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Netflix has very little interest in participating in this (to be honest I expect some of the others see it as a temporary arrangement to build share that they w

Netflix has very little interest in participating in this (to be honest I expect some of the others see it as a temporary arrangement to build share that they will pull out of at a later point too). They have agreed to do it in a few cases (such as Sky's set-top boxes in the UK), but I imagine that an awful lot of money was required to facilitate that. For bigger players the gain in traffic from participating is smaller than the loss from people drifting outside of your app to watch something else. Also from bitter experience, you will find that what is supposed to happen in search when a title is on two different services and which gets priority generally results in such scorched Earth warfare that these arrangements tend to fall apart quite quickly.

TylerE 3y ago
I was just thinking about how streaming is basically cable all over again. At first, Netflix was really the only game in town Now there is's Prime (with it's multitude of premium subscriptions), Max, Disney, Hulu, Espn+, Crunchyroll, etc etc.
- ThatPlayer 3y ago
  Netflix being the only game in town is also cable because that's a monopoly. We called them cable monopolies. You're describing competition, and that's good. Just look at how Netflix has been raising prices and blocking account sharing. They would raise prices even more if you couldn't go "I'll cancel and go to Disney+ instead".
  - Retric 3y ago
    Cable monopolies didn’t actually produce content, they had a distribution monopoly but different cable companies all had HBO etc. The biggest issue most people had with cable was the bundling, they would have a few channels you might like alongside dozens you didn’t but needed to pay for them collectively. And with streaming nothing changed, D+ has 1 or 2 shows I might be interested in, so does Netflix, and Hulu, and etc etc. Net result spend 100+$ per month to have a decent chance of finding something interesting, rotate subscriptions, or even better just skip them all as crap. I don’t know why streaming services have so consistently failed to produce good content rather than simply being mildly interesting, but I suspect it relates to how captive their audience is. Shows need to be actively bad before you swap to something else else because it’s all asynchronous. The threshold for success drops from actively engaging to mildly interesting.
    - ghaff 3y ago
      I have more streaming subscriptions than are probably justified by the amount I watch, can't be bothered to manage rotating, and buy some a la carte and I still pay probably half of what a cable TV only subscription would cost me. I give up live TV but that was something I rarely watched. And it's not like cable TV carried everything, including movies, I wanted to watch anyway.
      - Retric 3y ago
        To be fair I include the cost of internet when comparing them as cable TV included the physical connection. Anyway, it’s clear Cable had issues, my point is more streaming doesn’t seem to be a real improvement once you start looking for new content.

TylerE 3y ago

I was just thinking about how streaming is basically cable all over again. At first, Netflix was really the only game in town Now there is's Prime (with it's multitude of premium subscriptions), Max, Disney, Hulu, Espn+, Crunchyroll, etc etc.

ThatPlayer 3y ago
Netflix being the only game in town is also cable because that's a monopoly. We called them cable monopolies. You're describing competition, and that's good. Just look at how Netflix has been raising prices and blocking account sharing. They would raise prices even more if you couldn't go "I'll cancel and go to Disney+ instead".
- Retric 3y ago
  Cable monopolies didn’t actually produce content, they had a distribution monopoly but different cable companies all had HBO etc. The biggest issue most people had with cable was the bundling, they would have a few channels you might like alongside dozens you didn’t but needed to pay for them collectively. And with streaming nothing changed, D+ has 1 or 2 shows I might be interested in, so does Netflix, and Hulu, and etc etc. Net result spend 100+$ per month to have a decent chance of finding something interesting, rotate subscriptions, or even better just skip them all as crap. I don’t know why streaming services have so consistently failed to produce good content rather than simply being mildly interesting, but I suspect it relates to how captive their audience is. Shows need to be actively bad before you swap to something else else because it’s all asynchronous. The threshold for success drops from actively engaging to mildly interesting.
  - ghaff 3y ago
    I have more streaming subscriptions than are probably justified by the amount I watch, can't be bothered to manage rotating, and buy some a la carte and I still pay probably half of what a cable TV only subscription would cost me. I give up live TV but that was something I rarely watched. And it's not like cable TV carried everything, including movies, I wanted to watch anyway.
    - Retric 3y ago
      To be fair I include the cost of internet when comparing them as cable TV included the physical connection. Anyway, it’s clear Cable had issues, my point is more streaming doesn’t seem to be a real improvement once you start looking for new content.