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I don't agree with your Netflix story. Most people don't prefer free, they prefer convenience. Spotify almost works properly as a centralized platform because

I don't agree with your Netflix story. Most people don't prefer free, they prefer convenience. Spotify almost works properly as a centralized platform because almost all music is on there. But I know a few albums that aren't, and it's too bad. For Netflix, I have a subscription. But guess what I do when I want to watch the latest Walking Dead or Game of Thrones. I want it convenient, preferably legal, but most of all convenient.

ghaff 9y ago
How is subscribing to HBO inconvenient? It's a combination of price and convenience. There's some upper limit to the monthly price you (and everyone else) is willing to pay for content.
- rusk 9y ago
  Well for me, in my jurisdiction HBO just simply isn't available. That's hands down about as inconvenient as you can get. In jurisdictions where it is available it's often only available as a part of a larger cable package. If you're signed up with another provider that's pretty inconvenient also. There is a well worn cartoon on this topic that sums up the position of many quite well [0] [0] http://theoatmeal.com/comics/game_of_thrones http://theoatmeal.com/comics/game_of_thrones
  - lilbobbytables 9y ago
    You'll notice that in the HBO Go screen there was an option to subscribe if you don't already have it through your cable plan.
    - amdavidson 9y ago
      That was to subscribe to HBO from your cable provider if/when they decided to offer HBO GO, the streaming service. When this comic came out(2011) HBO Now (confusingly separate from HBO Go) did not exist.
    - rusk 9y ago
      Don't even know what a "HBO Go" is - never seen or heard of one before. EDIT Actually, I'm going to put aside disingenuity for a second. I actually have the closest equivalent of HBO with my provider, it's called "Sky Atlantic" and it's only available through Sky, of course. So I'm fully paid up and legit as far as GoT is concerned but only coincidentally. If a competing network were to start showing $competing_popular_tv_show you can be guaranteed I wouldn't be switching, or taking on a second subscription ... Take my $$$ by all means, but if you get greedy you'll get nothing.
- prepend 9y ago
  HBO Now is a much worse experience than torrents. The navigation is slow, the updates to new episodes are poorly placed under a bunch of clicks, there are ads for other hbo shows over and over (even after I watched every single West world episode they still show me ads about a “new show”), streaming bugs (Although this improved quite a bit). It wasn’t the price that moved me away from HBONow, it was their lack of convenience compared to a torrent rig. It ended up being HBO’s design was more for themselves rather than me (“we want to show you ads” vs “you want to watch your shows”). It was still very old in its philosophy of content. Netflix however is awesome because it’s very UX focused. Ultimately, I think only OSS/pirate are closest to the use desires.
  - paulie_a 9y ago
    HBO has long been against providing streaming service, and only seemed to begrudgingly with a "fuck you, this is going to be an awful experience" attitude
  - ryanianian 9y ago
    > Netflix however is awesome because it’s very UX focused. Except for the thousands of A/B experiments that incessantly drive you to spend every ounce of attention on Netflix. E.g. the auto-playing preview that starts whenever you stop moving the active selection. It strongly encourages you to start playing the thing rather than being thoughtful about whether you actually want to or not. Personally I hate this - it drives my anxiety nuts - and I find HBO's tactics much less user-hostile (although agreed the ads for HBO's own content are outright stupid).
  - kerng 9y ago
    >>Netflix however is awesome because it’s very UX focused. I find the Netflix UI, especially the one for Xbox utterly slow and too jammed with information. Its not that great.
  - wuliwong 9y ago
    I agree about HBO's ads but I think the UI/UX is fine on the Apple TV. I have not had any streaming bugs.
  - 9y ago
- koonsolo 9y ago
  First of all I live in Belgium, so no HBO here (some other European countries do have it I see, it's basically a lottery). There is indeed an upper limit for everyone. If I need to pay >50 euros/month and still get ads, no thanks.
- freeone3000 9y ago
  In order to subscribe to HBO in Canada, I'd need to call CTV, get a cable hookup to my apartment, schedule a time for the cableman, stay there while he's there, he'll hook up some box to the wall, I'd set up one account with CTV then another with HBO, and then after paying two companies and a real-world three-week delay, I'd be able to watch HBO. (Not to mention this would cost around $80/mo.)
- smoe 9y ago
  "HBO GO. It's HBO. Anywhere." click "To access HBO GO℠, you must reside within the fifty states of the United States of America." Some time ago while traveling I actively tried to find a way to pay to watch Game of Thrones. I failed miserably. Also I really don't like having to have and manage subscription for various providers, nor do I like to be locked in with one. I would love to have a single subscription or even better pre-paid option somewhere which can be used across services and my money gets distributed accordingly. Same with news media. I would be more than willing to pay a set amount per year for consumption, but I'm not willing to pay that amount exclusively to you.
  - jjrh 9y ago
    Basically this - a lot of the time the options just aren't there for the rest of the world. I think stuff like Netflix, Spotify, Steam, etc have proven that when content is priced right and delivered in a convenient manner folks are more than happy to pay. News media is one of the worst for not figuring out how to adapt. I'd love to read some newspapers, watch a couple news networks, etc - but i'm not willing to plop down $100 a month and deal with a bunch of different apps to do this so I stick with online.
fredley 9y ago
For Game of Thrones it's not such an issue, but I do feel bad if there's e.g. an old BBC film I want to watch, but there's no way to get it legally, sometimes at all. Other times it's £20 for a DVD. No way I'm paying three months of Netflix subscription (or a large fraction of a license fee) for that. The BBC has such an extensive and amazing back catalogue of content they wholly own. Why they don't chuck it on iPlayer is beyond me. I know they have it all on a digital platform internally already, format is not an issue.
- toyg 9y ago
  > Why they don't chuck it on iPlayer is beyond me. Because they would devalue new productions. The more license-payers watch old movies, the less they will watch Top Gear or Strictly or whatever it's supposed to be big now. This would mean less interest in new productions, less stuff sold by BBCWorld (or whatever it's called these days), less money going around... like all companies and organisations, the BBC wants to grow, not to stall.
  - mattmanser 9y ago
    No, I believe it's because it's against the law. They have rules on what they can and can't do because they're publicly funded. It's to allow the commercial operators a way to compete. And even if it's not, they have to operate in a political context, the Tories are always looking for an excuse to shutdown the BBC so their donors can pillage the public commons and eat the corpse.
    - nailer 9y ago
      Perhaps a commercial BBC that could actually sell it stuff to people who want it would help a) the BBC b) people who want it? > Tories are always looking for an excuse to shutdown the BBC so their donors can pillage the public commons and eat the corpse. Or maybe it's because it's not the government's job to run TV channels and radio stations, nor is it the public's job to fund them?
      - 9y ago
bobwaycott 9y ago
> For Netflix, I have a subscription. But guess what I do when I want to watch the latest Walking Dead or Game of Thrones. I want it convenient, preferably legal, but most of all convenient. What is inconvenient about subscribing to HBO Now? You have to do more work to find/download an episode of GoT compared to streaming via HBO Now. Or you could stream the episodes from Prime. Same with Walking Dead. There are rarely inconvenient streaming options.
- koonsolo 9y ago
  I live in Belgium, and so it already ends there.
  - bobwaycott 9y ago
    Ah. Yeah, region limitations are a really annoying issue.
tjoff 9y ago
Exactly, convenience is the most important part and here is where netflix et al has failed miserably. 1. All clients suck immensely. 2. The catalog is really poor. 3. DRM. I don't think you could describe inconvenient better than with those three letters. If I could pay, say $30 a month, to legally pirate (not from any official source even) any movie/series I want I'd pay that in a heartbeat ($30 is still more than I consume if I were to buy it in a store). But now I don't have any service because it isn't worth it. I don't get the convenience and I don't get a decent catalog and I would have gotten it with DRM.
- kelnos 9y ago
  I'll grant you #2 since tastes vary and even the catalog varies from month to month. But for the vast majority of people, #1 isn't true, and #3 is irrelevant. Neflix's (growing) subscriber numbers are all the evidence you need for that.
  - tjoff 9y ago
    That #1 and #3 is "acceptable" is simply because there are no (legal) alternatives.
    - kelnos 9y ago
      I'm not really sure what you're looking for, then. Your wish for the ability to "legally pirate" content makes no sense, since by definition that's an oxymoron.
      - tjoff 9y ago
        What I'm saying is that pirating is still much more convenient and results in a vastly superior experience than paying. Which is rather sad.
        kelnos 9y ago
        I don't agree with that. I'm a technically inclined person who has in the past done a ton of pirating, but nowadays I will always reach for a legal streaming service first. I actually do find, say, using Netflix much more convenient than firing up a usenet or torrent client and pulling down a video that takes 5-10 minutes to download. And that's just me. The masses of non-tech-savvy people out there don't want to deal with pirating things. For these people, paid services are far, far superior.
rhino369 9y ago
People are willing to pay for convience, but only so much. A lot of what gets torrented is easily and very conveniently available on iTunes, Playstore, or Amazon Instant, but it costs 5 bucks. What isn’t convient about HBO Now (assuming you are in the USA)?
- ams6110 9y ago
  Pay per view is not convenient. You have to make a decision each time "do I really want to watch this, is is worth it" and then have buyers remorse afterwards. Pay a monthly, automatically recurring, fixed fee is convenient. Out of sight, out of mind.
  - Spivak 9y ago
    I generally feel the opposite. It's much easier for me to buy a movie or box set outright than subscribe to a streaming service. It's pretty much the same with all fixed recurring payments -- I always feel pressure to use the service and I'm constantly evaluating whether its worth it.
  - rhino369 9y ago
    That sounds like price anxiety to me. If you didn’t care about cost you’d just buy. If Netflix cost 100 bucks a month you’d have the same anxiety.
    - ghaff 9y ago
      I'm very skeptical about arguments that it's about convenience and not price. Yes, especially outside the US, there is some content that is difficult to get legally for any amount of money. But there's also some upper limit to what I'm willing to pay for physical media that I'll watch once (even if I can acquire it with one click on Amazon) or what I'm going to pay for a monthly subscription even if it were a hypothetical all digitized content ever made for one monthly fee.
  - wuliwong 9y ago
    I don't understand your point, HBO Now is monthly and automatically recurring.

ghaff 9y ago

How is subscribing to HBO inconvenient? It's a combination of price and convenience. There's some upper limit to the monthly price you (and everyone else) is willing to pay for content.

rusk 9y ago
Well for me, in my jurisdiction HBO just simply isn't available. That's hands down about as inconvenient as you can get. In jurisdictions where it is available it's often only available as a part of a larger cable package. If you're signed up with another provider that's pretty inconvenient also. There is a well worn cartoon on this topic that sums up the position of many quite well [0] [0] http://theoatmeal.com/comics/game_of_thrones http://theoatmeal.com/comics/game_of_thrones
- lilbobbytables 9y ago
  You'll notice that in the HBO Go screen there was an option to subscribe if you don't already have it through your cable plan.
  - amdavidson 9y ago
    That was to subscribe to HBO from your cable provider if/when they decided to offer HBO GO, the streaming service. When this comic came out(2011) HBO Now (confusingly separate from HBO Go) did not exist.
  - rusk 9y ago
    Don't even know what a "HBO Go" is - never seen or heard of one before. EDIT Actually, I'm going to put aside disingenuity for a second. I actually have the closest equivalent of HBO with my provider, it's called "Sky Atlantic" and it's only available through Sky, of course. So I'm fully paid up and legit as far as GoT is concerned but only coincidentally. If a competing network were to start showing $competing_popular_tv_show you can be guaranteed I wouldn't be switching, or taking on a second subscription ... Take my $$$ by all means, but if you get greedy you'll get nothing.
prepend 9y ago
HBO Now is a much worse experience than torrents. The navigation is slow, the updates to new episodes are poorly placed under a bunch of clicks, there are ads for other hbo shows over and over (even after I watched every single West world episode they still show me ads about a “new show”), streaming bugs (Although this improved quite a bit). It wasn’t the price that moved me away from HBONow, it was their lack of convenience compared to a torrent rig. It ended up being HBO’s design was more for themselves rather than me (“we want to show you ads” vs “you want to watch your shows”). It was still very old in its philosophy of content. Netflix however is awesome because it’s very UX focused. Ultimately, I think only OSS/pirate are closest to the use desires.
- paulie_a 9y ago
  HBO has long been against providing streaming service, and only seemed to begrudgingly with a "fuck you, this is going to be an awful experience" attitude
- ryanianian 9y ago
  > Netflix however is awesome because it’s very UX focused. Except for the thousands of A/B experiments that incessantly drive you to spend every ounce of attention on Netflix. E.g. the auto-playing preview that starts whenever you stop moving the active selection. It strongly encourages you to start playing the thing rather than being thoughtful about whether you actually want to or not. Personally I hate this - it drives my anxiety nuts - and I find HBO's tactics much less user-hostile (although agreed the ads for HBO's own content are outright stupid).
- kerng 9y ago
  >>Netflix however is awesome because it’s very UX focused. I find the Netflix UI, especially the one for Xbox utterly slow and too jammed with information. Its not that great.
- wuliwong 9y ago
  I agree about HBO's ads but I think the UI/UX is fine on the Apple TV. I have not had any streaming bugs.
- 9y ago
koonsolo 9y ago
First of all I live in Belgium, so no HBO here (some other European countries do have it I see, it's basically a lottery). There is indeed an upper limit for everyone. If I need to pay >50 euros/month and still get ads, no thanks.
freeone3000 9y ago
In order to subscribe to HBO in Canada, I'd need to call CTV, get a cable hookup to my apartment, schedule a time for the cableman, stay there while he's there, he'll hook up some box to the wall, I'd set up one account with CTV then another with HBO, and then after paying two companies and a real-world three-week delay, I'd be able to watch HBO. (Not to mention this would cost around $80/mo.)
smoe 9y ago
"HBO GO. It's HBO. Anywhere." click "To access HBO GO℠, you must reside within the fifty states of the United States of America." Some time ago while traveling I actively tried to find a way to pay to watch Game of Thrones. I failed miserably. Also I really don't like having to have and manage subscription for various providers, nor do I like to be locked in with one. I would love to have a single subscription or even better pre-paid option somewhere which can be used across services and my money gets distributed accordingly. Same with news media. I would be more than willing to pay a set amount per year for consumption, but I'm not willing to pay that amount exclusively to you.
- jjrh 9y ago
  Basically this - a lot of the time the options just aren't there for the rest of the world. I think stuff like Netflix, Spotify, Steam, etc have proven that when content is priced right and delivered in a convenient manner folks are more than happy to pay. News media is one of the worst for not figuring out how to adapt. I'd love to read some newspapers, watch a couple news networks, etc - but i'm not willing to plop down $100 a month and deal with a bunch of different apps to do this so I stick with online.

fredley 9y ago

For Game of Thrones it's not such an issue, but I do feel bad if there's e.g. an old BBC film I want to watch, but there's no way to get it legally, sometimes at all. Other times it's £20 for a DVD. No way I'm paying three months of Netflix subscription (or a large fraction of a license fee) for that. The BBC has such an extensive and amazing back catalogue of content they wholly own. Why they don't chuck it on iPlayer is beyond me. I know they have it all on a digital platform internally already, format is not an issue.

toyg 9y ago
> Why they don't chuck it on iPlayer is beyond me. Because they would devalue new productions. The more license-payers watch old movies, the less they will watch Top Gear or Strictly or whatever it's supposed to be big now. This would mean less interest in new productions, less stuff sold by BBCWorld (or whatever it's called these days), less money going around... like all companies and organisations, the BBC wants to grow, not to stall.
- mattmanser 9y ago
  No, I believe it's because it's against the law. They have rules on what they can and can't do because they're publicly funded. It's to allow the commercial operators a way to compete. And even if it's not, they have to operate in a political context, the Tories are always looking for an excuse to shutdown the BBC so their donors can pillage the public commons and eat the corpse.
  - nailer 9y ago
    Perhaps a commercial BBC that could actually sell it stuff to people who want it would help a) the BBC b) people who want it? > Tories are always looking for an excuse to shutdown the BBC so their donors can pillage the public commons and eat the corpse. Or maybe it's because it's not the government's job to run TV channels and radio stations, nor is it the public's job to fund them?
    - 9y ago

bobwaycott 9y ago

> For Netflix, I have a subscription. But guess what I do when I want to watch the latest Walking Dead or Game of Thrones. I want it convenient, preferably legal, but most of all convenient. What is inconvenient about subscribing to HBO Now? You have to do more work to find/download an episode of GoT compared to streaming via HBO Now. Or you could stream the episodes from Prime. Same with Walking Dead. There are rarely inconvenient streaming options.

koonsolo 9y ago
I live in Belgium, and so it already ends there.
- bobwaycott 9y ago
  Ah. Yeah, region limitations are a really annoying issue.

tjoff 9y ago

Exactly, convenience is the most important part and here is where netflix et al has failed miserably. 1. All clients suck immensely. 2. The catalog is really poor. 3. DRM. I don't think you could describe inconvenient better than with those three letters. If I could pay, say $30 a month, to legally pirate (not from any official source even) any movie/series I want I'd pay that in a heartbeat ($30 is still more than I consume if I were to buy it in a store). But now I don't have any service because it isn't worth it. I don't get the convenience and I don't get a decent catalog and I would have gotten it with DRM.

kelnos 9y ago
I'll grant you #2 since tastes vary and even the catalog varies from month to month. But for the vast majority of people, #1 isn't true, and #3 is irrelevant. Neflix's (growing) subscriber numbers are all the evidence you need for that.
- tjoff 9y ago
  That #1 and #3 is "acceptable" is simply because there are no (legal) alternatives.
  - kelnos 9y ago
    I'm not really sure what you're looking for, then. Your wish for the ability to "legally pirate" content makes no sense, since by definition that's an oxymoron.
    - tjoff 9y ago
      What I'm saying is that pirating is still much more convenient and results in a vastly superior experience than paying. Which is rather sad.
      - kelnos 9y ago
        I don't agree with that. I'm a technically inclined person who has in the past done a ton of pirating, but nowadays I will always reach for a legal streaming service first. I actually do find, say, using Netflix much more convenient than firing up a usenet or torrent client and pulling down a video that takes 5-10 minutes to download. And that's just me. The masses of non-tech-savvy people out there don't want to deal with pirating things. For these people, paid services are far, far superior.

rhino369 9y ago

People are willing to pay for convience, but only so much. A lot of what gets torrented is easily and very conveniently available on iTunes, Playstore, or Amazon Instant, but it costs 5 bucks. What isn’t convient about HBO Now (assuming you are in the USA)?

ams6110 9y ago
Pay per view is not convenient. You have to make a decision each time "do I really want to watch this, is is worth it" and then have buyers remorse afterwards. Pay a monthly, automatically recurring, fixed fee is convenient. Out of sight, out of mind.
- Spivak 9y ago
  I generally feel the opposite. It's much easier for me to buy a movie or box set outright than subscribe to a streaming service. It's pretty much the same with all fixed recurring payments -- I always feel pressure to use the service and I'm constantly evaluating whether its worth it.
- rhino369 9y ago
  That sounds like price anxiety to me. If you didn’t care about cost you’d just buy. If Netflix cost 100 bucks a month you’d have the same anxiety.
  - ghaff 9y ago
    I'm very skeptical about arguments that it's about convenience and not price. Yes, especially outside the US, there is some content that is difficult to get legally for any amount of money. But there's also some upper limit to what I'm willing to pay for physical media that I'll watch once (even if I can acquire it with one click on Amazon) or what I'm going to pay for a monthly subscription even if it were a hypothetical all digitized content ever made for one monthly fee.
- wuliwong 9y ago
  I don't understand your point, HBO Now is monthly and automatically recurring.