12 ms·

If you look at twenty years ago, there's far more content available now, for far less money. Your minimum cable outlay back then would still cover the cost of a

If you look at twenty years ago, there's far more content available now, for far less money. Your minimum cable outlay back then would still cover the cost of a couple streaming services. What there isn't is a good way to get a single subscription to watch anything you want. The cable bundle was close to that for TV content, but very lacking for movies. So if you want to watch a really wide sampling of TV content, it can feel like we're going backward, since there's no more one-stop-shop. Careful what you wish for? The big desire then was a la carte, and right now you can bounce between streaming services at will, and they're all still far easier to cancel than cable. Some things have fallen through the cracks, particularly long-running (going back to the pre-streaming era) major-network content like the aforementioned Survivor (a random missing episode seems like a weird problem, would love to know what was going on). And getting US content stuff internationally is often sub-par, although... I don't recall stories of this being easy at all two decades ago. So consumers are overall definitely winning, but it's not a perfect victory for everyone.

fshbbdssbbgdd 5y ago
> Survivor (a random missing episode seems like a weird problem, would love to know what was going on) Music licensing?
- majormajor 5y ago
  I think that's pretty unlikely for something made this year. YoutubeTV and other Cable co's should be pretty similar in that regard. Buying the music for availability on "cable cable" and "CBS's own app" but not "streaming cable" would be baffling.
- stubish 5y ago
  Yeah, I hear their account got disabled by an automatic copyright violation notice and are trying to find a support contact to appeal.
margalabargala 5y ago
> Your minimum cable outlay back then would still cover the cost of a couple streaming services. It would not cover a typical US internet bill with speeds to support streaming, plus a couple streaming services.
- majormajor 5y ago
  True, the edge case of "I want TV but not internet" users are not in a great place to access streaming content. They still have all their existing cable content, though, at least? And in 2001, good chance they were already paying for internet back then too. I don't think it's realistic to assume "no internet" is a standard default these days, though, regardless of if/how you watch TV.
  - HWR_14 5y ago
    It's not "no internet". It's "low bandwidth" internet. If it wasn't for streaming or downloading OS updates, would most people need fast internet?
    - sokoloff 5y ago
      Most people working from home (or remote schooling, even occasionally) would need more than low bandwidth internet.
    - majormajor 5y ago
      What do you mean by low bandwidth? 56K dialup? 1.5Mbps DSL? 10Mbit? Streaming only was able to take off because broadband (back then this wouldn't even have been that much, >~2Mbps) was already widespread. So I'd say yes, nobody liked waiting for slow connections.
    - lotsofpulp 5y ago
      Yes? HD video calls and backing up your personal media. Even an old person can benefit from high upload being able to do a remote doctor visit with an HD camera.
  - 5y ago
jedberg 5y ago
> a random missing episode seems like a weird problem, would love to know what was going on In almost every case like that, the answer is "we can't figure out if this is licensed for streaming because it didn't exist yet". Usually it's music, which they licensed for "broadcast and video cassette release" or some similar language. In most cases they've decided DVD is close enough to VHS to still count, but is streaming? Courts haven't really decided yet.
- majormajor 5y ago
  That's why this case is weird: it's a brand new episode. And it is in the CBS streaming app. Just missing from YouTube's cable product.
  - jedberg 5y ago
    Ah. That is odd. Maybe there was an error in the master file given to YouTube or a glitch in their encoder that skipped it.
  - foobarian 5y ago
    Maybe there is a dollar sign or backslash or something in the title/description. Or a rogue UTF8 byte order mark [1] throwing off some comparison :-) [1] https://www.markhneedham.com/blog/2012/09/03/a-rogue-357273277-utf-8-byte-order-mark/ https://www.markhneedham.com/blog/2012/09/03/a-rogue-3572732...
  - FroshKiller 5y ago
    The season 8 premiere of Forged in Fire last year got pulled because one of the contestants turned out to be a neo-Nazi with a visible neo-Nazi tattoo.
freetinker 5y ago
Not to mention 4K HDR, spatial audio, etc. How quickly we take things for granted.
mynameisash 5y ago
> What there isn't is a good way to get a single subscription to watch anything you want. I would even settle for a way where I can ask, "Where can I stream X?" There used to be canistream.it -- which is apparently now being rebuilt but has long been mostly useless. Fingers crossed that it becomes useful.
- jwcooper 5y ago
  justwatch.com works pretty well, at least in the USA.
  - jbay808 5y ago
    Works well in Canada too (as long as you are on their Canadian site).
- nefitty 5y ago
  JustWatch is pretty good. https://www.justwatch.com/ https://www.justwatch.com/
- javajosh 5y ago
  I did a search for "streaming search" and got https://reelgood.com/ https://reelgood.com/ and https://www.justwatch.com/ https://www.justwatch.com/. Roku also has a search engine called "What's On". https://www.roku.com/whats-on https://www.roku.com/whats-on. Now if only someone would combine all of these search engines...
- delecti 5y ago
  The Google TV app does a good job at that. It checks all my installed apps and links directly to the media item in that app if I pick a piece of media on one. It will also link to services I don't have, or offer a pay-to-play through Google itself.
- baq 5y ago
  They funniest (saddest) answer is the Pirate Bay.
stefan_ 5y ago
Can I intercede and say that $170 cable bills were never a thing outside the US?
- brewdad 5y ago
  Surely you mean outside of North America. From my understanding, the cable situation was always even worse in Canada.
- lotsofpulp 5y ago
  Media content is typically sold based on the populations’ purchasing power. It is why the same book is sold in Asia for $5 that is $50 in the US. Since the marginal cost of selling an additional unit is near zero, it makes sense for sellers to heavily price discriminate such that poorer people are charged what they can afford and richer people are charged what they can afford.
  - laurent92 5y ago
    Would it be legal to ask for a paysheet and determine the price based on that? When I hear price discrimination, I do understand that it’s always been the deal, but I wonder whether we’re trending towards something proportional to salary.
    - lotsofpulp 5y ago
      I am sure it is legal to ask for the pay sheet, but no seller would give you that. Sellers usually do not price discriminate merchandise that is not differentials within the same country since commerce within the country cannot be easily restricted. That is where brands come in for differentiable products. The generic brand lotion and the name brand lotion might come from the same factory. Maybe it is even the same product, or the different in quality is only slightly better for the name brand. But now the seller can target people willing to pay $x for lotion, and people willing to pay $2x for basically the same lotion. Or you implement “binning”, where products of worse quality get branded differently, even though the sale price difference between the better quality product and the generic quality product is disproportionately larger than the cost to produce the better quality product than the generic product. Anyway, you cannot do this for a movie or tv show, so the sellers of movies/tv shows do it more crudely via country or region of the world.
fragmede 5y ago
Per https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/ https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/ a $50 cable bill from 1990 is about $110 now. Depending on where your reference point is, more streaming for less money sounds good, but don't forget Netflix was around with no real competition for a long while, and at $10/month. $50 (for Netflix+Hulu+Paramount+Disney/whatever vs $10 is quite the increase!
- majormajor 5y ago
  You could definitely pay less than $50 for cable throughout the 90s, it's HD which I remember pushing prices up. But those would be your basic packages, without addons, and especially without HBO and such. But now if all you wanted was HBO, you could get it for under 20 bucks if you have anything but the slowest internet packages!
- ghaff 5y ago
  Except Netflix never had the streaming content that you can get today for $50--both because of its own original content and because a lot of content (especially films) was never available on Netflix streaming. I agree with the parent. Without live TV, a streaming bundle you assemble is clearly cheaper than you were paying for cable TV (or cable TV plus Netflix) in the US. Today, add a live TV streaming service and you're probably back to about price parity with a lot more choice of content.
- mdasen 5y ago
  I think expecting Netflix to stick around at $10/mo with such a library of content was unrealistic. Sometimes there are odd fluctuations in markets. For example, the current used car market has insane values with used vehicles costing more than the MSRP on new ones sometimes. Likewise, when Netflix had no competition, they were able to sign deals with content providers for almost nothing because content providers thought streaming was worthless. Either streaming was going to fail and that $10 deal would go away or streaming was going to succeed and content providers wouldn't license content so cheaply. That era was an odd thing in the market before content owners realized that streaming wasn't just a little additional revenue, but a replacement for their service. I don't think you can really compare a market blip to a sustainable business model. HBO and others weren't going to continue licensing their catalogues to Netflix once it was clear that streaming was popular. They made the mistake of licensing to Netflix assuming that they'd be getting a little extra pocket money rather than cannibalizing their services. That mistake is probably the reason Netflix is the giant it is today. Netflix signed deals to license content before content owners realized the value of streaming. They used that content to gain subscribers until they could afford to build their own library of first-party content. Even from Netflix's side, they might have been spending more on content than they wanted to long-term to try and gain subscribers that would be sticky as their library waned and they transformed from "we licensed most of the content you want" to "we're another HBO with a limited content selection". These things happen. We saw MoviePass come and go because it was an unsustainably good deal. I think it's also important to remember that back in that era of Netflix, most people were still paying for cable and renting DVDs. Maybe you weren't, but most people were. I think it's important to think about the whole amount that people were spending and people were spending a lot on their entertainment. It was perfectly normal to head to a Blockbuster and spend $10 renting two DVDs each weekend. That feels like such an alien concept today, but people were spending $100 on cable plus $40 on rentals and getting a lot less entertainment than they are today. Sure, if you were one of the few that only had Netflix, it was a glorious time. $10/mo never bought so much entertainment! Likewise, if you were a MoviePass subscriber, no one had ever gotten so many theater tickets for so little money. But it wasn't going to last because it was unsustainably good. Once MoviePass found that people would actually use the service, it was dead in the water. Once content owners saw that people would cancel their HBO subscription because Netflix had HBO's content, the era of Netflix having such an expansive library for so cheap would end as the deals ran out. Comparing current prices to a market blip isn't really a fair comparison - but there was a pretty great 5 years in there.
ZetaZero 5y ago
I want more a la carte. Give me one service without bundles where every "channel" has a price. I don't want my provider negotiating a 14-channel package for every viewer (YouTubeTV and NBC Universal). I don't want MTV and VH1, but I do want Tennis Channel (which isn't an option).
- lotsofpulp 5y ago
  > I don't want MTV and VH1, but I do want Tennis Channel (which isn't an option). Do not pay Disney, and send an email to the US Tennis Association or whoever keeps contracting with ESPN. If you keep paying Disney to watch Tennis, you will never get it a la carte.
- smugglerFlynn 5y ago
  Apple TV did just that, but you have to manually purchase all the separate streaming services available locally
anothernewdude 5y ago
What bothers me is missing shows from my Countries' offerings. Netflix is supposed to have Arrested Development. Not from my Country. Why? No information.
- PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
  The answer is always the same: no licensing deal could be arranged. The precise reasons for that may vary, and certainly the license holders will vary, but since there's essentially nothing you could do about that, there seems to be little point in Netflix telling you over and over "this would be available if we could get a license deal"
stocknoob 5y ago
Plus, you can share it with family members. And watch on multiple devices. And turn services on/off without having to get on the phone. It's much, much better.
II2II 5y ago
People seem to forget how bad things used to be. We are extremely fortunate with the ability to watch what we want, when we want, without being interrupted by commercials, for an extremely low cost. There also appears to be a great deal of progress with respect to being able to view programs/movies produced for foreign markets. But the best thing is: > you can bounce between streaming services at will, and they're all still far easier to cancel than cable. Add to that cheaper, since you don't have to deal with connection fees. If you know that you're not going to have the time to use the service for a couple of months because you're too busy with work, you don't have to pay for it. If you have decided that you are going to spend most of your summer pursuing outdoor recreational activities, you don't have to pay for it. If you're going on the road for a few weeks (vacation or business), you don't have to pay for it. If you decide that you want to watch programming on two different streaming services, you can simply rotate through the services on a monthly basis and only pay for one service at a time. Why do I bring all of this up when it's not directly related to the article: it's because these articles reek of entitlement. Yes, there are times when licensing causes shows or movies to fall through the cracks. On the other hand, the situation is also far better than it used to be when using the same metrics. Not only that, but it can be a heck of a lot less expensive even when factoring in the cost of an Internet connection.
- citizenkeen 5y ago
  On the one hand, we got what we asked for: _a la carte_. I think what makes people frustrated is that cable channels were _themed_. I was frustrated that I was paying for TLC and Bravo because I didn't watch reality tv. I was paying for Discovery even though I didn't watch nature shows. I was paying for Lifetime even though I didn't watch cheap shows for women. I was paying for ESPN even though I didn't watch sports. I wanted to pay for the comedy, the scifi/syfy, the cartoons, and the kids programming. That was, like, five or six channels. Which streaming service do I go to now for the science fiction? Which streaming service do I go to now for the horror or the feel-good sitcoms? Streaming arose during the collapse of genre channels. There are now three genres of programming: prestige, drek, and children's.
  - mortenjorck 5y ago
wintermutestwin 5y ago
>Careful what you wish for? The big desire then was a la carte, and right now you can bounce between streaming services at will, and they're all still far easier to cancel than cable. "a la carte" means I don't subscribe to anything and instead I have access to "all the things" with a separate charge for each thing. The whole idea back then was to compete with the ease and access of piracy like Steam did. That said, "careful what you wish for" currently applies to sitcom episodes for rent on Amazon costing more per minute than mega budget movies.
- dnissley 5y ago
  I think this is an apples to oranges comparison, since single episodes of tv shows aren't generally available to rent, unlike movies.
- bamboozled 5y ago
  If you’re living outside the US getting content in English isn’t anywhere as easy as it should be. These services are definitely America centric. It’s been good for me, I just watch a whole lot less crap and get more sleep.
Hypx_ 5y ago
I suspect cost of streaming services will increase though. Cable didn't get as expensive as it did overnight after all.
ryandrake 5y ago
There is also too much "content" being made, and not enough quality movies to watch. There's a recent reddit thread[1] about this weird trend lately where more and more of what's offered is junk "made for TV" quality content. Even the word we use for it is revealing: Content. So boring. So gray and bland. Like a dry cardboard media ration made specifically to be consumed by some global ISO-standard Consumer. Everything has this odd B-movie With Big Stars hue. But two months after you view it, you struggle to even remember what it was about. Polished, featureless content, but hey, it's in 4K and stars Dwayne Johnson. High-quality, daring, inspired, more than superficially controversial, world-changing movies are another casualty of the rise of streaming. 1: https://old.reddit.com/r/movies/comments/qx4rtu/i_think_movies_are_getting_this_weird_netflixy/ https://old.reddit.com/r/movies/comments/qx4rtu/i_think_movi...
- antasvara 5y ago
  Is there some difference between streaming companies and classic movie studios that makes this the case? Arguably, the current state of movies is a direct result of studios realizing that well-produced, middle of the road content is the most profitable. Of course, I could be missing something about the industry and how streaming has shaped it. I just struggle to see how the streaming ecosystem has different content requirements than a normal movie studio.
  - joe_guy 5y ago
    > Is there some difference between streaming companies and classic movie studios that makes this the case? I have no inside knowledge and am fully speculating, including some random tidbits I've read here and there. Think about how Netflix changed when moving from DVD to streaming. They used to optimize for recommending you movies you would rate highly. Now it's all about what keeps people viewing the longest. 2 middle of the road acceptable movies that you rate a 6/10 is more viewing time than 1 higher quality production that you'd rate a 9/10 -- I doubt the costs are they cut and dry but I think that's the idea. More content that is passable wins out against less content that is of higher quality.
  - vineyardmike 5y ago
OminousWeapons 5y ago
> Careful what you wish for? The big desire then was a la carte, and right now you can bounce between streaming services at will, and they're all still far easier to cancel than cable. I feel like people say they want a la carte but that's not actually what they want. What they want is all the good content and none of the crap filler content, for cheap. People pushed for a la carte because in their mind all content costs the same, so they figured that by removing the content they don't want and only keeping the content they do want, they would save tons of money. They don't understand that the good content (live sports, FX, AMC, HBO, et al) is precisely what studios are charging a premium for and what is driving most of the cost in packages in the first place. It's roughly akin to someone looking at a Vegas buffet that costs $100 and features 100 entrees and saying "well there are 100 entrees but really all I want is the cheese, prime rib, crab legs, and caviar, so if I remove the other 96 entrees then this should cost $4" then being shocked when they are still charged 40 dollars. Sure it's cheaper but in their minds it should be an order of magnitude cheaper than it is.
- baq 5y ago
  Remember that streaming services don’t only compete with each other, but they also compete with torrents. Netflix won not because of being cool or good, but because it was way more convenient than torrents for the majority of content. This isn’t true anymore, as all major studios want in on the market, which makes the TAM smaller due to fragmentation and lost network effects. (It is common to hear people saying they won’t pay for more than 1, 2, maybe 3 services.) Ice is thinner than it seems, but streaming services know this.
  - chii 5y ago
    > Ice is thinner than it seems, but streaming services know this. but would streaming services rather compete with piracy than another big player? With piracy, they have the law on their side - they can lobby for rules to punish piracy using state resources, rather than their own. They cannot do so for their competitors.
dools 5y ago
Apple TV is a one stop shop to see what’s available then you can choose to subscribe to stuff if you want
slothtrop 5y ago
I think the archaic system with tv/movies that does not exist (in the same capacity) with games and music is the point of frustration with customers. The barriers are a bit strange. Consumers aren't really averse to spending money for content they want, as evidenced not just from streaming but Steam/GOG, which by contrast directly benefits creators more. With paid streaming it's more abstracted. You're paying, but with the machinations it's unclear how well content creators are compensated or how it will eventually benefit them. Even with music the option to directly support artists, with digital download purchases, is dead easy between Bandcamp and other options. Can't do that with film, have to buy a physical copy that will be eventually be obsolete hardware, and costs more. To be fair I think there's more of a "one and done" attitude people have towards film, consumed then disposed, so streaming lends better to it.
dwighttk 5y ago
>Your minimum cable outlay back then would still cover the cost of a couple streaming services. I'm paying twice as much for cable internet as I used to pay for basic cable, before even starting to pay for a streaming service.
mymythisisthis 5y ago
I remember the VHS era of renting movies. I'm fortunate enough to live in a large city that had a great, independent, rental store. Lots of selection. I suspect the selection at that rental store is better than the selection at any of these streaming services, or all of them combined.
WalterBright 5y ago
My dad recorded many made-for-TV movies in the 1980s. These movies exist on IMDB, but nowhere else. I wonder why TV networks don't make their back catalog available. After all, TCM seems to do well running their back catalog of movies.
- bacchusracine 5y ago
  >My dad recorded many made-for-TV movies in the 1980s. These movies exist on IMDB, but nowhere else. Dear Lord, this! This! I would dearly love to be able to get a good copy of Love is Never Silent with working subtitles but sadly since it was a Hallmark made for television movie it's simply not available to me. There are certainly others like that, half remembered movies that I'd watched in my youth that would be worth revisiting as an adult or to share with others but they're simply unavailable except through IMDB to remind myself that I didn't imagine them, they do exist.
kelnos 5y ago
> What there isn't is a good way to get a single subscription to watch anything you want. [...] So if you want to watch a really wide sampling of TV content, it can feel like we're going backward, since there's no more one-stop-shop. This is the issue for me. My lineup of currently-"airing" shows requires subscriptions to Netflix, HBO Max, CBS All Access, Disney+, and Amazon Prime Video. And I feel like I'm forgetting another one or two. To be fair, these subscriptions, in total, do cost less than what I was paying for cable back in 2005 (last time I had cable). I don't want one streaming platform to rule them all. A monopoly doesn't sound great. So ok, we keep the idea of several competing streaming platforms. I'm sure there are downsides to this, but maybe a legal requirement for compulsory licensing to competing platforms under RAND terms might help?
Beaver117 5y ago
Except torrents provide that, and have for 20+ years. All this time and streaming sites haven't quite caught up.
strken 5y ago
22 years ago Napster existed. 21 years ago the Gnutella (LimeWire etc.) and eDonkey2000 networks existed. 20 years ago Kazaar and BitTorrent existed. Around that time, LAN parties with hundreds of seats and 100mbps connections existed, and attendees would use Direct Connect or simple SMB shared to download pirated media for 24 hours straight. This is mentioned in other comments, but a large part of the reason streaming services got going was because piracy was so much more convenient than the brutal grind of actually paying for something. Users could be sitting in their living rooms with wallets out ready to go, and still choose piracy, because the only other alternative was waiting for a physical CD or DVD to arrive. If the streaming wars do too much damage to consumers, they'll just flip the playing board and go back to piracy.
- imiric 5y ago
  > If the streaming wars do too much damage to consumers, they'll just flip the playing board and go back to piracy. I think that's already happening among the tech literate. The difference now is that the majority of consumers are not technically inclined and don't mind paying for several streaming services to get easy access to their favorite content, so the industry generally doesn't care about losing a small fraction to piracy. Pirating content is now more technically difficult than paying for a service, but the benefits are still there: DRM-free content that can be consumed on any device, accessed offline, safe against removal, licensing issues, region locks, easily shareable, etc. Paying for a streaming service now has the same issues as paying for cable did: you get access to tons of low quality content you don't care about just to watch the few shows and movies you actually do. Content curation is still an unsolved problem and the industry is ripe for disruption once someone figures out what I actually want to watch and how I can pay for only that. Or pirating will become easier and they'll continue to lose revenue.
jancsika 5y ago
> So consumers are overall definitely winning, but it's not a perfect victory for everyone. You could say the same in an alternate reality where everyone is still putting up with using Sourceforge and getting the occasional binary download bundled with malware. People would have forgotten how much more difficult it was to receive CDs by mail, so by your definition these poor alt developers would be winning.
dehrmann 5y ago
> The big desire then was a la carte A la carte might only make sense in a world of themed channels. After that, pricing gets hard because no one wants to pay $3 for an episode of Friends (I suppose the season is only $10), they want to rent access to everything like with Spotify, but it's complicated because sports cost a lot more than most other content, and content like reality shows is dirt cheap to make. Then there's pricing streaming movies. Everything older than 2 years included, add-on charge for new releases? People don't like microtransactions. And this is in a hypothetical world where video streaming isn't balkanized.
xg15 5y ago
> If you look at twenty years ago, there's far more content available now, for far less money. Your minimum cable outlay back then would still cover the cost of a couple streaming services. That's an odd argument and reminds me of the situation with science publishers that led to scihub and friends: Publishers were offering package deals to universities which technically had a wealth of content, except the vast majority of it was garbage. Nevertheless, universities had to buy the packages, because of the few flagship journals that were embedded in the packages. > Careful what you wish for? The big desire then was a la carte, and right now you can bounce between streaming services at will, and they're all still far easier to cancel than cable. Who was wishing for anything here? Streaming has always been pushed by the industry as an acceptable alternative to piracy. The supppsed benefits of streaming were always part of the sales push.

fshbbdssbbgdd 5y ago

> Survivor (a random missing episode seems like a weird problem, would love to know what was going on) Music licensing?

majormajor 5y ago
I think that's pretty unlikely for something made this year. YoutubeTV and other Cable co's should be pretty similar in that regard. Buying the music for availability on "cable cable" and "CBS's own app" but not "streaming cable" would be baffling.
stubish 5y ago
Yeah, I hear their account got disabled by an automatic copyright violation notice and are trying to find a support contact to appeal.

margalabargala 5y ago

> Your minimum cable outlay back then would still cover the cost of a couple streaming services. It would not cover a typical US internet bill with speeds to support streaming, plus a couple streaming services.

majormajor 5y ago
True, the edge case of "I want TV but not internet" users are not in a great place to access streaming content. They still have all their existing cable content, though, at least? And in 2001, good chance they were already paying for internet back then too. I don't think it's realistic to assume "no internet" is a standard default these days, though, regardless of if/how you watch TV.
- HWR_14 5y ago
  It's not "no internet". It's "low bandwidth" internet. If it wasn't for streaming or downloading OS updates, would most people need fast internet?
  - sokoloff 5y ago
    Most people working from home (or remote schooling, even occasionally) would need more than low bandwidth internet.
  - majormajor 5y ago
    What do you mean by low bandwidth? 56K dialup? 1.5Mbps DSL? 10Mbit? Streaming only was able to take off because broadband (back then this wouldn't even have been that much, >~2Mbps) was already widespread. So I'd say yes, nobody liked waiting for slow connections.
  - lotsofpulp 5y ago
    Yes? HD video calls and backing up your personal media. Even an old person can benefit from high upload being able to do a remote doctor visit with an HD camera.
- 5y ago

jedberg 5y ago

> a random missing episode seems like a weird problem, would love to know what was going on In almost every case like that, the answer is "we can't figure out if this is licensed for streaming because it didn't exist yet". Usually it's music, which they licensed for "broadcast and video cassette release" or some similar language. In most cases they've decided DVD is close enough to VHS to still count, but is streaming? Courts haven't really decided yet.

majormajor 5y ago
That's why this case is weird: it's a brand new episode. And it is in the CBS streaming app. Just missing from YouTube's cable product.
- jedberg 5y ago
  Ah. That is odd. Maybe there was an error in the master file given to YouTube or a glitch in their encoder that skipped it.
- foobarian 5y ago
  Maybe there is a dollar sign or backslash or something in the title/description. Or a rogue UTF8 byte order mark [1] throwing off some comparison :-) [1] https://www.markhneedham.com/blog/2012/09/03/a-rogue-357273277-utf-8-byte-order-mark/ https://www.markhneedham.com/blog/2012/09/03/a-rogue-3572732...
- FroshKiller 5y ago
  The season 8 premiere of Forged in Fire last year got pulled because one of the contestants turned out to be a neo-Nazi with a visible neo-Nazi tattoo.

freetinker 5y ago

Not to mention 4K HDR, spatial audio, etc. How quickly we take things for granted.

mynameisash 5y ago

> What there isn't is a good way to get a single subscription to watch anything you want. I would even settle for a way where I can ask, "Where can I stream X?" There used to be canistream.it -- which is apparently now being rebuilt but has long been mostly useless. Fingers crossed that it becomes useful.

jwcooper 5y ago
justwatch.com works pretty well, at least in the USA.
- jbay808 5y ago
  Works well in Canada too (as long as you are on their Canadian site).
nefitty 5y ago
JustWatch is pretty good. https://www.justwatch.com/ https://www.justwatch.com/
javajosh 5y ago
I did a search for "streaming search" and got https://reelgood.com/ https://reelgood.com/ and https://www.justwatch.com/ https://www.justwatch.com/. Roku also has a search engine called "What's On". https://www.roku.com/whats-on https://www.roku.com/whats-on. Now if only someone would combine all of these search engines...
delecti 5y ago
The Google TV app does a good job at that. It checks all my installed apps and links directly to the media item in that app if I pick a piece of media on one. It will also link to services I don't have, or offer a pay-to-play through Google itself.
baq 5y ago
They funniest (saddest) answer is the Pirate Bay.

stefan_ 5y ago

Can I intercede and say that $170 cable bills were never a thing outside the US?

brewdad 5y ago
Surely you mean outside of North America. From my understanding, the cable situation was always even worse in Canada.
lotsofpulp 5y ago
Media content is typically sold based on the populations’ purchasing power. It is why the same book is sold in Asia for $5 that is $50 in the US. Since the marginal cost of selling an additional unit is near zero, it makes sense for sellers to heavily price discriminate such that poorer people are charged what they can afford and richer people are charged what they can afford.
- laurent92 5y ago
  Would it be legal to ask for a paysheet and determine the price based on that? When I hear price discrimination, I do understand that it’s always been the deal, but I wonder whether we’re trending towards something proportional to salary.
  - lotsofpulp 5y ago
    I am sure it is legal to ask for the pay sheet, but no seller would give you that. Sellers usually do not price discriminate merchandise that is not differentials within the same country since commerce within the country cannot be easily restricted. That is where brands come in for differentiable products. The generic brand lotion and the name brand lotion might come from the same factory. Maybe it is even the same product, or the different in quality is only slightly better for the name brand. But now the seller can target people willing to pay $x for lotion, and people willing to pay $2x for basically the same lotion. Or you implement “binning”, where products of worse quality get branded differently, even though the sale price difference between the better quality product and the generic quality product is disproportionately larger than the cost to produce the better quality product than the generic product. Anyway, you cannot do this for a movie or tv show, so the sellers of movies/tv shows do it more crudely via country or region of the world.

fragmede 5y ago

Per https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/ https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/ a $50 cable bill from 1990 is about $110 now. Depending on where your reference point is, more streaming for less money sounds good, but don't forget Netflix was around with no real competition for a long while, and at $10/month. $50 (for Netflix+Hulu+Paramount+Disney/whatever vs $10 is quite the increase!

majormajor 5y ago
You could definitely pay less than $50 for cable throughout the 90s, it's HD which I remember pushing prices up. But those would be your basic packages, without addons, and especially without HBO and such. But now if all you wanted was HBO, you could get it for under 20 bucks if you have anything but the slowest internet packages!
ghaff 5y ago
Except Netflix never had the streaming content that you can get today for $50--both because of its own original content and because a lot of content (especially films) was never available on Netflix streaming. I agree with the parent. Without live TV, a streaming bundle you assemble is clearly cheaper than you were paying for cable TV (or cable TV plus Netflix) in the US. Today, add a live TV streaming service and you're probably back to about price parity with a lot more choice of content.
mdasen 5y ago
I think expecting Netflix to stick around at $10/mo with such a library of content was unrealistic. Sometimes there are odd fluctuations in markets. For example, the current used car market has insane values with used vehicles costing more than the MSRP on new ones sometimes. Likewise, when Netflix had no competition, they were able to sign deals with content providers for almost nothing because content providers thought streaming was worthless. Either streaming was going to fail and that $10 deal would go away or streaming was going to succeed and content providers wouldn't license content so cheaply. That era was an odd thing in the market before content owners realized that streaming wasn't just a little additional revenue, but a replacement for their service. I don't think you can really compare a market blip to a sustainable business model. HBO and others weren't going to continue licensing their catalogues to Netflix once it was clear that streaming was popular. They made the mistake of licensing to Netflix assuming that they'd be getting a little extra pocket money rather than cannibalizing their services. That mistake is probably the reason Netflix is the giant it is today. Netflix signed deals to license content before content owners realized the value of streaming. They used that content to gain subscribers until they could afford to build their own library of first-party content. Even from Netflix's side, they might have been spending more on content than they wanted to long-term to try and gain subscribers that would be sticky as their library waned and they transformed from "we licensed most of the content you want" to "we're another HBO with a limited content selection". These things happen. We saw MoviePass come and go because it was an unsustainably good deal. I think it's also important to remember that back in that era of Netflix, most people were still paying for cable and renting DVDs. Maybe you weren't, but most people were. I think it's important to think about the whole amount that people were spending and people were spending a lot on their entertainment. It was perfectly normal to head to a Blockbuster and spend $10 renting two DVDs each weekend. That feels like such an alien concept today, but people were spending $100 on cable plus $40 on rentals and getting a lot less entertainment than they are today. Sure, if you were one of the few that only had Netflix, it was a glorious time. $10/mo never bought so much entertainment! Likewise, if you were a MoviePass subscriber, no one had ever gotten so many theater tickets for so little money. But it wasn't going to last because it was unsustainably good. Once MoviePass found that people would actually use the service, it was dead in the water. Once content owners saw that people would cancel their HBO subscription because Netflix had HBO's content, the era of Netflix having such an expansive library for so cheap would end as the deals ran out. Comparing current prices to a market blip isn't really a fair comparison - but there was a pretty great 5 years in there.

ZetaZero 5y ago

I want more a la carte. Give me one service without bundles where every "channel" has a price. I don't want my provider negotiating a 14-channel package for every viewer (YouTubeTV and NBC Universal). I don't want MTV and VH1, but I do want Tennis Channel (which isn't an option).

lotsofpulp 5y ago
> I don't want MTV and VH1, but I do want Tennis Channel (which isn't an option). Do not pay Disney, and send an email to the US Tennis Association or whoever keeps contracting with ESPN. If you keep paying Disney to watch Tennis, you will never get it a la carte.
smugglerFlynn 5y ago
Apple TV did just that, but you have to manually purchase all the separate streaming services available locally

anothernewdude 5y ago

What bothers me is missing shows from my Countries' offerings. Netflix is supposed to have Arrested Development. Not from my Country. Why? No information.

PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
The answer is always the same: no licensing deal could be arranged. The precise reasons for that may vary, and certainly the license holders will vary, but since there's essentially nothing you could do about that, there seems to be little point in Netflix telling you over and over "this would be available if we could get a license deal"

stocknoob 5y ago

Plus, you can share it with family members. And watch on multiple devices. And turn services on/off without having to get on the phone. It's much, much better.

II2II 5y ago

People seem to forget how bad things used to be. We are extremely fortunate with the ability to watch what we want, when we want, without being interrupted by commercials, for an extremely low cost. There also appears to be a great deal of progress with respect to being able to view programs/movies produced for foreign markets. But the best thing is: > you can bounce between streaming services at will, and they're all still far easier to cancel than cable. Add to that cheaper, since you don't have to deal with connection fees. If you know that you're not going to have the time to use the service for a couple of months because you're too busy with work, you don't have to pay for it. If you have decided that you are going to spend most of your summer pursuing outdoor recreational activities, you don't have to pay for it. If you're going on the road for a few weeks (vacation or business), you don't have to pay for it. If you decide that you want to watch programming on two different streaming services, you can simply rotate through the services on a monthly basis and only pay for one service at a time. Why do I bring all of this up when it's not directly related to the article: it's because these articles reek of entitlement. Yes, there are times when licensing causes shows or movies to fall through the cracks. On the other hand, the situation is also far better than it used to be when using the same metrics. Not only that, but it can be a heck of a lot less expensive even when factoring in the cost of an Internet connection.

citizenkeen 5y ago
On the one hand, we got what we asked for: _a la carte_. I think what makes people frustrated is that cable channels were _themed_. I was frustrated that I was paying for TLC and Bravo because I didn't watch reality tv. I was paying for Discovery even though I didn't watch nature shows. I was paying for Lifetime even though I didn't watch cheap shows for women. I was paying for ESPN even though I didn't watch sports. I wanted to pay for the comedy, the scifi/syfy, the cartoons, and the kids programming. That was, like, five or six channels. Which streaming service do I go to now for the science fiction? Which streaming service do I go to now for the horror or the feel-good sitcoms? Streaming arose during the collapse of genre channels. There are now three genres of programming: prestige, drek, and children's.
- mortenjorck 5y ago

wintermutestwin 5y ago

>Careful what you wish for? The big desire then was a la carte, and right now you can bounce between streaming services at will, and they're all still far easier to cancel than cable. "a la carte" means I don't subscribe to anything and instead I have access to "all the things" with a separate charge for each thing. The whole idea back then was to compete with the ease and access of piracy like Steam did. That said, "careful what you wish for" currently applies to sitcom episodes for rent on Amazon costing more per minute than mega budget movies.

dnissley 5y ago
I think this is an apples to oranges comparison, since single episodes of tv shows aren't generally available to rent, unlike movies.
bamboozled 5y ago
If you’re living outside the US getting content in English isn’t anywhere as easy as it should be. These services are definitely America centric. It’s been good for me, I just watch a whole lot less crap and get more sleep.

Hypx_ 5y ago

I suspect cost of streaming services will increase though. Cable didn't get as expensive as it did overnight after all.

ryandrake 5y ago

There is also too much "content" being made, and not enough quality movies to watch. There's a recent reddit thread[1] about this weird trend lately where more and more of what's offered is junk "made for TV" quality content. Even the word we use for it is revealing: Content. So boring. So gray and bland. Like a dry cardboard media ration made specifically to be consumed by some global ISO-standard Consumer. Everything has this odd B-movie With Big Stars hue. But two months after you view it, you struggle to even remember what it was about. Polished, featureless content, but hey, it's in 4K and stars Dwayne Johnson. High-quality, daring, inspired, more than superficially controversial, world-changing movies are another casualty of the rise of streaming. 1: https://old.reddit.com/r/movies/comments/qx4rtu/i_think_movies_are_getting_this_weird_netflixy/ https://old.reddit.com/r/movies/comments/qx4rtu/i_think_movi...

antasvara 5y ago
Is there some difference between streaming companies and classic movie studios that makes this the case? Arguably, the current state of movies is a direct result of studios realizing that well-produced, middle of the road content is the most profitable. Of course, I could be missing something about the industry and how streaming has shaped it. I just struggle to see how the streaming ecosystem has different content requirements than a normal movie studio.
- joe_guy 5y ago
  > Is there some difference between streaming companies and classic movie studios that makes this the case? I have no inside knowledge and am fully speculating, including some random tidbits I've read here and there. Think about how Netflix changed when moving from DVD to streaming. They used to optimize for recommending you movies you would rate highly. Now it's all about what keeps people viewing the longest. 2 middle of the road acceptable movies that you rate a 6/10 is more viewing time than 1 higher quality production that you'd rate a 9/10 -- I doubt the costs are they cut and dry but I think that's the idea. More content that is passable wins out against less content that is of higher quality.
- vineyardmike 5y ago

OminousWeapons 5y ago

> Careful what you wish for? The big desire then was a la carte, and right now you can bounce between streaming services at will, and they're all still far easier to cancel than cable. I feel like people say they want a la carte but that's not actually what they want. What they want is all the good content and none of the crap filler content, for cheap. People pushed for a la carte because in their mind all content costs the same, so they figured that by removing the content they don't want and only keeping the content they do want, they would save tons of money. They don't understand that the good content (live sports, FX, AMC, HBO, et al) is precisely what studios are charging a premium for and what is driving most of the cost in packages in the first place. It's roughly akin to someone looking at a Vegas buffet that costs $100 and features 100 entrees and saying "well there are 100 entrees but really all I want is the cheese, prime rib, crab legs, and caviar, so if I remove the other 96 entrees then this should cost $4" then being shocked when they are still charged 40 dollars. Sure it's cheaper but in their minds it should be an order of magnitude cheaper than it is.

baq 5y ago
Remember that streaming services don’t only compete with each other, but they also compete with torrents. Netflix won not because of being cool or good, but because it was way more convenient than torrents for the majority of content. This isn’t true anymore, as all major studios want in on the market, which makes the TAM smaller due to fragmentation and lost network effects. (It is common to hear people saying they won’t pay for more than 1, 2, maybe 3 services.) Ice is thinner than it seems, but streaming services know this.
- chii 5y ago
  > Ice is thinner than it seems, but streaming services know this. but would streaming services rather compete with piracy than another big player? With piracy, they have the law on their side - they can lobby for rules to punish piracy using state resources, rather than their own. They cannot do so for their competitors.

dools 5y ago

Apple TV is a one stop shop to see what’s available then you can choose to subscribe to stuff if you want

slothtrop 5y ago

I think the archaic system with tv/movies that does not exist (in the same capacity) with games and music is the point of frustration with customers. The barriers are a bit strange. Consumers aren't really averse to spending money for content they want, as evidenced not just from streaming but Steam/GOG, which by contrast directly benefits creators more. With paid streaming it's more abstracted. You're paying, but with the machinations it's unclear how well content creators are compensated or how it will eventually benefit them. Even with music the option to directly support artists, with digital download purchases, is dead easy between Bandcamp and other options. Can't do that with film, have to buy a physical copy that will be eventually be obsolete hardware, and costs more. To be fair I think there's more of a "one and done" attitude people have towards film, consumed then disposed, so streaming lends better to it.

dwighttk 5y ago

>Your minimum cable outlay back then would still cover the cost of a couple streaming services. I'm paying twice as much for cable internet as I used to pay for basic cable, before even starting to pay for a streaming service.

mymythisisthis 5y ago

I remember the VHS era of renting movies. I'm fortunate enough to live in a large city that had a great, independent, rental store. Lots of selection. I suspect the selection at that rental store is better than the selection at any of these streaming services, or all of them combined.

WalterBright 5y ago

My dad recorded many made-for-TV movies in the 1980s. These movies exist on IMDB, but nowhere else. I wonder why TV networks don't make their back catalog available. After all, TCM seems to do well running their back catalog of movies.

bacchusracine 5y ago
>My dad recorded many made-for-TV movies in the 1980s. These movies exist on IMDB, but nowhere else. Dear Lord, this! This! I would dearly love to be able to get a good copy of Love is Never Silent with working subtitles but sadly since it was a Hallmark made for television movie it's simply not available to me. There are certainly others like that, half remembered movies that I'd watched in my youth that would be worth revisiting as an adult or to share with others but they're simply unavailable except through IMDB to remind myself that I didn't imagine them, they do exist.

kelnos 5y ago

> What there isn't is a good way to get a single subscription to watch anything you want. [...] So if you want to watch a really wide sampling of TV content, it can feel like we're going backward, since there's no more one-stop-shop. This is the issue for me. My lineup of currently-"airing" shows requires subscriptions to Netflix, HBO Max, CBS All Access, Disney+, and Amazon Prime Video. And I feel like I'm forgetting another one or two. To be fair, these subscriptions, in total, do cost less than what I was paying for cable back in 2005 (last time I had cable). I don't want one streaming platform to rule them all. A monopoly doesn't sound great. So ok, we keep the idea of several competing streaming platforms. I'm sure there are downsides to this, but maybe a legal requirement for compulsory licensing to competing platforms under RAND terms might help?

Beaver117 5y ago

Except torrents provide that, and have for 20+ years. All this time and streaming sites haven't quite caught up.

strken 5y ago

22 years ago Napster existed. 21 years ago the Gnutella (LimeWire etc.) and eDonkey2000 networks existed. 20 years ago Kazaar and BitTorrent existed. Around that time, LAN parties with hundreds of seats and 100mbps connections existed, and attendees would use Direct Connect or simple SMB shared to download pirated media for 24 hours straight. This is mentioned in other comments, but a large part of the reason streaming services got going was because piracy was so much more convenient than the brutal grind of actually paying for something. Users could be sitting in their living rooms with wallets out ready to go, and still choose piracy, because the only other alternative was waiting for a physical CD or DVD to arrive. If the streaming wars do too much damage to consumers, they'll just flip the playing board and go back to piracy.

imiric 5y ago
> If the streaming wars do too much damage to consumers, they'll just flip the playing board and go back to piracy. I think that's already happening among the tech literate. The difference now is that the majority of consumers are not technically inclined and don't mind paying for several streaming services to get easy access to their favorite content, so the industry generally doesn't care about losing a small fraction to piracy. Pirating content is now more technically difficult than paying for a service, but the benefits are still there: DRM-free content that can be consumed on any device, accessed offline, safe against removal, licensing issues, region locks, easily shareable, etc. Paying for a streaming service now has the same issues as paying for cable did: you get access to tons of low quality content you don't care about just to watch the few shows and movies you actually do. Content curation is still an unsolved problem and the industry is ripe for disruption once someone figures out what I actually want to watch and how I can pay for only that. Or pirating will become easier and they'll continue to lose revenue.

jancsika 5y ago

> So consumers are overall definitely winning, but it's not a perfect victory for everyone. You could say the same in an alternate reality where everyone is still putting up with using Sourceforge and getting the occasional binary download bundled with malware. People would have forgotten how much more difficult it was to receive CDs by mail, so by your definition these poor alt developers would be winning.

dehrmann 5y ago

> The big desire then was a la carte A la carte might only make sense in a world of themed channels. After that, pricing gets hard because no one wants to pay $3 for an episode of Friends (I suppose the season is only $10), they want to rent access to everything like with Spotify, but it's complicated because sports cost a lot more than most other content, and content like reality shows is dirt cheap to make. Then there's pricing streaming movies. Everything older than 2 years included, add-on charge for new releases? People don't like microtransactions. And this is in a hypothetical world where video streaming isn't balkanized.

xg15 5y ago

> If you look at twenty years ago, there's far more content available now, for far less money. Your minimum cable outlay back then would still cover the cost of a couple streaming services. That's an odd argument and reminds me of the situation with science publishers that led to scihub and friends: Publishers were offering package deals to universities which technically had a wealth of content, except the vast majority of it was garbage. Nevertheless, universities had to buy the packages, because of the few flagship journals that were embedded in the packages. > Careful what you wish for? The big desire then was a la carte, and right now you can bounce between streaming services at will, and they're all still far easier to cancel than cable. Who was wishing for anything here? Streaming has always been pushed by the industry as an acceptable alternative to piracy. The supppsed benefits of streaming were always part of the sales push.