7 ms·

Is it reasonable to expect an all-in-one streaming service? There is a lot of media, old and new, local and foreign. I don't know if a single provider can give

Is it reasonable to expect an all-in-one streaming service? There is a lot of media, old and new, local and foreign. I don't know if a single provider can give you all the access a person wants for a price that the consumer is willing to pay.

dmitrygr 7y ago
http://thepiratebay.org http://thepiratebay.org does. Like the good old days. And the media companies did it to themselves...
- z3c0 7y ago
  I get the humor in your statement, but there's a lot of truth there. At the end of the day, when Netflix, Hulu, and Prime don't have it, tpb does. In perfect, uninterrupted HD. The only downside? Waiting 5 minutes for it to download. It's hard to justify the $15/mo I'm paying for Netflix when that is an option, and especially hard to justify paying for all 3 (which I'm doing, for some reason.)
  - adjkant 7y ago
    > which I'm doing, for some reason Convenience has value. Even if tpb is easy enough, there's still friction. So long as streaming services stay convenient and cheap enough, they will keep customers. The interesting dynamic is that the more players enter the space, the less convenience there is. Justwatch.com is already trying to add that convenience back, but the fact that we need that meta step is already frustrating.
    - toxik 7y ago
      Let there be friction so the techies can go back to being alone in pirating. It wasn’t an issue until everybody started doing it!
    - nwallin 7y ago
      Maybe it's just because I was doing it for 10 years until Netflix got good, but now that Netflix no longer cuts it for 90% of what I want to watch it has been really easy to slip back into pirating. > The interesting dynamic is that the more players enter the space, the less convenience there is. This is exactly what happened to me. When Netflix had literally everything, it was the only place I looked. Now that it doesn't have everything, I'm not going to go through the litany of Hulu, prime, etc, I just go straight to tpb. So I cancelled Hulu etc. And because tpb is second nature and it always has what I'm looking for, I just go there first... so I cancelled Netflix. It's like watching the 2000 p2p shift all over again. The media companies don't understand how to build a business model that fits seemlessly into society.
    - TeMPOraL 7y ago
      > The interesting dynamic is that the more players enter the space, the less convenience there is. That's only because they're allowed to have exclusive deals. If and when streaming services will get commoditized, this won't be a problem - much like having more grocery stores around you doesn't make shopping more inconvenient.
  - CameronNemo 7y ago
    Well the other downside is having to sign up for a VPN...
    - godelski 7y ago
      On the up side, you now have a VPN.
  - godelski 7y ago
    There are streaming pirating services like popcorn time which means you don't wait 5 minutes. Though these also typically have low selections and low seed counts.
  - imgabe 7y ago
    I don't find the quality on tpb to be all that great. Sometimes you get super-compressed audio, or it only has the dialogue dubbed into Russian with no English option, or random other problems. It's kind of a crapshoot. I know there are other torrent sites and probably private groups that are well curated, but I imagine you have to maintain some seed ratio to be in there and I'm not sure I could get away with that.
  - scarface74 7y ago
    Pirate Bay doesn’t have lots of stuff and if it does, the quality varies, sometimes they have baked in subtitles in foreign languages, etc.
    - CameronNemo 7y ago
      then i have only had good luck. the only problem is the isp attaches to all of the links and snoops your ip, and telecoms hapoily enforce because they are often the media company or smaller than the media/telecom conglomerate.
- modzu 7y ago
  u mean .org
- madengr 7y ago
  Alternatively, the only rule about us...t is you don’t talk about us...t.
- la_barba 7y ago
  If you want to break the law, then of course anything is possible. In any case, all you are doing by pirating is telling the media companies how badly you want their product. That is going to tell them to fight harder against piracy. The only ethical option IMHO is to crowd-fund and pay people directly to create content.
  - dudul 7y ago
    I feel like you're saying the opposite actually. You don't value their product enough to actually pay for it. It's available on TPB? Well, sure I'll watch it, why not. No torrent? Too bad, I'll just watch something else.
    - redwall_hp 7y ago
      We have more options for entertainment than ever. More shows are produced by more studios, we have plenty of foreign options like anime or BBC shows instead of being limited to our region, video games compete for attention, and there's been a huge explosion of independent things online. Some people just sit and watch things on YouTube. What hasn't increased? An individual's time and attention. There are a finite number of hours in the day. Static demand, increased supply and an unwillingness to pay the asking price. That sounds like pretty simple economics to me.
      - cannonedhamster 7y ago
        Yeah, but content producers still haven't realized that our time is more valuable than their usually garbage product, their product is overvalued, and no one feels bad about pirating because copyright is so fundamentally broken by the same content providers that the contract between the public and producers has been totally violated.
      - TeMPOraL 7y ago
        Entertainment still isn't a commodity, though. Just because there are hundreds of sci-fi movies and TV shows, doesn't mean I can pick up any of them and enjoy it as much as one that I wanted to that wasn't available. If I really want to watch, say, Star Trek movies and Continuum TV show, then if CBS decides to pull the Star Trek movies from Netflix and spin off their own streaming service doesn't mean I'll just find something else on Netflix, or that I'll subscribe to CBS too; I'll keep watching Continuum on Netflix and head to TPB for the missing movies. If movie studios want to stop piracy, they have to stop being so greedy. Streaming services shouldn't be allowed to get exclusive licensing deals on movies/shows. The market would sort itself out and people would be able to watch all they needed from one or two services whose UI they most like. (And honestly, UI should be unbundled too. Streaming service's crappy four-button player can't beat VLC.)
- scarface74 7y ago
  There is a lot of stuff you can’t find reliable seeds for on bit torrent sites if it isn’t popular.
leggomylibro 7y ago
Whether it is reasonable or not, the rules that say we need to pay for video at all are more what you'd call...guidelines. By and large, people will obey when they consider it to be affordable and fair, and they won't when they don't. Just like every other rule in the world.
rayiner 7y ago
Why is that the desired end goal? Isn’t a single entity controlling distribution almost always the sign of something deeply wrong with a market?
- reificator 7y ago
  I think their point is not anti-competition, but rather anti-fragmentation. Really the issue is an issue of frontends. If there were a frontend that transparently handled all the different providers and let you pay for what you wanted to watch when you wanted to watch it, that would be much more pleasant to navigate. But media companies want to control the frontend, for both lock-in and advertising potential. And don't forget DRM!
  - rayiner 7y ago
    Competition is fragmentation.
    - reificator 7y ago
      > Competition is fragmentation. No it is not. I don't have to buy a separate car or a separate gas cap or whatever to go fill up my car with gas. There's a standard that car manufacturers follow and a standard that gas stations follow that allow them to interop without issue. I can stop at a Diamond Shamrock, a Wawa, a 7-11, a Sinclair, a Texaco, or a Phillips 66 and get gas at any of them. And while I'm filling up that gas, I have to pay for it. At most places I can use my Visa, my Discover, my MasterCard, or walk inside and pay cash. American Express is of course the outlier here. Competition can exist and flourish despite agreed upon standards. A standard to watch all your video from one app despite buying/renting/subscribing to multiple services does not mean an end to competition. To the contrary it would make me significantly more likely to try new services. In fact Amazon's model for this proves it can work. It's just that their frontend is tied to their subscription service, rather than being its own entity. But I watched Ash vs Evil Dead on Amazon by buying a Starz subscription. I watched Game of Thrones by buying an HBO subscription on Amazon. It was seamless from my perspective and I was able to watch in my favored player. Now we just need something that can do that but is not tied to a specific service. We'll call it MetaPlayer. I open up MetaPlayer and search for Stranger Things. Since I have a Netflix subscription, I watch it and that's it. I then search for The Simpsons. I don't have Hulu, so I'm prompted to sign up, preferably with one click, and then I can watch the Simpsons the exact same way I watched Stranger Things. And so on.
bthrn 7y ago
I think Spotify handles this pretty well. You have a central service that license holders contribute content to. The central service negotiates prices with the license holders and charges a fee to cover its aggregate expenses. Although music is a different product than video content, I'd really like to see a model like this going forward. Right now to watch the shows I want, I often have to: (1) Download and keep (multiple) apps installed / updated (2) Have several bills each month for each service (3) Wait a period of X days before the content is available post-airing (4) Watch ads before and during the content I don't have any of these issues using a service like Spotify. As long as the single price of Spotify-but-for-video is less than the sum of all the services I want, I won't feel like I'm paying for things I don't need. Honestly people loved to pay $50+/month for cable before. If I could do that, except able to watch whatever I want, not have to suffer through ads, or be fixed to some viewing schedule, it would be pretty compelling.
- godelski 7y ago
  I think the difference is that Spotify has the market cornered. What the alternative? Pandora[0]? YouTube? All three also aren't producing good original content. Prime, HBO, and Netflix all have great shows to watch. Hulu even is getting in there. Now Disney will be soon. So the market is saturated, but there's also better content. [0] I use Pandora because while I was paying for Spotify premium the interface broke on Linux and my phone. Not allowing me to create new stations. They told me to fuck off so I stopped paying them. Pandora isn't that much worse.
- fivre 7y ago
  Spotify is pretty imperfect at this also. Issues over rates paid aside, albums disappear seemingly at random (presumably failures in license negotiation, but users aren't provided any information about why an album is no longer available) and metadata is a mess. Spotify duplicates albums in my library, indicates that albums are not available when they've instead been replaced with a new version (which is identical aside from Spotify's internal references), and track info changes constantly (old Soviet albums seem to shift between translated English titles, Russian titles transliterated into Latin script, and the actual proper Russian titles on a monthly basis). The single provider aggregating content from many rightsholders model seems stymied by rightsholders' inability to provide standardized information about their content on a consistent basis.
jcims 7y ago
They can't. But if there was a single standard for low-overhead payments to these companies I'd definitely use more than I do today.
humanrebar 7y ago
> Is it reasonable to expect an all-in-one streaming service? Philosophically, yes. Vertical integration reduces competition, reduces standardization, leaves less room for innovative newcomers, and is ultimately bad for consumers. Economically, it's plausibly more profitable to play the bundling and siloing games.
- godelski 7y ago
  Is it bad for consumers? Monopolies aren't always bad. Some businesses work better because of the network effect. Granted they can price gouge and do a lot of market manipulation, but if they aren't don't that I don't think it's bad for consumers. But I will agree that having that power it's more likely that they will. Just trying to say it's much more nuanced.
rhizome 7y ago
It's reasonable to want one but unreasonable to expect one, given history. As far as I'm concerned, unified search is the killer app of Apple TV.
gnopgnip 7y ago
A statutory/compulsory license could solve this. It is already in use for internet radio in the US, and streaming video is not too different. Basically you can pay a royalty set by law instead of negotiated individually with each company, but the rate is high enough that it still makes sense to negotiate a lower rate in many cases.
- scarface74 7y ago
  There is no compulsory license for on demand music like Spotify - only music where you don’t get to choose your songs. Do you really want a Pandora like service for video? So if we want to make their content compulsory, are you okay with making software licensing compulsory?
  - gnopgnip 7y ago
    I would love to be able to watch everything in one place without ads, and be happy to pay for it. There is no reason that the licensing would only apply when you do not choose your shows or movies. Internet radio stations currently pay 22 cents for every 100 "plays" by those paying a subscription fee. And the system works well, creators are compensated, streaming companies can run a successful business, consumers do not need to subscribe to 5 different services to listen to the music they want.
    - scarface74 7y ago
      Internet radio stations currently pay 22 cents for every 100 "plays" by those paying a subscription fee. Movies cost a lot more than music and the price you site isn’t for on demand music - only for services where you can’t choose your songs. https://www.vox.com/2017/6/15/15807382/spotify-revenue-2016-financials-guarantee-payment-universal-merlin https://www.vox.com/2017/6/15/15807382/spotify-revenue-2016-... creators are compensated, Not really: https://www.cnbc.com/2018/01/26/how-spotify-apple-music-can-pay-musicians-more-commentary.html https://www.cnbc.com/2018/01/26/how-spotify-apple-music-can-... https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2018/12/25/streaming-music-services-pay-2019/ https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2018/12/25/streaming-music-... streaming companies can run a successful business, Not really... https://venturebeat.com/2019/02/06/spotify-posts-second-consecutive-quarterly-profit-but-projects-big-losses-for-2019/ https://venturebeat.com/2019/02/06/spotify-posts-second-cons...
tsukurimashou 7y ago
You're asking for a monopoly here, I don't think it ever ends well, piracy gives you what you're asking for
wmf 7y ago
Is it reasonable to expect an all-in-one streaming service? Sure, if you're willing to pay $200 per month. (Which, frankly, would be a fair price to access all movies and TV ever made.)
jumelles 7y ago
Even if you're pirating everything, with the right tools, it can easily appear to be just that. There's software like Sick Beard, sonarr, CouchPotato that will automate downloads for you. Plex, Kodi, or even a Roku or Apple TV pointed at a hard drive or NAS gets you the interface. It's not that difficult to set it up so new episodes of TV shows automatically appear on your TV, ready to watch. (And if you're not on the east coast you can even get shows before they air locally!) This of course is just scratching the surface of what's possible.
richardw 7y ago
Interlink. Like cellphones allow you to choose the UI you want to call the person you want on any network, I think the future should be all services cross licensing content.
pontifier 7y ago
I'm attempting to build a service that provides all that, plus music and books. Basically all media that can be delivered digitally, but has been sold physically. Unfortunately it might be an uphill battle because Disney just won a huge lawsuit against VidAngel, who was providing a similar service. They are still fighting, and I think I'm different enough that I could survive even if they don't.
buboard 7y ago
Popcorn Time

dmitrygr 7y ago

http://thepiratebay.org http://thepiratebay.org does. Like the good old days. And the media companies did it to themselves...

z3c0 7y ago
I get the humor in your statement, but there's a lot of truth there. At the end of the day, when Netflix, Hulu, and Prime don't have it, tpb does. In perfect, uninterrupted HD. The only downside? Waiting 5 minutes for it to download. It's hard to justify the $15/mo I'm paying for Netflix when that is an option, and especially hard to justify paying for all 3 (which I'm doing, for some reason.)
- adjkant 7y ago
  > which I'm doing, for some reason Convenience has value. Even if tpb is easy enough, there's still friction. So long as streaming services stay convenient and cheap enough, they will keep customers. The interesting dynamic is that the more players enter the space, the less convenience there is. Justwatch.com is already trying to add that convenience back, but the fact that we need that meta step is already frustrating.
  - toxik 7y ago
    Let there be friction so the techies can go back to being alone in pirating. It wasn’t an issue until everybody started doing it!
  - nwallin 7y ago
    Maybe it's just because I was doing it for 10 years until Netflix got good, but now that Netflix no longer cuts it for 90% of what I want to watch it has been really easy to slip back into pirating. > The interesting dynamic is that the more players enter the space, the less convenience there is. This is exactly what happened to me. When Netflix had literally everything, it was the only place I looked. Now that it doesn't have everything, I'm not going to go through the litany of Hulu, prime, etc, I just go straight to tpb. So I cancelled Hulu etc. And because tpb is second nature and it always has what I'm looking for, I just go there first... so I cancelled Netflix. It's like watching the 2000 p2p shift all over again. The media companies don't understand how to build a business model that fits seemlessly into society.
  - TeMPOraL 7y ago
    > The interesting dynamic is that the more players enter the space, the less convenience there is. That's only because they're allowed to have exclusive deals. If and when streaming services will get commoditized, this won't be a problem - much like having more grocery stores around you doesn't make shopping more inconvenient.
- CameronNemo 7y ago
  Well the other downside is having to sign up for a VPN...
  - godelski 7y ago
    On the up side, you now have a VPN.
- godelski 7y ago
  There are streaming pirating services like popcorn time which means you don't wait 5 minutes. Though these also typically have low selections and low seed counts.
- imgabe 7y ago
  I don't find the quality on tpb to be all that great. Sometimes you get super-compressed audio, or it only has the dialogue dubbed into Russian with no English option, or random other problems. It's kind of a crapshoot. I know there are other torrent sites and probably private groups that are well curated, but I imagine you have to maintain some seed ratio to be in there and I'm not sure I could get away with that.
- scarface74 7y ago
  Pirate Bay doesn’t have lots of stuff and if it does, the quality varies, sometimes they have baked in subtitles in foreign languages, etc.
  - CameronNemo 7y ago
    then i have only had good luck. the only problem is the isp attaches to all of the links and snoops your ip, and telecoms hapoily enforce because they are often the media company or smaller than the media/telecom conglomerate.
modzu 7y ago
u mean .org
madengr 7y ago
Alternatively, the only rule about us...t is you don’t talk about us...t.
la_barba 7y ago
If you want to break the law, then of course anything is possible. In any case, all you are doing by pirating is telling the media companies how badly you want their product. That is going to tell them to fight harder against piracy. The only ethical option IMHO is to crowd-fund and pay people directly to create content.
- dudul 7y ago
  I feel like you're saying the opposite actually. You don't value their product enough to actually pay for it. It's available on TPB? Well, sure I'll watch it, why not. No torrent? Too bad, I'll just watch something else.
  - redwall_hp 7y ago
    We have more options for entertainment than ever. More shows are produced by more studios, we have plenty of foreign options like anime or BBC shows instead of being limited to our region, video games compete for attention, and there's been a huge explosion of independent things online. Some people just sit and watch things on YouTube. What hasn't increased? An individual's time and attention. There are a finite number of hours in the day. Static demand, increased supply and an unwillingness to pay the asking price. That sounds like pretty simple economics to me.
    - cannonedhamster 7y ago
      Yeah, but content producers still haven't realized that our time is more valuable than their usually garbage product, their product is overvalued, and no one feels bad about pirating because copyright is so fundamentally broken by the same content providers that the contract between the public and producers has been totally violated.
    - TeMPOraL 7y ago
      Entertainment still isn't a commodity, though. Just because there are hundreds of sci-fi movies and TV shows, doesn't mean I can pick up any of them and enjoy it as much as one that I wanted to that wasn't available. If I really want to watch, say, Star Trek movies and Continuum TV show, then if CBS decides to pull the Star Trek movies from Netflix and spin off their own streaming service doesn't mean I'll just find something else on Netflix, or that I'll subscribe to CBS too; I'll keep watching Continuum on Netflix and head to TPB for the missing movies. If movie studios want to stop piracy, they have to stop being so greedy. Streaming services shouldn't be allowed to get exclusive licensing deals on movies/shows. The market would sort itself out and people would be able to watch all they needed from one or two services whose UI they most like. (And honestly, UI should be unbundled too. Streaming service's crappy four-button player can't beat VLC.)
scarface74 7y ago
There is a lot of stuff you can’t find reliable seeds for on bit torrent sites if it isn’t popular.

leggomylibro 7y ago

Whether it is reasonable or not, the rules that say we need to pay for video at all are more what you'd call...guidelines. By and large, people will obey when they consider it to be affordable and fair, and they won't when they don't. Just like every other rule in the world.

rayiner 7y ago

Why is that the desired end goal? Isn’t a single entity controlling distribution almost always the sign of something deeply wrong with a market?

reificator 7y ago
I think their point is not anti-competition, but rather anti-fragmentation. Really the issue is an issue of frontends. If there were a frontend that transparently handled all the different providers and let you pay for what you wanted to watch when you wanted to watch it, that would be much more pleasant to navigate. But media companies want to control the frontend, for both lock-in and advertising potential. And don't forget DRM!
- rayiner 7y ago
  Competition is fragmentation.
  - reificator 7y ago
    > Competition is fragmentation. No it is not. I don't have to buy a separate car or a separate gas cap or whatever to go fill up my car with gas. There's a standard that car manufacturers follow and a standard that gas stations follow that allow them to interop without issue. I can stop at a Diamond Shamrock, a Wawa, a 7-11, a Sinclair, a Texaco, or a Phillips 66 and get gas at any of them. And while I'm filling up that gas, I have to pay for it. At most places I can use my Visa, my Discover, my MasterCard, or walk inside and pay cash. American Express is of course the outlier here. Competition can exist and flourish despite agreed upon standards. A standard to watch all your video from one app despite buying/renting/subscribing to multiple services does not mean an end to competition. To the contrary it would make me significantly more likely to try new services. In fact Amazon's model for this proves it can work. It's just that their frontend is tied to their subscription service, rather than being its own entity. But I watched Ash vs Evil Dead on Amazon by buying a Starz subscription. I watched Game of Thrones by buying an HBO subscription on Amazon. It was seamless from my perspective and I was able to watch in my favored player. Now we just need something that can do that but is not tied to a specific service. We'll call it MetaPlayer. I open up MetaPlayer and search for Stranger Things. Since I have a Netflix subscription, I watch it and that's it. I then search for The Simpsons. I don't have Hulu, so I'm prompted to sign up, preferably with one click, and then I can watch the Simpsons the exact same way I watched Stranger Things. And so on.

bthrn 7y ago

I think Spotify handles this pretty well. You have a central service that license holders contribute content to. The central service negotiates prices with the license holders and charges a fee to cover its aggregate expenses. Although music is a different product than video content, I'd really like to see a model like this going forward. Right now to watch the shows I want, I often have to: (1) Download and keep (multiple) apps installed / updated (2) Have several bills each month for each service (3) Wait a period of X days before the content is available post-airing (4) Watch ads before and during the content I don't have any of these issues using a service like Spotify. As long as the single price of Spotify-but-for-video is less than the sum of all the services I want, I won't feel like I'm paying for things I don't need. Honestly people loved to pay $50+/month for cable before. If I could do that, except able to watch whatever I want, not have to suffer through ads, or be fixed to some viewing schedule, it would be pretty compelling.

godelski 7y ago
I think the difference is that Spotify has the market cornered. What the alternative? Pandora[0]? YouTube? All three also aren't producing good original content. Prime, HBO, and Netflix all have great shows to watch. Hulu even is getting in there. Now Disney will be soon. So the market is saturated, but there's also better content. [0] I use Pandora because while I was paying for Spotify premium the interface broke on Linux and my phone. Not allowing me to create new stations. They told me to fuck off so I stopped paying them. Pandora isn't that much worse.
fivre 7y ago
Spotify is pretty imperfect at this also. Issues over rates paid aside, albums disappear seemingly at random (presumably failures in license negotiation, but users aren't provided any information about why an album is no longer available) and metadata is a mess. Spotify duplicates albums in my library, indicates that albums are not available when they've instead been replaced with a new version (which is identical aside from Spotify's internal references), and track info changes constantly (old Soviet albums seem to shift between translated English titles, Russian titles transliterated into Latin script, and the actual proper Russian titles on a monthly basis). The single provider aggregating content from many rightsholders model seems stymied by rightsholders' inability to provide standardized information about their content on a consistent basis.

jcims 7y ago

They can't. But if there was a single standard for low-overhead payments to these companies I'd definitely use more than I do today.

humanrebar 7y ago

> Is it reasonable to expect an all-in-one streaming service? Philosophically, yes. Vertical integration reduces competition, reduces standardization, leaves less room for innovative newcomers, and is ultimately bad for consumers. Economically, it's plausibly more profitable to play the bundling and siloing games.

godelski 7y ago
Is it bad for consumers? Monopolies aren't always bad. Some businesses work better because of the network effect. Granted they can price gouge and do a lot of market manipulation, but if they aren't don't that I don't think it's bad for consumers. But I will agree that having that power it's more likely that they will. Just trying to say it's much more nuanced.

rhizome 7y ago

It's reasonable to want one but unreasonable to expect one, given history. As far as I'm concerned, unified search is the killer app of Apple TV.

gnopgnip 7y ago

A statutory/compulsory license could solve this. It is already in use for internet radio in the US, and streaming video is not too different. Basically you can pay a royalty set by law instead of negotiated individually with each company, but the rate is high enough that it still makes sense to negotiate a lower rate in many cases.

scarface74 7y ago
There is no compulsory license for on demand music like Spotify - only music where you don’t get to choose your songs. Do you really want a Pandora like service for video? So if we want to make their content compulsory, are you okay with making software licensing compulsory?
- gnopgnip 7y ago
  I would love to be able to watch everything in one place without ads, and be happy to pay for it. There is no reason that the licensing would only apply when you do not choose your shows or movies. Internet radio stations currently pay 22 cents for every 100 "plays" by those paying a subscription fee. And the system works well, creators are compensated, streaming companies can run a successful business, consumers do not need to subscribe to 5 different services to listen to the music they want.
  - scarface74 7y ago
    Internet radio stations currently pay 22 cents for every 100 "plays" by those paying a subscription fee. Movies cost a lot more than music and the price you site isn’t for on demand music - only for services where you can’t choose your songs. https://www.vox.com/2017/6/15/15807382/spotify-revenue-2016-financials-guarantee-payment-universal-merlin https://www.vox.com/2017/6/15/15807382/spotify-revenue-2016-... creators are compensated, Not really: https://www.cnbc.com/2018/01/26/how-spotify-apple-music-can-pay-musicians-more-commentary.html https://www.cnbc.com/2018/01/26/how-spotify-apple-music-can-... https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2018/12/25/streaming-music-services-pay-2019/ https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2018/12/25/streaming-music-... streaming companies can run a successful business, Not really... https://venturebeat.com/2019/02/06/spotify-posts-second-consecutive-quarterly-profit-but-projects-big-losses-for-2019/ https://venturebeat.com/2019/02/06/spotify-posts-second-cons...

tsukurimashou 7y ago

You're asking for a monopoly here, I don't think it ever ends well, piracy gives you what you're asking for

wmf 7y ago

Is it reasonable to expect an all-in-one streaming service? Sure, if you're willing to pay $200 per month. (Which, frankly, would be a fair price to access all movies and TV ever made.)

jumelles 7y ago

Even if you're pirating everything, with the right tools, it can easily appear to be just that. There's software like Sick Beard, sonarr, CouchPotato that will automate downloads for you. Plex, Kodi, or even a Roku or Apple TV pointed at a hard drive or NAS gets you the interface. It's not that difficult to set it up so new episodes of TV shows automatically appear on your TV, ready to watch. (And if you're not on the east coast you can even get shows before they air locally!) This of course is just scratching the surface of what's possible.

richardw 7y ago

Interlink. Like cellphones allow you to choose the UI you want to call the person you want on any network, I think the future should be all services cross licensing content.

pontifier 7y ago

I'm attempting to build a service that provides all that, plus music and books. Basically all media that can be delivered digitally, but has been sold physically. Unfortunately it might be an uphill battle because Disney just won a huge lawsuit against VidAngel, who was providing a similar service. They are still fighting, and I think I'm different enough that I could survive even if they don't.

buboard 7y ago

Popcorn Time