How much would unlimited access to movies, books, magazines, and music cost?
blog.minming.net
blog.minming.net
Interestingly, after having had Prime for a year and not having renewed it, I've noticed that Amazon.ca seems to have deliberately downgraded their free super-saver shipping. It used to be that if you ordered something early Monday you could receive it by Friday. Not every time, but most of the time. Now super-saver orders arrive the following week reliably. They also make "standard" non-free shipping the default selection where super-saver used to be default if your order was large enough to qualify. I'm not a huge fan of companies that make their premium offers more attractive by making the basic offerings worse, and then make the worst possible option default.
As for all-you-can-consume media... As a canuck I doubt this will ever come under one subscription within my lifetime. Media rights are a fustercluck up here. Even Canadian Netflix is a pale, pathetic shadow of U.S. Netflix.
All three are mostly useful for assorted TV series viewing. Little, of interest, movie-wise is available on them on a regular basis.
I'm actually reevaluating the whole Netflix/Hulu subscription thing.
Not being able to access the same content from anywhere in the world was supposed to be the problem that the Internet was going to fix, right? (Region restrictions are getting me depressed)
I also get free books, but the few times I've looked it seemed a pretty poor selection of crap. Certainly nothing that I've purposefully gone to get has been free.
In the US a fast net connection costs about $60. Once you've got that you can watch, say, 3h of whatever you like for $6 every night -- assuming you pay Apple or Amazon $2/h of content. Assuming 50% of your viewing is repeat viewing, that drops to $3/night. Movies cost more, maybe as much as $20. But you probably don't religiously watch 3h of TV per night. So let's say $120/month at the high end. If you read, books are cheaper per hour than TV unless you're a very fast reader. Magazines -- seriously who cares? Music is $20/h but almost all of it is repeat listening.
That's pretty much the upper bound. In practice there's pointless friction and inconvenience. Some shows aren't available. Some shows have long delays (HBO, Showtime) before they can be (legally) downloaded. OTOH huge amounts of content are available much more cheaply.
The only thing this model doesn't cover is watching TV as mindless background noise -- paying $2/h for reality shows is probably going to drive you broke.
I think deliberately picking and paying for content is a better way to consume content, sends the right signals to the right people, and also wastes less time (don't watch stupid background noise shows, think carefully about what you watch, and only watch good stuff with no ads).
It can also prevent one from discovering offbeat content, by making those bets more costly. For example, I quite liked Super[1], but if I had to make to choice to pay $20 beforehand, maybe I'd watch something worse but that I was guaranteed to enjoy.
Granted, this is also for non-current releases.
Also, you may be underestimating the legal protections that libraries have, and also the voting power (and uncanny monetary resources) of the common library patron.
I am not an expert in the subject, but it would be interesting to see recent legislation for/against library systems (budget cuts notwithstanding).
> I personally only care about the shipping.
> I'd gladly ditch all of the other tack-on services for $10 less a month.
OnTrac regularly delivers late, not at all, or with the package arriving in a condition that my friends and I have started to refer as "OnTrac condition". Maybe you have to pay extra to not get the "looks like it was kicked down several flights of stairs stairs and smells like it was rubbed down with cigarette butts" treatment?
And I would totally be willing to pay $100 per month for this, if it only would include literally everything:
Paywalls of newssites, magazines, books, scientific papers, series, movies, music, audiobooks. Everything. - DRM / Region Code free. - With curated meta-data. - Accessible wordlwide. - Free choice of audio tracks, independent of the customer's location. - Available upon release (no delays). - Streaming and local download (well-established, non-proprietary file formats!). - All accessible from this one central "media hub".
Most of the services have lost me as a customer, due to ridiculous limitations (Player), only streaming possible (no sufficient "download over wifi and playback offline" options) etc.
What the content providers are missing...it is about convenience. I'd be willing to pay $1200 a year to have this convenience, freedom and feeling of not being "screwed over".
Right now I am paying for none of those services and lent my media on DVD or BR from friends and colleagues. Or listen to free music streaming services and podcasts. I get audiobooks on CDs from the local library. I get books from friends or the library. I don't have cable or anything else.
The content providers are missing out. Because my yearly spendings for media are below $100 and I pretty much can observe similar behavior amongst my friends and colleagues.
It is a big opportunity, but it has to be done right.
Further, free/cheap alternatives reduce demand for premium services. Why would content creators cannibalize their own revenue streams?
I'll be on board with your view once we reach post-scarcity, but right now humans still need to eat, and high quality production still requires money to produce.
Every hour that a quality musician can afford not to work is an hour they can be working on refining their craft. It has already been shown that touring pays less than minimum wage (yes, including those fucking t-shirts) for all but the top acts, so the purchase of music is one of the few ways to stay afloat.
The truth is, if we support the musicians that make the music which we want to hear more, then we will get more of that music.
I'm an ardent supporter of Lessig et. al, but the proposed alternative revenue models aren't working.
Once some service controls a significant user base, its priorities start to shift. It's cheaper to make additional investments in advertising to gain users (or convince existing users to consume content you already license) rather than continue to add content. If you go from 1000 to 2000 titles, your reputation for content increases proportionately. If you go from 1,000,000 to 1,001,000 titles, it's not clear anyone will notice. It becomes increasingly expensive to enhance the value of your service by acquiring new content.
Sure, the most successful distributor can gain more bargaining power with some content owners, but at the same time, holdout IP owners can threaten enormous rents or go to other distributors out of a desire for a niche image. Upstart competitors can risk more to gain niche exclusives, hoping for a breakaway hit that will bring them into the game. If there's an oligopoly, like we sort of have now, the two lead services will compete for exclusivity, making content balkinized across services so no one can really get everything they want in one place.
Neither Amazon Prime nor Netflix will ever provide everything people want to watch, and it will always be a little easier for them to provide just a little less than you want to try to build a broad common pool of cheaply satisfied subscribers (while making the costs higher for services that might try to cater to those with more eclectic tastes).
Compulsory licensing could fix this, it's what we use for terrestrial radio stations and a few other arenas. Basically any radio station is allowed to play any song, they just tabulate royalties and pay lump sums at the end of the month.
If we had this for streaming services, the distributors would actually have to compete on distribution, and we wouldn't have the quality of backroom deals determining winners and losers in the streaming space. We'd actually get a long tail, instead of ridiculously tiny fractions of critically acclaimed film lists actually becoming available for the public to watch.
13 of the AFI Top 100: http://www.hollywood.com/news/movies/55041194/afi-100-movies... 40+ of 700+ Criterion films: http://criterioncast.com/netflix/ 6 of Spike Lee's "Essential 86": http://blogs.indiewire.com/shadowandact/films-on-spike-lees-...
That is a really sad state of affairs. When bookstores and record shops were where we got content, we didn't have to go to one shop for Random House (or Warner Brothers) and a different one for Harper Collins (or Sony).
That depends on the licensing model. If you model it such that the content owner gets a fixed % of the revenue for each view they get, then once you get to 1,000,000 titles you wouldn't have to pay anything more for another 1,000 titles- the people who own those titles would organise themselves to put their content on your service since otherwise they would miss out on a revenue stream.
I think if a service like spotify or netflix gets a dominant position, and presents a deal that seems fair to everybody, eventually you'll be able to find pretty much every song/movie/etc on those services.
http://techland.time.com/2011/12/01/hbo-boss-to-netflix-youl...
There are unique hurdles in negotiating fair terms with every content owner simultaneously. Transaction costs are abundant, and some people just don't want to work with you.
>> In all seriousness, this [the concept of libraries] doesn't scale
1. It scaled perfectly well for 3 centuries with no reason not to continue scaling with the requisite funding. It could be argued that the concept of a library has scaled since 2600 BC. It scales for almost every town in the Western world and every single University, College and School worldwide. Beyond food/clean water sources and a medical centre the next municipal institution offered to struggling African and Southern American communities is often a School/Library with books.
In the West, demand is tempered by the need to physically go to a Library to source the media for consumption. Some might see this as a barrier to entry for certain customers; good. It is not a barrier to scaling though, it is a net benefit that makes the customer flow manageable.
A similar argument can be made against Amazon. You physically need to access the internet? You need a computer or mobile device? You need a payment card? You need an address? Ha. Too many barriers.
The only barrier to a library is physically arriving at the library and in some cases mobile libraries will come to you with an RV packed with media for free consumption.
Only a person blinded by the current SV-inspired business models can look at something in existence, already scaling and say according to me I do not believe this idea scales
2. Since it is impossible for any individual to consume the sum total of media at the same time the system has built in redundancy guaranteeing it scales effectively. IE You cannot physically check out and consume every piece of media therefore unlimited copies are not required to be stored. Data analysis yields the optimum level of media storage further improved by aggregating analysed lending habits.
3. Libraries are not weakened by greater public interest, they are strengthened by it. The demise of the social library has been largely brought about by the ubiquitousness of online content (including piracy). If those sources dried up overnight library use would explode in growth and Governments would double their budgets.
The idea that if libraries suddenly gained too many customers they would be shut down is ludicrous with absolutely no credible reasoning.
Source: History.
Beyond viability, I find the implications of this post terrifying. The line between licensing and ownership is becoming blurred. And the prospect of having so few personal assets is disconserting.
Disagree. I want to live in a world where my major possessions are my clothes, my laptop, my cellphone, and that's about it. Books? All cut off, scanned in, and PDFs by 1dollarscan.com. CD's? All ripped and stored in S3.
Maybe its just my bent as a tech professional, but I'd rather have the bits than the atoms.
More like "In the US how much one could be charged on top of internet access to be granted access to a limited selection of limited online digital libraries of stuff".
IMHO this is severely limited, us only, online only (mostly), broadband only (mostly), limited libraries, etc. this is subpar compared to what people2people file sharing can offer which is far from being unlimited nevertheless.
It is to laugh. I usually manage to read (or in some cases, reread) 5-10 novels a month. I have on occasion read as many as 15 novels in a month (admittedly older, and thus shorter, works).
I love reading and I still don't read more than 1-2 a month... and I read more than many of my friends.
Regular books are pretty easy to get through. Unless they're written by Peter Hamilton.
I'll also point out that restricting the analysis to people like myself (and presumably you) who have a full time job is also rather amusing, as I read much more when I was a teenager in high school (and in fact got a part time job in a bookstore to feed my habit / take advantage of an employee discount).
Why is reading considered such a virtue? Specifically reading stuff in book format.
Before the internet and videos reading was one of the most efficient ways you could learn, be it actual non-fiction texts or the expanding the mind type fiction. (I'd argue it still is, but I'd guess it's arguable about reading fiction). So we still burn a candle for the heights reading reached as an intellectual pursuit.
Another reason it may be lauded is the positive signaling that can be associated with it. Off the top of my head it would indicate: the fact you have time to read, that you are able to focus for long enough to read, that you can be stimulated by purely mental pursuits, (arguably) that you will spend time finding books to read rather than just watch whatever the latest advertisement told you to, (arguably) that you have an interest in some of humanities greatest works.
This is off the top of my head and certainly you could argue that reading books (especially fiction, though studies have shown fiction to improve empathy) is no longer as important. Certainly you could argue that people may read books that have no inherent value but even that low bar would be worth encouraging as it would still encourage those around them to read in (perhaps) a more productive way.
Averaging 90,000 words per novel (A). Average reading speed per person of 275 words per minute (WPM)
A/WPM*15/60 = 81 Hours Per Month spent reading novels
The average person cannot spend 2.7 hours per day reading novels.
I wish I could though :-(
2nd, if you don't watch much TV, and read when you take the bus to work and back, and always read for at least an hour before going to sleep, and you read faster than average, it tends to add up.