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Amazon and Apple lure you in but many shows it seems need to be rented or bought. How much disposable income do these companies think the average Joe has to spe
by dghughes 5y ago
Amazon and Apple lure you in but many shows it seems need to be rented or bought. How much disposable income do these companies think the average Joe has to spend? the answer seems to be $10 to $20 to rent or "buy" movies. Which you never own a physical copy of. They seem to be out of touch with reality.
- duxup 5y agoI find I have access to a ton of content for the cost of a couple cds and dvds. I like it. Content is mostly ephemeral for me. I don't want to manage a ton of files or physical media.
- dmix 5y agoI stupidly “rented” a copy of Apollo 13 for $3.99 and being a long movie fell asleep halfway through. I came back to watch it a few days later and found the rental had “expired” in 2-3 days and was required to pay again to continue watching. Sometimes I think these people live in an alternate universe. last time I did that.
- azinman2 5y agoAnd what happened in the VHS days?
- archsurface 5y agoYou connected the player to another player and copied it.
- throwawayboise 5y agoThat typically didn't work very well, as there was crude anti-copying tech in most VHS consumer machines.
- naikrovek 5y agomacro block, a.k.a. MacroVision. as a child I knew a guy that knew how to make the recording VCR record those properly, though I don't know how it was done.
- hunter2_ 5y agoI'm guessing it was something like a jumper over an AGC (auto gain control) circuit VCRs use to avoid saturating the tape, since the MacroVision mechanism was basically to intermittently blast out-of-frame lines with too-intense brightness, which has no effect on a typical TV, but does make the AGC clamp down so the whole frame is intermittently too dark.
- bb88 5y agoIt had to do with screwing around with the vertical blanking interval. TV's had no issue with it, but VCR's would fail. Cable TV "scrambling" was similar back in the day as well. It wasn't so much that the signal was "encrypted" as it was "modified" in such a way it wouldn't play on a normal tv anymore. Over time they could modify the scrambling technique so that any box you did buy to descramble a signal would be worthless in a few months when they changed the method. The only way to really descramble Pay TV was to be an electronics guy who could reconstruct the video signal. Usually you needed the minimum of an oscilloscope to analyze the timing signals, and then the ability to create a circuit to fix it -- it wasn't exactly easy.
- rOOb85 5y agoMy dad had a black box that worked awesome. It had a little dial in the back that you could twist to dial in a channel to be super clear.
- TedDoesntTalk 5y agoIn the early 80s where I lived, there was some kind of filler that, once removed, allowed you to watch HBO. It was housed in a green box exterior to each house, where the cable left the street and entered your house. I don’t know if it was a filter really. It was just an electronic component of some kind that screwed on/off. When you ordered HBO, someone visited your property to remove this thing.
- dwild 5y agoYou can still do the same. HDCP has been broken for a long time now...
- dwild 5y agoHe would have made a similar comment but instead would complains of late fees.
- azinman2 5y agoYou’re the only one who seems to have gotten that :)
- Vrondi 5y agoHe would have recorded it with a VCR during a promotional free weekend on HBO or similar, then watched it whenever desired.
- nebula8804 5y agoYes this used to be a fun hobby. All my favorite films were TV runs and i'd have to time the stop button so I minimized any commercials ending up on the recording. Same goes for recording audio on the Radio onto tapes. It was a simpler time back then.
- ramraj07 5y agoPirate if you want (and can) but let’s not keep persisting the myth that these companies are being unreasonable. The average family paid 100 for cable and on top kept buying dvds for 10-20 a pop. These streamers are just trying to replicate that level of spending (and for the most part, failing).
- kortilla 5y ago> The average family paid 100 for cable and on top kept buying dvds for 10-20 a pop. Lol, no way in hell that was the average. That was the high end dream consumer that very few of the people I knew matched even back in cable’s heyday. https://www.statista.com/statistics/680645/number-of-cable-subscribers-usa/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/680645/number-of-cable-s... In my family we would rent lots of movies each week with an 2-3 times a week ritual trip to the video rental store to pick something out for $2 or so. Movies we liked were bought when they went on sale at the cheap DVD trough at Walmart for $5.
- bryanrasmussen 5y agoprobably it was the average family but not the median family, which of course means that the high end dream consumer family was paying much more than that.
- kortilla 5y agoNo, it wasn’t the median either. That would be the high end of a cable subscriber setup in the 90s and 00s. About the only way to go above it is constant on demand rentals and PPV fights.
- VRay 5y agoMan, I grew up lower/lower-middle class, about 30-40% of the median family income, and we had the $80/month cable package plus went to Blockbuster for 5+ rentals per week I don't think that was unusual, either.
- 5y ago
- Philip-J-Fry 5y agoPeople used to buy DVDs or blu-rays for $10-20. But of all the ones I have, there's probably only a handful that have been watched more than once. That's what the renting system is built off. The fact that most people only watch a film once. I couldn't care less about whether I own a copy of a movie. All I care is that I can watch it when I want to watch it. That's a different issue though, not one of disposable income, but of licensing and content availability.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- bluedino 5y agoChristmas is a good example. A couple years ago I threw out all of my DVD's. We watch the same ten or so movies every holiday season. Now we scramble to find them on streaming services and pay $3-5 each to watch. At one point I had them all downloaded on a portable HD (along with others) but it failed, and why back up what you can just re-download?
- Consultant32452 5y agoI don't understand why the major streaming services don't have the good Christmas movies. They all have these new "made for TV" quality awful movies they push really hard. It's A Wonderful Life A Christmas Carol Rudolph The Red Nosed Reindeer (old animated version) How the Grinch Stole Christmas (old animated version) National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation Home Alone Miracle On 34th Street Elf White Christmas There's tons of GREAT Christmas movies. On any given Christmas season Netflix might have 1-2 of the greats. Same for Amazon Prime. I'm confused because it seems like an easy win for these streaming services. Is licensing them really so expensive?
- xwolfi 5y agoImagine you re a tv station with a license. I think you re ready to MURDER to keep some of these exclusive, must be their last easy butter these days. Last time I watched tv I did the whole vpn + american tv package thing and I just was appalled at the sheer amount of unwatchable content (ads)... I pity these things, how did it even work in the first place?
- vimy 5y agoIt’s bad UI design that mixes up two different services.
- tptacek 5y agoThere has never been a better time to be a consumer of home media than today. I wouldn't trade the (legal) access I have to essentially any film or TV show I can imagine wanting to watch for any conceivable bookshelf full of DVDs. The Blockbuster Video and Comcast Premium Channel Package era was no more cost effective, and things just get worse as you go further back in time.
- stkdump 5y agoI used to live next to a DVD rental place that was 1€ per day. Often I would return the movie the same night. I used to watch 1-2 movies per month. Nowadays I have Netflix for what, 12€ a month? I still watch maybe one movie a month. So I guess I pay ~10x for not having to step outside?
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- dmix 5y agoBit of a niche anecdote.
- lotsofpulp 5y agoYou pay 10x for access to Netflix’s content. The fact that you only want to watch 1 movie out of their catalog is irrelevant. I do not find their content worth it, so I do not pay Netflix. I find it better to just rent a movie from an online provider if/when I want to watch one, since I rarely watch. If I want to watch it over and over, I buy it (kids’ movies).
- stkdump 5y agoSo I pay for what I don't need to get the little that do I need. What you call irrelevant I call the core of their business model.
- lotsofpulp 5y ago
- labster 5y agoAmazon should offer an NFT of a physical copy for each streamed movie you buy. Then they could also sell that physical copy to another consumer. It’s a win-win!
- harles 5y agoHow does decentralization help with a centralized service?
- bitexploder 5y agoMagical acronyms and thinking.
- jzb 5y agoIf they’re out of touch with reality, there will be a price adjustment or they’ll fail. Something tells me they’ve done the research to determine what the average person will pay. Looking at some newer films rentals are $4-$6 and “buying” $8-$15. Probably more for really new releases. $4 for a rental isn’t bad compared to renting a VHS or DVD at Blockbuster a few years ago. Compared to taking a few adults and kids to a movie theater, it’s a steal.
- dmix 5y agoBut why is rebutting a few days and not at least a week. Never made sense.
- Skunkleton 5y agos/rebutting/renting? Its a few days because you can rent digitally just before you buy it. Back in the Hollywood Video days, you also had to make a special trip to the video store. Often this was done days in advance.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- HWR_14 5y agoI assume that's mostly indicative of the rights they were able to grab, vs. seeking profit.
- stjohnswarts 5y agothey count on you to price it against going to the movies and a lot of people (particularly families) choose to stay home and spend 1/5 to 1/10 what they would have spend going to the theater