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Comment by natdempk | Hacker News Reader

This is true to the point where you can barely believe services release the products they do. The experience on Popcorn Time vs HBO GO isn't even comparable. HBO GO serves their content through a laggy flash player that you can't even force to play HD. Why would anyone watch non-HD content in a terrible browser player that wastes additional battery when they can open Popcorn Time in the time that it takes for the HBO player to load and start watching in HD immediately? Some services like Netflix get this and give the end user a better experience than Popcorn Time, but others only seem to exist for the hour before shows get uploaded as torrents.

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I completely agree re: the quality of streaming service apps. The Amazon Prime Video player is a joke. HBO GO is one of the buggiest apps I've ever used on Android. Netflix has gone a long way to improving their service and is probably the most satisfactory of them. Generally speaking, though, the experience of using these apps and the predictability/accessibility of content is not going to outcompete free & easy.

The saddest part is that if they wanted they could adopt a hybrid central seed/P2P model, too, and be able to offer HD content without overwhelming their servers (in fact there more would people watch a certain episode at a given time, the better it would work).

From elsewhere i have gotten the impression that some central legal figures within the business have some kind of stuck up idea about counting copies.

There was a company trying to offer cloud based DVR service, and found that the only way they could get big media legal approval was to not use deduplication of any kind. This meant that their storage costs skyrocketed.

I think this is to do with media controllers (the managers of the megacorps) predicating value on number of copies reproduced. Shows are not to be allowed to be given only the value of production but must be talked up to have a value according to the number of copies - the more expensive the copies can be made to appear the more realistic it seems that a copy should cost more.

Charging $20 per viewer for content that cost $0.20 per viewer to make is hard; you have to pay off politicians to maintain that sort of control.

If content creation is pushed to a point where the actors, production team, etc. just get a seriously good wage and no further profits are produced then there's no place for media magnates. They must do everything to push against the concept of economy of scale.

I'm imagining a utopia in which a $50M movie takes $100M, everyone gets a bonus (down to the caterers and toilet cleaners), the people who front it get 10%, the rest is fed back in to other projects and the movie is now in the public domain.

We need to support content creators not make those who control the media even more ridiculously wealthy.

Then we have people like the car manufacturer controllers not happy to make piles of money from the effort of the people who work beneath them they want to cripple the product and make cars impossible to repair ...

If you ever buy a supercar society should have you stripped naked and left to beg for scraps in a favela whilst all your personal assets are liquidised to feed the poor.

/rant

[Dammit, I'm really ready to go off on one, enjoy the rants of an over-tired slightly drunk person. Free at source! License: CC0!!]

This is a very risky business. People won't put money if reward is only 10%. And you are talking about successful products. The overall return would be far lower.

Actually, it's risk / reward that drives people.

Low percentage returns aren't anywhere near as sexy as high ones are. Right?

But then again, a sure thing carries a lot more weight than it does sex appeal.

The people making blockbusters won't be happy with that, but the people telling stories totally will. Serial programming that pays consistently is attractive to those people wanting to tell stories in exchange for a nice life.

IMHO, if we actually did go down this road, we might be surprised at what people would pay for and why.

Well yeah, counting views, or more recently copies, has been a central tenant of show business since its inception in antiquity when minstrels played on stage. No wonder the media business is resistant to changing on that point.

Along those lines, if you're interested in the legal history of distribution and "copies," Ars Technica put out a great summary article during the Aereo fight last year.

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/04/20/antennas-for-u...

> not going to outcompete free & easy.

The ease of setting up the TV in my living room to watch Netflix far outcompetes the difficulty of setting up a whole system that involves Plex and bittorrent/direct-dl, especially for someone non-technical that just wants to buy a box from Best Buy that "just works".

I feel the same applies to physical media releases too. Trying to watch a DVD is an absolutely miserable experience with menus and restricted actions. It's for this reason that I have the majority of the content I own ripped and stored in an iTunes library where I can access it quickly from my Apple TV.

And ripping is actually more effort (in my limited experience) than just torrenting the damned thing even if you own the physical DVD.

It's magic

Yep. Way back in the day, I happened to setup the Open Source OGLE DVD player software. I think it was Mandrake Linux, running on some PC with a Matrox G400 card --the one with nice 2D, and great DVD support.

Insert disc, press T, then P, and you are watching the movie, no BS. Took maybe 5 seconds tops after disk mount.

Turned out to be popular, so I bought a real DVD player for the family, and we hated that thing.

"Aladdin" is talked about a lot, but it's true! Every single time the kids wanted to watch that thing, it was something like 15 minutes of previews for all this other cool stuff, over and over.

That was the first DVD I ripped. Couldn't stand it. And once setup for that, I ripped 'em all, and also got the benefit of younger ones not destroying fragile media at some considerable expense all the time too. That and losing it, or swapping with friends...

For a number of years, I replaced that "real" DVD player with OGLE setup to just play the movie no matter what.

Was great OSS advocacy. Suddenly, a whole bunch of people knew who a "geek" and "hacker" was, what software was, how it can impact lives, and all sorts of other good things just because DVD media producers just HAD to annoy the crap out of people. Funny that!

It's also rather bizarre that you have to go to a provider's app to get their content. All the content is siloed and walled off by each provider, so you have to remember whether a show is on HBO or Netflix or whatever. The old TV model of "channels" doesn't work with streaming.

Reminds me of what Gabe Newell said about piracy: It's not a pricing issue, but a service issue.

Then why are so many Steam games pirated?

I'm not doubting that service can be a cause. But I think it's crazy to pretend getting something for nothing isn't a good motivation.

I'd play a pirated version of a game before using the Steam version. Steam implements DRM and is generally obnoxious, trying to force itself all over games (popups), showing sdverts, etc. It just shows how terrible things are in game-buying-land. Look at the Xbox 360. A marketplace UI so laggy, you wonder how they technically able to make it that slow.

At least in steam you can turn off the popups :

Settings -> Interface -> Uncheck "Notify me about additions or change ..."

I'm surprised. Steam has been quite successful because for most people the intrusion is acceptable, the portability/redownloadability useful, the social side works acceptably, and they regularly offer big discounts.

It never ceases to amaze me how slow the steam store browser is, though.

GOG is a nice DRM-free alternative. I've been trying to buy as much as I can through there, in order to support their DRM-free initiative.

There will always be people who will pirate no matter what. You can't do anything about that, and they will never be your customers. And for games, the percentage of the audience is probably higher than elsewhere because it is a mostly young and tech-savvy audience.

But the explosion of indie and smaller games on Steam should be evidence that their platform works, and that it makes economic sense to distribute digitally in that fashion because there are tons of us who want it, even with the ongoing piracy (that has been around since floppy disks and will never go away).

My Steam library has over 100 titles in it. I mostly buy during sales and via Humble Bundles mostly, but I also occasionally buy full-priced launch games that I really want to play. I can't remember the last time I bought a boxed game for PC.. Probably 2006? And before Steam I bought maybe 4-5 games per year? The service absolutely works.

One last thing: games piracy also has the added layer of protection cracking, which is pretty much a social contest in itself that incentivizes the activity (and leads to distribution as a measure of recognition etc).

That's easy to say when the products you sell aren't as easy to pirate as movies and music.

Let's say a content provider created the perfect media service, exactly to your specifications - super easy, DRM free, etc. etc. Done and done; the service issue is gone.

Tomorrow, you want a new movie. On one hand, you have Provider X's new service, and on the other, you have piracy, which gives you pretty much the same content it always has but now is relatively less convenient in comparison to the service. Which are you going to choose? Oh yeah, by the way, piracy is still free, but Provider X is charging $19.99 for a movie, because that content service cost them millions. More importantly, they don't want to devalue their content. They don't want to live in a world where the street value of a first-run film is 99 cents.

Piracy is a value issue. The only reason it looks like a service issue is because there's a reasonable solution to that part of the problem and it's easy to point at content providers and blame them for not fixing it. But the reason they don't is because if they did, it would simply surface the other side of the problem, which they're not going to do anything about.

I would say its both, a value and a service issue.

I used to pirate a lot of music, but nowadays i rarely do it. Because in my opinion, it's just so much easier to quickly buy them. With only 3 accounts – Bandcamp, Soundcloud and Spotify – I can cover almost all my needs in this regard. This wasn't possible only a few years ago.

Compare that to the state of tv series. I wanted to watch some HBO content recently an typed "HBO GO" into search. First result says:

"HBO GO. It's HBO. Anywhere."

Anywhere, great! click

"To access HBO GO, you must reside within the fifty states of the United States of America."

I didn't even bother trying to circumvent that and went straight for a torrent site …

Of course, a lot of people use a lack of service quality as an excuse, when they just want free content. But for those who are willing to pay, service and availability is a problem.

Agreed!

There will always be people who will go to any length to pirate content, and there is nothing you can do about them. They are not, and never will be, your customers.

But for others, it is absolutely a service issue, and I am one of those people. I pay monthly for Spotify and I spend money on Bandcamp and iTunes because it's convenient and value-priced.

And it's actually easier than piracy, which is probably more important than the price..

> But for others, it is absolutely a service issue

Absolutely? So if the price was $50 per movie, $100, or $1000?

There has to be the balance in next equation:

Affordability + ease of obtain versus feeling of guilt for pirating.

If there is no feel of guilt, little can be done, example: Russians pirating everything, and they are not as poor as you might perceive.

Ludicrous price? Oh to heck it will be pirated even by Americans.

Ease of obtain - at least we are not arguing over this (now) obvious fact.

Movie price should still be subject to market pressure rather than the false valuations of the content owners. Having every provider create their own competing digital standard for media distribution is as absurd as expecting them to all produce their own hardware for playing DVDs.

For efficient media distribution you need a common medium through which to publish it. Leave the creation of those platforms to others and charge a licensing fee for the content but let those services carry any content they can pay for. The customers will decide which services they prefer and you don't run the risk of funding a losing platform.

Popular movies will still be able to pull in millions on top of the box office earnings through licensing and a lot of also ran movies will likely make more than they do now as they are picked up by later audiences after they've come out from under the shadow of the big hits. I'm sure you could come up with some creative licensing terms that take viewership into account or go up for renewal on a regular basis so that they could be adjusted.

They already debut their content in the same theatres, why not a common home theatre?

Are you using a computer? I think most people watch TV on a TV, where "legit" apps aren't based on Flash.

I think that further proves his point. It shouldn't matter what device I'm consuming the content on.

i have a sony bravia at home and using its interface with the provided apps simply sucks. it's slow and cumbersome, while in contrast it's so easy to plugin a PC with wireless keyboard / controller / remote and just use regular applications, a state-of-the-art web browser and so on.

This was our experience with a Samsung Smart TV.

The TV apps are crappy, with the exception of Netflix, which is actually quite good. Best thing on the TV itself.

Over time, my family has consistently preferred either a PC for viewing (laptop), or a game console or a PC connected to a TV for viewing.

The little boxes are crappy, and using a TV remote is too.

> I think most people watch TV on a TV

HBO Go is an online service for people with an HBO subscription through a Cable/Satellite provider that's billed as making HBO content available on other devices; while you might get some utility out of HBO GO on a TV (e.g., for streaming back catalog content that isn't available through HBO On Demand), its not really the primary use case.

OTOH, neither is using it through a browser; I think the mobile app (which does support HD) is the main vehicle. I'm somewhat surprised if the browser version doesn't, but not that surprised

The HBO GO apps for things like Roku are also laughably bad. One of the best examples of truly not caring about UX is their default sorting of episodes. All shows sort episodes by most-recent air date, including shows that have fully aired, so if you want to get to the first episode of a show you have to scroll through a full season's worth of episodes. This is after having to scroll through all HBO shows alphabetically to find the one I want with no concept of recently watched. Again compare to Netflix where it takes a single button press to start watching a new series on every platform. There is a clear pattern that some companies just don't care about customer experience.

To be fair, there's good reason why a "newest first" (LIFO, I suppose) approach would make sense (namely, if it's assumed that most users have already been watching the series in question and just want to jump straight to the newly-aired episode that they haven't seen yet).

Which is a fair point, but NETFLIX KNOWS WHAT I'VE WATCHED.

They even added profile selection so different individuals using the same account get a better user experience.

Watching a show at a friend's house (and thus on their account) should be considered the degenerate case. LIFO order also has the added problem of showing screenshots for the latest episode which may contain spoilers.

Even if the service (Hulu) doesn't require users to login, cookies can still be used to track which episodes have been watched.

> The HBO GO apps for things like Roku are also laughably bad.

I'm working on an app for DirecTV boxes right now. The experience on that won't be much better. They are horrible platforms for development. I'll never do a project like this again.

old, not most. Old people watch commercials with occasional break for content on tv

Until a younger one shows them what streaming is.

No joke.

Commercials are so goddamn brutal now. Just about anyone will do the work to get a better experience.

Same with cord cutting. Just show 'em. They weigh that monthly $150 or so, commercials, etc... against just buying stuff they want and it's a no brainer, save for sports.

That's the reason ESPN is brutal. They know they are an anchor for much of the Cable TV business. Anybody who can ditch that probably is doing so right now.

> Are you using a computer? I think most people watch TV on a TV, where "legit" apps aren't based on Flash.

Not too important, but quite a few legit TV apps are Flash based. YouView and TiVo in the UK are both entirely flash (AS3 for YV, TiVo was AS2 last time I worked on it). Roku I think were AS2. Samsung TVs used to support flash but that might not be handled any more, I think their browser is pretty decent now.

Most TVs have moved to HTML+JS though, that's true. Thankfully many actually moved to sensible browsers too, there used to be massive inconsistencies between devices.

Actually a bit of a shame. Although flash can be really annoying, you can control when frames are drawn and position things accurately. You also had much better control over the memory (which things are cached, what's still a vector), which is important if you've got only a few megs of RAM and you're sliding around 1280x720 images.

Flash could have been hugely better, but the compiler was terrible (thanks to motion-twin though, you saved my sanity so many times on AS2 projects) and the runtime needed a lot of work on slower devices. But for animating things when you know the exact resolution you're always going to be running at? Brilliant.

Source: worked on apps for smart TV and set top boxes.

HBO NOW isn't built by HBO and is much better than HBO GO.

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