11 ms·

There are more streaming choices than ever – why are prices going up?

91 points by prostoalex 6y ago

ponker 6y ago
Don’t know why a person needs more than one streaming service. How much TV does a person need to watch?
- capsulecorp 6y ago
  I don't know that one NEEDS to watch any TV. Then again you don't NEED to be on the internet or hacker news. People also do things they want, not just what they need.
  - tialaramex 6y ago
    You do need access to the Network to participate in human society. Currently the Internet is the Network. Historically the PSTN was the Network and before that (and to some extent in parallel) the global postal system was the Network. Now participating in society isn't as immediately necessary as air, water, or food, but just staying physically alive isn't really enough for people. They seek meaning in their lives and emotional connections to others, by participating in human society. The Network enables that. A programme to deliver Network access to everybody who wants it and hasn't gone out of their way to live somewhere crazy makes at least as much sense for a rich industrialised nation as a programme to build sewers, or to demand safe housing for its people. Fortunately if you want television the Network delivers that too.
- zapzupnz 6y ago
  It depends on what shows people want to watch.
- liamkinne 6y ago
  Yes but one might watch a small selection of shows over many streaming services. And even still, I know several people who fill every spare minute with streamed tv to keep their conscience busy.
- dexterdog 6y ago
  You only need more than one because of siloing. Would anybody be happy with one channel or one website. This is not music where all of the offerings have nearly identical catalogs. The problem is they silo so much that piracy becomes the only logical option.
- loopz 6y ago
  It's more about all that you choose not to watch.
  - jchook 6y ago
    Perhaps equally what you choose and choose not to watch
- xenospn 6y ago
  Same goes with clothes. People like having choices, even tho they may never actually wear it.
- p1necone 6y ago
  If I could buy a magical streaming service that only carries the two or three shows I care about at any one time that would be great, but that doesn't exist. But rather than actually paying for all the content I just end up subbing to Netflix and Anime Lab and pirating everything that's not there. (And I'm considering unsubbing from Netflix - they've slowly removed all of the non Netflix original stuff I care about) Piracy bad I know I know, but there's a limit to how many hoops I'm willing to jump through before I give up and pirate stuff - legitimately finding out how to buy content I want to watch shouldn't be harder than torrenting it.
- rdiddly 6y ago
  I don't know about what I need, but I guess I've decided there's no way in hell I'm paying for more than one. I feel like each little fiefdom demanding its little tribute is going to hurt them all in the long run, or at least I hope it does. Let the market consolidate into some kind of monopoly, dare I say it, since I'm usually against such things. If it's even possible at this point with how fragmented it is. Maybe the next generation aggregator/platform will come along and all these services will jump onboard it. Until then, I'm kind of leaning toward piracy or just plain abstinence. There are a lot of creative people out there making time-dependent art but the fact is, it's time-dependent art, which means I have to spend the time to watch it. Maybe more than once, in the case of the super detail-oriented ones like the Breaking Bad universe let's say. I notice when I skip all that shit, I get tons of learning-new-frameworks-and-languages done.
- imtringued 6y ago
  Because streaming services have a limited selection. You might only be interested in a dozen shows and after a year you've watched everything you wanted.
  - pnw_hazor 6y ago
    Then switch to a different service for awhile. That is the killer consumer feature, the ability to rotate services on a month-to-month basis.
vinni2 6y ago
The only streaming service I subscribe to is Netflix and that is shared with 4 of our family members across 3 countries. I stopped watching live tv there is no point anymore.
blinding-streak 6y ago
Linear TV as a concept just doesn't seem sustainable for much longer at the current trajectory. It's lost half its viewership in the past 3 years [1]. The decline will continue. Flagship channels will continue to exist, but at some point the bundling model will break down when the economics deteriorate further. Bundling is the only thing keeping most of these channels afloat. [1] https://medium.com/@ThinkNowTweets/linear-tv-loses-half-its-viewers-as-streaming-services-soar-61ac0d67381f https://medium.com/@ThinkNowTweets/linear-tv-loses-half-its-...
- themodelplumber 6y ago
  I think there will always be demand for linear content. But I would add that linear content tends to benefit an audience that is somewhat off the HN-user's psychological radar: 1) Enjoy "noise" in the environment, 2) appreciate scheduled, always-on randomness, and 3) tend to want to like what is generally liked by society. Mass consumerism is the more pessimistic name for it. Bundling is also beneficial for allowing some choice as a value-add, as opposed to choice-first like Netflix. There's less friction in the former, less in the way of putting some random thing on and making it stay on while changing programming over time.
- selectodude 6y ago
  It’s sports. As long as people want sports, they can bundle and charge whatever they want. HGTV probably pays for itself in advertising alone, but bundle it with, say, ESPN and you can charge $1/mo and streaming companies have no choice but to buy it. I would love to spend $65/mo for all the sports, but I can’t. All of the people who want the channels I don’t want are subsidizing me. Unbundle everything and now I’m paying $170/mo and all the other ancillary channels cease to exist.
  - dexterdog 6y ago
    ESPN needs way way more than one dollar per month per subscriber for their licensing alone.
    - 6y ago
dang 6y ago
Recent and related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23693407 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23693407
- toohotatopic 6y ago
  "YouTube TV sharply increases monthly subscription to $64.99"
Waterluvian 6y ago
I am convinced the pricing is all deflated to jockey for dominance and then they’ll start raising them. I pay $6.60USD per month for Disney+. No way that’s their par pricing. Why would I ever buy my kids a Disney DVD or blu ray?
- tjoff 6y ago
  So, $80 a year. How much did you spend on Disney before? (And how much was left for Disney after everyone on the way had their cut taken).
  - Waterluvian 6y ago
    A whole hell of a lot more. Not just for Star Wars but for all the Disney and Pixar stuff for my boys. Your revision makes the point a bit better. They’ve cut out the store. Manufacturer. Etc. So that’s a win win. Doesn’t mean Disney is happy sharing the profits with me.
    - ekianjo 6y ago
      Digital distribution costs are much lower than physical distribution. And toys are still being sold, maybe even more, as your kids watch more stuff. They could make their whole catalog free and still have a very profitable toy/parks business out of it.
      - ohyeshedid 6y ago
        To your point, they've done that previously. Originally, the Disney channel was a premium subscription channel. They started transitioning to basic cable bundling in 1990-91.
  - CivBase 6y ago
    Streaming rentals are $3-$5 and Disney definitely doesn't come out with enough content I'm interested in watching (much less re-watching) each year to justify the service even at its current price. I suppose it might seem like a more reasonable value if you have kids, re-watch a lot of their older stuff, or actually care about any of their TV shows. But I'm not sure how much further they can really push it with their current offerings.
sixothree 6y ago
Youtube TV is just such an awful experience. It's slow, non-responsive, completely uncustomizable, non-intuitive. Skipping 15 minutes ahead using a remote control is virtually impossible. You cannot turn off auto play. And what it chooses is complete garbage - nothing I ever watched while using it. Ugh.
- tech-historian 6y ago
  Couldn't disagree more. I've tried almost all of the OTT services. YTTV is by far the best. It's not slow at all for me. The DVR is fantastic, search feature is great, and the predictive shows work well. It even has live stats during certain sports, and allows you to catch up watching each "key play." That is, when sports were actually happening. Sigh.
- chrismcb 6y ago
  Youtube TV has some issues, but I've never experienced those. I use shield and fast forward with a remote is easy. I've never had it autoplay. I'm not sure what you mean by what it chooses. Are you talking about youtube instead of YouTube TV?
  - sixothree 6y ago
    Youtube TV will continue to play shows after your current show ends. Seems to be the default for multiple platforms.
    - tech-historian 6y ago
      This is the default for every streaming service I've ever used. Netflix, Hulu, HBO, etc etc. Certainly not just a quirk of YTTV.
brian-bk 6y ago
Long ago, the internet streaming services lived in harmony. Then everything changed when the Disney conglomerate attacked. In all seriousness - I believe it really is pressure from Disney forcing their competitors out, that's caused the faster acceleration of prices. It's something that would have happened anyway, but it's more pronounced with such a large behemoth of licensed content joining in to the fight.
- echelon 6y ago
  Disney isn't forcing competitors out. There are more competitors now than ever.
  - brian-bk 6y ago
    It's noted in the article, they're not forcing them out by direct competition. Rather, their squeezing their competitors profit margins and forcing competitors' prices up, but charging more prohibitive prices for content.
twblalock 6y ago
The low prices were never sustainable. Streaming companies have ever-increasing costs and they can either make money with subscriptions, one-time rental fees (common on Amazon Prime Video) or advertisements -- or a combination of those. Low subscription prices are sustainable when the subscriber base is growing and continually bringing in more money, but at some point most of the customer base has been reached and then the only way to increase revenue is to raise prices. Until recently, streaming customers have had their subscription prices subsidized by subscriber growth. Why can't streaming companies be happy with the revenue they already have? They need to increase revenue not solely because shareholders demand it, but also because the price of content continues to increase, especially when content providers know they have leverage when licensing terms are negotiated. The bigger a streaming company gets, the more eyeballs will see the content, so content providers feel justified in asking for more money. Also, streaming companies generally have libraries of content that increase in size over time, so the total money they pay for licensing will also continue to increase even if the price of each piece of content does not. On top of all that, they need to pay for the infrastructure to deliver all the bytes. (This is why Disney's streaming service is in such a good spot -- they already own the content, and they have a huge back catalog.) Say what you will about the cable companies (and they really do suck) but their pricing was not entirely a result of monopolistic practices. Price pressure from content owners was also a major factor, and it is such a strong force that streaming companies can't escape it.
- chii 6y ago
  It's a problem of business model to me. Streaming companies are starting to look like cable companies, because the "system" incentivizes exclusivity of content. When netflix started, they didn't make their own content, but instead licensed it. They offered fast and reliable services, and the content was tangential. But as soon as content producers (and other media companies including cable companies) saw how profitable netflix was, they either raised their content license fees, or withdrew it to add to their own streaming service for exclusivity. Therefore, netflix needed to complete with exclusivity. This is starting to look like the cable days. I would propose that all content producing companies have to license their content to anyone who is willing to pay, at the "same" price (per user? per year? etc? this is something yet to be decided). That is, a content producer cannot charge one entity one price, and another entity a different price, nor refuse to license it to another entity (in the same way that a store cannot charge one customer one price, while another customer gets a different price).
ChuckMcM 6y ago
I am keeping an eye on Netflix and Amazon who are creating more and more content. They are looking to cut out the "middle" as it were and while their successes are a bit hit or miss, my assumption is that they will eventually figure out how to get the best production companies on board and completely take people like Disney and Viacom/CBS out of the picture. Can't do it for pre-existing content but they can for new content going forward.
- twblalock 6y ago
  The pre-existing content is the problem. How many people would subscribe to Amazon and Netflix if the only content available was produced by Amazon and Netflix? In some ways the video/DVD business was better for consumers, because once you've bought the DVD you won't have to go pay more money next year to be allowed to watch it again. The problem is very few people can afford all the DVDs they might ever want to watch.
  - CobrastanJorji 6y ago
    I think you could solve a lot of this problem by coming up with a legal framework for a digital first sale doctrine. If I buy a movie digitally, I need a way to legally sell it or, critically, rent it to someone else. Make that happen, and all of these digital rental services will suddenly increase their catalog a hundredfold. Netflix would do it overnight, since they already have a massive DVD warehouse and they'd just need to stop shipping the DVDs.
    - f1refly 6y ago
      I don't think that matters. Like really, at all. I think the first thing you'd have to come up with is a service that sells drm free, so people can actually get what they paid money for. When I "buy" digitally from either amazon or google, there's no way I'll ever see an mkv file or anything like that. When "buying" video digitally, I don't ever get the feeling that the stuff is really "mine". When I buy from bandcamp, I can download a flac and archive it. That music is mine. When I get it from google, I can view it from their website. That movie is not mine. And let's not pretend that sales would go down. Music is sold like this for a long time, just like copying without permission unfortunately didn't kill Hollywood all this time.
Joeri 6y ago
Prices are going up because there is no competition. All these services have different selections of content, and paradoxically the more of them there are, the smaller the slice each one gets, and the more services you need to subscribe to in order to have a well rounded selection. If you are fine with the old model, where the station picks your programming for you, then this model is an on demand continuation of that, but if you would like a model like in music streaming where all services carry mostly the same content but provide a different UX, you are out of luck. I’m currently subscribed to four streaming services, and disney hasn’t even launched in my area. It is too much. I’m going to get rid of a few, and just start pirating content again. There are many shows and movies I can’t get on any streaming service anyway, but the pirate bay carries them all in bluray quality.
- chii 6y ago
  > all services carry mostly the same content but provide a different UX, you are out of luck. and hence the return to channel bittorrent.
  - itskwanyall 6y ago
    I’d try and confirm that but the UX on Prime Video is so bad I can never tell what’s actually exists on the platform
- jbay808 6y ago
  Heh, I recently found out that season one of a show I'm watching is exclusive to platform A, and season two to platform B... It's madness.
- imdoor 6y ago
  The situation was very similar in US in the past with film studios owning their own movie theaters and showing their movies only there [1]. Then movie producers got broken off of movie distributors. I would like the same happen to streaming platforms. Until then, i can't see any meaningful competition happening in this space. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Paramount_Pictures,_Inc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Paramount_Pic....
toohotatopic 6y ago
The article explains that the prices go up because the carriers rise prices so that the steaming services have to follow suit. What this doesn't explain is why the market accepts those prices. Why is there such a demand for the carrier channels? Shouldn't youtube and twitch channels and other content providers increase supply to the point that people don't care about the content that they can get from the carriers? Are those prices sustainable for the next generation or are carriers milking old customers who just have switched the medium but won't switch content? On the other hand, with phones going for $1,000+, there is enough money available to be spent. What's the upper overall limit on money that is spent on streaming and entertainment? If people can afford to spend $200 per month on entertainment, it's not unreasonable for streaming services to go for a $100 share.
pnw_hazor 6y ago
My plan was to have two streaming subscriptions at any one time. One is Amazon Prime, that only leaves one slot. I cancelled Netflix over a year ago, intending to buy HBO for a while. Somehow, I never got around to it. Though lately it helps that my daughter is home from college now because of the pandemic. She seems to have access to just about every service. (Sharing accounts with friends) We did watch The Mandalorian via my other daughter's ex-boyfriend's account. I felt a little dirty doing that because they just broke up and his heart was broken. Between sub $10.00 video games on Steam or GOG, Youtube, and Amazon Prime, it seems silly to pay for more services.
pmontra 6y ago
I'd love pay per view. I'd give them 1 Euro per view and at the end of the month I could even spend more than a monthly subscription, or zero. Unfortunately none of the streaming services sells this product and I'm not subscribing any of them.
- em-bee 6y ago
  that sounds about right. from my own usage experience i found that i'd be wiling to pay about $1 per movie, and half for a tv episode. i could also live with a system that costs $30 per month but caps the hours i can watch to say, 60. that's 2 hours per day. that would be enough. now of course with that in mind, i should be willing to pay more for each family member, and then $60/month don't look so bad anymore. however, i'd still want to get all available tv channels for that, and not just a selection
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
loraa 6y ago
It's getting expensive to rewrite movies.
orisho 6y ago
Because they now offer more content, at a higher quality, with greater convenience than when they first started. It is also perceived as high value socially, something you should obviously have. This wasn't always the case, and the price had to be lower to reflect that - or some people would not pay it. I'm sure before Netflix raises prices, they ask themselves the question "what % of our subscriber base will we lose, and how much will it hurt the growth rate?" Presumably, they also do some research. For Netflix, previous subscribers were slowly grandfathered in to the new prices, while new subscriptions paid the full price immediately. I imagine that allowed them to measure the impact on growth and churn before affecting their entire user base, allowing them to reverse the change if they saw it was a big mistake. Since they haven't reversed the change, one can only assume that it didn't have a big enough effect to justify keeping the previous pricing. Ergo, people consider it to be worth the money. I know I do. Finally, presumably they arrived at the previous price point by playing with prices, content and advertising until they arrived at a sufficiently large growth rate, so they were at the right price for that time. But many variables have changed since.
8fingerlouie 6y ago
Media consumption is somewhat different here in Scandinavia, but while prices on streaming services are increasing, i can still manage to buy both Netflix and HBO Nordic (~$14 each) for less than the price of the smallest Linear TV package, consisting of 5 free channels, and 4 paid channels ($40). Add to that, that the linear tv channels spam me with commercials at a frequency and duration so that it feels like the commercials is the content (which is probably not far from the truth from a broadcasters perspective). I'd say that the "breaking point" is around $20/month. After that it is no longer possible for most people to have 3-5 streaming services, and there will be a battle for customers, and we're going to see an increase in piracy again. In Denmark (and possibly more European countries) you can get "streaming bundles" with your mobile subscription with a 10%-20% discount. I.e. Telmore (https://www.telmore.dk/ https://www.telmore.dk/) offers a "Telmore Play" bundle, consisting of unlimited/free calls/texts, 60GB data (of which 32 are free for EU roaming), as well as Netflix, HBO Nordic, Viaplay and TV2 Play (last 2 are danish/nordic). This bundle will cost you $52/month. Upgrade it to $60/month and you also get unlimited data, a music streaming service (Telmore Music) as well as Bookmate which is a "book streaming service" (not really needed as public libraries are free and offer everything as ebooks anyway) As prices increase, i think we're going to see more and more deals like this. Netflix etc. will be the new "middlemen" in the coming decades and have less and less direct customers. As to why it ended up being the cell companies distributing it, i can only guess that the danish (nordic?) cell market was/is highly competetive, and for the past 20 years prices have been downward spiraling. That has changed in the last 5 years or so with prices starting to increase, but the amount of goods/services offered increasing as well. It is no longer enough (in Denmark at least) to simply offer more calling time/data, and we've arrived at "unlimited" at <$50/month.
fallingfrog 6y ago
Probably because of the loss of net neutrality, they are having to give a bigger and bigger cut to the cable companies.
sbmthakur 6y ago
How much it would cost me per month if I am to subscribe to the top three streaming services in the US?
tmaly 6y ago
I do not know a single person paying YouTube $65 a month. I had a friend that was buying YouTube without the ads, but I am not sure if that is the same thing.
- tenebrisalietum 6y ago
  The only situation I can think of where that makes sense is if you have a really fast fiber connection to the Internet but no cable at all, and really want the equivalent of cable TV. If I'm getting my Internet through Comcast and really want cable TV that bad I might as well go through them and take advantage of the bundles.
risfriend 6y ago
India, did actually implement a regulation to let users pay for exactly what they want to see to give the users an option other than the bundles provided by carriers/aggregators. This was implemented from Feb, 2019 https://www.indiatoday.in/technology/news/story/watching-tv-to-be-cheaper-after-february-1-trai-dth-rules-allow-users-to-create-pay-per-channel-plan-1427140-2019-01-09 https://www.indiatoday.in/technology/news/story/watching-tv-... Also, from March of this year the price per channel was capped and even the carriage fee has been capped to what the government agency deemed suitable - https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/industry/telecom/telecom-policy/trai-lowers-cap-on-mrp-of-individual-channels/articleshow/73063399.cms?from=mdr https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/industry/telecom/teleco... Though this can end up making the business for some cable TV companies unsustainable, especially on the lower end of the spectrum - some of which were already in losses.
donclark 6y ago
Content wars.

91 points by prostoalex 6y ago

ponker 6y ago

Don’t know why a person needs more than one streaming service. How much TV does a person need to watch?

capsulecorp 6y ago
I don't know that one NEEDS to watch any TV. Then again you don't NEED to be on the internet or hacker news. People also do things they want, not just what they need.
- tialaramex 6y ago
  You do need access to the Network to participate in human society. Currently the Internet is the Network. Historically the PSTN was the Network and before that (and to some extent in parallel) the global postal system was the Network. Now participating in society isn't as immediately necessary as air, water, or food, but just staying physically alive isn't really enough for people. They seek meaning in their lives and emotional connections to others, by participating in human society. The Network enables that. A programme to deliver Network access to everybody who wants it and hasn't gone out of their way to live somewhere crazy makes at least as much sense for a rich industrialised nation as a programme to build sewers, or to demand safe housing for its people. Fortunately if you want television the Network delivers that too.
zapzupnz 6y ago
It depends on what shows people want to watch.
liamkinne 6y ago
Yes but one might watch a small selection of shows over many streaming services. And even still, I know several people who fill every spare minute with streamed tv to keep their conscience busy.
dexterdog 6y ago
You only need more than one because of siloing. Would anybody be happy with one channel or one website. This is not music where all of the offerings have nearly identical catalogs. The problem is they silo so much that piracy becomes the only logical option.
loopz 6y ago
It's more about all that you choose not to watch.
- jchook 6y ago
  Perhaps equally what you choose and choose not to watch
xenospn 6y ago
Same goes with clothes. People like having choices, even tho they may never actually wear it.
p1necone 6y ago
If I could buy a magical streaming service that only carries the two or three shows I care about at any one time that would be great, but that doesn't exist. But rather than actually paying for all the content I just end up subbing to Netflix and Anime Lab and pirating everything that's not there. (And I'm considering unsubbing from Netflix - they've slowly removed all of the non Netflix original stuff I care about) Piracy bad I know I know, but there's a limit to how many hoops I'm willing to jump through before I give up and pirate stuff - legitimately finding out how to buy content I want to watch shouldn't be harder than torrenting it.
rdiddly 6y ago
I don't know about what I need, but I guess I've decided there's no way in hell I'm paying for more than one. I feel like each little fiefdom demanding its little tribute is going to hurt them all in the long run, or at least I hope it does. Let the market consolidate into some kind of monopoly, dare I say it, since I'm usually against such things. If it's even possible at this point with how fragmented it is. Maybe the next generation aggregator/platform will come along and all these services will jump onboard it. Until then, I'm kind of leaning toward piracy or just plain abstinence. There are a lot of creative people out there making time-dependent art but the fact is, it's time-dependent art, which means I have to spend the time to watch it. Maybe more than once, in the case of the super detail-oriented ones like the Breaking Bad universe let's say. I notice when I skip all that shit, I get tons of learning-new-frameworks-and-languages done.
imtringued 6y ago
Because streaming services have a limited selection. You might only be interested in a dozen shows and after a year you've watched everything you wanted.
- pnw_hazor 6y ago
  Then switch to a different service for awhile. That is the killer consumer feature, the ability to rotate services on a month-to-month basis.

vinni2 6y ago

The only streaming service I subscribe to is Netflix and that is shared with 4 of our family members across 3 countries. I stopped watching live tv there is no point anymore.

blinding-streak 6y ago

Linear TV as a concept just doesn't seem sustainable for much longer at the current trajectory. It's lost half its viewership in the past 3 years [1]. The decline will continue. Flagship channels will continue to exist, but at some point the bundling model will break down when the economics deteriorate further. Bundling is the only thing keeping most of these channels afloat. [1] https://medium.com/@ThinkNowTweets/linear-tv-loses-half-its-viewers-as-streaming-services-soar-61ac0d67381f https://medium.com/@ThinkNowTweets/linear-tv-loses-half-its-...

themodelplumber 6y ago
I think there will always be demand for linear content. But I would add that linear content tends to benefit an audience that is somewhat off the HN-user's psychological radar: 1) Enjoy "noise" in the environment, 2) appreciate scheduled, always-on randomness, and 3) tend to want to like what is generally liked by society. Mass consumerism is the more pessimistic name for it. Bundling is also beneficial for allowing some choice as a value-add, as opposed to choice-first like Netflix. There's less friction in the former, less in the way of putting some random thing on and making it stay on while changing programming over time.
selectodude 6y ago
It’s sports. As long as people want sports, they can bundle and charge whatever they want. HGTV probably pays for itself in advertising alone, but bundle it with, say, ESPN and you can charge $1/mo and streaming companies have no choice but to buy it. I would love to spend $65/mo for all the sports, but I can’t. All of the people who want the channels I don’t want are subsidizing me. Unbundle everything and now I’m paying $170/mo and all the other ancillary channels cease to exist.
- dexterdog 6y ago
  ESPN needs way way more than one dollar per month per subscriber for their licensing alone.
  - 6y ago

dang 6y ago

Recent and related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23693407 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23693407

toohotatopic 6y ago
"YouTube TV sharply increases monthly subscription to $64.99"

Waterluvian 6y ago

I am convinced the pricing is all deflated to jockey for dominance and then they’ll start raising them. I pay $6.60USD per month for Disney+. No way that’s their par pricing. Why would I ever buy my kids a Disney DVD or blu ray?

tjoff 6y ago
So, $80 a year. How much did you spend on Disney before? (And how much was left for Disney after everyone on the way had their cut taken).
- Waterluvian 6y ago
  A whole hell of a lot more. Not just for Star Wars but for all the Disney and Pixar stuff for my boys. Your revision makes the point a bit better. They’ve cut out the store. Manufacturer. Etc. So that’s a win win. Doesn’t mean Disney is happy sharing the profits with me.
  - ekianjo 6y ago
    Digital distribution costs are much lower than physical distribution. And toys are still being sold, maybe even more, as your kids watch more stuff. They could make their whole catalog free and still have a very profitable toy/parks business out of it.
    - ohyeshedid 6y ago
      To your point, they've done that previously. Originally, the Disney channel was a premium subscription channel. They started transitioning to basic cable bundling in 1990-91.
- CivBase 6y ago
  Streaming rentals are $3-$5 and Disney definitely doesn't come out with enough content I'm interested in watching (much less re-watching) each year to justify the service even at its current price. I suppose it might seem like a more reasonable value if you have kids, re-watch a lot of their older stuff, or actually care about any of their TV shows. But I'm not sure how much further they can really push it with their current offerings.

sixothree 6y ago

Youtube TV is just such an awful experience. It's slow, non-responsive, completely uncustomizable, non-intuitive. Skipping 15 minutes ahead using a remote control is virtually impossible. You cannot turn off auto play. And what it chooses is complete garbage - nothing I ever watched while using it. Ugh.

tech-historian 6y ago
Couldn't disagree more. I've tried almost all of the OTT services. YTTV is by far the best. It's not slow at all for me. The DVR is fantastic, search feature is great, and the predictive shows work well. It even has live stats during certain sports, and allows you to catch up watching each "key play." That is, when sports were actually happening. Sigh.
chrismcb 6y ago
Youtube TV has some issues, but I've never experienced those. I use shield and fast forward with a remote is easy. I've never had it autoplay. I'm not sure what you mean by what it chooses. Are you talking about youtube instead of YouTube TV?
- sixothree 6y ago
  Youtube TV will continue to play shows after your current show ends. Seems to be the default for multiple platforms.
  - tech-historian 6y ago
    This is the default for every streaming service I've ever used. Netflix, Hulu, HBO, etc etc. Certainly not just a quirk of YTTV.

brian-bk 6y ago

Long ago, the internet streaming services lived in harmony. Then everything changed when the Disney conglomerate attacked. In all seriousness - I believe it really is pressure from Disney forcing their competitors out, that's caused the faster acceleration of prices. It's something that would have happened anyway, but it's more pronounced with such a large behemoth of licensed content joining in to the fight.

echelon 6y ago
Disney isn't forcing competitors out. There are more competitors now than ever.
- brian-bk 6y ago
  It's noted in the article, they're not forcing them out by direct competition. Rather, their squeezing their competitors profit margins and forcing competitors' prices up, but charging more prohibitive prices for content.

twblalock 6y ago

The low prices were never sustainable. Streaming companies have ever-increasing costs and they can either make money with subscriptions, one-time rental fees (common on Amazon Prime Video) or advertisements -- or a combination of those. Low subscription prices are sustainable when the subscriber base is growing and continually bringing in more money, but at some point most of the customer base has been reached and then the only way to increase revenue is to raise prices. Until recently, streaming customers have had their subscription prices subsidized by subscriber growth. Why can't streaming companies be happy with the revenue they already have? They need to increase revenue not solely because shareholders demand it, but also because the price of content continues to increase, especially when content providers know they have leverage when licensing terms are negotiated. The bigger a streaming company gets, the more eyeballs will see the content, so content providers feel justified in asking for more money. Also, streaming companies generally have libraries of content that increase in size over time, so the total money they pay for licensing will also continue to increase even if the price of each piece of content does not. On top of all that, they need to pay for the infrastructure to deliver all the bytes. (This is why Disney's streaming service is in such a good spot -- they already own the content, and they have a huge back catalog.) Say what you will about the cable companies (and they really do suck) but their pricing was not entirely a result of monopolistic practices. Price pressure from content owners was also a major factor, and it is such a strong force that streaming companies can't escape it.

chii 6y ago
It's a problem of business model to me. Streaming companies are starting to look like cable companies, because the "system" incentivizes exclusivity of content. When netflix started, they didn't make their own content, but instead licensed it. They offered fast and reliable services, and the content was tangential. But as soon as content producers (and other media companies including cable companies) saw how profitable netflix was, they either raised their content license fees, or withdrew it to add to their own streaming service for exclusivity. Therefore, netflix needed to complete with exclusivity. This is starting to look like the cable days. I would propose that all content producing companies have to license their content to anyone who is willing to pay, at the "same" price (per user? per year? etc? this is something yet to be decided). That is, a content producer cannot charge one entity one price, and another entity a different price, nor refuse to license it to another entity (in the same way that a store cannot charge one customer one price, while another customer gets a different price).

ChuckMcM 6y ago

I am keeping an eye on Netflix and Amazon who are creating more and more content. They are looking to cut out the "middle" as it were and while their successes are a bit hit or miss, my assumption is that they will eventually figure out how to get the best production companies on board and completely take people like Disney and Viacom/CBS out of the picture. Can't do it for pre-existing content but they can for new content going forward.

twblalock 6y ago
The pre-existing content is the problem. How many people would subscribe to Amazon and Netflix if the only content available was produced by Amazon and Netflix? In some ways the video/DVD business was better for consumers, because once you've bought the DVD you won't have to go pay more money next year to be allowed to watch it again. The problem is very few people can afford all the DVDs they might ever want to watch.
- CobrastanJorji 6y ago
  I think you could solve a lot of this problem by coming up with a legal framework for a digital first sale doctrine. If I buy a movie digitally, I need a way to legally sell it or, critically, rent it to someone else. Make that happen, and all of these digital rental services will suddenly increase their catalog a hundredfold. Netflix would do it overnight, since they already have a massive DVD warehouse and they'd just need to stop shipping the DVDs.
  - f1refly 6y ago
    I don't think that matters. Like really, at all. I think the first thing you'd have to come up with is a service that sells drm free, so people can actually get what they paid money for. When I "buy" digitally from either amazon or google, there's no way I'll ever see an mkv file or anything like that. When "buying" video digitally, I don't ever get the feeling that the stuff is really "mine". When I buy from bandcamp, I can download a flac and archive it. That music is mine. When I get it from google, I can view it from their website. That movie is not mine. And let's not pretend that sales would go down. Music is sold like this for a long time, just like copying without permission unfortunately didn't kill Hollywood all this time.

Joeri 6y ago

Prices are going up because there is no competition. All these services have different selections of content, and paradoxically the more of them there are, the smaller the slice each one gets, and the more services you need to subscribe to in order to have a well rounded selection. If you are fine with the old model, where the station picks your programming for you, then this model is an on demand continuation of that, but if you would like a model like in music streaming where all services carry mostly the same content but provide a different UX, you are out of luck. I’m currently subscribed to four streaming services, and disney hasn’t even launched in my area. It is too much. I’m going to get rid of a few, and just start pirating content again. There are many shows and movies I can’t get on any streaming service anyway, but the pirate bay carries them all in bluray quality.

chii 6y ago
> all services carry mostly the same content but provide a different UX, you are out of luck. and hence the return to channel bittorrent.
- itskwanyall 6y ago
  I’d try and confirm that but the UX on Prime Video is so bad I can never tell what’s actually exists on the platform
jbay808 6y ago
Heh, I recently found out that season one of a show I'm watching is exclusive to platform A, and season two to platform B... It's madness.
imdoor 6y ago
The situation was very similar in US in the past with film studios owning their own movie theaters and showing their movies only there [1]. Then movie producers got broken off of movie distributors. I would like the same happen to streaming platforms. Until then, i can't see any meaningful competition happening in this space. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Paramount_Pictures,_Inc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Paramount_Pic....

toohotatopic 6y ago

The article explains that the prices go up because the carriers rise prices so that the steaming services have to follow suit. What this doesn't explain is why the market accepts those prices. Why is there such a demand for the carrier channels? Shouldn't youtube and twitch channels and other content providers increase supply to the point that people don't care about the content that they can get from the carriers? Are those prices sustainable for the next generation or are carriers milking old customers who just have switched the medium but won't switch content? On the other hand, with phones going for $1,000+, there is enough money available to be spent. What's the upper overall limit on money that is spent on streaming and entertainment? If people can afford to spend $200 per month on entertainment, it's not unreasonable for streaming services to go for a $100 share.

pnw_hazor 6y ago

My plan was to have two streaming subscriptions at any one time. One is Amazon Prime, that only leaves one slot. I cancelled Netflix over a year ago, intending to buy HBO for a while. Somehow, I never got around to it. Though lately it helps that my daughter is home from college now because of the pandemic. She seems to have access to just about every service. (Sharing accounts with friends) We did watch The Mandalorian via my other daughter's ex-boyfriend's account. I felt a little dirty doing that because they just broke up and his heart was broken. Between sub $10.00 video games on Steam or GOG, Youtube, and Amazon Prime, it seems silly to pay for more services.

pmontra 6y ago

I'd love pay per view. I'd give them 1 Euro per view and at the end of the month I could even spend more than a monthly subscription, or zero. Unfortunately none of the streaming services sells this product and I'm not subscribing any of them.

em-bee 6y ago
that sounds about right. from my own usage experience i found that i'd be wiling to pay about $1 per movie, and half for a tv episode. i could also live with a system that costs $30 per month but caps the hours i can watch to say, 60. that's 2 hours per day. that would be enough. now of course with that in mind, i should be willing to pay more for each family member, and then $60/month don't look so bad anymore. however, i'd still want to get all available tv channels for that, and not just a selection

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loraa 6y ago

It's getting expensive to rewrite movies.

orisho 6y ago

Because they now offer more content, at a higher quality, with greater convenience than when they first started. It is also perceived as high value socially, something you should obviously have. This wasn't always the case, and the price had to be lower to reflect that - or some people would not pay it. I'm sure before Netflix raises prices, they ask themselves the question "what % of our subscriber base will we lose, and how much will it hurt the growth rate?" Presumably, they also do some research. For Netflix, previous subscribers were slowly grandfathered in to the new prices, while new subscriptions paid the full price immediately. I imagine that allowed them to measure the impact on growth and churn before affecting their entire user base, allowing them to reverse the change if they saw it was a big mistake. Since they haven't reversed the change, one can only assume that it didn't have a big enough effect to justify keeping the previous pricing. Ergo, people consider it to be worth the money. I know I do. Finally, presumably they arrived at the previous price point by playing with prices, content and advertising until they arrived at a sufficiently large growth rate, so they were at the right price for that time. But many variables have changed since.

8fingerlouie 6y ago

Media consumption is somewhat different here in Scandinavia, but while prices on streaming services are increasing, i can still manage to buy both Netflix and HBO Nordic (~$14 each) for less than the price of the smallest Linear TV package, consisting of 5 free channels, and 4 paid channels ($40). Add to that, that the linear tv channels spam me with commercials at a frequency and duration so that it feels like the commercials is the content (which is probably not far from the truth from a broadcasters perspective). I'd say that the "breaking point" is around $20/month. After that it is no longer possible for most people to have 3-5 streaming services, and there will be a battle for customers, and we're going to see an increase in piracy again. In Denmark (and possibly more European countries) you can get "streaming bundles" with your mobile subscription with a 10%-20% discount. I.e. Telmore (https://www.telmore.dk/ https://www.telmore.dk/) offers a "Telmore Play" bundle, consisting of unlimited/free calls/texts, 60GB data (of which 32 are free for EU roaming), as well as Netflix, HBO Nordic, Viaplay and TV2 Play (last 2 are danish/nordic). This bundle will cost you $52/month. Upgrade it to $60/month and you also get unlimited data, a music streaming service (Telmore Music) as well as Bookmate which is a "book streaming service" (not really needed as public libraries are free and offer everything as ebooks anyway) As prices increase, i think we're going to see more and more deals like this. Netflix etc. will be the new "middlemen" in the coming decades and have less and less direct customers. As to why it ended up being the cell companies distributing it, i can only guess that the danish (nordic?) cell market was/is highly competetive, and for the past 20 years prices have been downward spiraling. That has changed in the last 5 years or so with prices starting to increase, but the amount of goods/services offered increasing as well. It is no longer enough (in Denmark at least) to simply offer more calling time/data, and we've arrived at "unlimited" at <$50/month.

fallingfrog 6y ago

Probably because of the loss of net neutrality, they are having to give a bigger and bigger cut to the cable companies.

sbmthakur 6y ago

How much it would cost me per month if I am to subscribe to the top three streaming services in the US?

tmaly 6y ago

I do not know a single person paying YouTube $65 a month. I had a friend that was buying YouTube without the ads, but I am not sure if that is the same thing.

tenebrisalietum 6y ago
The only situation I can think of where that makes sense is if you have a really fast fiber connection to the Internet but no cable at all, and really want the equivalent of cable TV. If I'm getting my Internet through Comcast and really want cable TV that bad I might as well go through them and take advantage of the bundles.

risfriend 6y ago

India, did actually implement a regulation to let users pay for exactly what they want to see to give the users an option other than the bundles provided by carriers/aggregators. This was implemented from Feb, 2019 https://www.indiatoday.in/technology/news/story/watching-tv-to-be-cheaper-after-february-1-trai-dth-rules-allow-users-to-create-pay-per-channel-plan-1427140-2019-01-09 https://www.indiatoday.in/technology/news/story/watching-tv-... Also, from March of this year the price per channel was capped and even the carriage fee has been capped to what the government agency deemed suitable - https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/industry/telecom/telecom-policy/trai-lowers-cap-on-mrp-of-individual-channels/articleshow/73063399.cms?from=mdr https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/industry/telecom/teleco... Though this can end up making the business for some cable TV companies unsustainable, especially on the lower end of the spectrum - some of which were already in losses.

donclark 6y ago

Content wars.