, 1080p cap, no account sharing… that’s one thing.

But the content issue is just so dumb (and I’m not blaming Netflix).

I suppose next we will have a new streaming service for each film and show.

Let me pay $0.1 for each episode I watch, make everything available and route to the right entity that should be paid and then offer one cross-platform client that everyone pooled their efforts into. And since we're dreaming, make it a open collaboration with a FOSS client too.

I'd predict most of the piracy would again disappear quickly as long as it's better, faster and has virtually everything people wanna watch. Basically replicate what Spotify did, but more open, so closer to what Grooveshark tried to do I guess.

Grooveshark, that's a name I've not heard in a while...

But even Spotify are putting the price up this year. I bet if something like that happened, it'd quickly soar to $0.2 an episode in the next year, then slowly creep up more and more.

> I bet if something like that happened, it'd quickly soar to $0.2 an episode in the next year, then slowly creep up more and more

Yeah probably, until they find the point where more people leave because it's too expensive than they'll earn by raising prices, then they'll oscillate or find a new direction. Isn't that how capitalism is supposed to work?

... so we end up in the same predicament we are now. Maybe the model doesn't work? And no, I'm not a communist.

I think it's broken, yeah. I think the whole "art for money" thing doesn't make sense in general and something else has to be figured out. Artists should be able to survive without depending on things like "perfectly competitive goods" or whatever.

Capitalism is supposed to have perfectly competitive goods to be efficient. IP protection - especially the obscene century-long protection of copyrights - renders capitalist competition into monopolistic competition, which no longer maximises consumer surpluses. Hence mandatory licencing can increase benefits for society - and in the past such models worked - e.g. for radio. Today, the only reason content conglomerates get away with it is that they can pay of sufficiently many legislators.

That's Adam Smith liberalism. You can have a market and competition without capitalism. Just look at what China did for EVs and solar panels, its full liberalism under state planning.

China does have _some_ capitalism, state capitalism but still, capital owners decide what is produced, with state supervision (nuclear, coal, rail sector, Alibaba). Already for its telco sector we knew it was different, it wasn't like the usual, a sort of capitalist liberalism with state planning. Now we have more data, and i'm not the only one to think its EV boom is the perfect example of a non-capitalist liberalism.

In 1999 I paid (inflation adjusted) $20 per episode in DS9

If you are only wiling to pay 10 cents then that's a major problem - viewing figures just aren't that high any more. A modern scifi show would need 100 million viewers to cover the production budget at 10 cents a person

The post popular scripted show on US TV - George and Mindy - gets about 5-6 million viewers when it's on for free. At 10c/episode or $2 for the year that would be $10m for the entire season. TV costs a lot more than that to produce.

This is what Hulu started out as... before ABC/Disney bought everyone else out as they shifted to their own separate services, and now Disney is burying Hulu under Disney+. When Hulu started, it seemed like the solution, but everyone was greedy and wanted a bigger piece of the pie. The same goes for TV/Cable and even streaming "live tv" options. YouTube TV option even tried, originally like $35/mo, but now is just as much as any of the other "Live TV" services (in the US at least), north of $80/mo.

Piracy is the answer... though, it's aa couple extra hoops to jump through... using a seedbox over self-hosting that is. I should probably just have a script that does an rsync to my local NAS every few minutes to make it slightly easier... already have a watch script to upload .torrent files to the seedbox.

This is what copyright does though by design. Everyone leverages the monopoly granted by government to maximize profit because its way easier to force people to your service for maximum profit and compete (n offerings rather than everyone ha>ing the same offerings and competing on price and user experience. This is also causing the crazy market dislocation from hige show budgets because they are tryingto invest in their competitive edge when creativity doesnt work on big budgets at all. it needs a constraint to push on.

Plus exclusivity, probably. Music abides by the same copyright laws yet you don't need to subscribe to Spotify to listen to certain artists, or pay YT Music Premium for someone else. I'm not including podcasts here, since they are more of a "production" itself rather than just owning the rights.

The government came in and spanked the music industry back when it was radio primarily and that caused a licencing and payment regime to be codified that forced this as a matter of custom. The situation in video has always been exclusivity to channel partners and replayability didn't play a big role until the industry was pretty mature so no spanking from government has yet to materialize in the video market to fix this situation to the extent possible under the currenty broken copyright regime.

Too many services is a good problem to have in a regular market. The problem is the accessibility and fragmentation of content. If all services had the same content, they would have to compete on the features, price and performance, which would be a healthy form of competition.

Yes, need proper standardisation. we are now in the era when there’s fragmentation in a tape audio players, with dozen of different incompatible cassette tape formats and musicians having lock-in contracts with one format each. To listen to all music you would have to buy each player on the market. Only piracy allows you to buy just one tape player and have copies of all other tapes to play.

> Was fine when it was just Netflix, had mostly everything

This was problematic too. Centralisation is never good in the long-term. Surely, we would have learned that from traditional media, AWS outages or autocratic structures. Humanity as so much to learn still

Centralized marketplaces can work, but it’s hard to maintain those (there is one Centralized Internet, not many various internets, for example).

A subscription service that “covers all” like we usually get with music would be quite nice, even if it was only “older” shows after a year or so.

There isn't one centralised internet, its thousands of autonomous systems which connect to each other using a common language.

Now sure, some companies try hard to centralise it and own it, this leads to a more fragile ecosystem.

I mean that as a customer, you buy "one Internet" and get the "whole thing", you don't have to connect to various internets depending on what you want that day (as you did before by dialing into BBSes).

Companies and countries are doing their darnedest to break the Internet up into separate, smaller networks.

I hope Apple TV doesn't get into the bandwagon

> Even if you subscribed to them all you'd still not have everything.

Do you actually need everything, everywhere, all at once?

Do one at a time and then switch after you run out of shows or if another service has a "must-watch".

Why are you simping for the shareholders? I should have the choice of anything I want to watch. The unethical option provides all and is cheaper than a subscription for a single one of those services.

Besides, those services often make it difficult to unsubscribe with dark patterns.

And why are you acting like you have a right to unlimited access of all content made, regardless of the economics, for $20 a month at the highest quality of service through one platform?

Things cost money, that's the world we live in. You don't have to like it, but it is what it is.

The unethical option is actually illegal and, as more people do it, only game theories everyone else into having to pay more. Feel free to do it, not going to pretend I'm a saint on the matter, but don't act all incredulous and morally superior. You're still here complaining you could steal oxy cheaper than pay for it at a pharmacy; just a different fix.

WRT unsubscribing, I can't relate. It's, what, 5 buttons? I do it every other month and it's never been a problem. Isn't this forum supposed to be techies?

Because it's totally possible? They've done it with Spotify for music. No reason the same shouldn't be done for films and TV.

Are we seriously praising Spotify's business model and affect on the creator market?

Not to mention they're up to $12/month. Creating movies and shows is significantly more expensive than music, so it makes sense the price to a catalogue would be scaled by an order of magnitude. Not to mention the increased costs for digital providers for storage, bandwidth, and compute requirements.

I'm, of course, more than happy to hear about how the reruns of Friends could stay on Netflix since it's just a dispute about perceived value. But the rest? Come on, I know you aren't totally ignorant on the economics of these markets.

I think many people would gladly pay somewhere between $60-100/mo for access to everything either ad free or very minimal ads... nobody offers that. And trying to mix-match always leaves a gaping hole. For that matter, I'd probably do somewhere between $25-50 a season of a show, depending on the show, episodes, run-length etc. As it is, you can get close to this where Blu-ray box sets are an option, and that includes media. Easy enough to rip yourself, though time consuming.

The breaking point is generally around 3-4 of the paid streaming services... many people are going to have Amazon as a baseline for shipping... then you get shoved D+ with every kind of bundling (Verizon, etc) under the sum, then Hulu may or may not be attached... People pay for Netflix out of legacy... that doesn't leave much room for Peacock, Paramount+, AppleTV, etc, etc. It's just easier to say f*ck it and pirate.

Hulu was great for the first couple years... minimal ads, new tv shows same or next day. Then the partners all dropped out with greed as primary motivators.

Making a movie or a series is way more expensive than record a song

That's an argument for having a more expensive service, not a worse one. Even ignoring price, nothing on the video side comes close to Spotify when it comes to selection, other than Netflix back in the day.

Copyright is supposed to exist for a limited time to "promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts." The current 100 year plus regime is effectively forever and not in line with the original constitutional purpose. With reasonable copyright timeframes, at some point all copyright will expire and then everything will be legal. The notion that an artist is entitled to extract money from each eyeball or ear that encounters the work until the heat death of the universe is unethical.

What does that have to do with streaming services?

Probably 80% of what is watched is from the last year, a lot of it from the last month. Most of the rest is from the past couple decades. The original US copyright law of 1790 allowed for 28 years.

I mean, I agree current copyright is too long. It's just not that relevant to streaming. Not a lot of people are looking to watch old episodes of Knight Rider for free. (Those who are, I salute you.)

Given that the law is broken and the entertainment industry is generally responsible for that, it seems reasonable enough to decide you don't want to give them money that they will use against you (perhaps making exceptions for indie groups). Once you've made that decision, piracy (at least downloading) becomes amoral. Whether you watch the stuff has no effect on anyone else (personally I don't, but more because I'm not interested).

You'd be surprised how many people watch Seinfeld and Friends on repeat as comfort shows. Old shows is a pretty large part of their business.

I agree with you, but that's not what's happening in this conversation. Nor are any of these services a historical archive, they are ongoing catalogues and your subscription funds new shows, as well as servicing cost.

And let's not feign ignorance by saying the overwhelming vast majority of things being watched are exactly that new content, not 30 year old reruns of Frasier.

EDIT: I apologize, only ~2 seasons of Frasier would extend past copyright. It started airing 1993.

> right to unlimited access of all content made, regardless of the economics, for $20 a month at the highest quality of service through one platform?

Because the only reason we don't have this is a substantial industry devoted to preventing it? Which simultaneously has a terrible rep for exploiting its workers, the pay non-transparency of Netflix, arbitrary cancellation of incomplete series, and the general fiasco that is David Zaslav.

Heck, I'd take "all content made before 2000 at acceptable quality transfers for $20", but the further back you go the more likely it is that the only online supplier of a movie is a pirate.

(Criterion Channel Online is not available in the UK, which is another bugbear: copyright means arbitrary unavailability)

I do have the right to do this. In my country downloading isn’t illegal, only uploading is. And rightfully so.

Or, just pirate it. The quality will probably be better, anyway.

Eh, depends. Pirates these days need to burn hardware keys for 4K, so only sponsored or high-popularity stuff gets it. Everything else gets 1080p, though some groups do upscaling to try and make up for it.

If the content has a Blu-ray release, the pirated content will usually be better than the stream. But you could also purchase the Blu-ray yourself.

Anyway, pirating is illegal. I totally respect it for those who can't pay due to economic bloc or age, or as a form of protest... but hearing folk with 6-figure salaries bemoan having to pay too much, then act like children when told they could just take turn with the toys does rub me the wrong way.

It's not about paying too much, it's about the actual experience.

While streaming has gotten (and continues to) progressively worse, pirating just gets better.

I'll pay 100 USD a month for an 'everything' subscription. That option doesn't exist, and piracy is by far the best option outside of that.

I'm there with you... I even pay/paid for a number of them at once for a long time... my SO would usually use their dedicated apps for streaming. Me, I'd sail the high seas just because the final landing point on my NAS was easier to watch through Kodi than dealing with the UI of many of the services themselves.

Amazon Prime used to have each season of each show separated, for example... Hulu and Hulu Live TV mess with each other, and fragment older episodes... Disney+ is a pain to use.. Paramount/CBS breaks with the PiHole... they all kinda suck in so many ways. I actually pay for YouTube ad free, it covers music as well... and I tend to watch from the couch. I've started using Rumble a little more, but the TV UX leaves a lot of room for improvement. Similar for Pepperbox and other alt streaming options.

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