Netflix, Amazon and Hulu No Longer Find Themselves Upstarts in Online Streaming | Hacker News Reader

Netflix, Amazon and Hulu No Longer Find Themselves Upstarts in Online Streaming

nytimes.com

As a consumer, I don't like the direction where streaming services are headed - many small services with limited content (original or not).

I've been a Netflix customer for years now (I also had Hulu Plus, cancelled it due to their then-horrendous interface). While in the past I was very impressed with Netflix's selection, I now find it... meh, despite all the original content. When I pay Netflix, it's not for one, two or ten specific shows, no matter how much I liked House Of Cards or Orange Is The New Black. It's for a big, diverse, easy-to-explore library, in which I can discover new content and I always have something to watch.

And as much as I like HBO programs, there is no chance I'll pay 15$/m for their streaming service, especially after I've already watched most of the content! I understand everybody wants a piece of that streaming revenue pie, but as a consumer, I can't but feel that this situation is bad for me.

Netflix seems to be very forward-looking at least with 4K already available. Still, I'd rather have a larger library of 720p content than fund a bunch of new mediocre shows. It's no surprise that everything is fragmenting into the new services proving that piracy will continue be the best option for the consumer.

In my area at least, I can sub to Netflix, Prime and HBO and still be paying far less than I would for cable. This is saying a lot considering it is on demand content with no commercials. On top of that, if I find Netflix lacking at some point, I can stop the sub for x months and come back later where most cable packages lock you for a year or more.

I have the same concern, but I think ultimately I will be able to subscribe to exactly what I want and still come out cheaper and more convenient than cable will ever be.

I don't understand why anyone cares about Netflix 4K. Their regular HD video bitrate maxes out at 3.9Kbps, apparently.[1] Their "Super HD" takes you up to 6mpbs. OTA television signals are at 18mbps.[2] And Blu-Ray can go up to 40mbps.[3] Increasing the number of pixels without increasing the bitrate doesn't really fit any more actual picture info into the stream.

1) http://blog.streamingmedia.com/2013/09/netflix-doubles-video... 2) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Television_Systems_Com... 3) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blu-ray_Disc#Bit_rate

The 18Mbps OTA signals you mention are MPEG2. Netflix is AVC. Anything above 6Mbps AVC is pointless because the quality differences become indiscernible. You need to start tuning things like frame rate and filters at that point.

Keep in mind that OTA television is using MPEG-2 instead of the more advanced H.264 video codec - roughly double the bitrate for the same quality.

As well, OTA is somewhat inefficient with duplicated frames, as all 1080i content is broadcast at 1080i60, whereas Netflix can encode content to the original frame rate (i.e. 1080p24).

That's exactly why the cable guys have been saying that bundling is the most economic option for consumers that want a large content catalog. As content creators stand up their own streaming services they'll begin to pull their content from third party streaming services (see Starz/Netflix). Consumers will eventually have two choices: purchase a very small subset of services directly from providers or go back to the big bundle.

Netflix and Amazon realize this, which is why they're scrambling to become content creators. Without original content, they're doomed to be nothing more than the Internet version of Nick at Nite.

I wonder if there is a third way, just not consuming content. As netflix becomes narrower as well as others in the space, could it led to a natural dry out of media? If I'm trained to not really use Netflix, but I already learned to get rid of cable bundles, I think I'll look to spend my time somewhere else.

I'm already doing this. For the most part I don't want to watch Netflix. I watch because my wife watches. I'm on my phone most of the time the TV is going.

The average American watches 34 hours of TV a week. Keep in mind: the HN audience is not representative of your average American. I don't think the media companies are too worried about a natural dry out.

How long until someone provides a bundling service? For just $50/mo they'll give you Netflix/HBO/Discovery/PBS/etc thru a single interface.

Ah, but how will they?

Startup: "Hey, Comcast, I'm a new startup trying to provide bundling services for all the fragmented streaming services out there! We feel we can offer a real win-win for both you and our customers by making it easier to subscribe and consume your service! And look at this awesome new Angular UI we built for your service that runs on Node.js backed by Mongo! It's web-scale!"

Comcast: "Sorry, kid, we have every intention of being the Uber-service. Have a lawsuit."

Startup: "Um, okay, well, that burns down our runway a bit. In the meantime, fake it 'till you make it! Hey, HBO, we're a new startup that can win-win yada yada webscale!"

HBO: "Sorry, kid, we have every intention of being the Uber-service. Have a lawsuit."

Startup: "Ack, now my runway is even shorter. Hey, Amazon..."

Amazon: "Sorry, kid, we're already the Uber-service and we intend to stay that way. Have a lawsuit."

Startup: "Shit."

Netflix: "No, we're the Uber-service! And also, have a lawsuit."

Startup: "Chapter 7 ho!"

Aereo: "Nice try, kiddo. Have a beer. Sucks, donnit?"

Apple: "Hey, Netflix & Hulu & Crackle & ... & HBO, we can double your revenue overnight if you'll consent to our bundling service."

Netflix & Hulu & Crackle & ... & HBO: "OK."

(Simplistic, yes; you fill in the details.)

> Consumers will eventually have two choices: purchase a very small subset of services directly from providers or go back to the big bundle.

I don't think the cable-style "big bundle" will exist much longer, just premium sources which you pay for per source (or, for the highest-value premium content, per individual piece of content or individual viewing) and advertising-supported disaggregated content. There might be (advertising-supported) portals and aggregators for this providing something like the big bundle, but consumers won't be directly paying money for it (with the cable model they do, but over time that's going to go to paying for internet access.)

Why do you think the big bundle will go away? Sure, subscribing to a small number of one-off streaming services may make sense for some consumers, but not all.

For example: if you collect the top three must-have channels from each member of your average American family, you'll discover that mom, dad and the kids have very different tastes in media. By the time each family member finds and subscribes to the streaming service that provides them the content they want, they'll be paying much more than what they paid for the big cable bundle.

> Why do you think the big bundle will go away?

Because the big bundle -- especially the big-bundle of sources that are themselves advertising-supported -- is an artifact of access-provider-as-gatekeeper. Especially with net neutrality, that's a feature of cable TV that doesn't exist on the internet.

> many small services with limited content (original or not)

UK customer here, totally agree.

Add to that the frustration of time limits on how long content is available for. I'm dawdling my way through Alias, just started s03, but Amazon emailed me today to say it's going away on April 12th.

Multiple devices, or device lock-in - I have a Roku 3, it'll do Netflix, BBC iPlayer, NowTV and Google Play. But I need to buy separate device to watch Amazon because Roku is a competing h/w platform. Fortunately I discovered my old Sony BDP BluRay player works with Amazon, but it's still a friction point and the UI is clunky.

No One Provider - you need to have subscriptions with at least two or more streamers to get a semi-decent range of content and even then I find 75% of it fairly mediocre.

I could go on.

> It's for a big, diverse, easy-to-explore library, in which I can discover new content and I always have something to watch.

I'm happy to and want to pay for content, but I still seem to end up torrenting stuff because these services are so infuriatingly patchy and limited.

My Roku does Amazon... did that change in newer models?

As far as I know it's Android that Amazon refuses to support for VOD (because they're trying to push their half-assed Kindle Fire line of Android knockoffs). Which is unfortunate because I had been a heavy purchaser of Amazon VOD season passes (not Prime)--back in the days before streaming you could set it up to auto download to TiVo as new episodes were released. Roku works great for viewing Amazon VOD.

They support Android too. It works through the Amazon store app.

Sadly not in the UK and I did trawl all the offerings on my Roku.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/video/ontv/devices

Totally agreed.

The other thing that frustrates me with Netflix et al. is how much better they could be if we had sane copyright terms. At a length of 30 years, which seems quite reasonable to me, we could have the classic cinema of the 70s easily available by now, rather than relying on Netflix or Amazon to renegotiate streaming deals every couple of years. Hell, even with 50 years we'd be getting something -- the animation of the 40s, Hitchcock movies of the 50s, etc. But with copyright essentially infinite in duration now, things fall into obscurity though no easy way to distribute and obtain them. (OK, obviously anything Hitchcock is always going to be for sale, but you know what I mean.)

Think about how wide the selection of Netflix discs was, essentially through what some people call a "loophole".

But the copyright holders are organizations which are very much alive. Copyright does and should expire after some number of years post death of original rights holders if they're individuals. We need copyright law upgrades, especially for digital media, like removing geographic territories which are traditionally negotiated region by region. That is insane when you're talking 1s and 0s and www distribution.

> But the copyright holders are organizations which are very much alive

According to some views they're alive ;)

> Copyright does and should expire after some number of years post death of original rights holders if they're individuals.

Unless it gets retroactively extended again.

But that brings us back to "securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries" (emphasis mine)...

Why should works be excluded from the public domain for (nearly || more than) a century?

If anything, we should have _shorter_ copyright terms now. Or at least have manual renewal requirements with fees that increase geometrically with respect to time passed since original publication. Works that are no longer worth retaining the monopoly on fall into the public domain where they can improve the commons, while works that are still (like Mickey Mouse) generating hefty profits for their owners can continue to be renewed until the cost is too onerous.

I don't know. There's something to be said about profiting off your work while you are alive. Corporations on the other hand, are an odd beast since they can have long lifespans where the rights can be transferred easily to a new organization, and the cycle continues.

I do believe it's generally good for innovation to let copyrights expire.

Not to worry! Yes, we will end up with many different streaming services, each a walled garden of content. However, what if some provider were to just "bundle" all of them together for the modicum price of $100/month!? Then everyone wins! They could also throw in some ads... those content licenses sure are expensive! But hey, at least is not cable!

Minor point: for some of us, HBO costs more than $15/month to add to our cable bills. (For me it is ~$21/month!)

Not every company will be able to do this.

HBO Currently costs 17/month + a cable subscription locally. Why should the streaming version be cheaper?

On the one hand, we do seem to be headed into a pretty fragmented market. On the other hand, if you're willing to cut the cord or at least switch to a bare-bones cable subscription with just the basic channels and no HD, that leaves you with a pretty sizable budget for streaming services and content purchases compared to a typical expanded channel lineup cable subscription. Of course that may mean limited access to certain types of content--live broadcasts in particular--especially if you don't get OTA. And it makes for a rather fragmented user experience. But it will probably actually be cheaper than a standard cable subscription, at least for now.

I'm very close to doing this but then I watch very little sports or other live events.

I'm curious how many people will be regular subscribers to all of these services or just sign up for a month to watch a new show and then freeze the account.

When Game of Thrones premieres I'll be getting an HBO Now account for a month, and then will freeze/cancel it until another new HBO show starts that I want to watch. I do the same with Netflix for House of Cards and a couple other shows. Unfortunately Amazon makes this difficult because you pay an annual subscription to Prime.

By doing it this way I might bounce around between services and only spend $10-20 for content streaming in any given month.

This is the natural evolution of the space. The fundamental laws havent changed, it's either everything bundled together for a flat price or a-la-carte where you'll need to get all the services you want and put them together yourself.

A-la-carte is what lots of people have been complaining about and now it's here, I don't really see what the problem is.

If people are expecting to have all the available content of cable which used to cost > $100 but only pay a single streaming service $10 that's just not going to happen. Those are unrealistic expectations.

Yep. Time's TV critic was talking about this when the Apple TV streaming service was announced. The gist was that people who expect these streaming services to give them the same TV for less money are probably dreaming. But they may give people the option of less TV for less money.

That's certainly the situation I'm in. I don't really get my "money's worth" (whatever that means exactly) out of cable but I sort of hate to give up live TV entirely. But as new streaming options become available, at some point I'll probably decide that I can live without a regular cable package given its cost even if that means I lose access to some programming.

A la carte is generally not described as running around searching 2-3 totally independent services, dealing with 2-3 different UI's, business models, etc, but having the ability to get discrete packages from a single provider which expressing on the programs you are interested in, and paying a fractional sum that is roughly proportional to the amount of content you selected versus the amount of content available in "the big package". Thus not being forced to subsidize groups such as sports fans, if you are not a sport fan.

I don't really think your statement connects well with this discussion. My understanding of the current discussion in this thread is a general dislike of how the major players are carving out exclusive deals ensuring the content distribution is fragmented and the only strategy to get a decent mix of content requires using multiple services each with different UI's, pricing models, ad policies, etc.

Those are just implementation details, whether it's split out with a single company with different packages or different vendors entirely.

The basic offering is the same, everything for a bulk discount or pick and choose but you'll have to deal with putting it together.

It's not in the interest of any company to do both, they're separate models so they'll either focus on offering a big package deal or a smaller tighter service.

The streaming services created the a la carte programming people have wanted from cable companies. They don't have a choice, content owners don't want any of them to have too much bargaining power.

http://www.lazyfan.com

One big problem is the lack of a TV guide equivalent. I've been taking a crack at this problem and have a prototype for movies (TV shows are still TODO).

XBMC has a solution for TV, but it only applies to your own hosted media. Take a look at PseudoTV.

I was actually writing a similar plugin for Plex.tv last year until my client hours put that on the backburner indefinitely.

I'll check out PseudoTV when I get home. Thanks.

I have a long list of tools that do something similar and I've not come across that one before.

Ok, so long-term participants aren't new anymore.

What's much more interesting is the death of the "long tail service" which attracted so many to these services in the first place: the implicit promise that their goal was to provide _everything_ in their catalogs, meaning you could give up buying media outright because they'd have & host whatever you could want. ...then others saw how very much money Netflix et al were making, and either raised their licensing costs/terms or made their own streaming services focused on some feature other than "long tail".

This is partly what makes Redbox is so infuriatingly frustrating. Netflix DVDs are in awful shape and waits for the "long tail" disks are insane.

I really can't get behind the online rentals because they feel like Blockbuster-style ripoffs. At the same time that I can rent a new release from Redbox for $1.50, streaming wants to charging $4 for the exact same show.

Public library inter-library requests are becoming the only answer anymore but it's so much freaking friction. And the local public library late fee policies here would make 90's Blockbuster look like saints...

And I'm getting really, really tired of the Netflix streaming new releases being exactly the same movies that are concurrently playing free on the HDTV subchannel broadcasts (ThisTV, BounceTV, etc) or on Crackle. Netflix doesn't have commercials, whoopee, I guess. That's only an issue because stupid streaming sites don't allow ad fastforwards (which a DVR handles wonderfully)

And while I'm ranting, who at Sony thought that anyone pushing the eject button on a Bluray player wants to stand around twiddling their thumbs while the player mines a bitcoin block or whatever it's doing before spitting out the tray? Sorry, I digress.

"No ads" is huge for many of us. I'll pay $7/mo to not have my time wasted & wallet seduced & continuity unbroken. Children in particular I want not exposed to ads, as they suddenly & passionately want something stupid (PopTarts? A teddy bear with a fishbowl for a belly? SpongeBob anything? Borderline R-rated trailers? WTH? keep that crap away from my under-7yo kids).

Redbox at $1.50 vs. iTunes at ~$4 is a fine tradeoff per: cheap & max data rate but travel time & unpredictable availability vs. right now & always available vs. marginally more expensive & lower data rate.

As for buttons, why does the "Play" button not do anything when "Play" is selected on the disc menu? on _every_ disc player out there?!?

Agree about "no ads" being important. But comparing Netflix to DVR OTA is a very different proposition than comparing it with the abomination of ad-straight-jacketed streaming apps.

Streaming apps don't let you skip and play the same damn apps all the time. On DVR it's just a fast-forward and it's not so difficult (caveat I use a TiVo for this and I know they have a warchest of patents so I have no idea whether it is worse on competing DVRs).

With respect to kids programming, honestly the Netflix kids section is basically a huge toy product ad. It's full of the product crap. Bratz this, Ponies that, Shortcake that, Legos this, Star Wars that, Barbie this, Tikerbell that, Disney fad-coms etc and Netflix doesn't let you blacklist any of that shit. Even rating it low, they'll still shove all the related shit in front of your kids. The best we can find are European imports and PBS shows. But you can get PBS shows without ads already.

Basically, for us Netflix streaming is becoming useful only for it's kids programming but we've started building a local streaming media library because we are so unsatisfied with the entire experience vs what it could and should be.

There is very little interesting to watch on Netflix. With Netflix DVD you at least used to (lately it's only true on paper, not in execution) have access to quality programming in addition to the crap. There was a time when Netflix content was broader than local rental options. Now the local rental options have disappeared and Netflix only cares about serving the 90% of the idiots of the world.

I'm missing the old Netflix DVD service. I still use it but a lot of films have dropped off my queue and my perception is that the bad disk count has gone up as well. It's tolerable given the lack of alternatives and the fact that my film tastes are relatively conventional, but it's still unfortunate.

Can you read the article without subscribing/logging in? There are more and more posts like that. Damn

Did the original link change? I can read the article without logging in

No idea, I still cannot access it.

Only the header is fully exposed, everything else behind some semi-transparent overlay. It seems that on on initial page load everything was visible and then hidden with JS.

And there is a link behind overlay: "To see full article, subscribe here."

You probably ran out of free views. NY Times requires a subscription but the first 10 articles per month can be viewed without paying.

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