"One interesting wrinkle in this march towards consolidated annoyance is the streaming sector’s interest in driving more users toward ad-based tiers, where profits can continue to skyrocket:"
Ah, but one must remember, we are in the streaming situation we are in now because the consolidation already happened. Netflix was The Streaming Service. But the content providers to Netflix looked at Neflix's profits and said, "Hey, we could have a larger slice of the pie if we ran our own services." So they went off and made their own. And, yes, they discovered they were wrong.
But even if they consolidate again, it's just the nature of a MBA-executive in a content producing company to look over at the consolidated streaming service and say, once again, "Well, my predecessor couldn't make it work last time, but I'm sure that I can get a larger slice of the pie if I just make my own service. And look, customers will flock to my service because according to my numbers we can charge them a mere $9.99 a month whereas the consolidated service is $109.99."
Streaming service consolidation requires all the MBA-executives to humbly submit to the idea that they have no effective choice but to fork over control of the revenues to the consolidated streaming service. Who will, of course, be taking full advantage of their position to squeeze the content providers and push them as hard as they possibly can in the direction of the economics of running their own service making sense again.
I don't know that there's a stable solution to this. If there is I don't think it's the naively obvious consolidation solution.
Netflix bought DVDs to ship out as rentals. Content providers had no say (first sale doctrine?).
Netflix then saw that streaming was going to eat the legacy physical-disc market and pivoted.
At this point, streaming was a new revenue stream. Most content provider money was still coming through cable/broadcast. So they said "Sure, we'll license you a bunch of stuff for cheap to do this thing we don't care about."
Streaming's growth led to it overtaking other revenue streams. At this point, content providers looked at the numbers and said "The main channel for eyeballs is getting our content for cheap. We should do something about that."
And then built their own streaming services, e.g. Hulu.
The biggest miss here seems to be by Google and Microsoft. Why, for the love of profit, didn't they say "Hmm, we have data centers, software expertise, and bandwidth... let's build a B2B streaming platform offering for content providers."
The missing piece here is that streaming was not profitable for a very long time, and all the studios and content producers cannibalized their existing profitable businesses to make equally unprofitable deals with Netflix, just to be where all the users were going.
Now that industry is stuck in a situation where they wrecked their own income streams, expectations have been set with customers about what streaming costs, and they are scrambling to figure out how to re-gain that income but no one wants to go back to those pre-streaming prices.
This whole problem was one of the foundational issues behind the recent writer and actor strikes.
> The biggest miss here seems to be by Google and Microsoft.
Bear in mind that you’re talking about Ballmer-era mobile’s-no-big-deal Microsoft here, not Nadella-era reimagine-the-company-around-cloud-and-services Microsoft. That kind of smart strategic offering was never going to happen during the time period it would’ve needed to happen.
> Netflix then saw that streaming was going to eat the legacy physical-disc market and pivoted.
Netflix was started with streaming in mind from the outset. It's in the name, for one thing. They didn't pivot, (they only stopped their DVD mailing service this year, I believe,) they just started streaming as soon as the hardware, software, and network could be built up to a point where it was feasible financially.
I don't know that there's a stable solution to this. If there is I don't think it's the naively obvious consolidation solution.
Prevent all exclusivity deals, and force identical pricing on all streaming platforms.
Do this, and we'll have competition for stability, and cost.
And it's 2023 ffs. There should be a backend deal, where you can watch anything ever made, and the streamer can on demand snag from the studio if rare. EG "Please wait 2 minutes, while we snag and cache super-rare content from studio X."
This sort of dynamic arrangement should be so logical, but instead, I have 120TB of storage. All with rare, hard to get media.
Because the people that own it, won't make it easy to consume.. if they'll even keep it available.
> Prevent all exclusivity deals, and force identical pricing on all streaming platforms.
In addition I'd add, force identical pricing for all TV/Movie actors auditioned for same role. All players same salary for same position in team. That will definitely change landscape for sports and entertainment business.
> I don't know that there's a stable solution to this.
I just quietly download copies of media I may want to watch to an archive NAS so that they'll always be available when I want to watch them. I don't try and justify this to myself as a good thing; it's just the pragmatic thing I do because I don't like being at the whims of some publicly traded company or other (I've had WAY too much of that in my life). Most of my friends do the same.
> I don't know that there's a stable solution to this
A probably-dumb idea that I haven’t seen discussed anywhere: a federation of services (I pay $30/mo to the federation -- if I spend 2/3 of my time on Netflix and 1/3 of my time on Hulu, then Netflix gets $20 and Hulu $10)
> Disney’s streaming operation lost $512 million in the most-recent quarter, the company said, bringing total streaming losses since 2019, when Disney+ was introduced, to more than $11 billion. Disney+ lost roughly 11.7 million subscribers worldwide in the three months that ended July 1, for a new total of 146.1 million.
It seems unlikely they were losing money on the Netflix licensing deals.
See how Disney and other pulled their content away from Netflix. Considering Netflix as existential threat to them, they thought its better to have their own streaming service. And now Disney of all is pulling their content away from their Disney+ because.. wait for it... it is too expensive to put their own content there.
Whereas with Netflix they could have gotten nice stack of money which they forgo dreaming about their own service ruling streaming.
I don't believe there is a stable solution. I think what we are witnessing is an industry hitting a wall it can't overcome. I do firmly believe that Hollywood is dying. Their structure just can't work in the world we live in.
Look at music streaming. Music was a crusty old industry rife with nepotism and abuse of artists, where some big companies scooped up all the profit. It was heavily disrupted, but the artists and their agents were free to list their music on any service, no exclusivity required, the services were just conduits that took a small cut. Now, that's mostly the world we live in.
The problem with video is that a single artist with a computer can't usually make a complete season of a TV show or a marvel movie. It cannot be disrupted in the same way because content cannot be produced unless big players are involved, its just too cumbersome and expensive.
But you already see that it's moving to the music model anyway, more people spend time watching tiktok, Instagram and YouTube than they spend watching TV shows and movies. And, with compute becoming cheaper and AI generated this and that, soon it will be possible for a single artist with a good computer to make good content. The key thing here is that video content will move the way music content did, except the incumbent content producers will not make it to the other side, whereas with music they can.
I'm pretty sure having a single service act a monopoly for all film/video content will not be a net win for consumers going forward. Also the DVD/physical media market is now mostly dead and never coming back. Those rights will not be given away for almost nothing again.
Physical media has been trending towards poorly. But in a changed world where streaming media costs for consumers are doubling, at the same time content on the services are shrinking, it's not clear that this trend will continue. Why wouldn't consumers want own more media as the relative value of streaming options plummets?
I mean, sure, Best Buy evidently thinks this is the right time to exit physical media. They might be right. But "never coming back" seems like an a possibly overly confident prediction at a time when the major substitute causing the decline is on fire?
The solution would be one where the user could just "ask the internet" to deliver them the content they're interested in watching, and they paid per-hour.
Of course we're not going to see that solution for many reasons.
Amazon basically provides that right now. If my mom wants to watch some movie or series she checks if it’s on a streaming service then rents/buys it from Amazon.
D+ for a month is a lot cheaper than paying 20$ for The Last Jedi, but they are happy to take 20$ from you.
Under capitalism this is the stable solution, the same way there are so many auto makers, essentially making the same 3 or 4 cars/trucks, the same way there's the same PC OEMs making the same 3-4 laptops, desktops, etc. Consolidation, central command, efficiencies of centralization, guiding towards lower prices via these efficiencies, etc isn't capitalism. Maximizing profit by maximizing acceptable price is capitalism. What you're asking for isn't capitalism, but these are capitalist industries, not socialist ones controlled by, say a co-op or the government.
Those MBA's are doing what they were hired for under a capitalist model. Their companies controlled IP's and those IP's are profitable outside of the Netflix umbrella, which ended up being true considering the success of Disney+, Hulu, etc. Of course now you're seeking a equilibrium. Will lower-tier offerings work like some no-name services or services with lesser content like Paramount? Maybe some players won't survive this, but that's also part of this model.
Not to mention nearly all these services opened with predatory pricing. Disney+ was not going to work at $7 a month, but it got people to sign up, maybe cancel with someone else without predatory pricing, and now Disney just needs to boil the frog to higher prices. Under capitalism these anti-consumer tricks are perfectly legal and oddly acceptable. It seems now we're in the stage of the capitalist entrepreneur cycle where predatory pricing is out the door, and everyone is clamoring to get to the price point that works. All the players who would make a streaming service already have, so this little masquerade can stop.
It just may be the case that your average US household can afford $150 in streaming services and everyone is just fighting to get that, which is close to what they paid with cable before streaming with inflation. This is the goal, not "lowering prices for good American families" and other dishonest marketing. If there's a $150 slice to be had per household, then capitalism will extract it. Or more, then people will revolt, cancel, and that will lead to price cuts and maybe some consolidation (say two weak services combine).
I find it amusing that Americans who claim to love capitalism, actually dislike what it does, and instead quietly pine for socialism without knowing the word or concept. "Hey why dont all these inefficient companies just combine already? With strong consumer protections? Under a non-dishonest marketing scheme where efficiencies and where they co-operate deeply to maximize value and lower prices?" That's not the system you live under. Instead companies will fight each other, steal marketshare, raise prices, etc and maybe there's efficiencies there, but often not, but what matters is learning what the consumer can pay, and charging her that exact maximum.
Which is what's happening here. No one but account sharers and college students etc are cancelling. Middle America isn't cancelling Disney or Netflix anytime soon. Maybe paramount or a weaker service, but everyone is in contention for that $150 and they're going to fight for it. It makes no sense under capitalism to consolidate back into a Netflix-like service. Its not going to happen again. Netflix was just capitalism getting there, but now that replicating the Netflix model got easier thanks to the cloud, these big IP holders just made their own.
Imagine asking "God I hate paying to the Disney parks, why don't universal and disney and MGM just make one big park with all their IP run by another profit-seeking entity?" That would be absurd to ask under capitalism, but people are asking this for streaming?
What you are describing isn’t how any functional capitalist system has worked.
Predatory pricing is illegal, and the first sale doctrine is core to how capitalism works. Similarly, current copyright terms are laughably long.
The problem here is not capitalism, it is corruption: The US has laws that will not be enforced, or that have been modified via regulatory capture / bribery.
I bought a mini PC (<$100). I started buying blu-rays on FB Marketplace and pawn shops ($.75-$2.00 each). I'm ripping them to a big harddrive (12TB, ~$200). I have Jellyfin installed (Open Source, Free). I bought a digital antenna ($130) and capture device ($200) compatible with Jellyfin. I set up SSL certs and DuckDNS (free). I integrated it with Home Assistant (free).
I can now watch my movie library or live tv from anywhere, and I have all of the bonus features from the disks. It's private!!!! I'm not being tracked. There is no profile anywhere that says "he watches this or that for X amount of time at Y part of the day, and travels to A and B".
I had subscribed to Netflix for over 16 years. Then, when they "cracked down" on my mother accessing it (I had stopped using it myself), I decided that enough was enough.
I don't care if it cost a lot to set up. This is mine, and I will NEVER go back to paying them a subscription.
Lesson: Don't anger the nerds. They can replace you. They will replace you.
At least until they stop selling Blu Rays. Best Buy will stop doing so at the end of this year[1]. Others will probably follow. That same article is saying that Disney is also cutting back on physical media.
I too have gone back to ripping Blu Rays, but it is a pain. Sometimes I buy the blu-ray, then torrent the digital files.
If they'd just sell me a DRM free digital version, I'd be all over it. I'd probably end up paying _more_ than I do in subscriptions knowing I can watch how I want, when I want, for as long as I want.
I spend way more than $15/month on bandcamp for DRM free music (vs Spotify plan), give more money to artists, and cut down on streaming costs of the platforms.
What do you use for a capture device? I'm currently using a Tivo Roamio (with lifetime subscription) and love it, but it's at least 7-8 years old so thinking about what's next. Only real complaint is remote viewing needs a really solid connection and sometimes just doesn't work.
Also a regular Plex user so would like something that integrates with it to handle antenna / live recording.
I got it because it can stream to more than one person simultaneously (although I haven't tested it thoroughly yet).
There's supposedly some issues with the newer encodings and Jellyfin itself (just watch any video on YT that talks about the HD Homerun Flex 4K and Jellyfin), but it's all good for me so far. I don't know if Plex users are affected.
I was able to pick up 41 channels, but I only got a 70 mile antenna, and the big cities are much further away, so I'm happy with it.
The only problem with this is the advent of streaming original content. Netflix, for example, has some really good stuff among the dross that they have produced, and I doubt it'll ever see a physical distribution.
I've been hesitant to drop below the provided resolution (1080 for blu-ray), and keep the quality quite high, so a movie is ~8 gigs. But Jellyfin will transcode it on-the-fly if you need a lower quality while streaming, so I wasn't too worried about it.
Do you mind if I ask how large the screen is that you view it on? I'm watching on a 65" tv in my living room, and artifacts are visible during high-action sequences.
However I'd consider Neil Postman's excellent book "Amusing ourselves to Death" on why Americans (and perhaps many more countries now) are obsessed with entertainment rather than why entertainment is so expensive
The biggest problem with streaming sites is the lack of movies in different regions. For example, if I'm watching Better Call Saul and I do not get all the seasons at once while the rest of the world does, I have no other option but to look at the high seas and immediately without any trouble, get all episodes from all seasons and watch with a simple one click.
Piracy is a service problem, not a pricing problem. I have major doubts that price increases alone drive a significant number of people to piracy.
Maybe a lot of people on this forum, but that doesn’t mean much.
Piracy used to compete with the complete inability to download TV shows and movies and conveniently watch them on a regular TV.
That’s not the world of piracy as it stands today. You have to put significantly more effort into piracy than you do to subscribe (or unsubscribe) from a streaming service.
You can’t just download stuff on BitTorrent without setting up a VPN, and the Usenet stack requires a whole bunch of technical knowledge to setup for yourself. Governments play whack-a-mole with tracker websites.
> Piracy is a service problem, not a pricing problem.
I have a real life example of this from the other day. My friends and I were about to watch an NBA game. I pay for Youtube TV with all the requisite sports packages and my friend had Sling with the corresponding sports packages. We tried both services only to realize that the game was "blacked out" in our area.
So we seeked out a pirate stream and watched the game that way. It's not that we don't want to pay for the service, no we are both more than happy to pay for it, there was simply no way to watch the game outside of a pirate stream.
I get that there are contracts in place that require blackouts and probably other agreements in place that prevent X game from being streamed at Y location. But as a consumer who just wants to watch an NBA game, I really don't give a s**t.
I never understood the rationale behind “We routed your tax dollars away from schools and roads and stuff to build an arena/stadium so you can’t watch this game”
If anything, I’d expect the opposite: If your tax money didn’t directly subsidize one of the teams, then you pay extra.
(Personally, I try my best to just ignore that corner of the industry as much as possible.)
There's a stat that 20% of pirate users are "pay never", so I always challenge the idea that if streaming services had a better proposition then piracy would go away.
Piracy exists because people inherently want to pay as little as possible, it's why people by knock off LV handbags and why people buy cheap TVs from the supermarket which have terrible picture quality.
The other psychological thing is FOMO, or the idea that you have to watch these things, so if you can't justify the expense then you might as well pirate. Ultimately people don't need to watch those shows, but they want to and they just don't want to pay what's being asked.
The frustration is that people think that the streaming services are scalping, when the reality is that streaming is not very profitable. It's hella expensive to get CDNs to deliver video in good quality and it's hella expensive to encode video at good quality.
I think you’ve got it backwards: “Piracy is a service problem, not a pricing problem.” is the thing that people on this forum say.
When I was a teenager in the late 00’s, I could totally rent “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” from Blockbuster, but I didn’t have any money. Once I got a job and had money, I started paying for streaming services because they were more convenient, and I’ll likely keep doing so.
But my friends outside of tech who make less money are pissed off about the unbundling and rising prices of streaming services, and I won’t be surprised if some of them switch from paying multiple expensive streaming services to paying for one of the VPNs that advertise on every YouTube video everywhere.
Outside the US that's not really true. In my country (EU) half the content I want to watch isn't available on streaming services here. It's often bought by cable providers, who want to show it first, then becomes available later. But who wants to wait 6+ months to watch a new TV show? So everyone torrents, as there is no other option.
You used to be able to use a VPN to create a streaming account in the US, but now everyone has cracked down on that, so they are actually making less money from us.
I feel like studios are shooting themselves in the foot with this kind of stuff.
How many times do we have to say it. It's not about paying. People are happy to pay. It's what you get for the money. It's about the experience.
Go on amazon prime and see what you get for your monthly flat fee. Half the movies you actually want to watch cost extra. Netflix is showing ads now. You have to pay for half a dozen services to get access to all the content you want. Content disappears all the time.
Here's the fundamental problem: people want to stream movies and shows on the internet. But the providers want video on demand cable TV channels. So that's what they're building. From a technical perspective they're the same. From a user experience perspective these are completely different things. From a business perspective, it seems, only the latter is viable. And so they push, and slowly a new reality is born, one where Redbox and Hallmark Channel have a better user experience than streaming services.
The free alternative is I search torrents-csv for a movie, click it and start watching. And if I want I never lose access, just like if I had a DVD. I don't watch all that much TV or movies these days, but I can clearly see what the problems are here, and the entrenched industry leaders either are too detached to see it, or they're trying to pretend it's something else because they don't have a viable business model.
They did it to themselves and I don't feel bad about it at all. Everyone I know is canceling their video streaming subscriptions but nobody is canceling Spotify/Apple subscriptions.
The industry just went 6 months without producing any content anyway, right on the heels of 2 years of craziness. There's not going to be much to pay for...
Readit News
Ah, but one must remember, we are in the streaming situation we are in now because the consolidation already happened. Netflix was The Streaming Service. But the content providers to Netflix looked at Neflix's profits and said, "Hey, we could have a larger slice of the pie if we ran our own services." So they went off and made their own. And, yes, they discovered they were wrong.
But even if they consolidate again, it's just the nature of a MBA-executive in a content producing company to look over at the consolidated streaming service and say, once again, "Well, my predecessor couldn't make it work last time, but I'm sure that I can get a larger slice of the pie if I just make my own service. And look, customers will flock to my service because according to my numbers we can charge them a mere $9.99 a month whereas the consolidated service is $109.99."
Streaming service consolidation requires all the MBA-executives to humbly submit to the idea that they have no effective choice but to fork over control of the revenues to the consolidated streaming service. Who will, of course, be taking full advantage of their position to squeeze the content providers and push them as hard as they possibly can in the direction of the economics of running their own service making sense again.
I don't know that there's a stable solution to this. If there is I don't think it's the naively obvious consolidation solution.
Netflix bought DVDs to ship out as rentals. Content providers had no say (first sale doctrine?).
Netflix then saw that streaming was going to eat the legacy physical-disc market and pivoted.
At this point, streaming was a new revenue stream. Most content provider money was still coming through cable/broadcast. So they said "Sure, we'll license you a bunch of stuff for cheap to do this thing we don't care about."
Streaming's growth led to it overtaking other revenue streams. At this point, content providers looked at the numbers and said "The main channel for eyeballs is getting our content for cheap. We should do something about that."
And then built their own streaming services, e.g. Hulu.
The biggest miss here seems to be by Google and Microsoft. Why, for the love of profit, didn't they say "Hmm, we have data centers, software expertise, and bandwidth... let's build a B2B streaming platform offering for content providers."
Now that industry is stuck in a situation where they wrecked their own income streams, expectations have been set with customers about what streaming costs, and they are scrambling to figure out how to re-gain that income but no one wants to go back to those pre-streaming prices.
This whole problem was one of the foundational issues behind the recent writer and actor strikes.
Bear in mind that you’re talking about Ballmer-era mobile’s-no-big-deal Microsoft here, not Nadella-era reimagine-the-company-around-cloud-and-services Microsoft. That kind of smart strategic offering was never going to happen during the time period it would’ve needed to happen.
Netflix was started with streaming in mind from the outset. It's in the name, for one thing. They didn't pivot, (they only stopped their DVD mailing service this year, I believe,) they just started streaming as soon as the hardware, software, and network could be built up to a point where it was feasible financially.
Prevent all exclusivity deals, and force identical pricing on all streaming platforms.
Do this, and we'll have competition for stability, and cost.
And it's 2023 ffs. There should be a backend deal, where you can watch anything ever made, and the streamer can on demand snag from the studio if rare. EG "Please wait 2 minutes, while we snag and cache super-rare content from studio X." This sort of dynamic arrangement should be so logical, but instead, I have 120TB of storage. All with rare, hard to get media.
Because the people that own it, won't make it easy to consume.. if they'll even keep it available.
In addition I'd add, force identical pricing for all TV/Movie actors auditioned for same role. All players same salary for same position in team. That will definitely change landscape for sports and entertainment business.
I just quietly download copies of media I may want to watch to an archive NAS so that they'll always be available when I want to watch them. I don't try and justify this to myself as a good thing; it's just the pragmatic thing I do because I don't like being at the whims of some publicly traded company or other (I've had WAY too much of that in my life). Most of my friends do the same.
A probably-dumb idea that I haven’t seen discussed anywhere: a federation of services (I pay $30/mo to the federation -- if I spend 2/3 of my time on Netflix and 1/3 of my time on Hulu, then Netflix gets $20 and Hulu $10)
> Disney’s streaming operation lost $512 million in the most-recent quarter, the company said, bringing total streaming losses since 2019, when Disney+ was introduced, to more than $11 billion. Disney+ lost roughly 11.7 million subscribers worldwide in the three months that ended July 1, for a new total of 146.1 million.
It seems unlikely they were losing money on the Netflix licensing deals.
Though, I suspect this is Hollywood accounting so that they can avoid paying royalties.
Look at music streaming. Music was a crusty old industry rife with nepotism and abuse of artists, where some big companies scooped up all the profit. It was heavily disrupted, but the artists and their agents were free to list their music on any service, no exclusivity required, the services were just conduits that took a small cut. Now, that's mostly the world we live in.
The problem with video is that a single artist with a computer can't usually make a complete season of a TV show or a marvel movie. It cannot be disrupted in the same way because content cannot be produced unless big players are involved, its just too cumbersome and expensive.
But you already see that it's moving to the music model anyway, more people spend time watching tiktok, Instagram and YouTube than they spend watching TV shows and movies. And, with compute becoming cheaper and AI generated this and that, soon it will be possible for a single artist with a good computer to make good content. The key thing here is that video content will move the way music content did, except the incumbent content producers will not make it to the other side, whereas with music they can.
I mean, sure, Best Buy evidently thinks this is the right time to exit physical media. They might be right. But "never coming back" seems like an a possibly overly confident prediction at a time when the major substitute causing the decline is on fire?
Of course we're not going to see that solution for many reasons.
D+ for a month is a lot cheaper than paying 20$ for The Last Jedi, but they are happy to take 20$ from you.
Those MBA's are doing what they were hired for under a capitalist model. Their companies controlled IP's and those IP's are profitable outside of the Netflix umbrella, which ended up being true considering the success of Disney+, Hulu, etc. Of course now you're seeking a equilibrium. Will lower-tier offerings work like some no-name services or services with lesser content like Paramount? Maybe some players won't survive this, but that's also part of this model.
Not to mention nearly all these services opened with predatory pricing. Disney+ was not going to work at $7 a month, but it got people to sign up, maybe cancel with someone else without predatory pricing, and now Disney just needs to boil the frog to higher prices. Under capitalism these anti-consumer tricks are perfectly legal and oddly acceptable. It seems now we're in the stage of the capitalist entrepreneur cycle where predatory pricing is out the door, and everyone is clamoring to get to the price point that works. All the players who would make a streaming service already have, so this little masquerade can stop.
It just may be the case that your average US household can afford $150 in streaming services and everyone is just fighting to get that, which is close to what they paid with cable before streaming with inflation. This is the goal, not "lowering prices for good American families" and other dishonest marketing. If there's a $150 slice to be had per household, then capitalism will extract it. Or more, then people will revolt, cancel, and that will lead to price cuts and maybe some consolidation (say two weak services combine).
I find it amusing that Americans who claim to love capitalism, actually dislike what it does, and instead quietly pine for socialism without knowing the word or concept. "Hey why dont all these inefficient companies just combine already? With strong consumer protections? Under a non-dishonest marketing scheme where efficiencies and where they co-operate deeply to maximize value and lower prices?" That's not the system you live under. Instead companies will fight each other, steal marketshare, raise prices, etc and maybe there's efficiencies there, but often not, but what matters is learning what the consumer can pay, and charging her that exact maximum.
Which is what's happening here. No one but account sharers and college students etc are cancelling. Middle America isn't cancelling Disney or Netflix anytime soon. Maybe paramount or a weaker service, but everyone is in contention for that $150 and they're going to fight for it. It makes no sense under capitalism to consolidate back into a Netflix-like service. Its not going to happen again. Netflix was just capitalism getting there, but now that replicating the Netflix model got easier thanks to the cloud, these big IP holders just made their own.
Imagine asking "God I hate paying to the Disney parks, why don't universal and disney and MGM just make one big park with all their IP run by another profit-seeking entity?" That would be absurd to ask under capitalism, but people are asking this for streaming?
Predatory pricing is illegal, and the first sale doctrine is core to how capitalism works. Similarly, current copyright terms are laughably long.
The problem here is not capitalism, it is corruption: The US has laws that will not be enforced, or that have been modified via regulatory capture / bribery.
I gave up. I cancelled my streaming services.
I bought a mini PC (<$100). I started buying blu-rays on FB Marketplace and pawn shops ($.75-$2.00 each). I'm ripping them to a big harddrive (12TB, ~$200). I have Jellyfin installed (Open Source, Free). I bought a digital antenna ($130) and capture device ($200) compatible with Jellyfin. I set up SSL certs and DuckDNS (free). I integrated it with Home Assistant (free).
I can now watch my movie library or live tv from anywhere, and I have all of the bonus features from the disks. It's private!!!! I'm not being tracked. There is no profile anywhere that says "he watches this or that for X amount of time at Y part of the day, and travels to A and B".
I had subscribed to Netflix for over 16 years. Then, when they "cracked down" on my mother accessing it (I had stopped using it myself), I decided that enough was enough.
I don't care if it cost a lot to set up. This is mine, and I will NEVER go back to paying them a subscription.
Lesson: Don't anger the nerds. They can replace you. They will replace you.
[1]: https://www.theverge.com/2023/10/13/23915567/best-buy-discon...
If they'd just sell me a DRM free digital version, I'd be all over it. I'd probably end up paying _more_ than I do in subscriptions knowing I can watch how I want, when I want, for as long as I want.
I spend way more than $15/month on bandcamp for DRM free music (vs Spotify plan), give more money to artists, and cut down on streaming costs of the platforms.
Also a regular Plex user so would like something that integrates with it to handle antenna / live recording.
I got it because it can stream to more than one person simultaneously (although I haven't tested it thoroughly yet).
There's supposedly some issues with the newer encodings and Jellyfin itself (just watch any video on YT that talks about the HD Homerun Flex 4K and Jellyfin), but it's all good for me so far. I don't know if Plex users are affected.
I was able to pick up 41 channels, but I only got a 70 mile antenna, and the big cities are much further away, so I'm happy with it.
I’ve yet to go all the way with an antenna and capture device, seemingly waiting forever for ATSC 3.0 broadcasts in my area.
Do you mind if I ask how large the screen is that you view it on? I'm watching on a 65" tv in my living room, and artifacts are visible during high-action sequences.
However I'd consider Neil Postman's excellent book "Amusing ourselves to Death" on why Americans (and perhaps many more countries now) are obsessed with entertainment rather than why entertainment is so expensive
Maybe a lot of people on this forum, but that doesn’t mean much.
Piracy used to compete with the complete inability to download TV shows and movies and conveniently watch them on a regular TV.
That’s not the world of piracy as it stands today. You have to put significantly more effort into piracy than you do to subscribe (or unsubscribe) from a streaming service.
You can’t just download stuff on BitTorrent without setting up a VPN, and the Usenet stack requires a whole bunch of technical knowledge to setup for yourself. Governments play whack-a-mole with tracker websites.
I have a real life example of this from the other day. My friends and I were about to watch an NBA game. I pay for Youtube TV with all the requisite sports packages and my friend had Sling with the corresponding sports packages. We tried both services only to realize that the game was "blacked out" in our area.
So we seeked out a pirate stream and watched the game that way. It's not that we don't want to pay for the service, no we are both more than happy to pay for it, there was simply no way to watch the game outside of a pirate stream.
I get that there are contracts in place that require blackouts and probably other agreements in place that prevent X game from being streamed at Y location. But as a consumer who just wants to watch an NBA game, I really don't give a s**t.
If anything, I’d expect the opposite: If your tax money didn’t directly subsidize one of the teams, then you pay extra.
(Personally, I try my best to just ignore that corner of the industry as much as possible.)
Piracy exists because people inherently want to pay as little as possible, it's why people by knock off LV handbags and why people buy cheap TVs from the supermarket which have terrible picture quality.
The other psychological thing is FOMO, or the idea that you have to watch these things, so if you can't justify the expense then you might as well pirate. Ultimately people don't need to watch those shows, but they want to and they just don't want to pay what's being asked.
The frustration is that people think that the streaming services are scalping, when the reality is that streaming is not very profitable. It's hella expensive to get CDNs to deliver video in good quality and it's hella expensive to encode video at good quality.
When I was a teenager in the late 00’s, I could totally rent “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” from Blockbuster, but I didn’t have any money. Once I got a job and had money, I started paying for streaming services because they were more convenient, and I’ll likely keep doing so.
But my friends outside of tech who make less money are pissed off about the unbundling and rising prices of streaming services, and I won’t be surprised if some of them switch from paying multiple expensive streaming services to paying for one of the VPNs that advertise on every YouTube video everywhere.
You used to be able to use a VPN to create a streaming account in the US, but now everyone has cracked down on that, so they are actually making less money from us.
I feel like studios are shooting themselves in the foot with this kind of stuff.
Go on amazon prime and see what you get for your monthly flat fee. Half the movies you actually want to watch cost extra. Netflix is showing ads now. You have to pay for half a dozen services to get access to all the content you want. Content disappears all the time.
Here's the fundamental problem: people want to stream movies and shows on the internet. But the providers want video on demand cable TV channels. So that's what they're building. From a technical perspective they're the same. From a user experience perspective these are completely different things. From a business perspective, it seems, only the latter is viable. And so they push, and slowly a new reality is born, one where Redbox and Hallmark Channel have a better user experience than streaming services.
The free alternative is I search torrents-csv for a movie, click it and start watching. And if I want I never lose access, just like if I had a DVD. I don't watch all that much TV or movies these days, but I can clearly see what the problems are here, and the entrenched industry leaders either are too detached to see it, or they're trying to pretend it's something else because they don't have a viable business model.