3 ms·

> Honestly, is it that hard to make a legal version of PopcornTime/Solarmovie/Putlocker? Yes! I have some experience in this industry and it is pretty much imp

> Honestly, is it that hard to make a legal version of PopcornTime/Solarmovie/Putlocker? Yes! I have some experience in this industry and it is pretty much impossible. Every level of the industry has long-standing practices with "optimized" expected fees. You have distribution package deals, release windows, release regions, etc. Any sense of new value is fought over like seagulls for potato chips and giving up a single penny is worth torpedoing contracts. Netflix had the best chance of anyone, but even they could not do it. The price to make this software (likely a hardware box with DRM) available would be not be financially viable. I would estimate in the high hundreds per month, or in the low hundreds if they could limit what you watch and how much.

AndrewKemendo 9y ago
Do you think it would be possible if you bootstrapped something where you have a consistent userbase and then started paying creators based on the revenue you get from viewers/advertisers? So lets say that popcorn time wanted to go legit. I don't know how many viewers they have but I would assume it's in the millions monthly. I guess they would have to be the sole source of viewership for production studios to agree to license to them, and even then they would have to fight other distributors for exclusivity. So it seems the only way to get there is if you somehow get 100M daily viewers then you could have a compelling case to make for licensing.
- mhuffman 9y ago
  > So it seems the only way to get there is if you somehow get 100M daily viewers then you could have a compelling case to make for licensing. Even then there is friction in the system. Look at some of the enormous distribution platforms for music like itunes and spotify. Some people still refuse to deal with them. It is pretty hopeless. I think the difficulty is why ycombinator has been seeking disruption in the entertainment industry for so long.

AndrewKemendo 9y ago

Do you think it would be possible if you bootstrapped something where you have a consistent userbase and then started paying creators based on the revenue you get from viewers/advertisers? So lets say that popcorn time wanted to go legit. I don't know how many viewers they have but I would assume it's in the millions monthly. I guess they would have to be the sole source of viewership for production studios to agree to license to them, and even then they would have to fight other distributors for exclusivity. So it seems the only way to get there is if you somehow get 100M daily viewers then you could have a compelling case to make for licensing.

mhuffman 9y ago
> So it seems the only way to get there is if you somehow get 100M daily viewers then you could have a compelling case to make for licensing. Even then there is friction in the system. Look at some of the enormous distribution platforms for music like itunes and spotify. Some people still refuse to deal with them. It is pretty hopeless. I think the difficulty is why ycombinator has been seeking disruption in the entertainment industry for so long.