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Maybe when I am 60, 70 or 80 the film industry will get their shi* together and finally agree on a solution that has long been found in the music business. For

by geff82 9y ago

Maybe when I am 60, 70 or 80 the film industry will get their shi* together and finally agree on a solution that has long been found in the music business. For a truly complete platform, I would FOR SURE pay more than the 10$ a month for Netflix. 20, maybe 30! But then I want it ALL. All films they have in storage. I mean, it is 2017 and there are a lot of films I can't find on Netflix, Amazon Prime or, when I am in spending mood, on Apple TV. Why? I mean how silly would you want to be as studios? There is no big DVD business anymore, BlueRay never totally took off. People have a net connection and multiple streaming devices at home, thats it. Thats the big asset they could build on! Instead they let their libraries die the death of the unseen film. Still, many keep shuffeling around harddrives with terabytes of pirated films. And why shouldn't they, as long as there is no substantial offer? So I decided for me (and the cloud guy I am), that with my 3 services I have, I am ok. If a film is not there, I don't care. I surely won't order a DVD of some old film somewhere and I surely will not subscribe to another service. If Disneys pulls their films from Netflix: thanks Netflix for their growing self produced content that often has a quality not seen before.

fooey 9y ago
I've completely given up on trying to stream movies I also completely refuse to buy physical media too, so the end result is that I basically never watch movies at home any more unless I go to the effort of torrenting it
- nkkollaw 9y ago
  Try Chromecast. It costs almost nothing and it's absolutely awesome.
  - NAHWheatCracker 9y ago
    I love my Chromecast, but isn't this discussion about accessing content? If the content owners don't let you access their content (or they make it a burden to access it by requiring a subscription for another service) it doesn't matter if you have a device that can output an HDMI signal.
  - slau 9y ago
    This is slightly off-topic, but the Chromecast Ultra, with the Ethernet connection, is an absolute beast. I'm lucky enough to have Ethernet in my whole flat (two drops in every room), and a gigabit internet connection. When I launch a 4K HDR video on YouTube, it literally takes less than two seconds to start playing. In comparison, the YouTube app on the TV takes 5-10 seconds to start playing. The TV is hardwired as well. Please note that the Chromecast only has a 100Mbit ethernet port, same as a RPi, or most smart TVs. I thought the original Chromecast was great. But even if you have a great wifi setup, get the Ethernet power plug. It will change your Chromecast. You don't need the Chromecast Ultra to use the Ethernet feature, just a second generation Chromecast (the round one)
- weq 9y ago
  https://fmovies.is/ https://fmovies.is/ u just need a good ad-blocker as with all these streaming sites, sometimes they get malicious ads
raldi 9y ago
In 1999, Qwest had a 30-second commercial that seemed incredibly futuristic at the time, talking about a hotel where "every room has every movie ever made in every language anytime day or night" and it seemed impossibly futuristic. Not 20 years later, the technology for this is already well-established; the only thing stopping it is that the owners of the films don't want to make them available this way. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UZ9qcp6Lcno https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UZ9qcp6Lcno
- samstave 9y ago
  Gee -- I wonder why the Qwest CEO went to prison... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Nacchio https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Nacchio
  - dingo_bat 9y ago
    Wtf they actually sent him to jail for refusing to give customer data to the NSA. No wonder we hardly see any resistance nowadays.
    - wunderg 9y ago
      There is popcorntime.io
      - balladeer 9y ago
        You'll actually have to go to .sh among the contenders (this is what I would suggest) as .io is not up anymore and besides .me was the original one. It's linked on the official/original github repo[0]. But the official official[1] repo doesn't link anything. Just that original developers are supporting .sh as official and have apparently moved to it. There's also ...ce.ch but that's community edition as the last two chars suggest. [0] https://github.com/popcorn-official https://github.com/popcorn-official [1] https://github.com/popcorn-time https://github.com/popcorn-time PS. I have put info to the best of my knowledge :)
      - thanatropism 9y ago
nkkollaw 9y ago
If I had a dollar for every time I tried to stream a movie legally and couldn't find it anywhere but on torrent sites...
- nitemice 9y ago
  You'd happily give away those dollars to the content owners, if they'd just let you stream it legally.
  - boyce 9y ago
    It also needs to be easier to buy it than steal it and not have unskippable adverts or lectures on piracy for a lot of things, stealing is both easier and better
    - beobab 9y ago
      Careful of this mindset. So the thought process is: "I want this" "I am not allowed this" "I should be allowed this" "I will take it anyway" This is seductive, easy, and the wrong way to go for most things. I understand the frustration. I have felt the same way many, many times. I suspect that if people who illegally downloaded movies posted money to the studios who created the content directly, then this problem would disappear pretty much overnight.
      - bkor 9y ago
        > illegally downloaded movies posted money to the studios who created the content directly, then this problem would disappear pretty much overnight So if you cannot get something legally easily, you should support that practice and suddenly you'll get it more easily in future? This in a post about an article where Disney is making it more difficult to get content legally? Really?
      - boyce 9y ago
        I'm discussing the product and service, no interest in moral or legal judgements.
dkrich 9y ago
The fact is that Disney is extremely savvy and knows how to produce content that sells with a nearly 100% success rate. They are simply a marketing and merchandising machine. They use the vault the way diamond miners do- to restrict supply of extremely coveted goods so that they can charge premium prices for them. It's good business and it keeps things that are decades old in constant demand so they can charge higher prices for them. Unfortunately for you and me that means that if we want access we have to pay more. While it may certainly be true that you don't place enough value on Disney products to pay a premium, there are lots of people who will and there are probably still going to be times that you want access to it and consider signing up. That's what they want- if they commoditized their content and you were able to get access to everything they own for $30 a month, that wouldn't serve their purposes at all. Companies like Netflix dream of having one franchise that's as successful as the countless ones that Disney has. Why on Earth would they just have a fire sale for all of their content when they can restrict supply and extract the most profit from it?
- tj-teej 9y ago
  Exactly, a DVD of a new movie doesn't cost $12.99 because that's the price of the disk
- laumars 9y ago
  Because Disney aren't just competing with Netflix and co; they're also competing with usenet services, torrents, Kodi streams and other illegal services. And because Disney keep fucking their own consumers about it's left a void where the illegal services have not only been able to raise the bar in terms of user experience, but also in terms of available content and video quality. In any other industry market forces would be in effect forcing business to either compete or go under. But because copyright laws give content owners a monopoly it means the only effective competition is illegal services. And the daft thing is they're literally better in every way. Which is why I know so many people who normally follow the letter of the law and who happily pay for expensive cable / satellite / Netflix / whatever subscriptions who also have absolutely no qualms in downloading or streaming movies illegally. These are customers who want to pay for services but end up pirating because there isn't any service available to them. It's completely bonkers. It shouldn't be like this but it is entirely the fault of the content industry. They created the void by monopolising their content and then failing to provide any practical services. And they created the demand by targeting their advertising at kids, by making it illegal to backup old formats like DVDs, and such like. So to answer your question, sure they can try to extract the most profit from it but customers are already angry, fed up and aware of better albeit illegal services so all Disney are going to do is drive more people to piracy. If they really wanted to extract more profit then they would trying to onboard more users instead of making their content harder to get hold of. It really feels like the whole FRAND patents situation where Disney are happy to become a critical part of pre-teen culture but don't want to licence their intellectual property in any reasonable way. And while I can happily make the decision not to watch any Disney movies again (I like Marvel but I can live without it), trying to explain that to my 3 and 6 year old is going to be much harder.
SN76477 9y ago
Why cant I watch old TV shows? 3's company? Facts of Life? The Peoples Court? It doesnt make much sense to me.
- pasquinelli 9y ago
  offtopic, but i get a tv station that broadcasts, afaict, nothing but Roseanne, Night Court, and Empty Nest. Roseanne was just as good as I remember... until it wasn't.
- Mindwipe 9y ago
  Because there aren't enough people like you who would to pay for it to cover the costs of even a lawyer reviewing the contracts to see who owns the rights (and the answer will be not a single party, actors/music/artwork etc rights involved in all will be incredibly complex), never mind actually pay anyone involved. There are lots of things I would like someone to make at a reasonable price too (roll on my line of all existing Transformers with chrome finishes, car paint, clear windows and chrome tire rims!). But I have to accept that there's not enough of me that the costs of that sort of thing come down to $10, and buy a limited subset of more expensive items instead.
  - lostcolony 9y ago
    If that's the case that stuff needs to enter the public domain. We need better legislation around orphaned works; those whose ownership is too complex to resolve should be treated the same as those whose ownership is completely lost. In both cases, ownership can't be reasonably determined.
    - mattm 9y ago
      Yes, this is the real issue. If copyright was reasonable - say 40-50 years - then a lot of this stuff would naturally enter the public domain and then could be shown on any streaming service. Instead we have the current copyright system because a minuscule amount of old content is still profitable and large companies lobby to protect it.
cletusw 9y ago
Sure, it's not as convenient as instant streaming, but the Netflix DVD shipping catalog is unparalleled. Every old movie you can think of plus new releases as soon as they release on DVD. Well worth what I pay since I'm patient enough to wait a couple days for the disk. Plus, if you pay a little extra for the blu-ray service the quality is way better than streaming "HD".
mrmondo 9y ago
This and I want as much content as possible in 4K/HDR, I’m really sick of the second tier streaming services being limited to highly compressed 1080p. If a service came along that truly had the TV and films I wanted with a preference for 4K content, I’d happily pay $40-$60AUD a month for it. Right now I subscribe to: - Netflix - Stan - Apple Music - Usenet related services - Audible - Plex Premium - Getflix content unblocking services And in recent times: - Pandora (cancelled as they’re leaving Aus) - Amazon Prime video (cancelled as they have hardly any content and a terrible interface) - Spotify (cancelled as I prefer Apple Music) - Last.FM streaming (cancelled when the service went EOL) - Several private trackers (avoid BT now) There’s a lot of opportunity for consolidation there, I realise I’m probably not in the majority but I WANT to pay and I WANT media creators and artists to take my money.
- remarkEon 9y ago
  Curious. Why do you prefer Apple Music? Has something changed recently? I had both for a while but found the UI, playlist building capacity, the generated playlists, and the ability to share music on Spotify to be superior so I dropped Apple.
  - mrmondo 9y ago
    Howdy, I have been running both macOS and iOS betas on my personal devices and both iTunes and Music have had a significant UX overhaul on macOS 10.13 and iOS 11, they’re not perfect - but it’s a good step forward. A bit high level but here’s my list of pros: - I’ve found a lot less missing tracks / albums, especially for more underground / lesser known artists I had real problems with this on Spotify. - Significantly less bandwidth usage compared to Spotify. - Unified interface to my music library (1.2TB~) and streaming / downloadable music on both the desktop and phone. - The ability to have my own music uploaded as part of my library and available on all desktops/laptops and my phone. - Apple Music data is unmetered on my mobile provider (I average around 8GB/mo of mobile music streaming on my phone) - The Music app on my phone is /really/ good at figuring out what music/playlists/albums to sync (prefetch if you will) onto my phone, I set the data limit (to 128GB) and it just figures it out nicely, often when I go to listen to a new album from an artist I follow / like - its already there for me (note: I believe this is opt-in functionality) What I don’t like about Apple Music / think needs to improve: - Playlists, They’re not as nice or as fast to manage as on Spotify but at least tracks don’t go missing randomly. - Artist/Album workflow performance, at times it still feels very ‘webframe’ (if that makes sense?) when browsing artists and their albums, the UI latency really annoys me and I liken it to the feeling that JavaScript ‘apps’ give you.
pasquinelli 9y ago
i don't need it all, i'd be happy with as much selection of my local video store that, somehow, only closed a couple years ago.
bsder 9y ago
> Maybe when I am 60, 70 or 80 the film industry will get their shi* together and finally agree on a solution that has long been found in the music business. Except that the music business continues to shrink each year. The only reason there was a slight pause in this is because suddenly vinyl sales, of all things, took off. Somehow I don't think you are going to find many takers in the video industry for following any music model.
- croon 9y ago
  > Except that the music business continues to shrink each year. What do you base this on? I googled a bit "music industry revenue" and only the opposite came up. http://www.ifpi.org/news/IFPI-GLOBAL-MUSIC-REPORT-2017 http://www.ifpi.org/news/IFPI-GLOBAL-MUSIC-REPORT-2017
  - bsder 9y ago
    Then you didn't look very far. https://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/global-record-industry-income-drops-below-15bn-for-first-time-in-history/ https://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/global-record-industr... Almost a straight line from 1999 with 26.6 billion to 14.97 billion in 2014. Quoting your source: > Total revenues for 2016 were US$15.7 billion. Quoting here: http://www.ifpi.org/facts-and-stats.php http://www.ifpi.org/facts-and-stats.php > This growth, however, should be viewed in the context of the industry losing nearly 40% of its revenues in the preceding 15 years.
onion2k 9y ago
...a solution that has long been found in the music business. Perhaps you're fortunate that everything you want to listen to is on your preferred music streaming service, but what they offer is far from everything in the music industry's catalogue. Ask any classical music fan what they think of streaming services and you'll hear a tirade against the woeful offerings that streaming services make available.
- maccard 9y ago
  I know that spotify/Apple Music are lacking in certain areas, however pretty much all "mainstream" music from the last 40(?) years is available on both platforms. Comparing that to Netflix, where searching for "top tv shows of the 1990's" will give you a list, of which less than 30% are available on netflix here. Worse still, they're available in other countries.
- alkonaut 9y ago
  You don't need "everything" but you need enough. If you subscribe to e.g Spotify you initially get surprised by some things not being in their library. However the library is so large and the use of a single service so convenient that most people can simply accept what's there. After the initial disappointment, any further disappointment is nearly zero so long as you keep all your discovery of new music within Spotify - because you'll never discover what isn't there. Classical is a bit special, but hopefully efforts like the internet archive can help bring at least a lot of the royalty free music to streaming. I'd be perfectly happy with a streaming service aggregating the current top 10 services for tv/movies, and I assume 90% of customers would. It seems reasonable to make a product that caters to "most" rather the all customers, just like Spotify.
  - beaconstudios 9y ago
    FWIW, I have the same issue trying to find new experimental EDM. I find indieshuffle provides a much better selection of more out-there songs, at the cost of having a much less mature interface.
  - wiz21c 9y ago
Keyframe 9y ago
Maybe when I am 60, 70 or 80 the software industry will get their shi* together and finally agree on a solution that has long been found in the music business. For a truly complete platform, I would FOR SURE pay more than the 10$ a month for Applix. 20, maybe 30! But then I want it ALL. All software they have in storage.
ZoomZoomZoom 9y ago
"solution that has long been found in the music business" Which is what?
blubb-fish 9y ago
The situation is effectively also disrespectful towards the creators of movies and the whole art form. Who would happy about a movie being buried in the archives? A movie has to be watched to effectively exist.
dorfsmay 9y ago
I don't even care about flat rate, charge me a couple dollars (and more if it was just out in the cinema, I don't want to go to a room full of stranger to watch a movie) per movie/show but. I'm even OK to have to use 3 different providers, but not being able to watch a movie because there is no agreement for the country I'm in is ridiculous.
- coldtea 9y ago
  >I don't want to go to a room full of stranger to watch a movie Sharing a cultural artifact with others outside a small social bubble is one of the great enjoyments of going to the cinema.
  - IanCal 9y ago
    I've rarely "shared" it with other people in any meaningful way. I almost always hear other people talk or see them using their phones though, unless the cinema is pretty much empty.
  - dorfsmay 9y ago
    Ah! Sounds like a great idea, a cinema followed by some cocktail party for people to talk about the movie. I'd go to that sort of event.
    - coldtea 9y ago
      What you describe has also been going on for nearly a century, at least in Europe: movie (and ordinary) theaters with a foyer (anteroom?) were people drink, smoke (in the past, but also now in some countries) and socialize before the movie starts and during the intermission (a short 10-15 minute break splitting the movie in two parts customary in some countries so you can piss in peace, have a drink or a smoke back in the day, and restock on popcorn without missing anything). And that's for regular movie screenings -- there are also all kinds of organized screenings, where people get to talk and discuss the movie afterwards, especially for art films and such. But already being in an audience while the movie plays, and being aware of people's reactions etc. is a shared experience (and it had been alluded as such by tons of filmmakers).
tiku 9y ago
Even a 10 cents per movie pricing strategy would generate millions of dollars for older movies. I just don't get why they don't just try this strategy..
- coldtea 9y ago
  There was this idea that if you had all movies available the long tail (obscure, old etc movies) would still be watched by at least some people, but in practice most people just stick to what's new/mainstream/known, so that it's not worth the extra hassle to maintain a long tail library. Tons of tracks on online music stores for example are never streamed or only a handful of times. (Of course the limited stuff e.g. Netflix has, is by no means not even the 10% of possible content).
  - lostcolony 9y ago
    But even if so, can those few not sufficiently monetize things to warrant the storage and delivery costs? I mean, yeah, old movies once had their original film melted down, but for the past 80 years they've at least thrown it into a vault or similar. Physical storage is orders of magnitudes more expensive than digital; even just dropping these things into an S3 bucket and serving them as needed for .10 cents would cost less than what they used to do, -and- would allow them to actually make money from it (albeit very little). If you don't want -any- of that, then why not release it for free and allow things like the internet archive to store it and deliver it for you? It's worth the money to store it -in case- you want to do something with it, but not worth the money to actually do something with it, even though that costs no more and has a return on investment?
hellofunk 9y ago
> thanks Netflix for their growing self produced content that often has a quality not seen before s/often/rarely There are some good shows on Netflix, but they are in the minority, in my opinion. Tastes vary, of course. But a lot of their original programming is not so original, it just feels like filler content to increase the perceived value of the platform. For every good original show they make like House of Cards, there are at least 5x as many that are uneventful or boring. But that's not unusual. Network television is the same way.
- toyg 9y ago
  > Network television is the same way. And the movie business. And the music business. And the book-publishing business. In any creative industry, there are hundreds or thousands of mediocre-to-terrible attempts for any hit. It's the nature of the beast. Shaving that ratio by orders of magnitude is black magic, or even just luck. This is why successful outliers are so handsomely paid - not because they do something well, but because they dramatically decrease the risk of producing stuff that won't sell enough. The saying that goes "90% of everything is crap" emerged before Netflix was even a concept.
  - hellofunk 9y ago
    Sure, but we were specifically discussing Netflix and TV and the use of the word "often."
- thanatropism 9y ago
  I find them better than TV, pound for pound. For example, _Backstrom_ is a shitty House clone in many senses, but is a much better detective show than _Elementary_. They have more feedback data and often great "production values" (i.e. they spent the extra money to make it nice). It doesn't always pay off (how stupid was _Marseille_, with Gerard Depardieu at his best acting chops in years and a political story that melts into family drama in three episodes flat?). But having 100 Netflix shows and a random assortment of failed indie movies is not better than having 10 Netflix shows and a decent film catalog. Netflix pretty much snuck up on the less attentive of us by giving us more shows (hey, I basically stayed for Bojack Horseman) and taking away feature-length studio-produced movies. I mean, who has the time to watch a full-length movie most days. So I kind of feel cheated, but not enough to leave yet.
almostarockstar 9y ago
> a solution that has long been found in the music business. A lot of people have commented that the music solution is not ideal in a number of ways from the 'demand' side, but I don't think anybody has mentioned how the music business is broken from the 'supply' side. It is next to impossible to make a living from music for the vast majority of musicians and producers out there. The obvious argument is that if you cant sell, your quality isn't good enough but that's actually not true in my opinion. Distribution is severely unbalanced - and if the movie industry continued in this direction, all we will ever see is Spiderman remakes.
rebuilder 9y ago
I got the urge to watch Total Recall, the original version. (Please don't judge me!) Is it available on Netflix where I am? Nope. HBO? No. Amazon Prime video? No! Now, Amazon does offer a digital rental - for 8 bucks! I never thought I'd say this, but I'm starting to miss video rental shops.
- anindha 9y ago
  What about iTunes? [1] [1] https://itunes.apple.com/us/movie/total-recall/id1040020260 https://itunes.apple.com/us/movie/total-recall/id1040020260
  - rebuilder 9y ago
    It seems I have to install their software on my computer to see what the price is. I'm being curmudgeonly here, I know, but I'm not keen on installing iTunes, my previous experiences with that and other software on Windows were not that great.
    - funkymike 9y ago
      While it is a bit of time invested initially it can be very handy to keep a Windows VM around for this purpose. Make sure to keep a baseline snapshot after patching. This way you can install questionable software with full confidence it won't impact your main system. You can simply revert to the baseline snapshot at any time to uninstall the software.
- bpenrod 9y ago
  Try your local library! Free rental plus a large catalog is pretty hard to beat.
  - rebuilder 9y ago
    Good idea, I'm embarrassed I didn't think of that... Only problem is, I just remembered I no longer have an optical drive!
blitmap 9y ago
For me I think movies mean less than they used to. We are spoiled with the amount of entertainment constantly being released to us nowadays. I will not go buy a movie or see a movie at the theater anymore - no matter what it is. It could be the most anticipated film in a half a decade and I'll still wait for it to be conveniently streamed to me. Maybe I'm getting old, but I feel like people don't create movie libraries anymore unless they're pirates. We don't have 1 specific night a week where we get everyone together for a special movie. We watch movies and shows all the time and that makes them less special/valuable. I don't think I'm articulating this well. Disney thinks I'll tack on another streaming service to watch Mulan or Captain America: Civil War - but they're wrong...
- rpiguy 9y ago
  It is a well known phenomenon that abundance decreases the amount of "specialness" we feel for things. It is true for music, comics, really anything that used to take effort to find and acquire. It is like a psychological corollary to supply and demand, and also why luxury goods lose their magic when they move down market.
  - aggie 9y ago
    The science on this (choice overload) is actually rather ambiguous. [pdf] http://www.scheibehenne.de/ScheibehenneGreifenederTodd2010.pdf http://www.scheibehenne.de/ScheibehenneGreifenederTodd2010.p...
- yvhhjbb 9y ago
  > Disney thinks I'll tack on another streaming service to watch Mulan or Captain America: Civil War - but they're wrong... How long have you been single for, if you don't mind me asking? It's not for you dude, it's for the kids.
  - mrcsparker 9y ago
    I will probably subscribe for that reason. Disney knows this about parents. They are one of the few companies that could put together their own offering
rpiguy 9y ago
Film studios are constrained by labyrinthine contracts between studios, distributors, actors, and unions. In cases where contracts are missing, any of the above parties can sue. Even more confusingly rights for IP might have been transferred and sold many times leading to questions about who actually owns a film or franchise. Distribution rights, production rights are separate. Actors may have been promised a cut of any of the above. So if you track down 40 years worth of contracts, you can safely add a movie to your streaming service. Add to that 100 years of studio mergers, consolidation, etc. It is a mess. I am sure many companies would like to stream more, but simply can't.
- DanBC 9y ago
  See for example the original Point Break. http://www.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/sight-sound-magazine/comment/point-break-not-coming-cinema-near-you http://www.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/sight-sound-magazine/comm...
- funkymike 9y ago
  That doesn't explain why a 20 year old movie will pop up on a streaming service for a few months then be unavailable again. Clearly they can sort these issues out. The content companies are stuck in a model of artificial scarcity. For myself, when I get the itch to watch an old movie and I can't immediately find it on the Netflix or Amazon prime video I don't go try to find some other streaming service or pay for a one time viewing. I'll just find something else to watch that is available. So when they could have had one more view for old content they wouldn't otherwise make money on, thereby increasing the value of their catalog, instead they get nothing at all.
  - rpiguy 9y ago
    Well the other side of the equation is what the new distributors (Netflix, Amazon, etc.) are willing to pay to stream a given property. If a property keeps jumping from service to service and in and out of availability I would guess it has more to do with a mismatch between the perceived value of the property and what the streaming services are willing to pay for it. Artificial scarcity is a thing I can't argue with you there, Disney has been doing it for years with drip-style "anniversary" releases of their properties on media. I would fully expect them to do the same with their streaming content.
felipelemos 9y ago
I think incredible how much money they are not making by each movie that is not available on some stream platform.
conanbatt 9y ago
If there were a single service that had all the content, and no one else had content, you would be pirating because the cost could go to the 100s. The competition of content is what makes the services cheap and pumps out new quality content on different platforms. At the same time it allows for the efficent satisfaction of the demand: those that care little pay little, those that care a lot pay a lot. With a single bundle, you either get all or you get nothing. There are many arguments to believe this is more efficient. The music industry, also, its ridden with tremendous problems, I would not model my business after them if I had the choice.
heygrady 9y ago
> [Streaming is] the big asset [movie studios] could build on! The movie studios likely don't see it this way. Tickets and merchandising are still the two main pillars of the industry. Home viewing is still the bottom end of the market [1]. The embrace of streaming represents a loss of revenue, not a gain of consumer good will [6]. Physical media (DVD/BluRay) are much more lucrative. Studios have an incentive to keep selling a pennies-worth of plastic for $20. Streaming represents a major loss of revenue and the studios will stall and delay until consumer demand forces them to change. People still buy millions of BluRay movies each year [2]. Now the studios are trying to compete directly with Netflix, rather than embrace the changing consumer landscape. This is largely a continuation of Blockbuster's long, slow demise [3]. In order to feed the lucrative parts of the distribution chain (movie tickets, merch, physical media), Hollywood is increasingly churning out "big" movies. This has spawned a new phenomenon called "super hero fatigue" [5]. Many are predicting the demise of blockbusters altogether in the near future [4]. But don't expect studios to change until it's proven that they can't make money the old way. [1] http://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/093015/how-exactly-do-movies-make-money.asp http://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/093015/how-ex... [2] http://www.denofgeek.com/us/movies/blu-ray/263154/falling-dvd-blu-ray-sales-and-an-era-passing http://www.denofgeek.com/us/movies/blu-ray/263154/falling-dv... [3] https://www.fool.com/investing/general/2013/11/06/3-bonehead-moves-that-killed-blockbuster.aspx https://www.fool.com/investing/general/2013/11/06/3-bonehead... [4] http://www.cracked.com/blog/why-blockbuster-movie-bubble-will-burst-in-2018/ http://www.cracked.com/blog/why-blockbuster-movie-bubble-wil... [5] http://www.rollingstone.com/movies/news/10-signs-that-you-have-superhero-movie-fatigue-20160601 http://www.rollingstone.com/movies/news/10-signs-that-you-ha... [6] http://www.latimes.com/business/hollywood/la-fi-ct-home-video-decline-20170106-story.html http://www.latimes.com/business/hollywood/la-fi-ct-home-vide...
frik 9y ago
> Maybe when I am 60, 70 or 80 the film industry will get their shi* together and finally agree on a solution that has long been found in the music business. You mean DRM free video MP4 files like the DRM free audio MP3 files on Amazon.com, iTunes and elsewhere? Yes, that would be a starting point.

by geff82 9y ago

fooey 9y ago

I've completely given up on trying to stream movies I also completely refuse to buy physical media too, so the end result is that I basically never watch movies at home any more unless I go to the effort of torrenting it

nkkollaw 9y ago
Try Chromecast. It costs almost nothing and it's absolutely awesome.
- NAHWheatCracker 9y ago
  I love my Chromecast, but isn't this discussion about accessing content? If the content owners don't let you access their content (or they make it a burden to access it by requiring a subscription for another service) it doesn't matter if you have a device that can output an HDMI signal.
- slau 9y ago
  This is slightly off-topic, but the Chromecast Ultra, with the Ethernet connection, is an absolute beast. I'm lucky enough to have Ethernet in my whole flat (two drops in every room), and a gigabit internet connection. When I launch a 4K HDR video on YouTube, it literally takes less than two seconds to start playing. In comparison, the YouTube app on the TV takes 5-10 seconds to start playing. The TV is hardwired as well. Please note that the Chromecast only has a 100Mbit ethernet port, same as a RPi, or most smart TVs. I thought the original Chromecast was great. But even if you have a great wifi setup, get the Ethernet power plug. It will change your Chromecast. You don't need the Chromecast Ultra to use the Ethernet feature, just a second generation Chromecast (the round one)
weq 9y ago
https://fmovies.is/ https://fmovies.is/ u just need a good ad-blocker as with all these streaming sites, sometimes they get malicious ads

raldi 9y ago

In 1999, Qwest had a 30-second commercial that seemed incredibly futuristic at the time, talking about a hotel where "every room has every movie ever made in every language anytime day or night" and it seemed impossibly futuristic. Not 20 years later, the technology for this is already well-established; the only thing stopping it is that the owners of the films don't want to make them available this way. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UZ9qcp6Lcno https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UZ9qcp6Lcno

samstave 9y ago
Gee -- I wonder why the Qwest CEO went to prison... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Nacchio https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Nacchio
- dingo_bat 9y ago
  Wtf they actually sent him to jail for refusing to give customer data to the NSA. No wonder we hardly see any resistance nowadays.
  - wunderg 9y ago
    There is popcorntime.io
    - balladeer 9y ago
      You'll actually have to go to .sh among the contenders (this is what I would suggest) as .io is not up anymore and besides .me was the original one. It's linked on the official/original github repo[0]. But the official official[1] repo doesn't link anything. Just that original developers are supporting .sh as official and have apparently moved to it. There's also ...ce.ch but that's community edition as the last two chars suggest. [0] https://github.com/popcorn-official https://github.com/popcorn-official [1] https://github.com/popcorn-time https://github.com/popcorn-time PS. I have put info to the best of my knowledge :)
    - thanatropism 9y ago

nkkollaw 9y ago

If I had a dollar for every time I tried to stream a movie legally and couldn't find it anywhere but on torrent sites...

nitemice 9y ago
You'd happily give away those dollars to the content owners, if they'd just let you stream it legally.
- boyce 9y ago
  It also needs to be easier to buy it than steal it and not have unskippable adverts or lectures on piracy for a lot of things, stealing is both easier and better
  - beobab 9y ago
    Careful of this mindset. So the thought process is: "I want this" "I am not allowed this" "I should be allowed this" "I will take it anyway" This is seductive, easy, and the wrong way to go for most things. I understand the frustration. I have felt the same way many, many times. I suspect that if people who illegally downloaded movies posted money to the studios who created the content directly, then this problem would disappear pretty much overnight.
    - bkor 9y ago
      > illegally downloaded movies posted money to the studios who created the content directly, then this problem would disappear pretty much overnight So if you cannot get something legally easily, you should support that practice and suddenly you'll get it more easily in future? This in a post about an article where Disney is making it more difficult to get content legally? Really?
    - boyce 9y ago
      I'm discussing the product and service, no interest in moral or legal judgements.

dkrich 9y ago

The fact is that Disney is extremely savvy and knows how to produce content that sells with a nearly 100% success rate. They are simply a marketing and merchandising machine. They use the vault the way diamond miners do- to restrict supply of extremely coveted goods so that they can charge premium prices for them. It's good business and it keeps things that are decades old in constant demand so they can charge higher prices for them. Unfortunately for you and me that means that if we want access we have to pay more. While it may certainly be true that you don't place enough value on Disney products to pay a premium, there are lots of people who will and there are probably still going to be times that you want access to it and consider signing up. That's what they want- if they commoditized their content and you were able to get access to everything they own for $30 a month, that wouldn't serve their purposes at all. Companies like Netflix dream of having one franchise that's as successful as the countless ones that Disney has. Why on Earth would they just have a fire sale for all of their content when they can restrict supply and extract the most profit from it?

tj-teej 9y ago
Exactly, a DVD of a new movie doesn't cost $12.99 because that's the price of the disk
laumars 9y ago
Because Disney aren't just competing with Netflix and co; they're also competing with usenet services, torrents, Kodi streams and other illegal services. And because Disney keep fucking their own consumers about it's left a void where the illegal services have not only been able to raise the bar in terms of user experience, but also in terms of available content and video quality. In any other industry market forces would be in effect forcing business to either compete or go under. But because copyright laws give content owners a monopoly it means the only effective competition is illegal services. And the daft thing is they're literally better in every way. Which is why I know so many people who normally follow the letter of the law and who happily pay for expensive cable / satellite / Netflix / whatever subscriptions who also have absolutely no qualms in downloading or streaming movies illegally. These are customers who want to pay for services but end up pirating because there isn't any service available to them. It's completely bonkers. It shouldn't be like this but it is entirely the fault of the content industry. They created the void by monopolising their content and then failing to provide any practical services. And they created the demand by targeting their advertising at kids, by making it illegal to backup old formats like DVDs, and such like. So to answer your question, sure they can try to extract the most profit from it but customers are already angry, fed up and aware of better albeit illegal services so all Disney are going to do is drive more people to piracy. If they really wanted to extract more profit then they would trying to onboard more users instead of making their content harder to get hold of. It really feels like the whole FRAND patents situation where Disney are happy to become a critical part of pre-teen culture but don't want to licence their intellectual property in any reasonable way. And while I can happily make the decision not to watch any Disney movies again (I like Marvel but I can live without it), trying to explain that to my 3 and 6 year old is going to be much harder.

SN76477 9y ago

Why cant I watch old TV shows? 3's company? Facts of Life? The Peoples Court? It doesnt make much sense to me.

pasquinelli 9y ago
offtopic, but i get a tv station that broadcasts, afaict, nothing but Roseanne, Night Court, and Empty Nest. Roseanne was just as good as I remember... until it wasn't.
Mindwipe 9y ago
Because there aren't enough people like you who would to pay for it to cover the costs of even a lawyer reviewing the contracts to see who owns the rights (and the answer will be not a single party, actors/music/artwork etc rights involved in all will be incredibly complex), never mind actually pay anyone involved. There are lots of things I would like someone to make at a reasonable price too (roll on my line of all existing Transformers with chrome finishes, car paint, clear windows and chrome tire rims!). But I have to accept that there's not enough of me that the costs of that sort of thing come down to $10, and buy a limited subset of more expensive items instead.
- lostcolony 9y ago
  If that's the case that stuff needs to enter the public domain. We need better legislation around orphaned works; those whose ownership is too complex to resolve should be treated the same as those whose ownership is completely lost. In both cases, ownership can't be reasonably determined.
  - mattm 9y ago
    Yes, this is the real issue. If copyright was reasonable - say 40-50 years - then a lot of this stuff would naturally enter the public domain and then could be shown on any streaming service. Instead we have the current copyright system because a minuscule amount of old content is still profitable and large companies lobby to protect it.

cletusw 9y ago

Sure, it's not as convenient as instant streaming, but the Netflix DVD shipping catalog is unparalleled. Every old movie you can think of plus new releases as soon as they release on DVD. Well worth what I pay since I'm patient enough to wait a couple days for the disk. Plus, if you pay a little extra for the blu-ray service the quality is way better than streaming "HD".

mrmondo 9y ago

This and I want as much content as possible in 4K/HDR, I’m really sick of the second tier streaming services being limited to highly compressed 1080p. If a service came along that truly had the TV and films I wanted with a preference for 4K content, I’d happily pay $40-$60AUD a month for it. Right now I subscribe to: - Netflix - Stan - Apple Music - Usenet related services - Audible - Plex Premium - Getflix content unblocking services And in recent times: - Pandora (cancelled as they’re leaving Aus) - Amazon Prime video (cancelled as they have hardly any content and a terrible interface) - Spotify (cancelled as I prefer Apple Music) - Last.FM streaming (cancelled when the service went EOL) - Several private trackers (avoid BT now) There’s a lot of opportunity for consolidation there, I realise I’m probably not in the majority but I WANT to pay and I WANT media creators and artists to take my money.

remarkEon 9y ago
Curious. Why do you prefer Apple Music? Has something changed recently? I had both for a while but found the UI, playlist building capacity, the generated playlists, and the ability to share music on Spotify to be superior so I dropped Apple.
- mrmondo 9y ago
  Howdy, I have been running both macOS and iOS betas on my personal devices and both iTunes and Music have had a significant UX overhaul on macOS 10.13 and iOS 11, they’re not perfect - but it’s a good step forward. A bit high level but here’s my list of pros: - I’ve found a lot less missing tracks / albums, especially for more underground / lesser known artists I had real problems with this on Spotify. - Significantly less bandwidth usage compared to Spotify. - Unified interface to my music library (1.2TB~) and streaming / downloadable music on both the desktop and phone. - The ability to have my own music uploaded as part of my library and available on all desktops/laptops and my phone. - Apple Music data is unmetered on my mobile provider (I average around 8GB/mo of mobile music streaming on my phone) - The Music app on my phone is /really/ good at figuring out what music/playlists/albums to sync (prefetch if you will) onto my phone, I set the data limit (to 128GB) and it just figures it out nicely, often when I go to listen to a new album from an artist I follow / like - its already there for me (note: I believe this is opt-in functionality) What I don’t like about Apple Music / think needs to improve: - Playlists, They’re not as nice or as fast to manage as on Spotify but at least tracks don’t go missing randomly. - Artist/Album workflow performance, at times it still feels very ‘webframe’ (if that makes sense?) when browsing artists and their albums, the UI latency really annoys me and I liken it to the feeling that JavaScript ‘apps’ give you.

pasquinelli 9y ago

i don't need it all, i'd be happy with as much selection of my local video store that, somehow, only closed a couple years ago.

bsder 9y ago

> Maybe when I am 60, 70 or 80 the film industry will get their shi* together and finally agree on a solution that has long been found in the music business. Except that the music business continues to shrink each year. The only reason there was a slight pause in this is because suddenly vinyl sales, of all things, took off. Somehow I don't think you are going to find many takers in the video industry for following any music model.

croon 9y ago
> Except that the music business continues to shrink each year. What do you base this on? I googled a bit "music industry revenue" and only the opposite came up. http://www.ifpi.org/news/IFPI-GLOBAL-MUSIC-REPORT-2017 http://www.ifpi.org/news/IFPI-GLOBAL-MUSIC-REPORT-2017
- bsder 9y ago
  Then you didn't look very far. https://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/global-record-industry-income-drops-below-15bn-for-first-time-in-history/ https://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/global-record-industr... Almost a straight line from 1999 with 26.6 billion to 14.97 billion in 2014. Quoting your source: > Total revenues for 2016 were US$15.7 billion. Quoting here: http://www.ifpi.org/facts-and-stats.php http://www.ifpi.org/facts-and-stats.php > This growth, however, should be viewed in the context of the industry losing nearly 40% of its revenues in the preceding 15 years.

onion2k 9y ago

...a solution that has long been found in the music business. Perhaps you're fortunate that everything you want to listen to is on your preferred music streaming service, but what they offer is far from everything in the music industry's catalogue. Ask any classical music fan what they think of streaming services and you'll hear a tirade against the woeful offerings that streaming services make available.

maccard 9y ago
I know that spotify/Apple Music are lacking in certain areas, however pretty much all "mainstream" music from the last 40(?) years is available on both platforms. Comparing that to Netflix, where searching for "top tv shows of the 1990's" will give you a list, of which less than 30% are available on netflix here. Worse still, they're available in other countries.
alkonaut 9y ago
You don't need "everything" but you need enough. If you subscribe to e.g Spotify you initially get surprised by some things not being in their library. However the library is so large and the use of a single service so convenient that most people can simply accept what's there. After the initial disappointment, any further disappointment is nearly zero so long as you keep all your discovery of new music within Spotify - because you'll never discover what isn't there. Classical is a bit special, but hopefully efforts like the internet archive can help bring at least a lot of the royalty free music to streaming. I'd be perfectly happy with a streaming service aggregating the current top 10 services for tv/movies, and I assume 90% of customers would. It seems reasonable to make a product that caters to "most" rather the all customers, just like Spotify.
- beaconstudios 9y ago
  FWIW, I have the same issue trying to find new experimental EDM. I find indieshuffle provides a much better selection of more out-there songs, at the cost of having a much less mature interface.
- wiz21c 9y ago

Keyframe 9y ago

Maybe when I am 60, 70 or 80 the software industry will get their shi* together and finally agree on a solution that has long been found in the music business. For a truly complete platform, I would FOR SURE pay more than the 10$ a month for Applix. 20, maybe 30! But then I want it ALL. All software they have in storage.

ZoomZoomZoom 9y ago

"solution that has long been found in the music business" Which is what?

blubb-fish 9y ago

The situation is effectively also disrespectful towards the creators of movies and the whole art form. Who would happy about a movie being buried in the archives? A movie has to be watched to effectively exist.

dorfsmay 9y ago

I don't even care about flat rate, charge me a couple dollars (and more if it was just out in the cinema, I don't want to go to a room full of stranger to watch a movie) per movie/show but. I'm even OK to have to use 3 different providers, but not being able to watch a movie because there is no agreement for the country I'm in is ridiculous.

coldtea 9y ago
>I don't want to go to a room full of stranger to watch a movie Sharing a cultural artifact with others outside a small social bubble is one of the great enjoyments of going to the cinema.
- IanCal 9y ago
  I've rarely "shared" it with other people in any meaningful way. I almost always hear other people talk or see them using their phones though, unless the cinema is pretty much empty.
- dorfsmay 9y ago
  Ah! Sounds like a great idea, a cinema followed by some cocktail party for people to talk about the movie. I'd go to that sort of event.
  - coldtea 9y ago
    What you describe has also been going on for nearly a century, at least in Europe: movie (and ordinary) theaters with a foyer (anteroom?) were people drink, smoke (in the past, but also now in some countries) and socialize before the movie starts and during the intermission (a short 10-15 minute break splitting the movie in two parts customary in some countries so you can piss in peace, have a drink or a smoke back in the day, and restock on popcorn without missing anything). And that's for regular movie screenings -- there are also all kinds of organized screenings, where people get to talk and discuss the movie afterwards, especially for art films and such. But already being in an audience while the movie plays, and being aware of people's reactions etc. is a shared experience (and it had been alluded as such by tons of filmmakers).

tiku 9y ago

Even a 10 cents per movie pricing strategy would generate millions of dollars for older movies. I just don't get why they don't just try this strategy..

coldtea 9y ago
There was this idea that if you had all movies available the long tail (obscure, old etc movies) would still be watched by at least some people, but in practice most people just stick to what's new/mainstream/known, so that it's not worth the extra hassle to maintain a long tail library. Tons of tracks on online music stores for example are never streamed or only a handful of times. (Of course the limited stuff e.g. Netflix has, is by no means not even the 10% of possible content).
- lostcolony 9y ago
  But even if so, can those few not sufficiently monetize things to warrant the storage and delivery costs? I mean, yeah, old movies once had their original film melted down, but for the past 80 years they've at least thrown it into a vault or similar. Physical storage is orders of magnitudes more expensive than digital; even just dropping these things into an S3 bucket and serving them as needed for .10 cents would cost less than what they used to do, -and- would allow them to actually make money from it (albeit very little). If you don't want -any- of that, then why not release it for free and allow things like the internet archive to store it and deliver it for you? It's worth the money to store it -in case- you want to do something with it, but not worth the money to actually do something with it, even though that costs no more and has a return on investment?

hellofunk 9y ago

> thanks Netflix for their growing self produced content that often has a quality not seen before s/often/rarely There are some good shows on Netflix, but they are in the minority, in my opinion. Tastes vary, of course. But a lot of their original programming is not so original, it just feels like filler content to increase the perceived value of the platform. For every good original show they make like House of Cards, there are at least 5x as many that are uneventful or boring. But that's not unusual. Network television is the same way.

toyg 9y ago
> Network television is the same way. And the movie business. And the music business. And the book-publishing business. In any creative industry, there are hundreds or thousands of mediocre-to-terrible attempts for any hit. It's the nature of the beast. Shaving that ratio by orders of magnitude is black magic, or even just luck. This is why successful outliers are so handsomely paid - not because they do something well, but because they dramatically decrease the risk of producing stuff that won't sell enough. The saying that goes "90% of everything is crap" emerged before Netflix was even a concept.
- hellofunk 9y ago
  Sure, but we were specifically discussing Netflix and TV and the use of the word "often."
thanatropism 9y ago
I find them better than TV, pound for pound. For example, _Backstrom_ is a shitty House clone in many senses, but is a much better detective show than _Elementary_. They have more feedback data and often great "production values" (i.e. they spent the extra money to make it nice). It doesn't always pay off (how stupid was _Marseille_, with Gerard Depardieu at his best acting chops in years and a political story that melts into family drama in three episodes flat?). But having 100 Netflix shows and a random assortment of failed indie movies is not better than having 10 Netflix shows and a decent film catalog. Netflix pretty much snuck up on the less attentive of us by giving us more shows (hey, I basically stayed for Bojack Horseman) and taking away feature-length studio-produced movies. I mean, who has the time to watch a full-length movie most days. So I kind of feel cheated, but not enough to leave yet.

almostarockstar 9y ago

> a solution that has long been found in the music business. A lot of people have commented that the music solution is not ideal in a number of ways from the 'demand' side, but I don't think anybody has mentioned how the music business is broken from the 'supply' side. It is next to impossible to make a living from music for the vast majority of musicians and producers out there. The obvious argument is that if you cant sell, your quality isn't good enough but that's actually not true in my opinion. Distribution is severely unbalanced - and if the movie industry continued in this direction, all we will ever see is Spiderman remakes.

rebuilder 9y ago

I got the urge to watch Total Recall, the original version. (Please don't judge me!) Is it available on Netflix where I am? Nope. HBO? No. Amazon Prime video? No! Now, Amazon does offer a digital rental - for 8 bucks! I never thought I'd say this, but I'm starting to miss video rental shops.

anindha 9y ago
What about iTunes? [1] [1] https://itunes.apple.com/us/movie/total-recall/id1040020260 https://itunes.apple.com/us/movie/total-recall/id1040020260
- rebuilder 9y ago
  It seems I have to install their software on my computer to see what the price is. I'm being curmudgeonly here, I know, but I'm not keen on installing iTunes, my previous experiences with that and other software on Windows were not that great.
  - funkymike 9y ago
    While it is a bit of time invested initially it can be very handy to keep a Windows VM around for this purpose. Make sure to keep a baseline snapshot after patching. This way you can install questionable software with full confidence it won't impact your main system. You can simply revert to the baseline snapshot at any time to uninstall the software.
bpenrod 9y ago
Try your local library! Free rental plus a large catalog is pretty hard to beat.
- rebuilder 9y ago
  Good idea, I'm embarrassed I didn't think of that... Only problem is, I just remembered I no longer have an optical drive!

blitmap 9y ago

For me I think movies mean less than they used to. We are spoiled with the amount of entertainment constantly being released to us nowadays. I will not go buy a movie or see a movie at the theater anymore - no matter what it is. It could be the most anticipated film in a half a decade and I'll still wait for it to be conveniently streamed to me. Maybe I'm getting old, but I feel like people don't create movie libraries anymore unless they're pirates. We don't have 1 specific night a week where we get everyone together for a special movie. We watch movies and shows all the time and that makes them less special/valuable. I don't think I'm articulating this well. Disney thinks I'll tack on another streaming service to watch Mulan or Captain America: Civil War - but they're wrong...

rpiguy 9y ago
It is a well known phenomenon that abundance decreases the amount of "specialness" we feel for things. It is true for music, comics, really anything that used to take effort to find and acquire. It is like a psychological corollary to supply and demand, and also why luxury goods lose their magic when they move down market.
- aggie 9y ago
  The science on this (choice overload) is actually rather ambiguous. [pdf] http://www.scheibehenne.de/ScheibehenneGreifenederTodd2010.pdf http://www.scheibehenne.de/ScheibehenneGreifenederTodd2010.p...
yvhhjbb 9y ago
> Disney thinks I'll tack on another streaming service to watch Mulan or Captain America: Civil War - but they're wrong... How long have you been single for, if you don't mind me asking? It's not for you dude, it's for the kids.
- mrcsparker 9y ago
  I will probably subscribe for that reason. Disney knows this about parents. They are one of the few companies that could put together their own offering

rpiguy 9y ago

Film studios are constrained by labyrinthine contracts between studios, distributors, actors, and unions. In cases where contracts are missing, any of the above parties can sue. Even more confusingly rights for IP might have been transferred and sold many times leading to questions about who actually owns a film or franchise. Distribution rights, production rights are separate. Actors may have been promised a cut of any of the above. So if you track down 40 years worth of contracts, you can safely add a movie to your streaming service. Add to that 100 years of studio mergers, consolidation, etc. It is a mess. I am sure many companies would like to stream more, but simply can't.

DanBC 9y ago
See for example the original Point Break. http://www.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/sight-sound-magazine/comment/point-break-not-coming-cinema-near-you http://www.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/sight-sound-magazine/comm...
funkymike 9y ago
That doesn't explain why a 20 year old movie will pop up on a streaming service for a few months then be unavailable again. Clearly they can sort these issues out. The content companies are stuck in a model of artificial scarcity. For myself, when I get the itch to watch an old movie and I can't immediately find it on the Netflix or Amazon prime video I don't go try to find some other streaming service or pay for a one time viewing. I'll just find something else to watch that is available. So when they could have had one more view for old content they wouldn't otherwise make money on, thereby increasing the value of their catalog, instead they get nothing at all.
- rpiguy 9y ago
  Well the other side of the equation is what the new distributors (Netflix, Amazon, etc.) are willing to pay to stream a given property. If a property keeps jumping from service to service and in and out of availability I would guess it has more to do with a mismatch between the perceived value of the property and what the streaming services are willing to pay for it. Artificial scarcity is a thing I can't argue with you there, Disney has been doing it for years with drip-style "anniversary" releases of their properties on media. I would fully expect them to do the same with their streaming content.

felipelemos 9y ago

I think incredible how much money they are not making by each movie that is not available on some stream platform.

conanbatt 9y ago

If there were a single service that had all the content, and no one else had content, you would be pirating because the cost could go to the 100s. The competition of content is what makes the services cheap and pumps out new quality content on different platforms. At the same time it allows for the efficent satisfaction of the demand: those that care little pay little, those that care a lot pay a lot. With a single bundle, you either get all or you get nothing. There are many arguments to believe this is more efficient. The music industry, also, its ridden with tremendous problems, I would not model my business after them if I had the choice.

heygrady 9y ago

> [Streaming is] the big asset [movie studios] could build on! The movie studios likely don't see it this way. Tickets and merchandising are still the two main pillars of the industry. Home viewing is still the bottom end of the market [1]. The embrace of streaming represents a loss of revenue, not a gain of consumer good will [6]. Physical media (DVD/BluRay) are much more lucrative. Studios have an incentive to keep selling a pennies-worth of plastic for $20. Streaming represents a major loss of revenue and the studios will stall and delay until consumer demand forces them to change. People still buy millions of BluRay movies each year [2]. Now the studios are trying to compete directly with Netflix, rather than embrace the changing consumer landscape. This is largely a continuation of Blockbuster's long, slow demise [3]. In order to feed the lucrative parts of the distribution chain (movie tickets, merch, physical media), Hollywood is increasingly churning out "big" movies. This has spawned a new phenomenon called "super hero fatigue" [5]. Many are predicting the demise of blockbusters altogether in the near future [4]. But don't expect studios to change until it's proven that they can't make money the old way. [1] http://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/093015/how-exactly-do-movies-make-money.asp http://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/093015/how-ex... [2] http://www.denofgeek.com/us/movies/blu-ray/263154/falling-dvd-blu-ray-sales-and-an-era-passing http://www.denofgeek.com/us/movies/blu-ray/263154/falling-dv... [3] https://www.fool.com/investing/general/2013/11/06/3-bonehead-moves-that-killed-blockbuster.aspx https://www.fool.com/investing/general/2013/11/06/3-bonehead... [4] http://www.cracked.com/blog/why-blockbuster-movie-bubble-will-burst-in-2018/ http://www.cracked.com/blog/why-blockbuster-movie-bubble-wil... [5] http://www.rollingstone.com/movies/news/10-signs-that-you-have-superhero-movie-fatigue-20160601 http://www.rollingstone.com/movies/news/10-signs-that-you-ha... [6] http://www.latimes.com/business/hollywood/la-fi-ct-home-video-decline-20170106-story.html http://www.latimes.com/business/hollywood/la-fi-ct-home-vide...

frik 9y ago

> Maybe when I am 60, 70 or 80 the film industry will get their shi* together and finally agree on a solution that has long been found in the music business. You mean DRM free video MP4 files like the DRM free audio MP3 files on Amazon.com, iTunes and elsewhere? Yes, that would be a starting point.