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Comment by zdw | Hacker News Reader

As much as I like using NetFlix's product, they're just the new face of content aggregation, like the Cable companies before them.

Many people want a-la-carte cable where they get to pick what they want - why not video services? Why not have it be so open that anyone can provide anything to anyone else, ala the more open app stores?

This is the route that most of the settop box vendors like Roku and Apple are going, and I tend to think it'll win in the end.

Aggregators like Netflix survive based on their marketing and negotiating strength, and economies of scale with servers and such. I tend to think that the latter will become less of an issue as technology progresses, and the former will be around as long as people are making media - this entire thing comes down to setting a price on specific content.

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There's more than that. The problem is that the cable operators made two big mistakes (1) they priced their service so high that you always asked yourself if it was worth the price. (2) They had tiered pricing, but at horrible granularity that didn't maximize customer happiness, but rather their profit.

Netflix does neither.

There's almost no advantage to a-la-carte streaming services. Are you going to pay less? I seriously doubt it, unless they do something like charging twenty five cents per hour of streaming of a movie/show. Are you going to get access to more content. Not likely unless they do the $.20/hour thing, since I'm not going to pay monthly fees to 10 different services.

Also Netflix provides DVD service that I still use. Having a unified search experience and ability to manage my queue is useful. As is a unified rating system.

Lastly, Netflix simplifies things greatly for my child. If my child now has to figure out which app to use for each show -- that becomes a nightmare. Shortcuts reduce this, but now the child has to learn a bunch of UIs as each service will likely have a slightly different UI.

Don't forget that cable companies ALSO saw fit to take feeds from NBC/CBS/ABC/FOX/etc that were free OTA with HD and 5.1 surround and cut them down to 4:3 480i in stereo and resell them as their "base" package.

Because people want to be able to pay a set price and then watch anything they want, without having to pay $10 for every movie or TV series. It's kind of like free shipping. It would probably be more economically efficient to pay only for what you use, but there is a mentality in getting things for free, or rather not having to worry about having a thousand separate prices. You can just watch a TV show without having to think how much it costs or if you should save it. At least you don't have to worry about your kids running up the bill or whatever.

Besides people tend to spend a set amount on entertainment every month anyways. If they weren't going to buy it anyways, and it costs nothing to distribute it, you might as well let them watch as much as they want. This wouldn't work for goods that actually cost money to distribute (well some people disagree.)

>Many people want a-la-carte cable where they get to pick what they want - why not video services?

I think the difference is that with cable you're picking genres a la carte, as opposed to picking based on production/distribution companies.

For example, if I'm into sports and news, a la carte cable would let me subscribe to, say, CBC, CNN, TSN, RSN, CTV NewsNet, The Score, etc. A la carte video services like WB is doing here don't give me such options. If I like the Harry Potter movies, I have to subscribe to WB's service to watch them. This costs $9.99/month and includes a bunch of other stuff I might not want. Then say I want to watch House Of Cards on Netflix, that's $7.99/month and includes a bunch of other stuff I might not want. So it starts to look a lot like the current cable setup people complain about: you're buying bundles of stuff you mostly don't want to get at the stuff you do want.

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