4 ms·
I'd pay money for a Netflix-like service for newspapers. I know it's probably not as good for the newspaper business as the old subscription model, but it's pre
by calebh 8y ago
I'd pay money for a Netflix-like service for newspapers. I know it's probably not as good for the newspaper business as the old subscription model, but it's pretty much the only viable model that I can see working.
- dopeboy 8y agoMe and three friends worked on a similar idea at the YC hackathon a couple weeks ago. You'd pay us $10/month and we'd buy a lot of subscriptions to different newspapers. You'd install our chrome extension and when you came across a paywall, we'd autofill credentials that are just valid for one day. We didn't win but it definitely piqued the interest of the crowd and the judges (Sam, Michael, and Adora). We're not pursuing it but hopefully others do.
- michaeltoth 8y agoThis is a cool idea, but I imagine this isn't legal, right? Creating an actual business out of this would have to require buy-in from the content creators
- psherman42 8y agoI think it’s funny how everyone is surprised that Silicon Valley hackathon-goers don’t understand or care about copyright. Maybe they’re just “disrupting”!
- matthewmcg 8y agoWhat did you plan to do when the publishers terminated your accounts for sharing credentials?
- rocky1138 8y agoProbably keep making more until the publishers were forced to negotiate. This method is successful. See: Uber.
- jstarfish 8y agoProxy and cache articles using a standard set of credentials from a set list of origin IPs, most likely. The traffic would appear as that of an average reader.
- TheCoelacanth 8y agoThat sounds very likely to get you sued for copyright infringement.
- djsumdog 8y agoOr just provide a front end for caching via archive.is and other archive sites?
- jogjayr 8y agoIf it gains sufficient traction and was found to generate equal or more revenue for publishers I could see them willing to come to the table. The problem I see with bringing publishers to the table is: How do you distribute revenue? Pageviews? That's what you don't want papers to optimize for right now. Equally? Hardly seems fair. Who decides which publishers are on Netscoopx? What ratio of subscribers to paper subscriptions should Netscoopx maintain? Overall the idea reminds me of Grooveshark and Aereo simultaneously.
- blahedo 8y agoBut, how is this not a flagrant violation of basically everybody's TOS, and illegal in its own right?
- julesjanssen 8y agoCheck Blendle https://blendle.com/ https://blendle.com/