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Netflix Is Why AT&T bought Time Warner, and Comcast and Disney want Fox

178 points by prostoalex 8y ago

black6 8y ago
Verizon wanted to divest itself of HuffPo almost immediately. The service provider(s) who ignore content and focus on the network infrastructure (Internet pipes, if you will) and practice(s) “net neutrality” as fundamental to the business model will come out on top. The vertical integration of service providers and content producers will only end poorly.
TACIXAT 8y ago
This post's title is a nightmare. Original from the article: >How Netflix sent the biggest media companies into a frenzy, and why Netflix thinks some are getting it wrong
MisterTea 8y ago
These companies are obsessed with fragmenting the market for the sake of owning content from production to delivery. I have bad news for them: you're going to lose. People don't want to go back to paying $100/month for a dozen streaming "channels" with one or two good shows and a the same crap the rest of the other "channels" have. We want an on-demand nexus. A single hub. Just the other day I had the urge to watch ghost in the shell. Not available on any of the major streaming sites (Netflix, Hulu, Prime) but available on stars via prime. So I have to pay an addition $7/month to watch a single show? No thanks. Off to a torrent site or asking around to see if someone has rips or a box set. I have better things to do with $7 like buy dinner.
- skinnymuch 8y ago
  Lionsgate Starz isn’t a big company with a lot of products so paying extra to watch things for that channel will be a challenge no matter what. On the other hand, HBO seems to be doing well enough with their not so cheap stand alone offering. Disney with Fox’s media would be a pretty big streaming provider and many people would likely get onto it. Good chance of it becoming a standard streaming service. So I don’t see how that specific merger is a bad idea in a battle against Netflix.
  - yebyen 8y ago
    If you're talking about HBO Go, I don't know how you gauge success, but if it's subscriber numbers I would take that with a grain of salt. I am a Comcast subscriber, and like many Comcast subscribers I'm sure, I have one of their boxes in my house, with the most basic Cable TV package, because if I don't take it my cost goes up (I mean the overall price of the monthly billed amount from Comcast/Xfinity). We get crappy quality SD letterbox channels including some local OTA channels that we can watch Jeopardy on, at lower quality than OTA whenever the antenna isn't doing the job. Oh, and HBO/On-Demand is also included. That includes HBO Go (but not HBO Now.) I don't use either HBO service and I don't know how they are different, at the risk of adding anecdata to an otherwise solid argument... Whether or not any of this works out to be a favorable deal for HBO, I can't say, but I hope this explains why I would say to take their digital subscriber numbers with a grain of salt. (On the other hand, I will actually pay for Showtime standalone when they have put out a new season of Homeland.)
    - vincentmarle 8y ago
      HBO Go is what you get when you subscribe to HBO through your cable service, HBO Now is a direct subscription to HBO.
      - yebyen 8y ago
        Thank you. That was clear-as-mud every time I wondered what the difference was before.
    - tzs 8y ago
      > I am a Comcast subscriber, and like many Comcast subscribers I'm sure, I have one of their boxes in my house, with the most basic Cable TV package, because if I don't take it my cost goes up (I mean the overall price of the monthly billed amount from Comcast/Xfinity) This seems to vary region to region. Where I am (western Washington, west of Seattle) all the internet-only packages are cheaper than all the internet + TV packages at the same internet speed, as far as I can tell. When comparing the price with and without TV, are your taking into account the fees and equipment charges that go away if you don't have TV? Although here internet only is cheaper than internet + TV, it isn't much cheaper. I've got 400 Mb/s internet, Preferred TV (220+ channels + Starz), and Phone, and dropping down to just 400 Mb/s internet would only knock $20 off the base price. That's a small enough change that it is probably less than I'd end up spending on streaming subscription and rental services to make up for the lost TV. However, dropping TV and phone would also drop $11/month for the DVR service, $8/month for the broadcast TV fee, $6.30/month for the regional sports fee, and $4.60 for the franchise fee (and maybe some sales tax, if any of those fees are taxable). That's another $30/month, so we are talking $50/month less on my total bill. Now I would come out ahead even if I have to subscribe to multiple streaming services for my TV.
- rhino369 8y ago
  >We want an on-demand nexus. A single hub. So you want one company to control all media? Seems like a poor plan longterm.
  - Spivak 8y ago
    Don't really care if it's a single company so long as they operate actually independently of content production and are only a distributor.
  - woolvalley 8y ago
    There seems to be quite a few available for music. Using apple music, spotify, tidal or whatever else doesn't seem to have the exclusivity problems that TV equivalents have. I can probably count the number of exclusive artists to each music provider on my hand.
    - AnthonyMouse 8y ago
      They're trying to recreate the cable TV channel package model on the internet, because it's a mechanism for price discrimination. If you make twenty shows and you want to sell subscriptions a la carte, how much do you charge per show? If you charge $10/month per show then you lose the business of everyone who might have paid you anything even slightly less than that. If you charge $.50/month per show to get those customers, you lose $9.50/month from everyone who would have paid $10/month per show. But if you put all twenty shows together in a bundle and sell them collectively for $10/month, you get $10/month from everyone who values the collection of shows at $10/month or more, regardless of the value they place on each individual show. Which can turn out to be more money. But that is less likely to work in a more competitive market. People only have so many hours to watch television. It may be worth $10/month for a package of shows to get the one you really want when that's the only option, but when someone else is offering an equivalently good show a la carte for $10/year and you don't have time to watch both, people will choose the one that saves them $90/year worth of shows they weren't actually interested in. The broader problem is that without a distribution monopoly to use as a chokepoint, content creation is a highly competitive market, and highly competitive markets have low margins. So the incumbents are flailing around trying to find something that looks like the model they're used to, even though that model is now defunct. The model which is likely to out-compete a la carte is the one where content producers make non-exclusive licenses to multiple aggregation companies that sell flat rate plans to their customers. Because $10/month for twenty shows can't out-compete $10/year for the one show you actually want anymore, but $20/month for every show can.
- rayiner 8y ago
  What you’re proposing would lead to a terrible market structure. It would eliminate the most important differentiating factor: content. Subscribing to multiple streaming services might be somewhat less convenient, but it also allows competition based on producing and distributing quality content.
  - shmerl 8y ago
    Subscribing to many services because each offers some exclusive stuff is inconvenient and taxes the user with the overhead of each service. People want to find more in their favorite stores. If creators would have been independent of distributors, this wouldn't have been a problem to begin with. Each creator would distribute in each store. But all this integration causes exclusivity that only inconveniences the end user. Netflix isn't any better in this sense, since they have tons of exclusives too. Competition on exclusivity is not good in the end and only benefits the distributor. In this sense, the idea above is spot on. How are these fragmented services (with DRM to boot) going to compete with torrents that offer everything without DRM through unified hubs? Film makers need to pull stuff together and fix it.
    - scarface74 8y ago
      The whole spiel about DRM is that you don’t truly own the content you buy and the inconvenience of not being able to use the content on the device of your choice. When you subscribe to streaming services you aren’t paying for ownership, you are paying for access. As far as convenience, the major streaming services are all on the web for computers and they all have apps for everything imaginable. Netflix, Hulu, et. al. are much more convenient that piracy. Besides they said the same thing about iTunes back in 2003. I stopped pirating music when the iTunes Misic Store was introduced. I definitely wouldn’t worry about pirating now over paying $15/month for the family Apple Music plan.
      - shmerl 8y ago
        > When you subscribe to streaming services you aren’t paying for ownership, you are paying for access. I personally prefer to avoid DRMed services and buy DRM-free. It's reasonably good with music and games for example, but with films you barely can find anything that way. The reason for renting digital goods is usually presented as an option to get it for lower prices, even though there is no scarcity like with physical goods. That's fine, people might want to rent something and pay less. But why does it mean there should be no option to buy (for higher price)? That is already not right, i.e. forcing renting only approach. That's why I quite dislike DRM attached to renting services as well.
- sosborn 8y ago
  > Off to a torrent site or asking around to see if someone has rips or a box set. The other option is to just not watch it.
  - rayiner 8y ago
    The down voting you’re getting is emblematic of the entitlement mentality among tech folks when it comes to content. There is no right to consume entertainment someone else produced for free. If you don’t like the terms on which they’re selling the fruits of their labor, don’t buy it.
    - lovich 8y ago
      If that feeling went both ways I could agree. Companies however, obviously don't like not controlling everything the public has and do things like increase copyright to a length that their own company would have never started(Disney), or try to claim that users no longer own products they buy and can no longer repair things themselves (John Deere). Companies have already taken multiple sustained attacks against consumers rights so why would consumers care about the companies rights?
      - rayiner 8y ago
        “Companies” are not an undifferentiated mass. What does John Deere have to do with Dexter or Game of Thrones? Are people only pirating the work of “bad” companies?
        lovich 8y ago
        Consumers aren't an undifferentiated mass either. Why are paying customers sitting through 5 minutes of FBI warnings in front of DVDs because some other people pirate? These arguments go both ways but a large portion of this forum seems to only view it from the companies perspective
        adventured 8y ago
- tzs 8y ago
  > Just the other day I had the urge to watch ghost in the shell. Not available on any of the major streaming sites (Netflix, Hulu, Prime) but available on stars via prime ... Off to a torrent site or asking around to see if someone has rips or a box set. I have better things to do with $7 like buy dinner Or you could have rented the Blu-ray at Redbox for $2 (or streamed it from Redbox for $5).
  - YokoZar 8y ago
    Or streamed it from Google Play for $2
    - lovich 8y ago
      How does any of this change the OP's point about fragmentation of the market? It does nothing to benefit the consumer, the competition is not lowering prices, so why would consumers not go back to piracy when it results in a superior product?
      - consumethreads 8y ago
        because we are not cheap and are ok with paying for a service. How cheap should it be. There will be no service that people will pay for if they pirate content. The service they want is a service where they dont have to pay. If you are pirating you are not a customer. Any business man should not be concerned with trying to gain your market, its not profitable.
        lovich 8y ago
        Steam, iTunes, and Spotify have almost completely killed off pirating for games and music. It's still possible but people would rather pay for those services because the services actually add a value over the actual data which is post scarcity. TV and the film industry have decided they'll make more money by making a worse product and doing everything they can to prevent users from finding alternatives
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- consumethreads 8y ago
  "We want an on-demand nexus." up until a point ... HBO has been all about the entire pipeline from its inception because it feels (and has proven) that its content alone is good enough for it to be purchased a la carte. Netflix and all others see this and say ... theres a business model here. Fastforward 20 years, creating good content is cheaper. There are more film grad students to make the supply cheaper. Add to that the internet which allows you to be your own distributor. Basically its easier to be HBO today than when HBO started and you still get the added profits that HBO gets vs not generating your own content. We want a hub but well take what we can get as long as the content is good. And we will get custom content because we have shown it pays. I guess we dont want the hub enough.
  - AckSyn 8y ago
    Apple has been trying to do the on-demand nexus on their platform for a while, but a lot of services don't want to play ball. Notably Netflix and Hulu. Which doesn't make sense to me since you'd be paying for whatever services anyways, just using the Apple branded app to view it through w/o their shitty interface (Netflix and Hulu interfaces really blow).
  - hakfoo 8y ago
    "We want a hub but well take what we can get as long as the content is good." I'm not sure. Convenience seems to trump content in a lot of markets. If you have a solid baseline level of content, the best experience wins. In that regard, a fragmented market could cause the entire streaming model to-- well perhaps not collapse, but fail to flower fully. Cable says "Yeah, you're spending $80 per month, but there's one consistent UI, one login, one bill." Streaming with one service like pre-fragmentation Netflix, says "You're spending $10 per month, getting a modest content pool, and it's all still pretty easy to use." But how will people respond to "You're spending $50 per month, get a fairly broad selection of content, but it's all scattered across a bunch of services which behave subtly differently and have to be managed independently?" They might well respond by going back to the less-hassle cable option, or just shed services til they get to something that feels manageable-- one or two services, maybe paying for a month of something else to binge its signature show once a year. Netflix and HBO might kick out enough big draws to justify subscribing year-round, but will a low-budget or niche player?
- always_good 8y ago
  > We want an on-demand nexus. Ah right, the utopia of extreme centralization I keep hearing HNers rave about.
  - phobosdeimos 8y ago
    Technically pirates figured that one out a long time ago.
- axaxs 8y ago
  Agreed. TV for me is a nicety, I enjoy it from time to time. I'm already a bit putoff from having both Netflix and Hulu, forgetting which show is on which, two apps, etc. I have a feeling we're heading towards each player making their own ecosystem, apps, monthly charges. If/when that happens, I'll either not watch TV at all, or use the 'free' options widely available. I want to give them money, but not if it makes my life more of a hassle.
  - giancarlostoro 8y ago
    >forgetting which show is on which On my Android TV device (Mi Box $60 at WalMart) if I search a show it aggregates results from all my apps so it doesn't even matter which app it's on I just click from the results and it opens what I want. Disclaimer: Not affiliated with anything I just mentioned just a happy customer.
    - axaxs 8y ago
      Ohhh...that sounds like a nice feature! I'll research this thank you.
      - giancarlostoro 8y ago
        Yeah no problem, I had seen the Android TV box at WalMart and said to myself: if this thing is awesome I'm gifting one to my parents, now they want two more... They've been asking for it to replace cable and they're not extremely tech savvy or anything! It's also a 4K capable device, so it's pretty good, I've had it for almost 2 years now. I otherwise would of had to use a Raspberry Pi with Kodi (and yes, the Android TV can run Kodi, much smoother).
    - henrikschroder 8y ago
      My current and my previous Samsung TVs had this built-in as well. It can search the channel guide in the cable-box, the installed apps, as well as some pay-per-view alternatives. Works pretty damn well, actually.
- Karishma1234 8y ago
  Well the ATT and other behemoths are set for a massive failure. Their core business has been navigating regulatory mazes while trying to seek near monopoly and push expensive and crappy subscriptions down the throats of old and gullible people. With each passing Year Netflix and Hulu are adding more and more original content which is becoming part of pop-culture. Within 5 years most of the cool things we want to watch would be from Netflix and Hulu and everything else would come from torrents or youtube. Dinosaurs are dying and we should cheer.
  - paul7986 8y ago
    Hulu is owned by Fox, Comcast, Warner and Disney.
- heroprotagonist 8y ago
  Once that torrent download becomes 'Miscellaneous data' charged per gigabyte due to loss of net neutrality, won't that encourage you through their preferred channel? Personally, I'll start reading books more but I imagine 90% of my country won't. They'll go through the service that has a deal with their ISP. The scarier part being that regardless of whether I go through the recommended source or disregard the content altogether, it's an impact on the information and ideas I consume.
- macspoofing 8y ago
  >I have bad news for them: you're going to lose. People don't want to go back to paying $100/month for a dozen streaming "channels" with one or two good shows and a the same crap the rest of the other "channels" have. No. That's not the correct way to think about this. You are dreaming if you think media and production companies are going to leave $90/mo on the table. You will see prices rise. You will see multiple streaming services. You will see bills in the same ballpark as those of cable/satellite ... because that's about the sweet spot for people willing to spend monthly for media content. >We want an on-demand nexus. A single hub. You won't get it. Nobody is going to let anyone control all media distribution. >So I have to pay an addition $7/month to watch a single show? Yeah. Or you can just pass on that single show. >Off to a torrent site or asking around to see if someone has rips or a box set. I have better things to do with $7 like buy dinner. Age of piracy is going to end as well. And by the way, you are free to go and buy dinner and read a book. Nobody needs to watch the latest season of GoT - its not a human right. Talk about entitled!
  - DrJaws 8y ago
    some poeple will just go back to p2p and there is nothing they can do.
    - macspoofing 8y ago
      I think you'll find avenues for piracy are going to be limited. Even now piracy isn't quite the same as it used to be.
      - LeoNatan25 8y ago
        Easier than ever to get season packs, rips, remuxes. And that’s downloads. If you want to stream, it’s even easier.
      - freeone3000 8y ago
        You're right, instead of getting a XDCC link from a listserv, you now buy a modded HTPC off Craigslist. It's way easier to pirate things now. People are pirating music. Off youtube. ACCIDENTALLY. To the point where there's an elaborate automated filtering system. It's not even viewed as piracy!
- im3w1l 8y ago
  Careful what you wish for, because that hub will be censored and the useful idiots will scream that it's not censorship if it's not the government. I'd much rather a very very fragmented space with lots of diverse productions and perspectives.
- SllX 8y ago
  You have it backwards: a la carte is exactly what people want. If they didn’t, they wouldn’t pay for so many different subscriptions.
- lgregg 8y ago
  > We want an on-demand nexus. A single hub. That is close to existing, it'd be nice if the top players agreed to open their APIs so you could integrate it into a unified TV external like Chromecast or Firestick. Or, to go further, a unified platform that can process subscriptions and PPV across each library. > $100/month for a dozen streaming "channels" with one or two good shows and a the same crap the rest of the other "channels" have. Amen, we cut the cord officially on Friday. We went to $67 (including modem rental) per month plus about $25 dollars in streaming services and $40 for YT TV per month. That's still $35 dollars cheaper than what we were paying for Comcast TV and once we buy a compatible modem then we'll drop our internet to about $55 per month. We also have renters, so we loop them into YTTV for them to watch to their heart's desire for an extra $5 on their rent per month. > Ghost in the Shell Respect just got done rewatching an episode of the TV show.
  - JimmyAustin 8y ago
    The on-demand nexus already works on Apple TV. Say "I want to watch Billions" into the remote and it shows you all the services you can watch it on, then tap through to actually watching it. Now if only it existed on other platforms.
    - lgregg 8y ago
      > Now if only it existed on other platforms. and has everyone's original content.
    - developer2 8y ago
      Can you elaborate? Does Apple TV let you purchase à la carte (on-demand) from any service, or do you still have to buy into a monthly subscription for a service just to watch one movie or TV series from its catalog? The "one hub nexus" we are clamoring for requires either a) preferably, a single monthly fee to access everything; or b) less ideally, assuming reasonable prices, on-demand pay-per-view pricing. A nexus that simplifies signing up for a dozen different streaming service subscriptions from one UI is not good enough. All that does is improve the frontend experience, while doing nothing to resolve the subscription hell that expects consumers to shell out $80+/month across many services to watch maybe 1% of the content.
- tootie 8y ago
  Rent it. Usually $4 on Amazon or Google or Vudu.
- JohnJamesRambo 8y ago
  How noble of you to steal what you didn’t want to pay for to fulfill your urge. Do you try this at the grocery store also when you get frustrated by the prices charged by the people that created the items?
  - IntelMiner 8y ago
    Piracy is not the same as theft. Please do not conflate the two
- bookbinder 8y ago
  People don't want to pay $100 a month for cable TV either, but they did it anyway (for decades) and continue to do so. Now we're being asked to buy a bunch of streaming services and we'll bitch and moan, but ultimately we'll pay because every major platform will have at least one show that justifies their existence. I associate CBS with bland procedural crime dramas and awful three-camera sitcoms. CBS All Access would have been doomed without Star Trek: Discovery. Admittedly, the show isn't particularly good, but I'm a trekkie so it doesn't matter. On the plus side, I discovered The Good Fight (a surprising smart, entertaining and well written show) so I now I have a legitimate reason to give a damn about All Access. And then Apple will offer their own gateway drug (Lord of the Rings?) and Disney (...well they could just offer their back catalogue alone and still be a major player) and so on.
  - adjkant 8y ago
    > continue to do so What are the numbers on that? My impression was that cable is declining fast.
  - daveFNbuck 8y ago
    I've paid for 2 months of CBS All Access, once at the end of each season of The Good Fight. That one show only gets me to pay a bit less than $1/month. Comedy Central doesn't have a streaming service, so I have to pay for shows individually on Amazon. That also ends up being a lot cheaper than CBS All Access, and it cuts me off from learning about their other shows. I think all the Comedy Central shows I used to watch have been cancelled, so they won't be getting any of my money going forward unless I somehow learn about their new shows. That's a lot easier to do if my existing services start recommending Comedy Central shows to me.
  - MikusR 8y ago
    Lord of the Rings is Amazon
  - pwinnski 8y ago
    > People don't want to pay $100 a month for cable TV either, but they did it anyway (for decades)... In the absence of alternatives, it seemed like what entertainment cost. The alternatives for free or cheap are enough that many, many, many people are opting out. > ...and continue to do so. Evidence[0] suggests otherwise. Leaving evidence aside, I think that each service will likely have something to attract some number of subscribers, yes. Amazon is doing LotR, Disney wants a piece, CBS has Star Trek, etc. I don't think it follows that a large number of people are going to subscribe to more than one or two on an ongoing basis. People subscribe to CBS All-Access for one month, perhaps a trial month, and binge all of ST:D, then cancel. They already have a subscription to Amazon Prime for non-TV reasons. Maybe they share subscriptions with friends, or maybe they turn to piracy, or maybe they just shrug and go back to watching Netflix and YouTube, which is enough. Most people never had all the available channels, including premium channels, anyway. Going without a show or two isn't a problem for most people when the marginal cost is so high. [0] https://variety.com/2018/biz/news/cord-cutting-2017-high-cost-cancellation-pay-tv-1202728922/ https://variety.com/2018/biz/news/cord-cutting-2017-high-cos...
- ocdtrekkie 8y ago
  The idea you'd be able to see everything you want for $9/month when the going rate was $100/month is and remains an utter fantasy. There is no way, shape, or form where the industry is going to suddenly operate on 90% less income. Ironically, when you ask for one big hub, you're asking for a traditional cable subscription: Comcast will give you most of the channels out there (often, throwing HBO in for free), and due to the APIs the major ISPs and channels are on board with, you can either watch them on Comcast's site or the individual channel websites. Oh, and Comcast boxes now integrate your Netflix subscription too. Cable packages when bundled with Internet service are often pretty price-competitive for what they offer. I recently left Comcast, but picked up their competitors' cable package for the same reasons: It's a pretty inclusive streaming package for a good price.
  - felipemnoa 8y ago
    >>The idea you'd be able to see everything you want for $9/month when the going rate was $100/month is and remains an utter fantasy. There is no way, shape, or form where the industry is going to suddenly operate on 90% less income. Reminds me of at&t. They made boatloads of money at one time until they didn't. I'm sure they didn't like it when suddenly their main product, long distance calls, became dirt cheap. I still remember paying huge amounts of money in late 1990s to make calls from NYC to Buffalo. The whole thing was such a big racket. I for one will not shed a single tear if these companies go out of business. Some other companies will take their place.
    - ocdtrekkie 8y ago
      Bear in mind, everyone's talking about how must-see a given TV show is, and how much they loathe "having to" shell out money to see it on X streaming service. Prices go down when demand is low. Demand for TV is not low, ergo, prices are not going to go down. Also, when it does, the first casualty isn't going to be the companies: It's going to be the shows you love. People on HN were thrilled when Amazon saved The Expanse. But if The Expanse doesn't drive X number of new Prime subscribers, it won't be around much longer than that.
- rileyphone 8y ago
  The fact is the reason anyone pays for content online is because the cost to access it is less than the cost to download and manage it as well as the possible cost of acquiring it is less than the cost of accessing it, which goes down the more content can be accessed. Every monthly subscription has an additional cost of maintaining beyond it's numenary value which quickly bring them above just torrenting the content. Ultimately the content is just constant information, which is pretty cheap on the internet.
- petre 8y ago
  They will bundle Internet subscriptions with cable plans. UPC already does that.
- chrismcb 8y ago
  Instead of stealing" it, you could have just rented it. There was a time if you wanted to watch a show you went down and rented it.
- NicoJuicy 8y ago
  Well, except if your kids want it. Disney is probably in a good position there
- SomewhatLikely 8y ago
  We have the nexus for music and I assume for books, not sure why video is still a hold out except I believe music and books are more regulated.
- Benji_San 8y ago
  I would be OK with occasionally paying for other streaming services than Netflix if they actually worked, I.e. better than torrents and preferably on Netflix's level. The other services available in the Nordics are not even close with some "not working at all" and some have shitty/exclusive device support. Subtitle/language options tend to be abysmal and Netflix, which isn't very good on this front, seems to be the winner there too. I'm more or less still waiting for Steam for films and TV series where I could just download the video file with whatever audio/language track I want. Providing a Netflix quality streaming service seems to be ridiculously non-trivial so it would be great if less complex and better working solutions were offered until the streaming platforms are figured out. Until that happens torrents offer a vastly superior way to watch content that is not on Netflix.
empath75 8y ago
If those company think it’s about content libraries they’re going to lose. All those companies think: we own a lot of media, we can just build a streaming media platform. And I think they’re way underestimating how hard it is to build the technology stack and processes that Netflix has. Netflix has an engineering team and a development and deployment process that has some production studios attached to it. Disney can probably copy what Netflix has today, but by the time they’ve done that, Netflix will have updated their platform hundreds of time, and I don’t think they’re going to be able to build an engineering team that can keep up.
- chiefalchemist 8y ago
  Yes. But Devil's Advocate here... Aside from stack, whatelse does Netflix have going for it? Pre-internet Blockbuster had an overpowering / dominate "stack" and that was their downfall. If VR is the next progression in home entertainment, who is best poised for that? Who has the tech + creativity DNA?
  - AnthonyMouse 8y ago
    > Pre-internet Blockbuster had an overpowering / dominate "stack" and that was their downfall. That is because the internet replaced them. Streaming is a direct replacement for video rentals. It's the exact same movie but you don't have to drive to the video store to get it. The industry itself doesn't go away. There isn't any apparent new distribution method that will do to the internet what the internet did to brick and mortar stores. VR is a completely different industry, more related to video games than film, and from a distribution standpoint is nothing new. VR isn't going to cause people to download games from some hypothetical new non-internet distribution network.
    - erik_seaberg 8y ago
      > drive to the video store to get it … only to find that all the copies are rented for the weekend.
    - chii 8y ago
bootlooped 8y ago
I think maybe the title could use some punctuation or reworking > Netflix Is Why AT&T bought Time Warner... Ok, yes, they bought Time Warner > Netflix Is Why AT&T bought Time Warner and Comcast... They bought Comcast too? > Netflix Is Why AT&T bought Time Warner and Comcast and Disney... And Disney!? > Netflix Is Why AT&T bought Time Warner and Comcast and Disney want Fox AT&T bought Time Warner and Comcast; Disney want Fox?
- reubenmorais 8y ago
  "Want" disambiguates to plural subject, so it can only be "Comcast and Disney want Fox".
  - wging 8y ago
    It's a subtle nuance that people often get wrong, though -- or they may be speaking in a dialect like British English, where 'want' (plural subject) is used for corporate entities. (I admit the latter is unlikely for an American publication.)
  - adrianmonk 8y ago
    You're absolutely right, but that still leaves it a garden path sentence (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden_path_sentence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden_path_sentence) and thus a poor title. The measure of good writing isn't that it's possible to parse unambiguously with sufficient dedication. Good writing gets the idea across without placing any undue burden on the reader. (And it's easily fixed by adding a second "why": "Netflix is why AT&T bought Time Warner and why Comcast and Disney want Fox".)
    - bootlooped 8y ago
      Thanks for this, I didn't realize there was a term for the issue I was taking with the structure.
  - always_good 8y ago
    But Disney can be plural the same way some people will write sentences like "Radiohead are awesome". It's ambiguous. There's no reason not to punctuate here.
digi_owl 8y ago
A large part of the initial appeal of Netflix, in particular for foreigners, was that they seemed to house digitized versions of straight-to-VHS movies that never left USA. But after the initial raving success, the big studios have been clamping down on giving blanket access to their back catalog of obscurities. Looking for those extra percentages of leaving out the middle man.
- Rjevski 8y ago
  > Looking for those extra percentages of leaving out the middle man. Is this profitable in the age of The Pirate Bay or illegal streaming? I'd argue easy legal access & better discoverability would more than make up for the cut taken by middlemen like Netflix.
- ascagnel_ 8y ago
  Netflix got the rights to stream the entirety of Starz's cable library for peanuts back in 2007 or 2008 -- that deal put them on the map since they got some high-quality content for basically nothing. The movie and TV distributors learned from the record labels -- they're deathly afraid of how iTunes basically took over the market, and will go out of their way to make sure the system stays as decentralized as possible.
sureaboutthis 8y ago
It's interesting it took ATT and Disney this long to figure out that this is a thing.
- noitsnot 8y ago
  Netflix's profit has only started to grow big enough in the past few years to even become a blip on those massive companies radar.
- r00fus 8y ago
  They were hoping Netflix would die or be acquired and lose it's edge. It's possible they did know but couldn't replicate what Netflix has done with any reliability or profitability. Innovators dilemma.
makecheck 8y ago
Companies focus on buying content while ignoring the quality of the broadcast experience. I am tired of competitors that skimp on this. Netflix doesn’t shove ads in your face, works on every platform and almost never has mysterious transmission failures. And now they have excellent content too. They have figured out so much more than some of the last-century providers.
- majani 8y ago
  and yet they still make mind boggling losses with no end in sight. I think in the next 10 years Netflix will serve as a reality check that shows why content creators have had to resort to their ugly business practices.
  - goodmattg 8y ago
    "no end in sight" is false. It took ~5 seconds to Google this. https://www.barrons.com/articles/netflix-will-be-cash-flow-positive-by-2022-moodys-says-1523475251 https://www.barrons.com/articles/netflix-will-be-cash-flow-p...
    - casefields 8y ago
      That’s assuming all the customers will continue to subscribe including a bunch of price increases and nearly double the current amount of subscribers. “We expect the steady subscriber growth, together with gradual price increases will outpace the increasing investment in content and the upfront working capital spending on self-produced and owned programming, resulting in steadily improving margins. We believe that those margins will need to grow from the 7% range of 2017, to the low to mid 20% range to generate positive cash flows. As a result, we forecast the company becoming cash-flow positive in approximately five years.” Yeah that increases as in plural.
- adjkant 8y ago
  Hulu is the worst goddamn experience, not even just because of ads, but the entire platform is so buggy and fragile. The Netflix playback experience is somehow still highly underrated. Amazon got the playback experience right pretty quick as well - I really want to know what is stopping Hulu.
p2t2p 8y ago
I'm a simple man: if I the music isn't on Spotify or Bandcamp I'm gonna torrent it. If the movie/show isn't on Netflix, I'm gonna torrent it. I'm not buying any dodgy channel subscriptions full of crap.
- mywittyname 8y ago
  This is my view (except I don't pirate the content). In my eyes, content creators know that these services exist, and how many people use them. So if they make a decision to cut out a large portion of the market, then I guess it's not important for them to be enjoyed by everyone. I don't want to manage and pay for dozens of services. I use iTunes/Spotify, Netflix/Prime, and Steam/GoG. Any new service is going to need to displace one of those. This probably means being 10x better at 1/10th of the price.
Bud 8y ago
This re-written headline could really use some punctuation for clarity, moderators.
- dang 8y ago
  It's the HTML doc title as well as the URL slug, so not technically rewritten, but let's have a disambiguating comma.
mjfern 8y ago
I teach a startup course at a public university. We had a class on disruption, where we specifically talked about Netflix. I polled my students and asked how many have cable or satellite. A single hand went up, out of over 30 students. I then asked how many had Netflix. Every hand went up. AT&T can buy Time Warner and Comcast can buy NBC and Fox. It's not going to matter. Millennials and Gen Z aren't going to pay for bundled linear content via cable and satellite with heavy amounts of advertising. The model is in process of being disrupted. Within a decade or so, I bet traditional cable and satellite goes the way of AOL and landlines.
Tiktaalik 8y ago
I wonder if this market segment will evolve to be similar to the games industry, where market leadership shifts along with customers interests. In the games industry a few big exclusives can shift fortunes significantly. The Playstation 4's significant success has come at the expense of the Xbox, and a driving factor of this success has been a superior exclusive content library.
lev99 8y ago
Why does cable TV cost money? Wouldn't the advertising cover the distribution/production costs?
- chii 8y ago
  If they can charge for it, they are going to charge for it. Since there's no competition, there's no pressure to not charge the highest price. Now that Netflix or other streaming services threaten this business model, the old guard is scrambling to get back to the same business model.
honestoHeminway 8y ago
Like steam for movies.
coretx 8y ago
Loads of comments regarding what "I" want or someone else wants. I think it's irrelevant and perhaps even dangerous to have the focal point on such popularities because the matter at hand is far more simple. Copyright grants a distribution monopoly >> Monopolists makes money monopolists style >> Internet breaks the distribution monopoly >> And now: copyright distribution monopolist buys ISP's ( distributors ) in order to regain control of the market. This is not about you, me, "people", it's simply business.
inanutshellus 8y ago
With ISPs becoming content companies, and with Net Neutrality dead they can charge companies like Netflix higher data rates.... Seems like Netflix needs to buy an ISP.
- inanutshellus 8y ago
  ... or stop allowing these mega-mega-mega-mega mergers :)
fenwick67 8y ago
The rhetoric by these gaint media companies about how "we're merging so we can compete with Netflix" is a con. They say "we have to get more vertically integrated like Netflix to survive", but Time Warner Cable is already as vertical as Netflix! They have their own production and distribution already, and Netflix isn't an ISP.
TooBrokeToBeg 8y ago
Netflix isn't that good, with such a crappy lineup and limited old mainstream movies. It's just cheap. Our household and people at work (california) struggle to justify paying for it.
richardthered 8y ago
The two main pricing models, today, are: 1) fixed monthly fee for one providers' content (e.g. Netflix) 2) pay-by-the-drink (e.g. $3.99 for this episode) I spend a lot less on pay-by-the-drink services than I do on recurring subscriptions. Cognitively, every time I initiate a purchase, I pause, and decide whether I want to spend the money. With a subscription service, I only have to make that choice once. What about a recurring 'credit' service? e.g. sign up for a $30/month recurring service, and you get 50 credits to watch content from a variety of providers?

178 points by prostoalex 8y ago

Verizon wanted to divest itself of HuffPo almost immediately. The service provider(s) who ignore content and focus on the network infrastructure (Internet pipes, if you will) and practice(s) “net neutrality” as fundamental to the business model will come out on top. The vertical integration of service providers and content producers will only end poorly.

TACIXAT 8y ago

This post's title is a nightmare. Original from the article: >How Netflix sent the biggest media companies into a frenzy, and why Netflix thinks some are getting it wrong

MisterTea 8y ago

These companies are obsessed with fragmenting the market for the sake of owning content from production to delivery. I have bad news for them: you're going to lose. People don't want to go back to paying $100/month for a dozen streaming "channels" with one or two good shows and a the same crap the rest of the other "channels" have. We want an on-demand nexus. A single hub. Just the other day I had the urge to watch ghost in the shell. Not available on any of the major streaming sites (Netflix, Hulu, Prime) but available on stars via prime. So I have to pay an addition $7/month to watch a single show? No thanks. Off to a torrent site or asking around to see if someone has rips or a box set. I have better things to do with $7 like buy dinner.

skinnymuch 8y ago
Lionsgate Starz isn’t a big company with a lot of products so paying extra to watch things for that channel will be a challenge no matter what. On the other hand, HBO seems to be doing well enough with their not so cheap stand alone offering. Disney with Fox’s media would be a pretty big streaming provider and many people would likely get onto it. Good chance of it becoming a standard streaming service. So I don’t see how that specific merger is a bad idea in a battle against Netflix.
- yebyen 8y ago
  If you're talking about HBO Go, I don't know how you gauge success, but if it's subscriber numbers I would take that with a grain of salt. I am a Comcast subscriber, and like many Comcast subscribers I'm sure, I have one of their boxes in my house, with the most basic Cable TV package, because if I don't take it my cost goes up (I mean the overall price of the monthly billed amount from Comcast/Xfinity). We get crappy quality SD letterbox channels including some local OTA channels that we can watch Jeopardy on, at lower quality than OTA whenever the antenna isn't doing the job. Oh, and HBO/On-Demand is also included. That includes HBO Go (but not HBO Now.) I don't use either HBO service and I don't know how they are different, at the risk of adding anecdata to an otherwise solid argument... Whether or not any of this works out to be a favorable deal for HBO, I can't say, but I hope this explains why I would say to take their digital subscriber numbers with a grain of salt. (On the other hand, I will actually pay for Showtime standalone when they have put out a new season of Homeland.)
  - vincentmarle 8y ago
    HBO Go is what you get when you subscribe to HBO through your cable service, HBO Now is a direct subscription to HBO.
    - yebyen 8y ago
      Thank you. That was clear-as-mud every time I wondered what the difference was before.
  - tzs 8y ago
    > I am a Comcast subscriber, and like many Comcast subscribers I'm sure, I have one of their boxes in my house, with the most basic Cable TV package, because if I don't take it my cost goes up (I mean the overall price of the monthly billed amount from Comcast/Xfinity) This seems to vary region to region. Where I am (western Washington, west of Seattle) all the internet-only packages are cheaper than all the internet + TV packages at the same internet speed, as far as I can tell. When comparing the price with and without TV, are your taking into account the fees and equipment charges that go away if you don't have TV? Although here internet only is cheaper than internet + TV, it isn't much cheaper. I've got 400 Mb/s internet, Preferred TV (220+ channels + Starz), and Phone, and dropping down to just 400 Mb/s internet would only knock $20 off the base price. That's a small enough change that it is probably less than I'd end up spending on streaming subscription and rental services to make up for the lost TV. However, dropping TV and phone would also drop $11/month for the DVR service, $8/month for the broadcast TV fee, $6.30/month for the regional sports fee, and $4.60 for the franchise fee (and maybe some sales tax, if any of those fees are taxable). That's another $30/month, so we are talking $50/month less on my total bill. Now I would come out ahead even if I have to subscribe to multiple streaming services for my TV.
rhino369 8y ago
>We want an on-demand nexus. A single hub. So you want one company to control all media? Seems like a poor plan longterm.
- Spivak 8y ago
  Don't really care if it's a single company so long as they operate actually independently of content production and are only a distributor.
- woolvalley 8y ago
  There seems to be quite a few available for music. Using apple music, spotify, tidal or whatever else doesn't seem to have the exclusivity problems that TV equivalents have. I can probably count the number of exclusive artists to each music provider on my hand.
  - AnthonyMouse 8y ago
    They're trying to recreate the cable TV channel package model on the internet, because it's a mechanism for price discrimination. If you make twenty shows and you want to sell subscriptions a la carte, how much do you charge per show? If you charge $10/month per show then you lose the business of everyone who might have paid you anything even slightly less than that. If you charge $.50/month per show to get those customers, you lose $9.50/month from everyone who would have paid $10/month per show. But if you put all twenty shows together in a bundle and sell them collectively for $10/month, you get $10/month from everyone who values the collection of shows at $10/month or more, regardless of the value they place on each individual show. Which can turn out to be more money. But that is less likely to work in a more competitive market. People only have so many hours to watch television. It may be worth $10/month for a package of shows to get the one you really want when that's the only option, but when someone else is offering an equivalently good show a la carte for $10/year and you don't have time to watch both, people will choose the one that saves them $90/year worth of shows they weren't actually interested in. The broader problem is that without a distribution monopoly to use as a chokepoint, content creation is a highly competitive market, and highly competitive markets have low margins. So the incumbents are flailing around trying to find something that looks like the model they're used to, even though that model is now defunct. The model which is likely to out-compete a la carte is the one where content producers make non-exclusive licenses to multiple aggregation companies that sell flat rate plans to their customers. Because $10/month for twenty shows can't out-compete $10/year for the one show you actually want anymore, but $20/month for every show can.
rayiner 8y ago
What you’re proposing would lead to a terrible market structure. It would eliminate the most important differentiating factor: content. Subscribing to multiple streaming services might be somewhat less convenient, but it also allows competition based on producing and distributing quality content.
- shmerl 8y ago
  Subscribing to many services because each offers some exclusive stuff is inconvenient and taxes the user with the overhead of each service. People want to find more in their favorite stores. If creators would have been independent of distributors, this wouldn't have been a problem to begin with. Each creator would distribute in each store. But all this integration causes exclusivity that only inconveniences the end user. Netflix isn't any better in this sense, since they have tons of exclusives too. Competition on exclusivity is not good in the end and only benefits the distributor. In this sense, the idea above is spot on. How are these fragmented services (with DRM to boot) going to compete with torrents that offer everything without DRM through unified hubs? Film makers need to pull stuff together and fix it.
  - scarface74 8y ago
    The whole spiel about DRM is that you don’t truly own the content you buy and the inconvenience of not being able to use the content on the device of your choice. When you subscribe to streaming services you aren’t paying for ownership, you are paying for access. As far as convenience, the major streaming services are all on the web for computers and they all have apps for everything imaginable. Netflix, Hulu, et. al. are much more convenient that piracy. Besides they said the same thing about iTunes back in 2003. I stopped pirating music when the iTunes Misic Store was introduced. I definitely wouldn’t worry about pirating now over paying $15/month for the family Apple Music plan.
    - shmerl 8y ago
      > When you subscribe to streaming services you aren’t paying for ownership, you are paying for access. I personally prefer to avoid DRMed services and buy DRM-free. It's reasonably good with music and games for example, but with films you barely can find anything that way. The reason for renting digital goods is usually presented as an option to get it for lower prices, even though there is no scarcity like with physical goods. That's fine, people might want to rent something and pay less. But why does it mean there should be no option to buy (for higher price)? That is already not right, i.e. forcing renting only approach. That's why I quite dislike DRM attached to renting services as well.
sosborn 8y ago
> Off to a torrent site or asking around to see if someone has rips or a box set. The other option is to just not watch it.
- rayiner 8y ago
  The down voting you’re getting is emblematic of the entitlement mentality among tech folks when it comes to content. There is no right to consume entertainment someone else produced for free. If you don’t like the terms on which they’re selling the fruits of their labor, don’t buy it.
  - lovich 8y ago
    If that feeling went both ways I could agree. Companies however, obviously don't like not controlling everything the public has and do things like increase copyright to a length that their own company would have never started(Disney), or try to claim that users no longer own products they buy and can no longer repair things themselves (John Deere). Companies have already taken multiple sustained attacks against consumers rights so why would consumers care about the companies rights?
    - rayiner 8y ago
      “Companies” are not an undifferentiated mass. What does John Deere have to do with Dexter or Game of Thrones? Are people only pirating the work of “bad” companies?
      - lovich 8y ago
        Consumers aren't an undifferentiated mass either. Why are paying customers sitting through 5 minutes of FBI warnings in front of DVDs because some other people pirate? These arguments go both ways but a large portion of this forum seems to only view it from the companies perspective
        adventured 8y ago
tzs 8y ago
> Just the other day I had the urge to watch ghost in the shell. Not available on any of the major streaming sites (Netflix, Hulu, Prime) but available on stars via prime ... Off to a torrent site or asking around to see if someone has rips or a box set. I have better things to do with $7 like buy dinner Or you could have rented the Blu-ray at Redbox for $2 (or streamed it from Redbox for $5).
- YokoZar 8y ago
  Or streamed it from Google Play for $2
  - lovich 8y ago
    How does any of this change the OP's point about fragmentation of the market? It does nothing to benefit the consumer, the competition is not lowering prices, so why would consumers not go back to piracy when it results in a superior product?
    - consumethreads 8y ago
      because we are not cheap and are ok with paying for a service. How cheap should it be. There will be no service that people will pay for if they pirate content. The service they want is a service where they dont have to pay. If you are pirating you are not a customer. Any business man should not be concerned with trying to gain your market, its not profitable.
      - lovich 8y ago
        Steam, iTunes, and Spotify have almost completely killed off pirating for games and music. It's still possible but people would rather pay for those services because the services actually add a value over the actual data which is post scarcity. TV and the film industry have decided they'll make more money by making a worse product and doing everything they can to prevent users from finding alternatives
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
consumethreads 8y ago
"We want an on-demand nexus." up until a point ... HBO has been all about the entire pipeline from its inception because it feels (and has proven) that its content alone is good enough for it to be purchased a la carte. Netflix and all others see this and say ... theres a business model here. Fastforward 20 years, creating good content is cheaper. There are more film grad students to make the supply cheaper. Add to that the internet which allows you to be your own distributor. Basically its easier to be HBO today than when HBO started and you still get the added profits that HBO gets vs not generating your own content. We want a hub but well take what we can get as long as the content is good. And we will get custom content because we have shown it pays. I guess we dont want the hub enough.
- AckSyn 8y ago
  Apple has been trying to do the on-demand nexus on their platform for a while, but a lot of services don't want to play ball. Notably Netflix and Hulu. Which doesn't make sense to me since you'd be paying for whatever services anyways, just using the Apple branded app to view it through w/o their shitty interface (Netflix and Hulu interfaces really blow).
- hakfoo 8y ago
  "We want a hub but well take what we can get as long as the content is good." I'm not sure. Convenience seems to trump content in a lot of markets. If you have a solid baseline level of content, the best experience wins. In that regard, a fragmented market could cause the entire streaming model to-- well perhaps not collapse, but fail to flower fully. Cable says "Yeah, you're spending $80 per month, but there's one consistent UI, one login, one bill." Streaming with one service like pre-fragmentation Netflix, says "You're spending $10 per month, getting a modest content pool, and it's all still pretty easy to use." But how will people respond to "You're spending $50 per month, get a fairly broad selection of content, but it's all scattered across a bunch of services which behave subtly differently and have to be managed independently?" They might well respond by going back to the less-hassle cable option, or just shed services til they get to something that feels manageable-- one or two services, maybe paying for a month of something else to binge its signature show once a year. Netflix and HBO might kick out enough big draws to justify subscribing year-round, but will a low-budget or niche player?
always_good 8y ago
> We want an on-demand nexus. Ah right, the utopia of extreme centralization I keep hearing HNers rave about.
- phobosdeimos 8y ago
  Technically pirates figured that one out a long time ago.
axaxs 8y ago
Agreed. TV for me is a nicety, I enjoy it from time to time. I'm already a bit putoff from having both Netflix and Hulu, forgetting which show is on which, two apps, etc. I have a feeling we're heading towards each player making their own ecosystem, apps, monthly charges. If/when that happens, I'll either not watch TV at all, or use the 'free' options widely available. I want to give them money, but not if it makes my life more of a hassle.
- giancarlostoro 8y ago
  >forgetting which show is on which On my Android TV device (Mi Box $60 at WalMart) if I search a show it aggregates results from all my apps so it doesn't even matter which app it's on I just click from the results and it opens what I want. Disclaimer: Not affiliated with anything I just mentioned just a happy customer.
  - axaxs 8y ago
    Ohhh...that sounds like a nice feature! I'll research this thank you.
    - giancarlostoro 8y ago
      Yeah no problem, I had seen the Android TV box at WalMart and said to myself: if this thing is awesome I'm gifting one to my parents, now they want two more... They've been asking for it to replace cable and they're not extremely tech savvy or anything! It's also a 4K capable device, so it's pretty good, I've had it for almost 2 years now. I otherwise would of had to use a Raspberry Pi with Kodi (and yes, the Android TV can run Kodi, much smoother).
  - henrikschroder 8y ago
    My current and my previous Samsung TVs had this built-in as well. It can search the channel guide in the cable-box, the installed apps, as well as some pay-per-view alternatives. Works pretty damn well, actually.
Karishma1234 8y ago
Well the ATT and other behemoths are set for a massive failure. Their core business has been navigating regulatory mazes while trying to seek near monopoly and push expensive and crappy subscriptions down the throats of old and gullible people. With each passing Year Netflix and Hulu are adding more and more original content which is becoming part of pop-culture. Within 5 years most of the cool things we want to watch would be from Netflix and Hulu and everything else would come from torrents or youtube. Dinosaurs are dying and we should cheer.
- paul7986 8y ago
  Hulu is owned by Fox, Comcast, Warner and Disney.
heroprotagonist 8y ago
Once that torrent download becomes 'Miscellaneous data' charged per gigabyte due to loss of net neutrality, won't that encourage you through their preferred channel? Personally, I'll start reading books more but I imagine 90% of my country won't. They'll go through the service that has a deal with their ISP. The scarier part being that regardless of whether I go through the recommended source or disregard the content altogether, it's an impact on the information and ideas I consume.
macspoofing 8y ago
>I have bad news for them: you're going to lose. People don't want to go back to paying $100/month for a dozen streaming "channels" with one or two good shows and a the same crap the rest of the other "channels" have. No. That's not the correct way to think about this. You are dreaming if you think media and production companies are going to leave $90/mo on the table. You will see prices rise. You will see multiple streaming services. You will see bills in the same ballpark as those of cable/satellite ... because that's about the sweet spot for people willing to spend monthly for media content. >We want an on-demand nexus. A single hub. You won't get it. Nobody is going to let anyone control all media distribution. >So I have to pay an addition $7/month to watch a single show? Yeah. Or you can just pass on that single show. >Off to a torrent site or asking around to see if someone has rips or a box set. I have better things to do with $7 like buy dinner. Age of piracy is going to end as well. And by the way, you are free to go and buy dinner and read a book. Nobody needs to watch the latest season of GoT - its not a human right. Talk about entitled!
- DrJaws 8y ago
  some poeple will just go back to p2p and there is nothing they can do.
  - macspoofing 8y ago
    I think you'll find avenues for piracy are going to be limited. Even now piracy isn't quite the same as it used to be.
    - LeoNatan25 8y ago
      Easier than ever to get season packs, rips, remuxes. And that’s downloads. If you want to stream, it’s even easier.
    - freeone3000 8y ago
      You're right, instead of getting a XDCC link from a listserv, you now buy a modded HTPC off Craigslist. It's way easier to pirate things now. People are pirating music. Off youtube. ACCIDENTALLY. To the point where there's an elaborate automated filtering system. It's not even viewed as piracy!
im3w1l 8y ago
Careful what you wish for, because that hub will be censored and the useful idiots will scream that it's not censorship if it's not the government. I'd much rather a very very fragmented space with lots of diverse productions and perspectives.
SllX 8y ago
You have it backwards: a la carte is exactly what people want. If they didn’t, they wouldn’t pay for so many different subscriptions.
lgregg 8y ago
> We want an on-demand nexus. A single hub. That is close to existing, it'd be nice if the top players agreed to open their APIs so you could integrate it into a unified TV external like Chromecast or Firestick. Or, to go further, a unified platform that can process subscriptions and PPV across each library. > $100/month for a dozen streaming "channels" with one or two good shows and a the same crap the rest of the other "channels" have. Amen, we cut the cord officially on Friday. We went to $67 (including modem rental) per month plus about $25 dollars in streaming services and $40 for YT TV per month. That's still $35 dollars cheaper than what we were paying for Comcast TV and once we buy a compatible modem then we'll drop our internet to about $55 per month. We also have renters, so we loop them into YTTV for them to watch to their heart's desire for an extra $5 on their rent per month. > Ghost in the Shell Respect just got done rewatching an episode of the TV show.
- JimmyAustin 8y ago
  The on-demand nexus already works on Apple TV. Say "I want to watch Billions" into the remote and it shows you all the services you can watch it on, then tap through to actually watching it. Now if only it existed on other platforms.
  - lgregg 8y ago
    > Now if only it existed on other platforms. and has everyone's original content.
  - developer2 8y ago
    Can you elaborate? Does Apple TV let you purchase à la carte (on-demand) from any service, or do you still have to buy into a monthly subscription for a service just to watch one movie or TV series from its catalog? The "one hub nexus" we are clamoring for requires either a) preferably, a single monthly fee to access everything; or b) less ideally, assuming reasonable prices, on-demand pay-per-view pricing. A nexus that simplifies signing up for a dozen different streaming service subscriptions from one UI is not good enough. All that does is improve the frontend experience, while doing nothing to resolve the subscription hell that expects consumers to shell out $80+/month across many services to watch maybe 1% of the content.
tootie 8y ago
Rent it. Usually $4 on Amazon or Google or Vudu.
JohnJamesRambo 8y ago
How noble of you to steal what you didn’t want to pay for to fulfill your urge. Do you try this at the grocery store also when you get frustrated by the prices charged by the people that created the items?
- IntelMiner 8y ago
  Piracy is not the same as theft. Please do not conflate the two
bookbinder 8y ago
People don't want to pay $100 a month for cable TV either, but they did it anyway (for decades) and continue to do so. Now we're being asked to buy a bunch of streaming services and we'll bitch and moan, but ultimately we'll pay because every major platform will have at least one show that justifies their existence. I associate CBS with bland procedural crime dramas and awful three-camera sitcoms. CBS All Access would have been doomed without Star Trek: Discovery. Admittedly, the show isn't particularly good, but I'm a trekkie so it doesn't matter. On the plus side, I discovered The Good Fight (a surprising smart, entertaining and well written show) so I now I have a legitimate reason to give a damn about All Access. And then Apple will offer their own gateway drug (Lord of the Rings?) and Disney (...well they could just offer their back catalogue alone and still be a major player) and so on.
- adjkant 8y ago
  > continue to do so What are the numbers on that? My impression was that cable is declining fast.
- daveFNbuck 8y ago
  I've paid for 2 months of CBS All Access, once at the end of each season of The Good Fight. That one show only gets me to pay a bit less than $1/month. Comedy Central doesn't have a streaming service, so I have to pay for shows individually on Amazon. That also ends up being a lot cheaper than CBS All Access, and it cuts me off from learning about their other shows. I think all the Comedy Central shows I used to watch have been cancelled, so they won't be getting any of my money going forward unless I somehow learn about their new shows. That's a lot easier to do if my existing services start recommending Comedy Central shows to me.
- MikusR 8y ago
  Lord of the Rings is Amazon
- pwinnski 8y ago
  > People don't want to pay $100 a month for cable TV either, but they did it anyway (for decades)... In the absence of alternatives, it seemed like what entertainment cost. The alternatives for free or cheap are enough that many, many, many people are opting out. > ...and continue to do so. Evidence[0] suggests otherwise. Leaving evidence aside, I think that each service will likely have something to attract some number of subscribers, yes. Amazon is doing LotR, Disney wants a piece, CBS has Star Trek, etc. I don't think it follows that a large number of people are going to subscribe to more than one or two on an ongoing basis. People subscribe to CBS All-Access for one month, perhaps a trial month, and binge all of ST:D, then cancel. They already have a subscription to Amazon Prime for non-TV reasons. Maybe they share subscriptions with friends, or maybe they turn to piracy, or maybe they just shrug and go back to watching Netflix and YouTube, which is enough. Most people never had all the available channels, including premium channels, anyway. Going without a show or two isn't a problem for most people when the marginal cost is so high. [0] https://variety.com/2018/biz/news/cord-cutting-2017-high-cost-cancellation-pay-tv-1202728922/ https://variety.com/2018/biz/news/cord-cutting-2017-high-cos...
ocdtrekkie 8y ago
The idea you'd be able to see everything you want for $9/month when the going rate was $100/month is and remains an utter fantasy. There is no way, shape, or form where the industry is going to suddenly operate on 90% less income. Ironically, when you ask for one big hub, you're asking for a traditional cable subscription: Comcast will give you most of the channels out there (often, throwing HBO in for free), and due to the APIs the major ISPs and channels are on board with, you can either watch them on Comcast's site or the individual channel websites. Oh, and Comcast boxes now integrate your Netflix subscription too. Cable packages when bundled with Internet service are often pretty price-competitive for what they offer. I recently left Comcast, but picked up their competitors' cable package for the same reasons: It's a pretty inclusive streaming package for a good price.
- felipemnoa 8y ago
  >>The idea you'd be able to see everything you want for $9/month when the going rate was $100/month is and remains an utter fantasy. There is no way, shape, or form where the industry is going to suddenly operate on 90% less income. Reminds me of at&t. They made boatloads of money at one time until they didn't. I'm sure they didn't like it when suddenly their main product, long distance calls, became dirt cheap. I still remember paying huge amounts of money in late 1990s to make calls from NYC to Buffalo. The whole thing was such a big racket. I for one will not shed a single tear if these companies go out of business. Some other companies will take their place.
  - ocdtrekkie 8y ago
    Bear in mind, everyone's talking about how must-see a given TV show is, and how much they loathe "having to" shell out money to see it on X streaming service. Prices go down when demand is low. Demand for TV is not low, ergo, prices are not going to go down. Also, when it does, the first casualty isn't going to be the companies: It's going to be the shows you love. People on HN were thrilled when Amazon saved The Expanse. But if The Expanse doesn't drive X number of new Prime subscribers, it won't be around much longer than that.
rileyphone 8y ago
The fact is the reason anyone pays for content online is because the cost to access it is less than the cost to download and manage it as well as the possible cost of acquiring it is less than the cost of accessing it, which goes down the more content can be accessed. Every monthly subscription has an additional cost of maintaining beyond it's numenary value which quickly bring them above just torrenting the content. Ultimately the content is just constant information, which is pretty cheap on the internet.
petre 8y ago
They will bundle Internet subscriptions with cable plans. UPC already does that.
chrismcb 8y ago
Instead of stealing" it, you could have just rented it. There was a time if you wanted to watch a show you went down and rented it.
NicoJuicy 8y ago
Well, except if your kids want it. Disney is probably in a good position there
SomewhatLikely 8y ago
We have the nexus for music and I assume for books, not sure why video is still a hold out except I believe music and books are more regulated.
Benji_San 8y ago
I would be OK with occasionally paying for other streaming services than Netflix if they actually worked, I.e. better than torrents and preferably on Netflix's level. The other services available in the Nordics are not even close with some "not working at all" and some have shitty/exclusive device support. Subtitle/language options tend to be abysmal and Netflix, which isn't very good on this front, seems to be the winner there too. I'm more or less still waiting for Steam for films and TV series where I could just download the video file with whatever audio/language track I want. Providing a Netflix quality streaming service seems to be ridiculously non-trivial so it would be great if less complex and better working solutions were offered until the streaming platforms are figured out. Until that happens torrents offer a vastly superior way to watch content that is not on Netflix.

empath75 8y ago

If those company think it’s about content libraries they’re going to lose. All those companies think: we own a lot of media, we can just build a streaming media platform. And I think they’re way underestimating how hard it is to build the technology stack and processes that Netflix has. Netflix has an engineering team and a development and deployment process that has some production studios attached to it. Disney can probably copy what Netflix has today, but by the time they’ve done that, Netflix will have updated their platform hundreds of time, and I don’t think they’re going to be able to build an engineering team that can keep up.

chiefalchemist 8y ago
Yes. But Devil's Advocate here... Aside from stack, whatelse does Netflix have going for it? Pre-internet Blockbuster had an overpowering / dominate "stack" and that was their downfall. If VR is the next progression in home entertainment, who is best poised for that? Who has the tech + creativity DNA?
- AnthonyMouse 8y ago
  > Pre-internet Blockbuster had an overpowering / dominate "stack" and that was their downfall. That is because the internet replaced them. Streaming is a direct replacement for video rentals. It's the exact same movie but you don't have to drive to the video store to get it. The industry itself doesn't go away. There isn't any apparent new distribution method that will do to the internet what the internet did to brick and mortar stores. VR is a completely different industry, more related to video games than film, and from a distribution standpoint is nothing new. VR isn't going to cause people to download games from some hypothetical new non-internet distribution network.
  - erik_seaberg 8y ago
    > drive to the video store to get it … only to find that all the copies are rented for the weekend.
  - chii 8y ago

bootlooped 8y ago

I think maybe the title could use some punctuation or reworking > Netflix Is Why AT&T bought Time Warner... Ok, yes, they bought Time Warner > Netflix Is Why AT&T bought Time Warner and Comcast... They bought Comcast too? > Netflix Is Why AT&T bought Time Warner and Comcast and Disney... And Disney!? > Netflix Is Why AT&T bought Time Warner and Comcast and Disney want Fox AT&T bought Time Warner and Comcast; Disney want Fox?

reubenmorais 8y ago
"Want" disambiguates to plural subject, so it can only be "Comcast and Disney want Fox".
- wging 8y ago
  It's a subtle nuance that people often get wrong, though -- or they may be speaking in a dialect like British English, where 'want' (plural subject) is used for corporate entities. (I admit the latter is unlikely for an American publication.)
- adrianmonk 8y ago
  You're absolutely right, but that still leaves it a garden path sentence (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden_path_sentence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden_path_sentence) and thus a poor title. The measure of good writing isn't that it's possible to parse unambiguously with sufficient dedication. Good writing gets the idea across without placing any undue burden on the reader. (And it's easily fixed by adding a second "why": "Netflix is why AT&T bought Time Warner and why Comcast and Disney want Fox".)
  - bootlooped 8y ago
    Thanks for this, I didn't realize there was a term for the issue I was taking with the structure.
- always_good 8y ago
  But Disney can be plural the same way some people will write sentences like "Radiohead are awesome". It's ambiguous. There's no reason not to punctuate here.

digi_owl 8y ago

A large part of the initial appeal of Netflix, in particular for foreigners, was that they seemed to house digitized versions of straight-to-VHS movies that never left USA. But after the initial raving success, the big studios have been clamping down on giving blanket access to their back catalog of obscurities. Looking for those extra percentages of leaving out the middle man.

Rjevski 8y ago
> Looking for those extra percentages of leaving out the middle man. Is this profitable in the age of The Pirate Bay or illegal streaming? I'd argue easy legal access & better discoverability would more than make up for the cut taken by middlemen like Netflix.
ascagnel_ 8y ago
Netflix got the rights to stream the entirety of Starz's cable library for peanuts back in 2007 or 2008 -- that deal put them on the map since they got some high-quality content for basically nothing. The movie and TV distributors learned from the record labels -- they're deathly afraid of how iTunes basically took over the market, and will go out of their way to make sure the system stays as decentralized as possible.

sureaboutthis 8y ago

It's interesting it took ATT and Disney this long to figure out that this is a thing.

noitsnot 8y ago
Netflix's profit has only started to grow big enough in the past few years to even become a blip on those massive companies radar.
r00fus 8y ago
They were hoping Netflix would die or be acquired and lose it's edge. It's possible they did know but couldn't replicate what Netflix has done with any reliability or profitability. Innovators dilemma.

makecheck 8y ago

Companies focus on buying content while ignoring the quality of the broadcast experience. I am tired of competitors that skimp on this. Netflix doesn’t shove ads in your face, works on every platform and almost never has mysterious transmission failures. And now they have excellent content too. They have figured out so much more than some of the last-century providers.

majani 8y ago
and yet they still make mind boggling losses with no end in sight. I think in the next 10 years Netflix will serve as a reality check that shows why content creators have had to resort to their ugly business practices.
- goodmattg 8y ago
  "no end in sight" is false. It took ~5 seconds to Google this. https://www.barrons.com/articles/netflix-will-be-cash-flow-positive-by-2022-moodys-says-1523475251 https://www.barrons.com/articles/netflix-will-be-cash-flow-p...
  - casefields 8y ago
    That’s assuming all the customers will continue to subscribe including a bunch of price increases and nearly double the current amount of subscribers. “We expect the steady subscriber growth, together with gradual price increases will outpace the increasing investment in content and the upfront working capital spending on self-produced and owned programming, resulting in steadily improving margins. We believe that those margins will need to grow from the 7% range of 2017, to the low to mid 20% range to generate positive cash flows. As a result, we forecast the company becoming cash-flow positive in approximately five years.” Yeah that increases as in plural.
adjkant 8y ago
Hulu is the worst goddamn experience, not even just because of ads, but the entire platform is so buggy and fragile. The Netflix playback experience is somehow still highly underrated. Amazon got the playback experience right pretty quick as well - I really want to know what is stopping Hulu.

p2t2p 8y ago

I'm a simple man: if I the music isn't on Spotify or Bandcamp I'm gonna torrent it. If the movie/show isn't on Netflix, I'm gonna torrent it. I'm not buying any dodgy channel subscriptions full of crap.

mywittyname 8y ago
This is my view (except I don't pirate the content). In my eyes, content creators know that these services exist, and how many people use them. So if they make a decision to cut out a large portion of the market, then I guess it's not important for them to be enjoyed by everyone. I don't want to manage and pay for dozens of services. I use iTunes/Spotify, Netflix/Prime, and Steam/GoG. Any new service is going to need to displace one of those. This probably means being 10x better at 1/10th of the price.

Bud 8y ago

This re-written headline could really use some punctuation for clarity, moderators.

dang 8y ago
It's the HTML doc title as well as the URL slug, so not technically rewritten, but let's have a disambiguating comma.

mjfern 8y ago

I teach a startup course at a public university. We had a class on disruption, where we specifically talked about Netflix. I polled my students and asked how many have cable or satellite. A single hand went up, out of over 30 students. I then asked how many had Netflix. Every hand went up. AT&T can buy Time Warner and Comcast can buy NBC and Fox. It's not going to matter. Millennials and Gen Z aren't going to pay for bundled linear content via cable and satellite with heavy amounts of advertising. The model is in process of being disrupted. Within a decade or so, I bet traditional cable and satellite goes the way of AOL and landlines.

Tiktaalik 8y ago

I wonder if this market segment will evolve to be similar to the games industry, where market leadership shifts along with customers interests. In the games industry a few big exclusives can shift fortunes significantly. The Playstation 4's significant success has come at the expense of the Xbox, and a driving factor of this success has been a superior exclusive content library.

lev99 8y ago

Why does cable TV cost money? Wouldn't the advertising cover the distribution/production costs?

chii 8y ago
If they can charge for it, they are going to charge for it. Since there's no competition, there's no pressure to not charge the highest price. Now that Netflix or other streaming services threaten this business model, the old guard is scrambling to get back to the same business model.

honestoHeminway 8y ago

Like steam for movies.

coretx 8y ago

Loads of comments regarding what "I" want or someone else wants. I think it's irrelevant and perhaps even dangerous to have the focal point on such popularities because the matter at hand is far more simple. Copyright grants a distribution monopoly >> Monopolists makes money monopolists style >> Internet breaks the distribution monopoly >> And now: copyright distribution monopolist buys ISP's ( distributors ) in order to regain control of the market. This is not about you, me, "people", it's simply business.

inanutshellus 8y ago

With ISPs becoming content companies, and with Net Neutrality dead they can charge companies like Netflix higher data rates.... Seems like Netflix needs to buy an ISP.

inanutshellus 8y ago
... or stop allowing these mega-mega-mega-mega mergers :)

fenwick67 8y ago

The rhetoric by these gaint media companies about how "we're merging so we can compete with Netflix" is a con. They say "we have to get more vertically integrated like Netflix to survive", but Time Warner Cable is already as vertical as Netflix! They have their own production and distribution already, and Netflix isn't an ISP.

TooBrokeToBeg 8y ago

Netflix isn't that good, with such a crappy lineup and limited old mainstream movies. It's just cheap. Our household and people at work (california) struggle to justify paying for it.

richardthered 8y ago

The two main pricing models, today, are: 1) fixed monthly fee for one providers' content (e.g. Netflix) 2) pay-by-the-drink (e.g. $3.99 for this episode) I spend a lot less on pay-by-the-drink services than I do on recurring subscriptions. Cognitively, every time I initiate a purchase, I pause, and decide whether I want to spend the money. With a subscription service, I only have to make that choice once. What about a recurring 'credit' service? e.g. sign up for a $30/month recurring service, and you get 50 credits to watch content from a variety of providers?