While Its Streaming Service Booms, Netflix Streamlines Old Business | Hacker News Reader

While Its Streaming Service Booms, Netflix Streamlines Old Business

nytimes.com

51 pointsdanso37 comments

My Netflix dvd queue is full of titles that are not available on streaming by anyone. I'm certainly not going to drop that service - I've seen a ton of movies via it that I've wanted to watch for decades but couldn't find.

Just because something is not a growing business does not mean it is not highly profitable and valuable.

But I am sad that Netflix's dvd selection has declined substantially. It's no longer "if it's on dvd, Netflix has it". If they continue shrinking the selection, I may wind up dropping it.

> I've seen a ton of movies via it that I've wanted to watch for decades but couldn't find

It blows my mind how much stuff (old stuff! especially non-blockbusters) isn't available anywhere streaming. I can't imagine why you wouldn't release a lot of that stuff and make a bit of extra money on those old titles.

I presume because the IP owner thinks the extra royalties they'd make off the streaming would be less than the cost of digitizing, metadata creation, etc.

I have some record albums from the 1950's. A few years ago, I checked around and they weren't available anywhere, even used, not no-how not no-way.

But recently I noticed them showing up on Amazon as mp3 downloads. Evidently, record companies are finally going through their back catalogs and making this stuff available again.

It's happening more and more with old paperback books, too, showing up as kindle books or collections on a dvd.

It hasn't happened yet for, say, made-for-TV movies produced in the 1970s.

I also think there'd be money to be made in simply producing an online archive of Channel 7 News broadcasts from 1975. Wouldn't that be fun to look at now and then?

> I also think there'd be money to be made in simply producing an online archive of Channel 7 News broadcasts from 1975. Wouldn't that be fun to look at now and then?

Probably, but often this just plain doesn't exist. I tried to get footage from a news station back in the 90s and they basically said they only keep the really notable days and otherwise recycle the tape after a few years.

http://www.dailydot.com/entertainment/marion-stokes-vhs-inte...

Which news station? I know public broadcasters across Europe generally keep very extensive archives (that are generally now being, or have recently been, digitized).

It was a local station in a small market in Wisconsin. I don't know, maybe the guy just wanted to get rid of me.

The television series Perfect Strangers is probably never, ever going to be rereleased, and you can blame the Bibbi-Babka Ditty.

See, the series makes use of a few licensed popular songs -- not as background or incidental music, but as songs sung by the main characters, often in Balki's native language or as a part of his culture, making them central to the show's jokes. (The Bibbi-Babka Ditty was one such, a version of Chubby Checker's "Limbo Rock" that must be sung while baking delicious Myposian pastries known as Bibbi-Babkas.)

So editing them out or replacing them with generic music, as was done for example with the rerelease of Daria which had all its popular background music removed, isn't an option.

It's kind of sad because perhaps the purest exemplar of "80s sitcom" will be lost to history.

So, the same problem as Nintendo has in bringing Mother 3 to the US.

Is there an opportunity here? I regularly 'digitize' old media for archival purposes. If a lot of Netflix DVDs are truly not available anywhere else, I would consider simply ripping them, storing them online and sharing them via p2p.

Legalities aside, there is definitely a market. In AU we have quickflix.com.au. I don't even have a working DVD player anymore. But when I did, I almost exclusively got DVDs that were hard to find even on torrent sites.

There's the obvious reason -- that digitization is expensive, relatively speaking -- but even more so, the rights to a lot of those older movies are not well defined. Many of those older movies are under contracts that have no provision for digitization, and in many cases the rightsholders who could grant a license are unknown. It's a mess.

And that's a great case for actually allowing copyrights to expire at some point.

> There's the obvious reason -- that digitization is expensive

Um, if it's on DVD it's already digitized.

It's unfortunately not that simple. Nobody uses DVD as a mezzanine format, partly because 4:2:0 MPEG-2 at DVD data rates is unsuitable for further manipulation, and partly because the DVD rights holders may not hold the rights to republish. It's a mess.

I just meant that in the process of producing a DVD, all the material would have to have been digitized. I'm sure for some releases the production companies have gone bankrupt and/or the files are lost -- but I'd think that once digitized the masters would be kept around?

You'd like to think so, but for the most part, the digitization and prep work is done by post houses or specialist digital distribution services, and the intermediates, which cost money to preserve, are almost always discarded.

The industry argument is that old stock dilutes new purchases. That's one reason why book publishers avoid re-publishing cheap editions of out of copyright work.

"'If you cut back on service, you are going to lose your subscriber base,' said Hank Breeggemann, general manager of Netflix’s DVD division[...]"

I wonder what it cost them in subscribers when they ended Saturday deliveries a year. They arguably reduced the value of their disc subscriptions by 16-17% without altering the monthly fee.

It's not surprising it's still profitable, based on some back of the envelope math, they're number of subscribers is only 26% (20 million to 5.3 million) of their high but their employee headcount is 17% of its high (50 hubs x 100 employees vs. 33 hubs x 25 employees). Not accounted for is how many of those subscribers has, like me, opted for a cheaper plan (e.g. 2 at a time from 3 at a time). My hunch is the costs of adding discs (and replacing damaged ones) have gone down (fewer subscribers need fewer discs plus disc costs have remained steady or even gone down) while adding streaming titles has probably gone up as there are more competitors including ones who will pay for exclusives.

I hope it survives pretty much as-is, at least until the total streaming market can compete in terms of catalog size. 93,000 DVD titles is about an order of magnitude greater than any one streaming service's catalog and most of what's in one streaming catalog is available in another.

So of the 93000 say about 80K of them are not currently streamable. At reasonable compression for streaming those would take about 160TB to store. Are they just not ripping them because of legal issues? Does piracy just get to win every argument? Hell, Netflix could write a client and let people rip them and upload them back to Netflix for some kind of Netflix points.

Yes, legal issues. They (Netflix) do not have the rights to rip or stream these movies.

I like to hope that a couple of the massive companies that have run against these kinds of legal problems have gone ahead and secretly ripped everything anyways, and sent it off to a secret Foundation, to weather the onset of our new intellectual property dark ages...

    “Never mistake a clear view for a short distance.”
    Paul Saffo

    “We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run 
    and underestimate the effect in the long run.”
    Roy Amara

I looks like they have mastered funding the transition to the next generation--yet to be profitable according to the NYT article--by preserving the DVD business as a cash cow. See also

http://www.skmurphy.com/blog/2011/10/11/learning-from-netfli...

http://www.skmurphy.com/blog/2011/10/14/learning-from-netfli...

"Only about 10 percent of the companies that appeared on the original Fortune 500 in 1955 remain on the list today."

The conventional wisdom is that companies in a free market grow until they dominate the planet. The reality is that larger companies tend to become dinosaurs, too big to adapt, and fade away.

I don't mean to sound snarky, but I can guarantee you that is a far from conventional view among anyone who has even a whiff of experience in economics.

Maybe the HN crowd is different, but I never heard otherwise in discussions during the Microsoft anti-trust trial, earlier with IBM, current discussions about Amazon, other large companies, Standard Oil, etc.

Aren't those monopolistic companies noteworthy because their monopolies were so exceptional? 99% of companies never get big enough to cause griping about monopoly.

A monopoly is always exceptional.

That statistic is misleading. Much of that change is the result of mergers. Just take a look at the list from 1955: http://archive.fortune.com/magazines/fortune/fortune500_arch... . Just looking through the top 25, the vast majority still exist in some form in the Fortune 500 today. Only a few have flat out gone out of business (e.g. Bethlehem Steel) or been booted from the Fortune 500 because the overall industry shrank (e.g. pretty much the rest of the steel companies).

Being in technology, which changes so rapidly, it's easy to think that "small companies overtaking big companies" is the norm, but if you look at more "static" industries, the leaders back in 1955 (e.g. Exxon Mobile, Kraft, Proctor and Gamble) are still the leaders today.

Few companies actually go bankrupt. They just fade away, and then the remains get bought (although such are technically called 'mergers'). I don't think that is the same as continuing and expanding dominance.

The DVD business may stay around for a long time, if only because it's the only cost-effective way to rent a great deal of content. Movies that want $6-7 for rental on Amazon or iTunes can be had on DVD for a fraction of the $7.99/month subscription.

As competition for streaming rights heats up it seems like a good way for Netflix to offer a large selection and differentiate itself in the market.

When I see people talk about competition for streaming rights all I can think of is a future of fragmented distributors that mimics the broken past. In that future piracy continues to be the sensible choice.

I cancelled Netflix a while ago. When I go to netflix.com to browse the plans, there's almost no mention of DVD! It's streaming to either 1, 2, or 4 screens. The Add DVD plan is found under Your Account, not on the front page.

The upcharge for Blu-Ray delivery is still there. I don't know who still watches DVDs, but I suspect it's the same people paying for AOL.

I watch DVDs. I don't pay for AOL.

You steal AOL service? Shame on you.

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