5 ms·

It's not a conspiracy, there's no backroom deals made through a haze of cigar smoke. The value of streaming rights is increasing, non-streaming revenue for the

by cwyers 10y ago

It's not a conspiracy, there's no backroom deals made through a haze of cigar smoke. The value of streaming rights is increasing, non-streaming revenue for the same content is slowly shrinking, there's multiple streaming services out there bidding up the rights to content, and the rightsholders are behaving appropriately according to their incentives. Remember, part of what made Netflix possible to begin with was the fact that the content they were licensing had already made its money through theatrical runs, cable deals and home video for movies, and original network fees and syndication rights for TV shows. So the content holders only had to worry about marginal revenue over negligible costs -- you can get very little for the content and still come out ahead. As streaming becomes a bigger and bigger piece of the pie, it canibalizes those other revenue channels, and more and more streaming money is required to make it revenue-positive. The market is reacting.

rayiner 10y ago
It's also the way the market should work. Content creators are selling a non-fungible product. Streaming services are to a great extent, fungible, like retailers. In fact, as content creators get their arms around streaming, I expect more of them to set up their own "shops" instead of relying on retailers, in the same way Apple and Tesla do.
- fweespeech 10y ago
  > It's also the way the market should work. Content creators are selling a non-fungible product. Streaming services are to a great extent, fungible, like retailers. In fact, as content creators get their arms around streaming, I expect more of them to set up their own "shops" instead of relying on retailers, in the same way Apple and Tesla do. The problem with this argument is, financially, I'd be willing to pay $NN/month for access to everything in a single distributor like Netflix. If the effort required to stay legal exceeds reason [which is what you are suggesting with N channels purchased separately] why bother? I've honestly reached a point where I'm completely indifferent to anything that isn't already on Amazon Prime or Netflix. Create a dozen distributors and people will just pirate things.
  - cwyers 10y ago
    > The problem with this argument is, financially, I'd be willing to pay $50/month for access to everything in a single distributor like Netflix. The problem with this argument is, financially, all the content distributors and rightsholders we currently have right now can't survive on that price. I mean, you're breaking out the dumb pipe provider into their own price bucket, so it's not apples-to-apples with current cable companies, but think of how much an everything package with a cable or satellite company costs, and think about how much content you don't get in such a package.
    - kiba 10y ago
      They make the vast majority of their money on new content. Making money off their old catalog is more like a freebie when it's all milked out.
    - thrownaway1984 10y ago
      So the solution is that Netflix change $8 Amazon charge $8 etc. I as a consumer pay for the services that have the shows I want. BUT instead of Netflix, Amazon, etc having their own site/app I use one aggregation site/app that seamlessly allows me to search for and watch all the content from the various services that I'm subscribed to in one interface.
  - rayiner 10y ago
    You can say that of pretty much any product or service. People would rather get something illegally for free instead of paying to get it legally, if it's easy enough and the risk of getting caught is low. That by itself doesn't mean prices are too high or there is anything wrong with the market.
    - thrownaway1984 10y ago
      Um the OP said she is willing to pay $50pm which is about 8x what netflix currently charge. She said that the inconvenience of having too many streaming services to choose from is the issue.
    - 10y ago
- thrownaway1984 10y ago
  Do you honestly expect your parents to navigate around several dozen different streaming sites? Their is already a much higher cognitive load to working out what shows are on the various streaming services already in existence than there is using a traditional TV. If content producers want to have their own streaming services then that is their business. If they want me to watch the content they had better come up with a unified interface where I can search in one place for content I have access to. I have never pirated anything and can well afford to pay for content but I also don't want to spend my limited leisure time hunting around for where I can find shows.
- astazangasta 10y ago
  There is no "should" here. Content creators are selling a non-fungible product because we've chosen to define it that way, for example in the DMCA, which signed onto a number of copyright treaties defining specific forms of copyright. There is no god-given reason for any of these choices. Notably, there is widespread room for disagreement on what constitutes "fair use" of these items that circumscribes the space of what makes them a product. These are legal constructs, and they exist to the extent that they are enforceable by law. Now, for example, we are seeing attempts to cast copyright ownership across particular tunes or styles of music; if this succeeds, this is a new paradigm in ownership, it is not some pre-ordained law. Property of all forms is a legal construct, a man-made thing. Where we set the bounds determines, to a large extent, who ends up owning it and reaping the profits. For example, the DMCA provisions required certain proprietary anti-circumvention measures to be included in all audio-recording devices; it is difficult to argue that this is how the market "should work".
  - morgante 10y ago
    You're confusing a good being fungible with it being non-rivalrous and non-excludable. Without legal protection, you're absolutely correct that a film cannot be excluded from consumption by non-payers and infinite reproducibility makes it non-rivalrous. That doesn't make films fungible though. They are very far from being even imperfect substitutes. If I am somehow able to keep the latest Avengers film excludable then very few will be willing to accept the "substitute" of a knock-off rom com with C-list actors. In markets, profits flow to whoever owns a monopoly.
    - astazangasta 10y ago
      There are plenty of non-fungible goods of this sort that are purely the result of legal constructions. The simplest example is the same movie available from two different vendors with separate digital rights systems. If I have purchased rights from one, it does not give me the right to consume the media from the other, even though it is arguably the same work. This means I can multiply the number of non-fungible versions of the same product by making it available on N different competing DRM systems.
    - 10y ago

by cwyers 10y ago

rayiner 10y ago

It's also the way the market should work. Content creators are selling a non-fungible product. Streaming services are to a great extent, fungible, like retailers. In fact, as content creators get their arms around streaming, I expect more of them to set up their own "shops" instead of relying on retailers, in the same way Apple and Tesla do.

fweespeech 10y ago
> It's also the way the market should work. Content creators are selling a non-fungible product. Streaming services are to a great extent, fungible, like retailers. In fact, as content creators get their arms around streaming, I expect more of them to set up their own "shops" instead of relying on retailers, in the same way Apple and Tesla do. The problem with this argument is, financially, I'd be willing to pay $NN/month for access to everything in a single distributor like Netflix. If the effort required to stay legal exceeds reason [which is what you are suggesting with N channels purchased separately] why bother? I've honestly reached a point where I'm completely indifferent to anything that isn't already on Amazon Prime or Netflix. Create a dozen distributors and people will just pirate things.
- cwyers 10y ago
  > The problem with this argument is, financially, I'd be willing to pay $50/month for access to everything in a single distributor like Netflix. The problem with this argument is, financially, all the content distributors and rightsholders we currently have right now can't survive on that price. I mean, you're breaking out the dumb pipe provider into their own price bucket, so it's not apples-to-apples with current cable companies, but think of how much an everything package with a cable or satellite company costs, and think about how much content you don't get in such a package.
  - kiba 10y ago
    They make the vast majority of their money on new content. Making money off their old catalog is more like a freebie when it's all milked out.
  - thrownaway1984 10y ago
    So the solution is that Netflix change $8 Amazon charge $8 etc. I as a consumer pay for the services that have the shows I want. BUT instead of Netflix, Amazon, etc having their own site/app I use one aggregation site/app that seamlessly allows me to search for and watch all the content from the various services that I'm subscribed to in one interface.
- rayiner 10y ago
  You can say that of pretty much any product or service. People would rather get something illegally for free instead of paying to get it legally, if it's easy enough and the risk of getting caught is low. That by itself doesn't mean prices are too high or there is anything wrong with the market.
  - thrownaway1984 10y ago
    Um the OP said she is willing to pay $50pm which is about 8x what netflix currently charge. She said that the inconvenience of having too many streaming services to choose from is the issue.
  - 10y ago
thrownaway1984 10y ago
Do you honestly expect your parents to navigate around several dozen different streaming sites? Their is already a much higher cognitive load to working out what shows are on the various streaming services already in existence than there is using a traditional TV. If content producers want to have their own streaming services then that is their business. If they want me to watch the content they had better come up with a unified interface where I can search in one place for content I have access to. I have never pirated anything and can well afford to pay for content but I also don't want to spend my limited leisure time hunting around for where I can find shows.
astazangasta 10y ago
There is no "should" here. Content creators are selling a non-fungible product because we've chosen to define it that way, for example in the DMCA, which signed onto a number of copyright treaties defining specific forms of copyright. There is no god-given reason for any of these choices. Notably, there is widespread room for disagreement on what constitutes "fair use" of these items that circumscribes the space of what makes them a product. These are legal constructs, and they exist to the extent that they are enforceable by law. Now, for example, we are seeing attempts to cast copyright ownership across particular tunes or styles of music; if this succeeds, this is a new paradigm in ownership, it is not some pre-ordained law. Property of all forms is a legal construct, a man-made thing. Where we set the bounds determines, to a large extent, who ends up owning it and reaping the profits. For example, the DMCA provisions required certain proprietary anti-circumvention measures to be included in all audio-recording devices; it is difficult to argue that this is how the market "should work".
- morgante 10y ago
  You're confusing a good being fungible with it being non-rivalrous and non-excludable. Without legal protection, you're absolutely correct that a film cannot be excluded from consumption by non-payers and infinite reproducibility makes it non-rivalrous. That doesn't make films fungible though. They are very far from being even imperfect substitutes. If I am somehow able to keep the latest Avengers film excludable then very few will be willing to accept the "substitute" of a knock-off rom com with C-list actors. In markets, profits flow to whoever owns a monopoly.
  - astazangasta 10y ago
    There are plenty of non-fungible goods of this sort that are purely the result of legal constructions. The simplest example is the same movie available from two different vendors with separate digital rights systems. If I have purchased rights from one, it does not give me the right to consume the media from the other, even though it is arguably the same work. This means I can multiply the number of non-fungible versions of the same product by making it available on N different competing DRM systems.
  - 10y ago