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We have a Netflix subscription, an Amazon Prime subscription, and we occasionally rent movies from the iTunes Store. But if I want to watch something specific,
by jakobegger 7y ago
We have a Netflix subscription, an Amazon Prime subscription, and we occasionally rent movies from the iTunes Store.
But if I want to watch something specific, 50% of the time I still can't get it on any of the stores.
I don't understand why video seems to be so much harder than music? I can legally stream almost any song I can think of from any streaming provider, or I can buy DRM free albums! But for video, the pirate bay is often the only place you can get something.
- Wowfunhappy 7y agoWhat can't you find on the iTunes Store? I use iTunes for most media, precisely because I see it as a way of cutting through all the BS—it has just about every movie and every show—including series from Hulu and HBO. (The sole thing I can't get are Netflix exclusive shows, which is annoying.) (And then I run my purchases through TunesKit to losslessly strip the DRM)
- Emigre_ 7y agoIf one is a cinephile there are many interesting classics that are sadly not available on the iTunes Store. There are no films by Ingmar Bergman, for example.
- jeena 7y agoFor classics I often use archive.org where you can download everything legally without DRM. https://archive.org/search.php?query=Bergman%2C%20Ingmar&and[]=mediatype%3A%22movies%22 https://archive.org/search.php?query=Bergman%2C%20Ingmar&and...
- Emigre_ 7y agoThanks! That looks really good! I will take a look... :)
- jakobegger 7y agoI'm in Austria, so iTunes doesn't have any TV shows at all, and for movies it's hit and miss. Two films I recently looked for and didn't find are "Tank Girl" and "Waking Life", not really any special. I just checked again and apparently Tank Girl is on Amazon Prime! So maybe I'll watch that tonight :) It's also really bad with kids shows. Netflix and Amazon have a lot of them, but the selection keeps changing, and once something disappears from the streaming catalog it's often gone for good (ie. you can't get it for download anymore either). For one show (Lego Chima) I ended up buying used DVDs because I couldn't find it anywhere to download / stream in German. I have no idea how it makes any business sense to stop selling a TV show just because it's a couple of years old.
- mikestew 7y agoAs one recent example, a movie with Giovanni Ribisi that was made about ten years ago (forget the title, something about buying a dog). Known actor, not terribly old movie, not available anywhere but a used DVD from Amazon. I’m not a cinephile into obscurity, but at least once or twice a year I’ll be unable to find a movie with known actor (Ribisi, Robin Wright, as two that come to mid) that, when I finally find a DVD or torrent, wasn’t a bad movie that deserves to be buried in a stack of $4 used DVDs.
- stilisstuk 7y agoNot an apple fan. Not a Google fan. All the movies I've bought have had various times to them. So I am that guy, who buys old DVD's and rip them to my local nas. I mostly buy local language kids movies as I especially don't want my children's viewing habits to be tracked and manipulated by Netflix.
- ramshorns 7y ago> I don't understand why video seems to be so much harder than music? Maybe the movie industry saw the music industry as a cautionary tale and doubled down with DRM and exclusivity. The difference is bitrate and music sharing happened first, giving the film industry time to react.
- boomboomsubban 7y agoThe movie industry has been strongly pushing exclusivity and DRM since the introduction of the VCR.
- criddell 7y agoThey doubled down with DRM and still, the only place you can reliably get just about anything you want is from pirate sites.
- shakna 7y agoThe rules around streaming are much tighter than the rules around purchases. For purchasing films, stuff like iTunes & Google Movies are still pretty good bets, they do have quite a lot. Streaming often falls under public performance and a few other more restrictive contracts, making it harder. As to why a mass-streaming service like Netflix doesn't offer both, usually, then it's simple - you want people to continue paying. The business model depends on people not signing up, downloading, and then cancelling. In my experience a surprising number of people are willing to do that. (Doesn't stop me offering it, however.) --- As for DRM with videos... Hollywood truly, truly despises the idea of DRM-free. I've looked at few contracts for film collections recently, and every contract I saw _required_ the use of DRM. It wasn't a negotiable point. Which is mostly theatre. Bypassing DRM does not take significant effort. It can never truly prevent theft (ignoring any definition of theft), and is massively anti-consumer in the way it breaks. It hurts real customers and doesn't hurt pirates. All the same, it's a hard rule with most national film associations.
- jakobegger 7y ago> It hurts real customers Yes it does. We bought a lot of kids movies on iTunes, and then I couldn't play them back because a device was not authorized (I bought it on my iPhone, so it doesn't work on my girlfriends iPad), or because the internet didn't work, or because iTunes was broken after upgrading to a new OS, ... it's so frustrating when you have a collection of video files on a USB stick that you paid for and you can't watch them.
- jeena 7y agoYou could re-download them DRM free from pirate bay, and because you already paid for them it wouldn't even be a immoral thing to do.
- lkschubert8 7y agoIt would however be illegal, which is a concern to some.
- sombremesa 7y agoAs someone who speaks three languages, it's just as hard to find music. Grooveshark used to have a much larger and well-rounded selection, though it had legality issues similar to Pirate Bay.
- jeena 7y agoI'm mostly using the regular YouTube for music nowadays.
- lostgame 7y agoGuessing you don’t care for quality or that listening to an album is interrupted by unskippable ads that are usually far louder than the content? It saddens me, as a musician and producer, how YouTube is the go-to for listening to music. We put a lot of effort into audio engineering, and the flow of an album, only to have a ton of that work degraded by YouTube’s shitty compression or ads that interrupt the intended experience.
- jholman 7y agoWhy would anyone listen to ads on youtube? Do they not know how to use software? Regarding quality, most music is listened to in traffic, or on the bus, or while working, or as background in a store, or while exercising, or.... I think it should be pretty obvious that the majority of the time, quality is just not a factor.
- true_religion 7y agoI use YouTube as well, but before it... I used this service called "radio". The compression was terrible. The ads were unstoppable. I love music, but for decades before we all fell in love with music despite the poor medium we listened it to. YouTube isn't any different.
- cookie_monsta 7y agoQuestion from my kids: what's an "album"?
- perlgeek 7y agoI guess much of it is related to Disney pulling their stuff (and of all the brands they've acquired) off of the existing streaming services, to give Disney Plus a competitive advantage.
- danaris 7y agoI think that ultimately, the difference is probably radio. Before the internet, people consumed music without buying it all the time. People consumed movies first solely at theaters, then at home from VHS and DVD. Some movies came to TV occasionally, but it was never a guarantee for any given title. So there was already a centralized way to pay record labels for music, and the basic idea of licensing it all to be played in a streaming format was well-established. The movie industry, on the other hand, still wants to make you pay every time you watch, like back when it was still just theaters.
- ghaff 7y agoI tend to agree but it probably went even beyond radio. Playing music has long been omnipresent in all sorts of venues and, as a result, there was a clear need for simple, low friction, centralized licensing. Pre-VHS, as you say, there just wasn't the same casual consumption of video content--and, even then, it was mostly private consumption for a long time. You even see differences between music and live theatre licensing. Music has mandatory mechanical licenses for cover. Whereas, with live theatre, a playwrite/copyright owner can refuse to allow a performance based on their work.
- FussyZeus 7y agoI think it might be because of the ubiquity of music piracy during the 90's. In it's heyday, you could get anything off of Limewire, Kazaa, and of course Napster with extremely little effort. By contrast, pirating video didn't come until later, when it was more technically feasible (downloading music over a modem already took forever, can you imagine downloading full length movies!?) and by that time, the likes of Spotify had already made legally consuming music so convenient as to make piracy obsolete. Even now, the pirating of PC games is being made more common by the introduction of the Epic Store, which, regardless of your feelings on it, has added friction. Games promised to Steam users are being delayed or going full Epic exclusive and many users are saying "fuck that, we're not getting railroaded into using a launcher we didn't like" and turning to piracy instead. The video landscape is even worse, where it used to be only a select few providers had their own bespoke services (like HBO) now every channel is looking to make their own damn subscription happen, which is adding tons of friction, causing the boom in piracy. The music companies learned, and the video companies haven't, that the main way to counter piracy is to make the legal way to get something as easy as possible, so easy that customers don't mind parting with some cash. And streaming right now is anything but easy.
- sircastor 7y agoI don't think it's a matter of harder. I think the film and television industry properly freaked out when they saw what Apple has done to the music industry, and the subsequent uniformity in available services. They had more time to prepare and locked down the content before SV companies could negotiate them into a more consumer-friendly position. I do note that the music industry has leveled out. You basically get the same deal from each streaming provider for the same price.
- jeena 7y agoI guess also that musicians stopped making money with their albums and only use streaming for it's reach, they found other ways to make money.
- Retric 7y agoMusicians never really made money from albums. Occasionally a mega hit might bring in residuals, but musicians generally need to start their own label to get any real cut of album sales.
- kfrzcode 7y agoTo be fair - the licensing catalog for each of the given music services varies pretty wildly, and you cannot expect to find almost any song on any provider. See: Spotify && [Jay-Z, Taylor Swift, Def Leppard, Tool, Beyonce, Garth Brooks], etc. Some of these artists have since released to Spotify but the concept is the same. I agree, though. If PLEX or someone offered a subscription that gave me consistent interface to access all the streaming services, I'd probably pay a few hundred USD a year.
- Bombthecat 7y agoAaaand back to cable it is :)
- chooseaname 7y ago> I don't understand why video seems to be so much harder than music? I have read places where if they can't secure the streaming rights to the music in the movie, they can't stream the movie. Also, if any other rights holders can't be found to secure streaming rights, they can't be streamed.
- BlueTemplar 7y agoSee also books and video games. It's all down to convenience again I guess ? One big difference is how you're going to replay music & video games multiple times, but are going to play/read movies/shows & books only once.
- userbinator 7y agoOne big difference is how you're going to replay music & video games multiple times, but are going to play/read movies/shows & books only once. This is a very good point. Just look around in a public space at everyone wearing headphones, and you can see that music is almost always not consumed in isolation but as a background. A movie or book requires more dedicated attention; I don't see people watching a movie or reading a book while doing something else.
- corodra 7y agoI know, it makes no sense. Just because it takes a few more people, a little more time and just a hair more money to make a movie or TV show compared to a song, doesn't mean there should be complicated distribution contracts that navigate multiple investor and labor interests, and channel through international markets and regulations. I swear, capitalism these days. People need to stop demanding money for making entertainment. Just because they spend time making something doesn't mean they're entitled to be "compensated" for it.
- AndrewKemendo 7y agoMy guess is that it's a much smaller group of investors and executives that control the movie industry, with music creation ownership and distribution being much more distributed.
- HN-Censorship 7y ago"I can legally stream almost any song I can think of" Maybe your taste in music is more mainstream
- forrestthewoods 7y agoStreaming music is a secondary revenue stream. The real money is in live concerts, merchandise, etc. Streaming and YouTube music videos are practically advertising. For TV/movies the video content is the primary revenue stream. And for most content the only revenue stream. Only a few IPs sell action figures and lunch boxes.
- dan-robertson 7y agoI think this wasn’t always the case, at least for more popular musicians, but it is certainly the case now.
- cookie_monsta 7y agoI think another big difference (apart from all those already stated) is that there was a realisation among musicians very early on (like mid 90s) that the internet was going to give them the ability to cut record labels out of the deal altogether and distribute directly to fans. Most of what a label does/did for musicians is marketing and distribution of physical copies. Sometimes a label organises a producer/engineer, but often bands do this themselves, or bring one along. With physical copies dying and the ability to self-promote on the rise the labels were looking less and less relevant. Movie studios on the other hand coordinate an insane amount of people (some credits sequences run for at least 5 minutes now) and legals, something that is out of the realms of possibility for indie film makers - if you want to make a "big" movie you pretty much need a studio, even to this day. So my understanding is that the record labels saw the writing on the wall, tried to fight the tide with the whole napster thing and ended up accepting reality and looking around for another way to remain relevant, which ended up being negotiating deals with legal music streaming services. Movie studios never felt that pinch. The other difference, at least for the artists, is that musicians don't make much money off recordings - many are happy to break even - where the real money is for them is in live performance and (in some markets) merch sales. The recordings almost act as ads for the "real" product. With movies, the movie is the product (although admittedly merch, theme park rides, etc can provide an even bigger revenue stream but those cases should be treated as outliers).
- Ericson2314 7y agoGreat comment. One thing though is sometimes indie movies are made and then sold for release. Maybe they should be able to go direct?
- cookie_monsta 7y agoThey can absolutely go direct. I've watched numerous movies on filmmakers' websites or youtube that I assume never got a cinematic release. I guess the difference is that the Hollywood studio model is still so entrenched with the massive PR/media industry built up around it and reliant on its survival that indie releases get drowned out in the noise. Another thing to consider is that niche content is just that - if a filmmaker decides to distribute direct to fans (or along some other indie avenue) it's likely you'll never hear about it unless you are one of those fans and regardless of what your definition of "success" is.
- Thorrez 7y agoPossibly because movies take a lot more money to make than music.
- swiley 7y agoI pretty often can't find specific music I want to listen to on Spotify. Sometimes it's weird meme stuff like vaporwave. Sometimes it's less weird modern "classical" music. Sometimes popular stuff disapears. Usually it's because the artist can't afford to upload it
- tinus_hn 7y agoTypically a song does not cost over $100 million to produce, while many movies do.