3 ms·
> The answer must be to provide legal services that are at least as convenient as MegaUpload. One thing that makes this hard in reality is that ANY service whe
by a5seo 15y ago
> The answer must be to provide legal services that are at least as convenient as MegaUpload.
One thing that makes this hard in reality is that ANY service where people have to pay means people have to SHOP. Which means they have to make decisions about what entertainment products to buy, and at what price. And since these are "experience goods" you can't judge them until you've paid for them. In my book, that means means this particular type of "shopping" REALLY sucks.
So the fact that "shopping-just-sucks" (and especially for experience goods) is the TRUE friction that any hypothetical as-easy-as-Megaupload services need to overcome. A big draw of Megaupload (I say this never having heard of it before this week) is you can consume whatever you want and there's no downside to a bad choice.
So I'm not sure how any alternative service avoids the Shopping For Entertainment Products Sucks Syndrome unless they get some reasonably-priced all-you-can-eat plan that makes a lot (80%?) of commercial content available under one roof.
- rgbrgb 15y agoNetflix and Hulu are working on that problem. Anyone know why Netflix has such a crappy selection?
- dangrossman 15y agoContent distributors are maximizing the profit from their products. Licensing them to streaming services before sales from Blu-ray/DVD level off would be lost money. A hit movie BR/DVD release will easily make $5-10 million/week selling half a million or more copies each week. Netflix can barely offer that to license a movie for its millions of subscribers for a year -- they're only charging $8/month per person after all and that has to pay for rights to every movie in the library. Once they do get to the point where it makes sense to license the movie again, Apple might pay extra for an exclusive so they won't license it to Netflix too, or vice versa. You can expect streaming libraries to suck in certain ways, like time between movie release and streaming rights, for a long long time -- until consumption patterns change on a large scale -- because that's what maximizes profit.
- xxqs 15y agoI don't see any reason why media companies don't offer their content on subscription. You wouldn't have to shop then. You just pay your 10 or 15 bucks a month, and you can watch whatever the content provider releases. "my friend" would be happy to have BBC content on subscription, but all "he" is left to do is use easynews.com subscription for downloading. He would be happy to pay that to the content owner instead. But the content owner doesn't want that.
- archangel_one 15y agoI think an easy answer to the "shopping sucks" problem is to sell them cheaply. If I can buy one episode of, say, House of Lies for $1, I'll give it a try and if it sucks, it didn't cost enough for me to care. This is more or less what AllofMP3 did, and it was great - the music was cheap enough that I'd happily take the risk of some of it being crap. It's similar to Apple's App Store as well, for that matter.
- klon 15y agoI think this might be one reason Spotify is so successful.