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Comment by kmkemp | Hacker News Reader

Piracy isn't eating cable tv's profits because of pricing... it's eating their profits because of convenience. How ridiculous is it that I can get an entire season of X show in high definition with no commercial interruptions streamed to my TV within an hour through torrenting, but the equivalent would take either foreknowledge, or lots of searching for reshowings? People have discovered that not having their TV dictate their schedule is valuable to them, and the providers that realize the value of that convenience are going to win. The only thing holding Netflix/Hulu back from eating Cable TV within a few years is live content (sports) and better selection. Be careful in extrapolating the 2% growth figure... it could easily become much, much faster if they can figure out how to provide the only reasons left to have cable TV.

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Normal people will load their computers with malware when they attempt to pirate anything. Cable TV is idiot-proofed. Which is why the ad rates are still so excellent on many channels. You're overestimating the technical competence of most people.

The video quality is also higher for less effort on cable. What I think it will take for the displacement to happen is another large improvement in the internet connectivity to American homes and smartphones. Netflix exploded video rentals already, but cable is not quite the same business.

Cable TV is idiot-proofed.

That's where streaming/torrent/pirate solutions keep failing, and not understanding why. Nirvana nailed it: "here we are now, entertain us." The cheaper the price tag, the more technical know-how is involved. Popcorn Time came close, but still requires geek skillz. We're talking people who don't quite grasp "enter key" or "space bar" (much less "grep"), people who just want a limited linear list of what's available right now, who want to pick a channel generally filled with content they'll like, and who just want it to keep going without involvement.

Netflix is great - when you know what you want and are inclined to find it. When they finally get a consistent flow of new content, and set up "channels" inclined toward specialization with a good mix of shows, with some live content thrown in, then cable TV will have reason to panic.

Drop-dead idiot-proof simple. No wonder it took Steve Jobs to "crack" video, and we still don't know what he figured out (akin to "I found a marvelous proof, but this margin is too small...").

I don't disagree that pirating is not a great option to a normal user. I'm simply saying that the reason for the success of Netflix is because they've taken the torrenting model and translated it for ease of use and safety, but they still have a few more hurdles before they can provide all of the features that keep people subscribing to cable TV.

Are you a Netflix subscriber? Their interface is pretty good. It's about as good as you can ask for given the technology we have and the selection that Netflix has.

Things are broken up by genre or new releases just like they used to be in video stores because it's pretty intuitive way to browse movies. "I feel like watching something funny, show me all comedies". Netflix also takes it 1 step further and tries to sort it by relevance based on previous watches.

Their interface for DVD players is quite good too. The search is smart and it only takes seconds to go from the DVD player being off to watching a stream from Netflix.

I rarely load up Netflix knowing exactly what I want to watch. I have ideas based on genre what I want and Netflix lets me browse reasonably. I've been a sub for almost as long as they've been around and I still find good stuff. The only thing that lacks is newer releases on stream but you can blame the media providers for that.

My cable provider sometimes offers free access for a month to their on demand/pay per month movie service and it's a joke. Things are listed alphabetically with 90 pages to go through or it's by genre but you're stuck going through 28 pages of alphabetical results where you see nothing but the movie title and a 1 sentence plot. It's an awful user experience.

You still need to think about what you want to watch, and deliberately make it happen. A very large market segment wants no more than a half-dozen choices, pick one, and let it run indefinitely.

For the same reason, the 90 page channel listing, dominated by "your not subscribed to this but we're going to show it to you anyway in hopes you might upgrade to include it" and "here's 37 duplicate channels all showing the same movie at slightly offset timeslots", has got to be driving people away - many staying only because there isn't a brain-dead-easy option hearkening to the days of 4 channels.

This is a great point. The 8 billion channel situation with an unusable guide channel seems like it was put together and maintained by a bunch of cokeheads with no sense of a sane user experience.

The menu I was talking about wasn't the typical channel listing. That's even worse to the point where I never use it. When I goto my friend's house where he has a ton of premium channels you can literally spend 3 hours just looking through that list to find something.

I hope that market segment with half a dozen choices never becomes fully main stream. I like choice in moderation (ie. web frameworks with opinions) but movies are just entirely different.

There's just too many interesting genres and type of movies to filter a list of 100,000 movies down to a handful. It's a very complicated problem to solve and might be unsolvable until we have huge break throughs in how machines process human input.

Example, how would you solve this problem: Customer A watches 5 comedies in a row then is proposed a choice of 3 movies. 1 comedy, 1 sci-fi and 1 romance.

If customer A picks the sci-fi movie you cannot conclude that he didn't like the comedy or romance choices. He just happened to prefer watching a sci-fi movie that night. You don't even know the outside conditions too. Maybe his friend is over sitting in the room while they pick the movie, you simply cannot know.

I think you're being biased here. Netflix's device interface is ho-hum (eg on the playstation entering text for search strings is painful) and they only have a 1-2 sentence description as well. They do try to sort things by relevance but they frequently get it wrong and I can 't depend on the same genres being there from session to session or having the same names. For example, I used to have a genre called 'horror movies'; after I watched a few different cartoon shows in a row one weekend that went away and instead I got a new genre called 'Scary Movies' with mostly PG-13 rather than R-rated content. Now I wasn't so into horror movies to begin with, but if I was this would be quite annoying. I do like Sci-Fi movies but but my options for curating my own genre selections are very limited, so I wind up thorwing everything into 'my list' in case I can't find again later.

The cable interface is also bad, but things are broken out by genre and broadcast station (eg some people prefer HBO stuff). It's a bit annoying because it's slower and I have to use a remote control, but that hasn't prevented my finding things I want to watch. Neither side is going to win by interface, but on selection; Netflix has fewer hits but more depth, Cable offers more populist and newer stuff.

I never tried accessing it through a console. Only through a fairly modern $40ish DVD player and a web browser, no complaints.

I'd drop them instantly without thinking twice if a better solution existed with equal or better selection, cheaper prices and more promising short term goals.

who just want it to keep going without involvement.

Binge-watching happens because Netflix autoplays the next episode each time. They could take it one further by making more content decisions for the user, going beyond proffering recommendations, which still require user action.

You can download The Daily Show (or any show for that matter) in 1080p minutes after its finished airing, with no commercials, or you can wait a day and have to sit through 12-15 ads on Hulu while their player desperately tries to play the proper rendition for your connection.

Hard choice.

It's pretty trivial to set up AdBlock and watch The Daily Show sans commercials. You're right, it's a day late, and you may have to wait a few seconds to watch Jon Stewart's mug in glorious HD, however it's still more convenient than finding a torrent.

Nothing's more convenient than finding a torrent of a hit show. The process involves typing "daily show" into a search bar, hitting enter, then clicking "download torrent" on the one that looks like what you want (which will normally be at the top of the list.)

You're skipping over the whole part where you have to download and configure a torrent client, and get a video player that reads MKVs and other containers encoded with x264... and probably a few other steps. Compared with hitting the power button a TV and clicking up and down until you find something, the torrenting process is labyrinthine. (Popcorn Time and others, of course, fix this somewhat)

Because it's a one time setup. You're skipping the sometimes multi-week process of getting cable installed.

Typing "thedailyshow.com" into a browser and just watching the show and having AdBlock+ remove all the ads is pretty convenient. A large percentage of people are using ad blocking software anyway, so setup once and forget about it.

You first need a computer, a high speed Internet connection, torrent software, a good/reliable/safe torrent site and then the knowledge to install said software and initiate a download. You then may need the proper codec/video player to watch the video and of course the wherewithal to stop seeding so you don't get caught by the piracy police. While these hurdles are easy (obvious) for geeks like me (and most HNers) they are not for the majority of the population.

You don't need any of that. Streaming and direct download sites have new TV episodes almost as quickly, with none of that hassle.

You still need a high speed internet connection, a computer (or do these streaming sites work on tablets? I don't know) and of course know where to go. Also, when your favorite pirate streaming site gets shut down (they all do eventually), you need to know how to find another (safe) site to keep on. Yes less hassle but still not "Cable TV" easy.

> You first need a computer, a high speed Internet connection, torrent software, a good/reliable/safe torrent site and then the knowledge to install said software and initiate a download.

So the barrier to entry is free knowledge, if you already have the same requirements to watch Netflix/Hulu.

Yea, for me, I'm only interested in piracy when there isn't a legal way for me to watch without being extorted by cable providers. I use a family HBOGo/Showtime Anytime account (but would pay for my own if it were an option), pay for Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu Plus, etc. Piracy only becomes an option if I can't use one of those services (I want to support people who create things I enjoy).

I am really curious about this point of view. Many of my friends and colleagues share it. Do you really see no issue with downloading something for free if it isn't provided to you in a way you can pay for and consume that you prefer? Are you okay that you are not paying for something that really does take a large amount of money to create?

Like I said, I'd prefer to pay for what I consume. I'm not ok with paying cable companies extortionate fees simply because they were able to develop a semi-monopoly on content distribution while they provide painfully poor service and actively work to avoid adapting to the fact that the internet has drastically reduced distribution costs. Shows that are available one day later on Amazon/Hulu or the like, I wait a day and purchase, so it's actually a lot more uncommon than you think that I pirate shows (that said, I'd pay more in some cases to be able to purchase the show when it airs - for events like Breaking Bad). HBOGo, WatchESPN, Showtime anywhere - they built a system that allows shared accounts explicitly, so there is no guilt on my part for not paying for a cable subscription just to get those channels, and if those companies wanted to enforce a policy of individual accounts, I'd happily pay for a subscription to just those channels.

I realize some of this is not perfectly logical and is contradictory. However, I see it as a broken system, with entrenched players acting poorly, and the best way to force adaptation is to pay when they offer me a way to and not pay when they don't. My hope is that this incentivizes the power players to move towards a system where all content is available for purchase should someone want to purchase it (which, given the minimal barriers to uploading copyrighted content, seems like they should have embraced long ago - especially as companies like Netflix and Amazon monitor pirated content to determine their targets).

You can in fact watch lots of hit shows on demand if you're a cable subscriber. there are a couple of TV shows that I like to watch at broadcast time because I enjoy them so much, but if I miss an episode I can just see it later. I've also used this to view shows that I was completely unaware of or uninterested in when they were first broadcast.

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