3 ms·

> but now they are trying to kill the convenience by splitting content over 20 platforms Isn't monopoly generally regarded as a bad thing? How do we reconcile

• mvid 6y ago
  Doesn’t really have to be one provider. I wouldn’t mind if there were 100 Netflix competitors if whichever one I picked gave me all of the content
  • Polylactic_acid 6y ago
    The problem is everyone is going to pick the one that has the most content and is most popular, so the competitors will all die unless they start making exclusivity deals.
    • riffraff 6y ago
      I am not a big fan of "solve by regulating" but I feel this is a case where I would like it to work. Just say that every content producer must license their work for a "reasonable" price which is connected to the actual viewership (we can do this with streaming). Companies may litigate this into oblivion but more likely the majority of content would become available cross- distribution. Don't cinemas work somewhat like this? You have chains owned by WB or whatever by they also show content from other content producers.
      • atq2119 6y ago
        To your last point, my guess would be that it's down to physical cinemas scaling differently, which makes exclusivity pretty unattractive.
    • caf 6y ago
      Multiple music streaming services with the same content seem to be able to exist in some sort of equilibrium.
• zanny 6y ago
  Monopolies are bad in generally free markets. Intellectual property and copyright are antithetical to markets. Copyright exists to grant (in the modern era thanks to Disney, permanent) monopolies to applicable works, thus divorcing them from the market. So you can't really frame a discussion on the behavior of rightsholders relative to markets when their "market" is manufactured by government and meant to keep their works monopoloized. The real consideration in regards to copyright and market forces is how market forces right against copyright - the existence of tcp, bittorrent, popcorn time, the hundreds of websites streaming copyrighted material against the rightsholders will - they are all the actual market offering information without the monopolization aspect. Its the distortion in the intention because you aren't supposed to have options in procuring copyrighted works - the distribution channels were originally complicated and expensive enough that centralization was required to create copies and thus anyone violating copyright was targetable. The system becomes dysfunctional when millions of people are giving away copies for free, on demand, instantly, anywhere in the world via the Internet - or in the olden days, via CD or VHS rips. It was the advent of digitization of information that brought about the paradigm shift threatening the institution, not any one specific implementation of the concept. But yea, monopoly is generally regarded as a bad thing in economics. Why is a huge segment of the economy then built around manufacturing artificial monopolies, primarily to the benefit of those with the means to enforce the terms of said monopolies - rarely an individual creator, often a fortune 500 company.
• on_and_off 6y ago
  The complaint is that the content is getting split among these platforms. Nobody would complain if a Netflix competitor emerged with a library at least as large.
• Polylactic_acid 6y ago
  The problem is all of the competing products are almost identical in all the features and software departments. The only way they can compete is on content, but the platforms are only useful when they have most of what you want. The more platforms compete on content, the less useful they all get.