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The Netflix ambition of a smorgasbord streaming product has slammed straight into the reality of the murky world of internationally licensed content. "It is di
by dcw303 11y ago
The Netflix ambition of a smorgasbord streaming product has slammed straight into the reality of the murky world of internationally licensed content.
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it"
The public has seen the future with Spotify, and wonder why video can't be the same. But there are a lot of people with influential positions in the industry whose livelihood depend on this red tape. Byzantine licensing laws fund entire departments of faceless middlemen, greedy regional affiliates and dark armies of lawyers.
Music wasn't particularly different, it's just that we are further along in the capitulating-industry-dinosaur story there.
- AlisdairO 11y agoIn fairness, the raw product of music has the advantage of being very cheap to produce. A lot of the value that the industry provides is in marketing. There's also an extent to which bands can afford to give away music on generous terms, because they can use it to publicise other, non-reproducible forms of entertainment like gigs. By contrast, with the exception of a small minority of films that rake in on merchandising, in the movie/tv industry the film is the only real product. That product is extremely expensive to make. If everyone only streamed Netflix to consume video, the industry would have to drastically reduce investment in making original content. That might be an acceptable outcome to many people, but I can see why the industry would want/need to fight it.