5 ms·

I feel this fragmentation of where content can be found is going to cause a new wave of torrenting movies/series. I pay for 5 different streaming services righ

by Flow 7y ago

I feel this fragmentation of where content can be found is going to cause a new wave of torrenting movies/series. I pay for 5 different streaming services right now, one is Apple Music. On Apple Music I can find, what I feel, like 90% of all music I want to listen to. On the other video streaming services it's a complete mess. They often show pictures of a movie/series on their front page, and later when I decide to watch it, it's gone. And gone from all of the services I pay for. This behavior is taking away the convenience and make me feel they are gaming me. I seldom go to iTunes and just buy some several decades old movie/series(you can't even buy series on iTunes in my country) when they do this, I either give up or torrent it(via VPN). Yeah, illegal I know. I'm not really wanting laws to change, but this behavior from the content owners in combination with their lobbying to make new laws to scan for content they own everywhere, lobbying for removing Internet anonymity, and having regular people pay damages that are more than they will earn in several lifetimes is not very constructive for the society either. I starting to think it's time for laws that, for example, force content owners to make their content available to 80% of the paying streaming watchers, or lose the right to the content.

derekp7 7y ago
That's why I maintain my DVD Netflix subscription, and keep stuffing my Plex server.
- wscott 7y ago
  Legally I hope those 2 statements are independent of each other. ;-)
  - scarface74 7y ago
    With practically zero percent chance of getting caught, that is a much better alternative than torrents.
  - derekp7 7y ago
    Yep, that is why I phrased it that way -- plausible deniability.
eteos 7y ago
For some reason alot of people talk like they have the right to have one 10$ subscription that provides every movie and series in the world, with the reasoning that it's possible with music. That is a utopia. All the movies/series are more expensive than all the songs. Especially production-wise. It wouldbbe bice
- Karunamon 7y ago
  If the studios had the will to get together and do this, it absolutely would be possible.
  - brianwawok 7y ago
    You want the studios to get together and fix the prices for consumers? That would end up well
  - javagram 7y ago
    $10 for everything that was already produced in history? Sure. $10 to fund equivalent production of new movies and TV shows? Impossible. Profits in the media industry aren’t that high, so reducing the amount of incoming monthly money to less than a single movie ticket or 1/6 of a cable subscription means that they can’t afford to produce nearly as much content as they do right now.
    - Flow 7y ago
      Doesn't most movies earn back the money the first days/weeks in the cinemas? But you might have a point for tv series. I suspect they have gotten much more expensive to make the last 1-2 decades.
    - wolco 7y ago
      If they started paying everyone minimum wage and cut production costs they could.
      - javagram 7y ago
pixelrevision 7y ago
I dunno. I really like the change from what we had prior. I do make it a point to subscribe/unsubscribe to different services as I go though. I always hated having to pay for cable to get hbo so I could watch 1 season of 1 show. Now I just sub to hbo for 2 months out of the year. I understand there are concerns about fragmentation but I would rather be giving my money to multiple services at different times than have 1 huge company like Netflix be the gatekeeper to everything.
scarface74 7y ago
There was never a time where you could get all of your steaming video from one place. Netflix has had a dismal collection of top movies since the beginning. They had a pretty good selection when they had partnership with STARZ, then Epyx.
mdasen 7y ago
I think the issue is that people got used to getting a lot of the content they wanted to watch for around $10/mo. Originally, no one realized that streaming would be such a huge thing. Owners licensed content to Netflix at cheap prices just to see Netflix streaming take over. Now they're wising up to the fact that they can't just give away their content. Let's say that we did have a law that would force content owners to license their content. Let's say that the royalty rate would be $3 per movie stream. Companies like Netflix would have to hugely increase their monthly fees. 4 movie streams a month and you've blown through their fee considering hardware, electricity, credit card processing fees, etc. Likewise, if TV episodes cost $1 per stream, people would very quickly blow through the $13/mo fee that Netflix charges. Plus, with more content, people would watch a lot more. Ultimately, what people want is a streaming service with most of what they want to watch at a fraction of the price that people used to pay for content. It used to be that people would pay $75 for cable tv or satellite plus $10-20/mo for one or two premium channels plus $4 every time they wanted to rent a movie from Blockbuster. Now people want that same experience for one $15 fee. I mean, would you sign up for a streaming service that had 80% of the content you wanted for $100+/mo? Do you think most people would? Netflix and competitors want to encourage you to binge on their service now. How does that change if they have to pay compulsory license fees for every stream? What happens to content if they're getting paid a set fee-per-stream rather than a negotiated rate? We've seen in music that songs have been getting shorter because the royalty rates are per-stream not per-minute and the shorter your songs, the more royalties you'll get. We've seen a lot of clickbait video on YouTube and, frankly, Netflix is putting up more and more cheap-to-make content, knocking off every random baking show and the like. With a compulsory license, Netflix would want to make it hard to watch the shows that they had to pay-per-stream. Would they even want to make them available at all? I think we had a few year period where content owners didn't realize how much streaming would substitute for other watching modes and made good deals for Netflix. I think any compulsory license would be higher than a service could go for at current rates. You're talking about getting rid of other large revenue streams via this compulsory licensing. Right now, they can give you a bunch of content as all-you-can-eat and then hold on to their premium content and get a lot of people to pay a separate charge. For example, I can stream a lot of Disney content, but it looks like Avengers Endgame will only be available for purchase separately. If you're getting rid of that, they aren't going to want to give up that money. Heck, even in music, we see that the compulsory licensing rates are high to the point that places like Apple Music want to negotiate revenue-sharing agreements rather than pay the compulsory license. If you're paying $10/mo for a streaming service and they're paying $0.091 per stream and you're listening in the car on a 20-minute commute twice a day, that's 10 songs per day and 300 songs per month costing them $27.3. And that's a short commute and not taking into consideration errands, workouts, listening at work, etc. So, even in music, the compulsory license isn't what most streaming services are relying on. They've negotiated a cut-of-revenue system to compensate artists rather than paying $0.091/stream. I think the problem is that we want to pay the same ~$10 fee for our video entertainment, but video entertainment costs a lot more to produce and doesn't have the same re-watch/listen potential as music. A song doesn't cost $350M to write and record and, ultimately, a good song can provide hours of listening enjoyment just like the movie. It's easy to accept a cut of $10/mo when your product is a lot cheaper to produce. The problem we face is that video producers want more than a cut of $15/mo due to the cost of producing their product, but we don't want to pay more. We had the glory days of Netflix having access to cheap content. We don't want that to end. You're not wrong about the feeling of gaming you. The problem is that people don't want to spend $100/mo, but they want all the content from services that used to cost that. So they're trying to find ways to retain the revenue while offering enough of what people want to a broad audience. They know people will balk at a $100/mo service even if many of them have been paying for cable and HBO and such. So they're trying to figure out what people will accept. Frankly, Netflix is doing that too: they're trying to figure out what content they can produce cheaply to get people to stick around without them having to license content. I think the ultimate problem is that the video content we want costs more to make than the music content we want.
tomcam 7y ago
> force content owners to make their content available to 80% of the paying streaming watchers, or lose the right to the content. Should there be more laws requiring that others get access things you paid for? If you don’t use a corner of your back yard should you be forced to lease it to someone? If you haven’t used your workout equipment for 90 days should you be forced to let members of the public come in and make better use of it?
- wolco 7y ago
  They can remove the copyright and everyone can have their own backyard.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

by Flow 7y ago

derekp7 7y ago

That's why I maintain my DVD Netflix subscription, and keep stuffing my Plex server.

wscott 7y ago
Legally I hope those 2 statements are independent of each other. ;-)
- scarface74 7y ago
  With practically zero percent chance of getting caught, that is a much better alternative than torrents.
- derekp7 7y ago
  Yep, that is why I phrased it that way -- plausible deniability.

eteos 7y ago

For some reason alot of people talk like they have the right to have one 10$ subscription that provides every movie and series in the world, with the reasoning that it's possible with music. That is a utopia. All the movies/series are more expensive than all the songs. Especially production-wise. It wouldbbe bice

Karunamon 7y ago
If the studios had the will to get together and do this, it absolutely would be possible.
- brianwawok 7y ago
  You want the studios to get together and fix the prices for consumers? That would end up well
- javagram 7y ago
  $10 for everything that was already produced in history? Sure. $10 to fund equivalent production of new movies and TV shows? Impossible. Profits in the media industry aren’t that high, so reducing the amount of incoming monthly money to less than a single movie ticket or 1/6 of a cable subscription means that they can’t afford to produce nearly as much content as they do right now.
  - Flow 7y ago
    Doesn't most movies earn back the money the first days/weeks in the cinemas? But you might have a point for tv series. I suspect they have gotten much more expensive to make the last 1-2 decades.
  - wolco 7y ago
    If they started paying everyone minimum wage and cut production costs they could.
    - javagram 7y ago

pixelrevision 7y ago

I dunno. I really like the change from what we had prior. I do make it a point to subscribe/unsubscribe to different services as I go though. I always hated having to pay for cable to get hbo so I could watch 1 season of 1 show. Now I just sub to hbo for 2 months out of the year. I understand there are concerns about fragmentation but I would rather be giving my money to multiple services at different times than have 1 huge company like Netflix be the gatekeeper to everything.

scarface74 7y ago

There was never a time where you could get all of your steaming video from one place. Netflix has had a dismal collection of top movies since the beginning. They had a pretty good selection when they had partnership with STARZ, then Epyx.

mdasen 7y ago

I think the issue is that people got used to getting a lot of the content they wanted to watch for around $10/mo. Originally, no one realized that streaming would be such a huge thing. Owners licensed content to Netflix at cheap prices just to see Netflix streaming take over. Now they're wising up to the fact that they can't just give away their content. Let's say that we did have a law that would force content owners to license their content. Let's say that the royalty rate would be $3 per movie stream. Companies like Netflix would have to hugely increase their monthly fees. 4 movie streams a month and you've blown through their fee considering hardware, electricity, credit card processing fees, etc. Likewise, if TV episodes cost $1 per stream, people would very quickly blow through the $13/mo fee that Netflix charges. Plus, with more content, people would watch a lot more. Ultimately, what people want is a streaming service with most of what they want to watch at a fraction of the price that people used to pay for content. It used to be that people would pay $75 for cable tv or satellite plus $10-20/mo for one or two premium channels plus $4 every time they wanted to rent a movie from Blockbuster. Now people want that same experience for one $15 fee. I mean, would you sign up for a streaming service that had 80% of the content you wanted for $100+/mo? Do you think most people would? Netflix and competitors want to encourage you to binge on their service now. How does that change if they have to pay compulsory license fees for every stream? What happens to content if they're getting paid a set fee-per-stream rather than a negotiated rate? We've seen in music that songs have been getting shorter because the royalty rates are per-stream not per-minute and the shorter your songs, the more royalties you'll get. We've seen a lot of clickbait video on YouTube and, frankly, Netflix is putting up more and more cheap-to-make content, knocking off every random baking show and the like. With a compulsory license, Netflix would want to make it hard to watch the shows that they had to pay-per-stream. Would they even want to make them available at all? I think we had a few year period where content owners didn't realize how much streaming would substitute for other watching modes and made good deals for Netflix. I think any compulsory license would be higher than a service could go for at current rates. You're talking about getting rid of other large revenue streams via this compulsory licensing. Right now, they can give you a bunch of content as all-you-can-eat and then hold on to their premium content and get a lot of people to pay a separate charge. For example, I can stream a lot of Disney content, but it looks like Avengers Endgame will only be available for purchase separately. If you're getting rid of that, they aren't going to want to give up that money. Heck, even in music, we see that the compulsory licensing rates are high to the point that places like Apple Music want to negotiate revenue-sharing agreements rather than pay the compulsory license. If you're paying $10/mo for a streaming service and they're paying $0.091 per stream and you're listening in the car on a 20-minute commute twice a day, that's 10 songs per day and 300 songs per month costing them $27.3. And that's a short commute and not taking into consideration errands, workouts, listening at work, etc. So, even in music, the compulsory license isn't what most streaming services are relying on. They've negotiated a cut-of-revenue system to compensate artists rather than paying $0.091/stream. I think the problem is that we want to pay the same ~$10 fee for our video entertainment, but video entertainment costs a lot more to produce and doesn't have the same re-watch/listen potential as music. A song doesn't cost $350M to write and record and, ultimately, a good song can provide hours of listening enjoyment just like the movie. It's easy to accept a cut of $10/mo when your product is a lot cheaper to produce. The problem we face is that video producers want more than a cut of $15/mo due to the cost of producing their product, but we don't want to pay more. We had the glory days of Netflix having access to cheap content. We don't want that to end. You're not wrong about the feeling of gaming you. The problem is that people don't want to spend $100/mo, but they want all the content from services that used to cost that. So they're trying to find ways to retain the revenue while offering enough of what people want to a broad audience. They know people will balk at a $100/mo service even if many of them have been paying for cable and HBO and such. So they're trying to figure out what people will accept. Frankly, Netflix is doing that too: they're trying to figure out what content they can produce cheaply to get people to stick around without them having to license content. I think the ultimate problem is that the video content we want costs more to make than the music content we want.

tomcam 7y ago

> force content owners to make their content available to 80% of the paying streaming watchers, or lose the right to the content. Should there be more laws requiring that others get access things you paid for? If you don’t use a corner of your back yard should you be forced to lease it to someone? If you haven’t used your workout equipment for 90 days should you be forced to let members of the public come in and make better use of it?

wolco 7y ago
They can remove the copyright and everyone can have their own backyard.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]