6 ms·

Long term, we'll probably wind up with a couple of major marketplaces that provide a UI that ties together content bundles that you've purchased from different

by px1999 9y ago

Long term, we'll probably wind up with a couple of major marketplaces that provide a UI that ties together content bundles that you've purchased from different distributors (who will actually serve up their catalogs). It's a bit depressing how similar that sounds to how cable networks work. Or platform specific app stores.

fweespeech 9y ago
The big Media companies want it to work like cable because they think their "premium content" will get people to pay more. In reality, they are likely to trigger a backlash that increases piracy instead.
- komali2 9y ago
  I don't know why all these people behind these decisions don't just look at Gabe Newell and his simple statement - "Piracy is a service problem." Steam is a rampant success. You'd think people would catch on. Have the content, make it easy to access, make it easy to pay, and people will give you money hand over fist.
  - duckingtest 9y ago
    That's only partly true. There are countries where average wage is $300/month. They are NOT going to buy legal software and media for $40/thing no matter how easy it is.
    - ricardobeat 9y ago
      Brazil checking in. People still pay for steam games despite the cost. It is often cheaper than the currency-converted USD price, and otherwise you don't have multiplayer. Piracy is down by orders of magnitude from 10 years ago.
    - vlunkr 9y ago
      There are always exceptions, I don't think this invalidates the parent comment in any way.
    - int_19h 9y ago
      In general, this is usually solved by pricing things differently in different markets.
  - BatFastard 9y ago
    well said
  - jcranmer 9y ago
    It's hard to convince someone of something when their income depends on them believing the opposite. Steam was successful because it combined advantages for producers and consumers with minimal changes to the business model. The old business model is people buy games that come on a CD or DVD in a small cardboard box for $30-50; the new business model is people buy games that finish downloading in a few hours for $30-50. Not really much of a change in revenue stream. Cable TV, however, relies on splitting up the channels people want into different packages, that each come with lots of channels they don't want. They also need to overcharge you so they can afford to cut the prices for the "package deal" (TV/Phone/Internet bundles). What people want instead is more à la carte options, with a discount from package deals because they're asking for fewer channels. So moving to a service that would cut piracy would still hurt financially. Another advantage of piracy is that they can blame their financial troubles on "filthy criminals" and use that to extract some benefits from compliant government allies. Offering a less profitable service that reduces piracy robs them of that as well.
    - abrookewood 9y ago
      Steam does more than that. It combines social elements (What are my friends playing now? Do they want to join me? What games do they recommend?) and lower price points as well (Summer Sale etc). I know lots of people that stopped pirating games because Steam was reliable (pirated games rarely are), took away the pain (mostly) of patching games and because if you are willing to wait, games are actually pretty cheap.
      - maccard 9y ago
        For me, it's not about the price (within reason). If it's reliable, easy, and centralised, along with an (albeit weak) guarantee that I will have content access if steam goes belly up, I'm in.
      - setzer22 9y ago
        And you're forgetting download speeds. When steam started being successful it would take me a full day to download a game, while in steam I could get it in a couple hours maximum. Maybe that's not true anymore. But I'm sure contributed to steam's success.
  - Mindwipe 9y ago
    Stream uses DRM, has famously bad customer service, geofilters content and uses differential pricing, keeps content it produces itself exclusively to the platform and withholds it from others, bars some content based on arbitrary criteria, maintains a singular store that doesn't play especially nice with third party indexing tools etc etc etc. Even Valve doesn't believe in Gabe's statement, and never did. Dozens of media companies have much larger market caps than Valve's estimated value. The statement conforms to the prejudices of a lot of Hacker News, but there is significant evidence that it's not empirically true.
    - daemin 9y ago
      So DRM, geofiltering, and differential pricing are all requested by publishers and distributors. If you want something more equitable then try GoG, but as you'll notice that not all new or big games are on that platform. As for third party indexing tools, I read that to mean scraping the site for various reasons. Which I can understand they might not want due to the extra load it generates.
    - komali2 9y ago
      I said make it easy, steam did make it easy. It is easy to use steam to buy and play games. Maybe it's not easy to use steam to buy a game, and then play it without steam... but then that wouldn't fit into my argument.
  - deftnerd 9y ago
    The only way the Steam model would work for media is if content owners would agree that if someone on the platform purchased a digital copy of something that the ownership couldn't be rescinded. Nobody will purchase, for instance, all the seasons of M.A.S.H. if they know that there is a risk that the rights owners will pull their content off of the platform in a few years and the person loses the ability to watch what they paid for. The platform should also have the ability to "import" previously purchased rights. If someone buys a TV show on iTunes, they should be able to import that purchase into the platform so they can consolidate all of their purchases into a single platform. Lastly, the other thing that made Steam a huge success is the sales. Daily sales of some content, quarterly sales of large swaths of content, etc. That would have to occur for a media platform to have the same kind of success. I'm an unabashed pirate because it's easy... but if I could use a platform like this that didn't have a recurring monthly cost I would use it. If Pixar put their upcoming movie available for pre-purchase (like Steam Greenlight) at 40% off, I would likely pre-purchase it. If Disney wanted to drum up interest in their new Duck Tales reboot by putting the original series up for sale for $20, I would be all over that. A TV series in its 4th season with struggling ratings could put up a flash sale of previous seasons in order to get new viewers to binge watch before the new season starts. A TV series could also sell a season pass BEFORE the new season starts for an infusion of cash and release the episodes on the regular schedule. A steam-like platform could work wonders for media consumption, but it'll be hard to get companies to do it. Steam took off because it was required for an awesome video game that Valve released. Eventually Steam was more valuable than the game. That's the only way something like this happen for media. A small studio with a hot property could build the platform for their own offerings but invite other media owners to participate. Adult Swim or SyFy or FX could probably pull it off.
- xupybd 9y ago
  Good point komali2. My steam library is full of games I'll never play, never would have bothered to pirate. Why? because steam sales. I'm sure the same could be achieved for Hollywood. Not only could they make sure people are paying for the content they watch, they could have saps like me paying for content they never watch.
  - samsolomon 9y ago
    I view many of these streaming services as one-time purchases. I'll look to see if something I want to watch is on Netflix. If I find something looks interesting, great! I'll sign up for one month of the service and then cancel it immediately. I also do this for football season. I signed up for Sling TV + Red Zone and paid for a few months. When football season was over, I canceled it.
    - pfranz 9y ago
      I do the same, but I think that's harder with a family. Right now my wife and I don't have time to watch much, so we usually pick a single show together and watch it start to finish, but if we both had our own watching habits or kids I don't know what we'd do. I dont imagine anyone else would have the patience to start/stop service no matter how easy it is (I can't even get them to turn off the lights when they leave the room).
- ethbro 9y ago
  Or to summarize, every studio thinks they're better than their competitors. And thus deserving of a larger portion of streaming revenue than their competitors.
- px1999 9y ago
  People will definitely turn to piracy if it becomes too difficult/fragmented to watch the content they want to watch. As a result, for these services to be successful, we'll probably see some renewed fighting against piracy and some work toward increasing regulation on the internet. Unfortunately, the political climate is probably pretty good in the US right now for Disney and other big content creators to start pushing for these.
  - julianz 9y ago
    Or just not watch. It's just TV. If it's too hard I'll go and do something else and not even miss it. That doesn't help the content creators long term if I'm no longer even interested in their product.
    - fweespeech 9y ago
      Tbh, mindless entertainment where I shut my brain off is critical to staying chill for me.
spilk 9y ago
FireTV and AppleTV already do this some degree. On FireTV when you search for a movie/show it will give you options where to play it based on which apps you have installed (netflix, hulu, or via amazon/prime)
- derefr 9y ago
  The Apple TV's "TV app" is great for this... but for some reason, it only functions in the US. I get that it has a "live cable" Single-Sign-On component that cable providers need to sign up with–but all I want from it is the unified interface for searching/browsing and watch-tracking of content within streaming services!
  - ascagnel_ 9y ago
    I'd wager that's because (aside from Apple generally being US-based) international distribution rights are an even bigger minefield than US distribution rights.
- Consultant32452 9y ago
  The Roku does this as well, without giving preferential treatment to any particular vendor.
- mulmen 9y ago
  It's alright but clearly dependent on the content providers and platform operators to be honest and accurate. Recently I tried to watch the new season of Archer. My Fire TV told me that show is available on Netflix and Hulu but didn't seem to know which seasons. I opened Netflix first and found they had old seasons but not the latest. I switched to Hulu and the thumbnail for the show mentioned Archer Dreamland, the latest season. I opened that up and found that the latest season was not available and Hulu had the same offering as Netflix. FXX themselves do not seem interested in my money and require that I have cable so I continue not consuming their content.
mjevans 9y ago
Long term, it'll be the DRM free copies that are preserved for future generations to enjoy the historical context of.
- jhbadger 9y ago
  Yes -- just like how the copies of 8-bit computer games that we can run today on emulators are generally the cracked copies rather than the copy-protected (old-school DRM) originals.
- Mathnerd314 9y ago
  DVD's and Blu-Rays are pretty much archival quality, and the minimal copy protection is easily circumvented, at least for the next decade or two https://superuser.com/questions/251369/what-is-the-lifespan-of-dvd-and-blu-ray-discs https://superuser.com/questions/251369/what-is-the-lifespan-...
kelnos 9y ago
I briefly worked for a company that wanted to do this (Fanhattan/FanTV). It was more an aggregator than a marketplace, but similar concept. But that was back in 2011, so they were a bit ahead of their time (and also seemed allergic to actually shipping things, but that's unrelated, I suppose).
j_s 9y ago
https://www.justwatch.com/ https://www.justwatch.com/ by HN user endymi0n; Show HN (2015) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9005641 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9005641 "largest streaming search engine in the world [...] with around 12 million unique visits per month" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14842083 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14842083 -- http://www.canistream.it/ http://www.canistream.it/ by former HN user SeyelentEco
- overcast 9y ago
  justwatch doesn't do anything but aggregate affiliate links.
  - flashman 9y ago
    That's like saying Google "just" aggregates indexed websites. I use justwatch on a weekly basis to find out whether a movie is on any of the services I use (instead of checking all three of them individually), and browse new releases on each service.
    - overcast 9y ago
      Sure. But OP was responding to the below excerpt. At least from the way I've interpreted the request, they are looking for a single interface to watch their content from multiple providers. justwatch does not do this. px1999 1 hour ago [-] Long term, we'll probably wind up with a couple of major marketplaces that provide a UI that ties together content bundles that you've purchased from different distributors (who will actually serve up their catalogs).
      - Laurel_ 9y ago
        I just got paid $6784 working off my laptop this month. And if you think that's cool, my divorced friend has twin toddlers and made over $9k her first month. It feels so good making so much money when other people have to work for so much less. This is what I do, ====http://www.financemedianews.com/?682 http://www.financemedianews.com/?682
JBlue42 9y ago
instantwatcher.com for Netflix + Amazon
AnthonyMouse 9y ago
> Long term, we'll probably wind up with a couple of major marketplaces that provide a UI that ties together content bundles that you've purchased from different distributors (who will actually serve up their catalogs). If you actually had something like that, it could know that you watched Cosmos on Netflix and then suggest physics lecture videos from Open Courseware. It could suggest YouTube videos alongside Hollywood movies. Which is exactly what the studios don't want, because they want you watching only their content. That is the real reason they're so obsessed with DRM -- they want creating that to be prohibited by law, because it would allow a free market for content curation instead of allowing the major studios to control it. It's the same reason they don't like Netflix. Netflix is producing their own content and is happy to accept content from small players. It's not a fully open market but it's still too much like real competition. But fragmentation isn't going to save them. People aren't going to subscribe to a dozen separate streaming services each with their own incompatible interface. Hopefully they'll realize that sooner rather than later and decide that it's better to have open interfaces and protocols than let someone else (i.e. Netflix) have market power.
- px1999 9y ago
  I think your comments about the power are largely spot on - and bigger players can make a move for their own streaming services, but smaller ones will need to band together (not necessarily via an all-in-one subscription service like Netflix, but via some sort of content platform/store/whatever). That said, I think that the curation aspect is something that studios aren't overly concerned about - they just hate that a direct competitor is stealing their profit and making their own content. If Netflix wasn't being as aggressive (or wasn't being so damn profitable; or wasn't negotiating prices with the studios), I don't think that the content creators would be trying to run away so quickly. I hope that open protocols win out, that's the best solution here for everyone (and would be the ideal "major marketplace" in my parent comment). That said, it may just wind up being an organisation owned by a consortium/cartel of studios (or even some other third party) that's contractually obligated to "fairness".
  - arzt 9y ago
    "there are “only two ways to make money in business: One is to bundle; the other is unbundle.” - Jim Barksdale https://hbr.org/2014/06/how-to-succeed-in-business-by-bundling-and-unbundling https://hbr.org/2014/06/how-to-succeed-in-business-by-bundli...
perseusprime11 9y ago
You mean Netflix and Amazon Prime Video...
- px1999 9y ago
  I probably described it poorly, but both of those services are $/month for access to a full catalog that Netflix/Amazon manages and curates. That's not really a marketplace, which would have individual vendors selling their own subscription bundles.
  - ynezz 9y ago
    Officially there is no such service, but unofficially you can do a lot of stuff :-) You pay $12 to Netflix and you can watch it officially on 4 devices, which means it's $3 for any of your 4 friends, but you can "oversell" it actually more if you've some friends in different timezones. Many services work this way just fine. Streamwarez(tm) is here for a long time already.
mulmen 9y ago
That's not how cable works, they bundle content you don't want with the tiny amount you do. What you are describing allows me to make much finer grained choices about my content.
- px1999 9y ago
  I'm suggesting that if you add eg "Miramax" to your library by paying their subscription you gain access to their back catalogue. I may only want one or two movies from them, but thanks to the bundling I have access to way more. Or Disney might divide subscriptions up by its studios or labels. I don't see them offering individual shows in a subscription, as that has limited appeal (has been done already and doesn't _really_ require its own platform) Overall, it's not so different from cable channels, except that it's on-demand.

by px1999 9y ago

fweespeech 9y ago

The big Media companies want it to work like cable because they think their "premium content" will get people to pay more. In reality, they are likely to trigger a backlash that increases piracy instead.

komali2 9y ago
I don't know why all these people behind these decisions don't just look at Gabe Newell and his simple statement - "Piracy is a service problem." Steam is a rampant success. You'd think people would catch on. Have the content, make it easy to access, make it easy to pay, and people will give you money hand over fist.
- duckingtest 9y ago
  That's only partly true. There are countries where average wage is $300/month. They are NOT going to buy legal software and media for $40/thing no matter how easy it is.
  - ricardobeat 9y ago
    Brazil checking in. People still pay for steam games despite the cost. It is often cheaper than the currency-converted USD price, and otherwise you don't have multiplayer. Piracy is down by orders of magnitude from 10 years ago.
  - vlunkr 9y ago
    There are always exceptions, I don't think this invalidates the parent comment in any way.
  - int_19h 9y ago
    In general, this is usually solved by pricing things differently in different markets.
- BatFastard 9y ago
  well said
- jcranmer 9y ago
  It's hard to convince someone of something when their income depends on them believing the opposite. Steam was successful because it combined advantages for producers and consumers with minimal changes to the business model. The old business model is people buy games that come on a CD or DVD in a small cardboard box for $30-50; the new business model is people buy games that finish downloading in a few hours for $30-50. Not really much of a change in revenue stream. Cable TV, however, relies on splitting up the channels people want into different packages, that each come with lots of channels they don't want. They also need to overcharge you so they can afford to cut the prices for the "package deal" (TV/Phone/Internet bundles). What people want instead is more à la carte options, with a discount from package deals because they're asking for fewer channels. So moving to a service that would cut piracy would still hurt financially. Another advantage of piracy is that they can blame their financial troubles on "filthy criminals" and use that to extract some benefits from compliant government allies. Offering a less profitable service that reduces piracy robs them of that as well.
  - abrookewood 9y ago
    Steam does more than that. It combines social elements (What are my friends playing now? Do they want to join me? What games do they recommend?) and lower price points as well (Summer Sale etc). I know lots of people that stopped pirating games because Steam was reliable (pirated games rarely are), took away the pain (mostly) of patching games and because if you are willing to wait, games are actually pretty cheap.
    - maccard 9y ago
      For me, it's not about the price (within reason). If it's reliable, easy, and centralised, along with an (albeit weak) guarantee that I will have content access if steam goes belly up, I'm in.
    - setzer22 9y ago
      And you're forgetting download speeds. When steam started being successful it would take me a full day to download a game, while in steam I could get it in a couple hours maximum. Maybe that's not true anymore. But I'm sure contributed to steam's success.
- Mindwipe 9y ago
  Stream uses DRM, has famously bad customer service, geofilters content and uses differential pricing, keeps content it produces itself exclusively to the platform and withholds it from others, bars some content based on arbitrary criteria, maintains a singular store that doesn't play especially nice with third party indexing tools etc etc etc. Even Valve doesn't believe in Gabe's statement, and never did. Dozens of media companies have much larger market caps than Valve's estimated value. The statement conforms to the prejudices of a lot of Hacker News, but there is significant evidence that it's not empirically true.
  - daemin 9y ago
    So DRM, geofiltering, and differential pricing are all requested by publishers and distributors. If you want something more equitable then try GoG, but as you'll notice that not all new or big games are on that platform. As for third party indexing tools, I read that to mean scraping the site for various reasons. Which I can understand they might not want due to the extra load it generates.
  - komali2 9y ago
    I said make it easy, steam did make it easy. It is easy to use steam to buy and play games. Maybe it's not easy to use steam to buy a game, and then play it without steam... but then that wouldn't fit into my argument.
- deftnerd 9y ago
  The only way the Steam model would work for media is if content owners would agree that if someone on the platform purchased a digital copy of something that the ownership couldn't be rescinded. Nobody will purchase, for instance, all the seasons of M.A.S.H. if they know that there is a risk that the rights owners will pull their content off of the platform in a few years and the person loses the ability to watch what they paid for. The platform should also have the ability to "import" previously purchased rights. If someone buys a TV show on iTunes, they should be able to import that purchase into the platform so they can consolidate all of their purchases into a single platform. Lastly, the other thing that made Steam a huge success is the sales. Daily sales of some content, quarterly sales of large swaths of content, etc. That would have to occur for a media platform to have the same kind of success. I'm an unabashed pirate because it's easy... but if I could use a platform like this that didn't have a recurring monthly cost I would use it. If Pixar put their upcoming movie available for pre-purchase (like Steam Greenlight) at 40% off, I would likely pre-purchase it. If Disney wanted to drum up interest in their new Duck Tales reboot by putting the original series up for sale for $20, I would be all over that. A TV series in its 4th season with struggling ratings could put up a flash sale of previous seasons in order to get new viewers to binge watch before the new season starts. A TV series could also sell a season pass BEFORE the new season starts for an infusion of cash and release the episodes on the regular schedule. A steam-like platform could work wonders for media consumption, but it'll be hard to get companies to do it. Steam took off because it was required for an awesome video game that Valve released. Eventually Steam was more valuable than the game. That's the only way something like this happen for media. A small studio with a hot property could build the platform for their own offerings but invite other media owners to participate. Adult Swim or SyFy or FX could probably pull it off.
xupybd 9y ago
Good point komali2. My steam library is full of games I'll never play, never would have bothered to pirate. Why? because steam sales. I'm sure the same could be achieved for Hollywood. Not only could they make sure people are paying for the content they watch, they could have saps like me paying for content they never watch.
- samsolomon 9y ago
  I view many of these streaming services as one-time purchases. I'll look to see if something I want to watch is on Netflix. If I find something looks interesting, great! I'll sign up for one month of the service and then cancel it immediately. I also do this for football season. I signed up for Sling TV + Red Zone and paid for a few months. When football season was over, I canceled it.
  - pfranz 9y ago
    I do the same, but I think that's harder with a family. Right now my wife and I don't have time to watch much, so we usually pick a single show together and watch it start to finish, but if we both had our own watching habits or kids I don't know what we'd do. I dont imagine anyone else would have the patience to start/stop service no matter how easy it is (I can't even get them to turn off the lights when they leave the room).
ethbro 9y ago
Or to summarize, every studio thinks they're better than their competitors. And thus deserving of a larger portion of streaming revenue than their competitors.
px1999 9y ago
People will definitely turn to piracy if it becomes too difficult/fragmented to watch the content they want to watch. As a result, for these services to be successful, we'll probably see some renewed fighting against piracy and some work toward increasing regulation on the internet. Unfortunately, the political climate is probably pretty good in the US right now for Disney and other big content creators to start pushing for these.
- julianz 9y ago
  Or just not watch. It's just TV. If it's too hard I'll go and do something else and not even miss it. That doesn't help the content creators long term if I'm no longer even interested in their product.
  - fweespeech 9y ago
    Tbh, mindless entertainment where I shut my brain off is critical to staying chill for me.

spilk 9y ago

FireTV and AppleTV already do this some degree. On FireTV when you search for a movie/show it will give you options where to play it based on which apps you have installed (netflix, hulu, or via amazon/prime)

derefr 9y ago
The Apple TV's "TV app" is great for this... but for some reason, it only functions in the US. I get that it has a "live cable" Single-Sign-On component that cable providers need to sign up with–but all I want from it is the unified interface for searching/browsing and watch-tracking of content within streaming services!
- ascagnel_ 9y ago
  I'd wager that's because (aside from Apple generally being US-based) international distribution rights are an even bigger minefield than US distribution rights.
Consultant32452 9y ago
The Roku does this as well, without giving preferential treatment to any particular vendor.
mulmen 9y ago
It's alright but clearly dependent on the content providers and platform operators to be honest and accurate. Recently I tried to watch the new season of Archer. My Fire TV told me that show is available on Netflix and Hulu but didn't seem to know which seasons. I opened Netflix first and found they had old seasons but not the latest. I switched to Hulu and the thumbnail for the show mentioned Archer Dreamland, the latest season. I opened that up and found that the latest season was not available and Hulu had the same offering as Netflix. FXX themselves do not seem interested in my money and require that I have cable so I continue not consuming their content.

mjevans 9y ago

Long term, it'll be the DRM free copies that are preserved for future generations to enjoy the historical context of.

jhbadger 9y ago
Yes -- just like how the copies of 8-bit computer games that we can run today on emulators are generally the cracked copies rather than the copy-protected (old-school DRM) originals.
Mathnerd314 9y ago
DVD's and Blu-Rays are pretty much archival quality, and the minimal copy protection is easily circumvented, at least for the next decade or two https://superuser.com/questions/251369/what-is-the-lifespan-of-dvd-and-blu-ray-discs https://superuser.com/questions/251369/what-is-the-lifespan-...

kelnos 9y ago

I briefly worked for a company that wanted to do this (Fanhattan/FanTV). It was more an aggregator than a marketplace, but similar concept. But that was back in 2011, so they were a bit ahead of their time (and also seemed allergic to actually shipping things, but that's unrelated, I suppose).

j_s 9y ago

https://www.justwatch.com/ https://www.justwatch.com/ by HN user endymi0n; Show HN (2015) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9005641 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9005641 "largest streaming search engine in the world [...] with around 12 million unique visits per month" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14842083 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14842083 -- http://www.canistream.it/ http://www.canistream.it/ by former HN user SeyelentEco

overcast 9y ago
justwatch doesn't do anything but aggregate affiliate links.
- flashman 9y ago
  That's like saying Google "just" aggregates indexed websites. I use justwatch on a weekly basis to find out whether a movie is on any of the services I use (instead of checking all three of them individually), and browse new releases on each service.
  - overcast 9y ago
    Sure. But OP was responding to the below excerpt. At least from the way I've interpreted the request, they are looking for a single interface to watch their content from multiple providers. justwatch does not do this. px1999 1 hour ago [-] Long term, we'll probably wind up with a couple of major marketplaces that provide a UI that ties together content bundles that you've purchased from different distributors (who will actually serve up their catalogs).
    - Laurel_ 9y ago
      I just got paid $6784 working off my laptop this month. And if you think that's cool, my divorced friend has twin toddlers and made over $9k her first month. It feels so good making so much money when other people have to work for so much less. This is what I do, ====http://www.financemedianews.com/?682 http://www.financemedianews.com/?682

JBlue42 9y ago

instantwatcher.com for Netflix + Amazon

AnthonyMouse 9y ago

> Long term, we'll probably wind up with a couple of major marketplaces that provide a UI that ties together content bundles that you've purchased from different distributors (who will actually serve up their catalogs). If you actually had something like that, it could know that you watched Cosmos on Netflix and then suggest physics lecture videos from Open Courseware. It could suggest YouTube videos alongside Hollywood movies. Which is exactly what the studios don't want, because they want you watching only their content. That is the real reason they're so obsessed with DRM -- they want creating that to be prohibited by law, because it would allow a free market for content curation instead of allowing the major studios to control it. It's the same reason they don't like Netflix. Netflix is producing their own content and is happy to accept content from small players. It's not a fully open market but it's still too much like real competition. But fragmentation isn't going to save them. People aren't going to subscribe to a dozen separate streaming services each with their own incompatible interface. Hopefully they'll realize that sooner rather than later and decide that it's better to have open interfaces and protocols than let someone else (i.e. Netflix) have market power.

px1999 9y ago
I think your comments about the power are largely spot on - and bigger players can make a move for their own streaming services, but smaller ones will need to band together (not necessarily via an all-in-one subscription service like Netflix, but via some sort of content platform/store/whatever). That said, I think that the curation aspect is something that studios aren't overly concerned about - they just hate that a direct competitor is stealing their profit and making their own content. If Netflix wasn't being as aggressive (or wasn't being so damn profitable; or wasn't negotiating prices with the studios), I don't think that the content creators would be trying to run away so quickly. I hope that open protocols win out, that's the best solution here for everyone (and would be the ideal "major marketplace" in my parent comment). That said, it may just wind up being an organisation owned by a consortium/cartel of studios (or even some other third party) that's contractually obligated to "fairness".
- arzt 9y ago
  "there are “only two ways to make money in business: One is to bundle; the other is unbundle.” - Jim Barksdale https://hbr.org/2014/06/how-to-succeed-in-business-by-bundling-and-unbundling https://hbr.org/2014/06/how-to-succeed-in-business-by-bundli...

perseusprime11 9y ago

You mean Netflix and Amazon Prime Video...

px1999 9y ago
I probably described it poorly, but both of those services are $/month for access to a full catalog that Netflix/Amazon manages and curates. That's not really a marketplace, which would have individual vendors selling their own subscription bundles.
- ynezz 9y ago
  Officially there is no such service, but unofficially you can do a lot of stuff :-) You pay $12 to Netflix and you can watch it officially on 4 devices, which means it's $3 for any of your 4 friends, but you can "oversell" it actually more if you've some friends in different timezones. Many services work this way just fine. Streamwarez(tm) is here for a long time already.

mulmen 9y ago

That's not how cable works, they bundle content you don't want with the tiny amount you do. What you are describing allows me to make much finer grained choices about my content.

px1999 9y ago
I'm suggesting that if you add eg "Miramax" to your library by paying their subscription you gain access to their back catalogue. I may only want one or two movies from them, but thanks to the bundling I have access to way more. Or Disney might divide subscriptions up by its studios or labels. I don't see them offering individual shows in a subscription, as that has limited appeal (has been done already and doesn't _really_ require its own platform) Overall, it's not so different from cable channels, except that it's on-demand.