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Comment by CaptainOfCoit | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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?

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.

... 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.

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.

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