7 ms·

It's interesting to see that free market competition actually worsened the customer offering when it comes to streaming services. Back in the days, Netflix was

by Varqu 3y ago

It's interesting to see that free market competition actually worsened the customer offering when it comes to streaming services. Back in the days, Netflix was a one-to-see-all service and that was also one of the reasons why it took people from torrenting to paying for movies. Nowadays, if you want to watch a particular movie, you have maybe a 10% chance that it is available on the streaming service that you are currently paying for. And it makes more sense to just buy it directly, than pay monthly.

mypastself 3y ago
The competition against another media giant, Blockbuster, created Netflix in the first place. It wasn’t a state-owned monopoly.
- oblio 3y ago
  Yeah, but there was no real competition for Netflix' main business, streaming, for at least 5 years, when everyone was happy with the show selection.
  - mypastself 3y ago
    That’s correct, and I’m personally dissatisfied with the content currently available on Netflix, as well as the distribution of content across too many services. But it would be disingenuous to describe it as a market failure when the market was responsible for creating the industry in the first place. If there’s a critical mass of consumers unhappy with the current streaming landscape, providers will be forced to improve or risk being replaced by superior competitors. That’s what happened to Blockbuster as well, and what I suspect is going to happen to many major providers in the coming years.
pjc50 3y ago
As an old movie kind of guy: I don't get why nobody wants me to have a big economical catalogue of all the movies. If you want to watch stuff from before about 1990 your best bet is pirating it off Youtube, oddly. Or hoping it's part of the 20th Century Fox that ended up on Disney+. The most generous film studio is .. Mosfilm. I suppose it's fitting that the Communist movies are available for free. (Criterion looks promising but is a long way from all movies and US/CA only)
- baq 3y ago
  That's the paradox: everybody wants to build and operate that since it's obvious everyone would subscribe to such a service, it'd be a cash cow, a golden goose, etc. But nobody wants to share their slice of the copyright and licensing pie with anybody else for revenue reasons, brand reasons, whatever, so we're slowly moving back toward the cable model with 200 subscriptions and nothing to watch. Torrents will be back, big time, since they actually provide the service everybody wants.
  - m000 3y ago
    This is essentially the ridiculous copyright laws backfiring. The entertainment market is stagnating (if not quantity, at least quality-wise) because the copyright laws stiffle innovation instead of fostering it. Early-comers (Hollywood & co) are comfortably sitting on their stash of content, content with rehashing the same franchises. New-comers are forced to low-risk - low-quality content, sprinkled with anything they can get their hands on from other sources.
    - sokoloff 3y ago
      What part of that is about "ridiculous copyright laws backfiring", though? It seems like it's copyright laws working as intended. (I may not love that I have to pay to access a 25 year old movie legally, but it hardly feels objectively unfair or ridiculous that I have to do that.)
      - lotsofpulp 3y ago
        The unfairness comes from the fact that society is paying to enforce those copyrights via expenses on judges, lawyers, police etc, but society is not getting a commensurate return on investment. The purpose of copyright is to incentivize creativity, but society does not need to pay for 180 years of monopoly protection to incentivize creativity.
        andsoitis 3y ago
pallas_athena 3y ago
It would be all better (for the customer) if video streaming services were like music streaming services. Want to hear an album? it's on Spotify / Apple Music / Deezer / Qobuz... You pick the one that offers the best user experience (or unique features like HD songs). Exclusives are basically non-existent.
- elAhmo 3y ago
  This is quite hard to achieve with original comment getting the spotlight and being a differentiator between services. For "the rest" of the content, I think the situation is pretty much close to streaming services with music.
  - theonlybutlet 3y ago
    Agreed, but I think it only works to a point. Content is becoming more commoditized/more generic (maximise margins/cash in on some big trend). This, coupled with way too many new services claiming exclusive originals and people are deciding to not even bother watching it or just to sail the high seas. It's much like at one point the music streaming services had exclusives too. Sorry Spotify I'd rather just not bother listening to Rammstein than have yet another subscription.
  - pallas_athena 3y ago
    A solution could be time-based exclusives. Stranger Things is on Netflix only for X days (a month?) and then it's everywhere. The hype train will still give Netflix its edge, because a lot of people want to watch in the first few days after release.
    - scarface74 3y ago
      And it completely devalues the content and their catalog.
- ericmcer 3y ago
  So an independent studio would produce a show, put it on all the platforms and the platforms would pay based on views? Sounds like youtube. The current model works because producing a television show is way more complex than making an album, it is way too much risk for indie companies to absorb.
jokethrowaway 3y ago
This is because the free market is a killer for monopolies, unless government regulation kicks in. I'd rather pay for the single item I'm consuming than for thousands I'm not paying. The big innovation streaming services really brought was lowering the price for the crap content people watch and subsidising with people who buy the service and don't use it a lot. That's how they become better than piracy, not by centralisation (piracy is also incredibly decentralised) but by offering content at a reasonable price. Let's say netflix costs 10$ a month and I watch 20 movies a month. 50c is a reasonable amount so I'm happy with my netflix subscription. Of course if I could pay 0.50$ to watch a movie I like I would just outright buy it - and not pirate it. The problem with the industry is that content is overpriced. When piracy was a thing that just meant people were valuing the content at less than it was being sold. Sure, a percentage would convert anyway no matter the price, the rest would pirate it. I sincerely hope we get rid of centralised services and we just end up with micro transactions to buy movies for cheap. I think once AI will be used more in content production we will get there.
ricardobayes 3y ago
The only good one these days seem to be movie rental on youtube. That has the biggest catalog
- FrojoS 3y ago
  If your IP is outside the US, say German, then you often don''t get the original audio offered. Piratebay has the best user experience.
  - rerx 3y ago
    It's so weird that they still haven't learned to provide multiple audio tracks and subtitles. I don't know how sizable the portion of the market is that they lose this way, but people like you and me won't ever consider one of Google's services to rent films. Presumably, US-centric decision-making is to blame.
    - cyberpunk 3y ago
      Prime Video on apple tv box is awful for this too. English shows, dubbed in German with absolutely no way to get the original audio. Urgh.
Hamuko 3y ago
Customers benefit from benevolent monopolies. If you can get everything you want from one place and for a good price, why would you ever shop around? One place caters to all of your needs, so you always know where to go. The problem is that having a monopoly doesn't incentivize benevolent behaviour. If Steam is the only platform to get PC games, then I can just install Steam and get access to any game I want to play. I know how the service works, I don't need to install multiple things, my credit card is only tied to one service, etc. But if it's not, and I need to juggle between multiple places, then I need multiple clients, know how multiple different things operate, give my information to multiple companies, etc. I'd much rather only have Steam if Steam keeps their prices and service quality good. Would they if they were the only game in town? No idea, but the incentive wouldn't really be there.
ThatPlayer 3y ago
That's only if you consider streaming services a separate market than cable television. With the decline in cable subscriptions, that's clearly not the case. Netflix was just the hot new innovator in the entertainment delivery market, and now everyone else has caught up. The same market Blockbuster was in.
Etrnl_President 3y ago
[dead]
_a_a_a_ 3y ago
What you describe doesn't sound like a free market, which assumes the product is freely available.
- comfypotato 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - _a_a_a_ 3y ago
    [flagged]
wouldbecouldbe 3y ago
I enjoy YouTube movies model for that reason, I wouldn't mind an overlapping service of all streamers and just pay to rent / buy almost everything on-demand.
light_hue_1 3y ago
> It's interesting to see that free market competition actually worsened the customer offering when it comes to streaming services. There is nothing "free market" about the crazy copyright regulations we have today.
phpisthebest 3y ago
Nothing in your post has anything to do with free markets... markets maybe, but copyright is not a "free market".... it is by definition a monopoly a free market in content would be requiring the copyright holder to following something like FRAND for patents, and disallow them from making "exclusive" deals with one provider, this would then mean the market would be on price, speed, other competitive factors not on content library
- Faark 3y ago
  Jup, gp was talking about unregulated markets. Those surprisingly often have winner take it all outcomes. I don't want to go back to company towns. BTW back to the current situation with streaming services, we nearly would have had the same with movie theaters. But United States v. Paramount Pictures, Inc. shut that down, thankfully. Wouldn't expect such a ruling these days, though :(
  - josephcsible 3y ago
    It isn't an unregulated market. Copyright is a regulation.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - akiselev 3y ago
      There are no unregulated markets. Property rights are a regulation.
  - youreincorrect 3y ago
    > If we don't regulate streaming services to have exactly one really good service that I prefer, then we will go back to company towns. What are you talking about?
- Varqu 3y ago
  A free market for content provider essentially means that they can do whatever they want with their content and rights to it.
mgoetzke 3y ago
The number of movies I wanted to watch in the last few months that where actually available anywhere on streaming was devastatingly low. Some where available, but only dubbed (which I don't watch), most where not. Not even to buy. So I now either go into my basement and look for the BluRay/DVD like twenty years ago or ... :)
scarface74 3y ago
> Back in the days, Netflix was a one-to-see-all service and that was also one of the reasons why it took people from torrenting to paying for movies. Netflix streaming never had a good library of the most popular movies - especially after the initial STARZ partnership.
Sohcahtoa82 3y ago
> It's interesting to see that free market competition actually worsened the customer offering when it comes to streaming services. I don't know why anybody could possibly be surprised by this. Businesses do not optimize for customer satisfaction, they optimize for profit. Customer satisfaction is merely a pathway to profitability. When $STUDIO decides to pull their content from Netflix so they can put it on their own streaming service, nobody should be surprised. They're trying to optimize their profits. They don't care customers will be annoyed paying for two streaming services, they're betting they'll make more from customers paying them directly than from Netflix's licensing fees.
emrah 3y ago
> Back in the days, Netflix was a one-to-see-all service I think you mean "the only game in town" because the selection was worse back then! Plus HBO and Hulu were around. I still remember Hulu commercials with Alec Baldwin. He hadn't shot anyone yet, that we know of. I also remember getting GOT dvds mailed from netflix because i didn't want to pay for HBO service.
- mitchdoogle 3y ago
  Yes! People who claim things are worse now were either not around then, or they have bad memory.
mitchdoogle 3y ago
Competition has forced all these streamers to up their game and produce more good shows to stay popular. Netflix has never been a one-to-see-all service. When Netflix was the only major streamer, other networks and studios were also producing great content. It's not like they came out of nowhere. You still had to find other ways to watch the very best shows and movies across all of TV, which at the time means you would've had to have a cable subscription with premium channels like HBO and Showtime. And if you just decided on a random movie, there is a way better chance it is on Netflix now than there would've been ten years ago. Nowadays, there are more shows, including more prestige shows, more movies, more comedies, more kids shows, as well as a lot of stuff that never would have been made twenty years ago. And it's all cheaper now than having cable ever was, even when you add them all up. And that's making a big assumption that you actually want/need to see "all". Which you don't. Any one of them would be totally sufficient to fill your time with quality programming. Netflix today is filled with way more content of all types than Netflix ten years ago.
youreincorrect 3y ago
> free market competition Ah yes, free market competition funded by insane amounts of quantitative easing pumping equity into NFLX which took that money and lowballed customers to pick them up early. And of course, this is all somehow "worse" than the universe before Netflix existed, when you'd have to physically go rent movies and return them.

by Varqu 3y ago

mypastself 3y ago

The competition against another media giant, Blockbuster, created Netflix in the first place. It wasn’t a state-owned monopoly.

oblio 3y ago
Yeah, but there was no real competition for Netflix' main business, streaming, for at least 5 years, when everyone was happy with the show selection.
- mypastself 3y ago
  That’s correct, and I’m personally dissatisfied with the content currently available on Netflix, as well as the distribution of content across too many services. But it would be disingenuous to describe it as a market failure when the market was responsible for creating the industry in the first place. If there’s a critical mass of consumers unhappy with the current streaming landscape, providers will be forced to improve or risk being replaced by superior competitors. That’s what happened to Blockbuster as well, and what I suspect is going to happen to many major providers in the coming years.

pjc50 3y ago

As an old movie kind of guy: I don't get why nobody wants me to have a big economical catalogue of all the movies. If you want to watch stuff from before about 1990 your best bet is pirating it off Youtube, oddly. Or hoping it's part of the 20th Century Fox that ended up on Disney+. The most generous film studio is .. Mosfilm. I suppose it's fitting that the Communist movies are available for free. (Criterion looks promising but is a long way from all movies and US/CA only)

baq 3y ago
That's the paradox: everybody wants to build and operate that since it's obvious everyone would subscribe to such a service, it'd be a cash cow, a golden goose, etc. But nobody wants to share their slice of the copyright and licensing pie with anybody else for revenue reasons, brand reasons, whatever, so we're slowly moving back toward the cable model with 200 subscriptions and nothing to watch. Torrents will be back, big time, since they actually provide the service everybody wants.
- m000 3y ago
  This is essentially the ridiculous copyright laws backfiring. The entertainment market is stagnating (if not quantity, at least quality-wise) because the copyright laws stiffle innovation instead of fostering it. Early-comers (Hollywood & co) are comfortably sitting on their stash of content, content with rehashing the same franchises. New-comers are forced to low-risk - low-quality content, sprinkled with anything they can get their hands on from other sources.
  - sokoloff 3y ago
    What part of that is about "ridiculous copyright laws backfiring", though? It seems like it's copyright laws working as intended. (I may not love that I have to pay to access a 25 year old movie legally, but it hardly feels objectively unfair or ridiculous that I have to do that.)
    - lotsofpulp 3y ago
      The unfairness comes from the fact that society is paying to enforce those copyrights via expenses on judges, lawyers, police etc, but society is not getting a commensurate return on investment. The purpose of copyright is to incentivize creativity, but society does not need to pay for 180 years of monopoly protection to incentivize creativity.
      - andsoitis 3y ago

pallas_athena 3y ago

It would be all better (for the customer) if video streaming services were like music streaming services. Want to hear an album? it's on Spotify / Apple Music / Deezer / Qobuz... You pick the one that offers the best user experience (or unique features like HD songs). Exclusives are basically non-existent.

elAhmo 3y ago
This is quite hard to achieve with original comment getting the spotlight and being a differentiator between services. For "the rest" of the content, I think the situation is pretty much close to streaming services with music.
- theonlybutlet 3y ago
  Agreed, but I think it only works to a point. Content is becoming more commoditized/more generic (maximise margins/cash in on some big trend). This, coupled with way too many new services claiming exclusive originals and people are deciding to not even bother watching it or just to sail the high seas. It's much like at one point the music streaming services had exclusives too. Sorry Spotify I'd rather just not bother listening to Rammstein than have yet another subscription.
- pallas_athena 3y ago
  A solution could be time-based exclusives. Stranger Things is on Netflix only for X days (a month?) and then it's everywhere. The hype train will still give Netflix its edge, because a lot of people want to watch in the first few days after release.
  - scarface74 3y ago
    And it completely devalues the content and their catalog.
ericmcer 3y ago
So an independent studio would produce a show, put it on all the platforms and the platforms would pay based on views? Sounds like youtube. The current model works because producing a television show is way more complex than making an album, it is way too much risk for indie companies to absorb.

jokethrowaway 3y ago

This is because the free market is a killer for monopolies, unless government regulation kicks in. I'd rather pay for the single item I'm consuming than for thousands I'm not paying. The big innovation streaming services really brought was lowering the price for the crap content people watch and subsidising with people who buy the service and don't use it a lot. That's how they become better than piracy, not by centralisation (piracy is also incredibly decentralised) but by offering content at a reasonable price. Let's say netflix costs 10$ a month and I watch 20 movies a month. 50c is a reasonable amount so I'm happy with my netflix subscription. Of course if I could pay 0.50$ to watch a movie I like I would just outright buy it - and not pirate it. The problem with the industry is that content is overpriced. When piracy was a thing that just meant people were valuing the content at less than it was being sold. Sure, a percentage would convert anyway no matter the price, the rest would pirate it. I sincerely hope we get rid of centralised services and we just end up with micro transactions to buy movies for cheap. I think once AI will be used more in content production we will get there.

ricardobayes 3y ago

The only good one these days seem to be movie rental on youtube. That has the biggest catalog

FrojoS 3y ago
If your IP is outside the US, say German, then you often don''t get the original audio offered. Piratebay has the best user experience.
- rerx 3y ago
  It's so weird that they still haven't learned to provide multiple audio tracks and subtitles. I don't know how sizable the portion of the market is that they lose this way, but people like you and me won't ever consider one of Google's services to rent films. Presumably, US-centric decision-making is to blame.
  - cyberpunk 3y ago
    Prime Video on apple tv box is awful for this too. English shows, dubbed in German with absolutely no way to get the original audio. Urgh.

Hamuko 3y ago

Customers benefit from benevolent monopolies. If you can get everything you want from one place and for a good price, why would you ever shop around? One place caters to all of your needs, so you always know where to go. The problem is that having a monopoly doesn't incentivize benevolent behaviour. If Steam is the only platform to get PC games, then I can just install Steam and get access to any game I want to play. I know how the service works, I don't need to install multiple things, my credit card is only tied to one service, etc. But if it's not, and I need to juggle between multiple places, then I need multiple clients, know how multiple different things operate, give my information to multiple companies, etc. I'd much rather only have Steam if Steam keeps their prices and service quality good. Would they if they were the only game in town? No idea, but the incentive wouldn't really be there.

ThatPlayer 3y ago

That's only if you consider streaming services a separate market than cable television. With the decline in cable subscriptions, that's clearly not the case. Netflix was just the hot new innovator in the entertainment delivery market, and now everyone else has caught up. The same market Blockbuster was in.

Etrnl_President 3y ago

[dead]

_a_a_a_ 3y ago

What you describe doesn't sound like a free market, which assumes the product is freely available.

comfypotato 3y ago
[flagged]
- _a_a_a_ 3y ago
  [flagged]

wouldbecouldbe 3y ago

I enjoy YouTube movies model for that reason, I wouldn't mind an overlapping service of all streamers and just pay to rent / buy almost everything on-demand.

light_hue_1 3y ago

> It's interesting to see that free market competition actually worsened the customer offering when it comes to streaming services. There is nothing "free market" about the crazy copyright regulations we have today.

phpisthebest 3y ago

Nothing in your post has anything to do with free markets... markets maybe, but copyright is not a "free market".... it is by definition a monopoly a free market in content would be requiring the copyright holder to following something like FRAND for patents, and disallow them from making "exclusive" deals with one provider, this would then mean the market would be on price, speed, other competitive factors not on content library

Faark 3y ago
Jup, gp was talking about unregulated markets. Those surprisingly often have winner take it all outcomes. I don't want to go back to company towns. BTW back to the current situation with streaming services, we nearly would have had the same with movie theaters. But United States v. Paramount Pictures, Inc. shut that down, thankfully. Wouldn't expect such a ruling these days, though :(
- josephcsible 3y ago
  It isn't an unregulated market. Copyright is a regulation.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - akiselev 3y ago
    There are no unregulated markets. Property rights are a regulation.
- youreincorrect 3y ago
  > If we don't regulate streaming services to have exactly one really good service that I prefer, then we will go back to company towns. What are you talking about?
Varqu 3y ago
A free market for content provider essentially means that they can do whatever they want with their content and rights to it.

mgoetzke 3y ago

The number of movies I wanted to watch in the last few months that where actually available anywhere on streaming was devastatingly low. Some where available, but only dubbed (which I don't watch), most where not. Not even to buy. So I now either go into my basement and look for the BluRay/DVD like twenty years ago or ... :)

scarface74 3y ago

> Back in the days, Netflix was a one-to-see-all service and that was also one of the reasons why it took people from torrenting to paying for movies. Netflix streaming never had a good library of the most popular movies - especially after the initial STARZ partnership.

Sohcahtoa82 3y ago

> It's interesting to see that free market competition actually worsened the customer offering when it comes to streaming services. I don't know why anybody could possibly be surprised by this. Businesses do not optimize for customer satisfaction, they optimize for profit. Customer satisfaction is merely a pathway to profitability. When $STUDIO decides to pull their content from Netflix so they can put it on their own streaming service, nobody should be surprised. They're trying to optimize their profits. They don't care customers will be annoyed paying for two streaming services, they're betting they'll make more from customers paying them directly than from Netflix's licensing fees.

emrah 3y ago

> Back in the days, Netflix was a one-to-see-all service I think you mean "the only game in town" because the selection was worse back then! Plus HBO and Hulu were around. I still remember Hulu commercials with Alec Baldwin. He hadn't shot anyone yet, that we know of. I also remember getting GOT dvds mailed from netflix because i didn't want to pay for HBO service.

mitchdoogle 3y ago
Yes! People who claim things are worse now were either not around then, or they have bad memory.

mitchdoogle 3y ago

Competition has forced all these streamers to up their game and produce more good shows to stay popular. Netflix has never been a one-to-see-all service. When Netflix was the only major streamer, other networks and studios were also producing great content. It's not like they came out of nowhere. You still had to find other ways to watch the very best shows and movies across all of TV, which at the time means you would've had to have a cable subscription with premium channels like HBO and Showtime. And if you just decided on a random movie, there is a way better chance it is on Netflix now than there would've been ten years ago. Nowadays, there are more shows, including more prestige shows, more movies, more comedies, more kids shows, as well as a lot of stuff that never would have been made twenty years ago. And it's all cheaper now than having cable ever was, even when you add them all up. And that's making a big assumption that you actually want/need to see "all". Which you don't. Any one of them would be totally sufficient to fill your time with quality programming. Netflix today is filled with way more content of all types than Netflix ten years ago.

youreincorrect 3y ago

> free market competition Ah yes, free market competition funded by insane amounts of quantitative easing pumping equity into NFLX which took that money and lowballed customers to pick them up early. And of course, this is all somehow "worse" than the universe before Netflix existed, when you'd have to physically go rent movies and return them.