7 ms·

Baffles me why all these streaming companies are shooting themselves in the foot. For about 18 months there was a golden age where it was easier to pay for thin

Baffles me why all these streaming companies are shooting themselves in the foot. For about 18 months there was a golden age where it was easier to pay for things than to pirate. Now we’re in a situation where it’s even /harder/ than it’s ever been. People will pay for media if it’s easy and a good experience. The barrier to piracy is non-existent these days and you actually get a far better experience.

spondylosaurus 3y ago
For HBO/Max's foot-shooting specifically, David Zaslav is why. https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-communications/can-david-zaslav-make-it-in-hollywood https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-communications/can-...
- BlackjackCF 3y ago
  Imagine being the person who took a rock solid brand like HBO and flushed it down the toilet…
  - spondylosaurus 3y ago
    There was another really good New Yorker piece recently about Howard Schultz (the Starbucks CEO responsible for elevating the company into the juggernaut chain it is today) and his insistence on rolling out these Oleato drinks that are literally just coffee with olive oil drizzled in. Granted, I don't think Oleato is enough to kill Starbucks, but my takeaway of the whole thing was that sometimes these C-suite guys end up in positions where everyone around them is too afraid to say "what the fuck are you doing."
    - jquery 3y ago
      I don't know anything about Oleato, but some people swear by the coffee+MCT oil (bulletproof coffee) combo. I see several brands at Whole Foods that are basically this (Super Coffee and others). Oleato doesn't sound too far off from that, and looking it up, it looks intriguing. But reading more about it, seems they put way too much oil in the coffee. Super Coffee has 3 grams of MCT oil, I'm seeing Oleato with 34 grams of oil reported in a Grande.
      - mlinhares 3y ago
        Trouble here is that “Some people” isn’t the public for Starbucks, they have to cater for a wide swath of the population for them to make sense as a business the way they have shops all over the place. So trying to convince people to drink something bitter adding something else that is also bitter, like olive oil, is something only someone completely disconnected from reality would do. The super rich are definitely lost to the rest of the world.
    - MisterBastahrd 3y ago
      What a better way to give your customers the shits than to drizzle oil in coffee.
      - jrflowers 3y ago
        Coffee + oil + magnesium citrate + sennosides = Maximizing spatial awareness in record time.
    - shepherdjerred 3y ago
      I've loved the Oleato drinks that I've had, although they are very caloric
    - mrbadguy 3y ago
      Oleato? Is that pronounced like “Aviato”?
  - schleck8 3y ago
    Afaik they were or are planning to add a bunch of low quality content to Max from Discovery or something like that and didn't want to destroy HBO's reputation. Not sure though
aodin 3y ago
> "One thing that we have learned is that piracy is not a pricing issue. It’s a service issue" Gabe Newell of Valve, Oct 2011 [1] https://www.gamesradar.com/gabe-newell-piracy-issue-service-not-price/ https://www.gamesradar.com/gabe-newell-piracy-issue-service-...
- throwaway5959 3y ago
  I struggle to understand how services like Netflix or Max have an issue with providing service. How could they possibly make it easier to access their content with various apps?
  - manuelmoreale 3y ago
    The issue is that Neflix, Max and the others are a bridge between you and the content you want to watch. When this content starts to shift around and things that were available in one place now are in another, consuming content becomes problematic. In addition to that, prices are going up while overall catalogue size seems to be going down (at least the catalogue of quality content) On top of that you have an increasing tendency of just canceling things left and right because the ROI from the companies perspective is not as high as they were hoping and so fuck the people who were invested in that TV series. The end result is that the entire streaming landscape is a mess, everything is becoming more expensive and you get no real benefit in return and at a certain point, if I want to watch TV series X or Movie Y my best bet is to just pirate the damn thing and call it a day.
    - throwaway5959 3y ago
      MAX, YouTube Premium, Spotify, Netflix, Disney+ can all be had for about $100/mo. Even assuming someone only makes $20/hour, that's about 15 minutes of work per day for a month to access effectively unlimited content. If you can't find what you want to watch there, swap providers or just buy the content on Apple TV/Google Play/etc. Again, I struggle to see how these platforms don't provide massive value. Like that's one meal out any more for a family of four. Pirating content when it's so cheap seems entitled to me, like not tipping when you go out to eat (in the US) because you have personal issues with tipping.
matheusmoreira 3y ago
These copyright owners always defeat themselves. Netflix used to have a rich selection of content. Now every single studio has its own shitty streaming service instead. You subscribe to one of these things and you find they have like 5 films you like. You watch one of these things and you find they compressed the "high definition" stream so much it has artifacts in 90% black frames. Meanwhile "pirates" have everything humanity ever created in Blu-Ray quality all in one place and thoroughly catalogued. Makes me feel like a sucker.
- jquery 3y ago
  My lifetime Plex pass I bought a few years ago is paying off in spades.
- mdasen 3y ago
  Netflix used to have a rich selection of content because content creators licensed it to Netflix without realizing how streaming was going to eat into physical media sales. $15 Netflix wasn't going to replace a $75 cable TV package, $30 for a couple premium channels, and a $10-15/week Blockbuster habit (around $150/mo) over the long term. Once studios realized that licensing their content to Netflix was cannibalizing their revenue from other sources, they weren't going to decide they didn't actually want revenue. $150/mo buys you way better entertainment today than it used to. If you remember the 90s, you should remember the absolute dearth of content to the point that you'd end up watching infomercials - we'd watch commercials as entertainment because there was nothing better. Yea, the current situation definitely isn't perfect and it sucks any time companies are trying to grab more of your cash. I mean, $73.50 buys you Netflix, Disney+, Hulu, Max, Paramount+ and Showtime all without ads and with way more and better content than a cable package offered in the 90s or 2000s. Plus, it's easy enough to sign up for one, watch a bunch of its content for a month and then jump to another service (paying for only one or two at a time). It was unrealistic to believe that we'd have one extremely cheap service that everyone would license their content to over the long run. For those born in the late 90s, you wouldn't remember the absolute garbage that was entertainment before the mid/late 2000s. It isn't perfect today, but there's so much to watch at your fingertips in a way that there just wasn't back then. If it was 11pm, there was just nothing on TV and if you didn't have a DVD you were just out of luck. Being realistic, the copyright holders would have "defeated themselves" if they continued licensing content at low rates when they realized that streaming was cannibalizing other revenue streams. What we're experiencing sucks - it was better when Netflix had a richer selection and things were cheaper. No one likes companies getting more money out of them - especially when we had better years before they realized we were all moving to streaming. However, it was bound to happen. The alternative would be them seeing their revenue drop to an incredibly low level.
mdasen 3y ago
It's not that baffling. For a time, they were trying to grow their subscriber base and luring them in with low prices. Now that they have their subscriber base, they want to get back to the revenue they were getting before. Realistically, entertainment companies weren't going to accept lower revenue than they previously had for their product. As the industry transitions from physical media and cable TV to streaming, they needed to get users over the hump of signing up. It isn't harder to pay than to pirate. It's just getting more expensive. Max's move to charge $4 extra for 4K doesn't make it harder to pay. You say that people will pay for media if it's easy and a good experience. C'mon, Max isn't changing the ease or experience. They're just changing the price. We got used to paying less for entertainment and now we're all annoyed that they're trying to get us back to paying what we used to pay 20 years ago. I'm not suggesting that cost isn't an important factor. It is. But an argument many people made was "I'd pay for it if they'd just make it available." Turns out, we don't like the price. Tons of people with cable used to pay $15/mo for HBO. Max has more content and is more convenient than what HBO offered 15-20 years ago. It's really not baffling and they aren't making it harder. They want more money and we don't want to pay as much. I'm not saying that it doesn't make the price hikes garbage. It's just not baffling: they want to get back the revenue they're losing in declining physical media sales and declining cable TV subscription rates.
- arcticbull 3y ago
  > It isn't harder to pay than to pirate. It's just getting more expensive. No, it's harder too. Shows I want to watch bounce between the various silos of un-indexed content, without notice, as licenses shift and expire. Each silo behind their own separate paywalls. New ones pop up and shut down. Their feature matrix changes. They introduce geo restrictions, device restrictions, they force you to sign in from your 'home location' every few weeks to keep features like live TV running. Of course they'll charge you even if you don't, because you've been traveling for a while, in a geo where you can't even access the content you're paying for in the first place. I don't care about the money, within reason. I care about being able to sit down and watch the show I want, in 4K, with Dolby whatever whatever. Without having to think about it. I'm trying to relax here dammit, lol. This isn't about Max wanting a few extra dollars, it's just a price hike. We'd whine if they moved the price point up in the same way we're whining they kept the price the same but de-contented it. That's not the part that sucks. Chasing down which of the 11 streaming services has the TV show you want to watch on a Mario-esque "the princess is in another castle" adventure sucks. When you find it, being greeted with a message saying that you've changed IP address too many times this year so better luck next year sucks. Then trying to figure out why it looks like it was filmed with a potato because you missed the email saying unless you act now and pay more, you're only getting 480p - sucks.
yieldcrv 3y ago
> The barrier to piracy is non-existent these days and you actually get a far better experience I hadn’t used a torrent in a decade and revisited the concept due to this streaming service convulsion I found that: VPN to another country was a 1-click in a chrome extension I already had that for other reasons, and all the torrent sites remind you to enable it or install one thats just as simple My TV was running a DLNA server on my network with a lot of storage space I never knew about. I had only connected it to the internet for an OTA update once, and never used any of the “Smart TV” stuff. But it also has USB ports. It runs the latest video formats and can read subtitles packaged with them The torrent downloaded directly to it at gigabit speed over my Wifi 6 network the ISP had already setup with their gear The quality is far higher than what gets streamed over the internet. Something I was willing to overlook as long as the streaming services were more convenient. I think a lot of people have similar infrastructure already right now, without needing to be an enthusiast in electronics or home entertainment really is better at the moment
miki123211 3y ago
Not if your main devices are a smartphone and a smart TV, maybe a gaming console or a TV stick, which is the case for most people these days. Outside of the tech bubble, many people barely ever use a computer, especially outside of work.
owenpalmer 3y ago
I've often pondered the idea of a pirating site that lets you donate to specific individuals/teams of the production. For example, if you particularly liked the movie's animation but hated the writing, your donation would be sent to the animators. Basically a cinema meritocracy.
- janosdebugs 3y ago
  I can't quite put my finger on it, but this sounds legally problematic. Maybe even for the receiving party as they may be violating their contract by accepting the money.
- ShadowBanThis01 3y ago
  Same. I was thinking about this in terms of rewarding music artists. We could have invented PayPal!
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
AniseAbyss 3y ago
[dead]

spondylosaurus 3y ago

For HBO/Max's foot-shooting specifically, David Zaslav is why. https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-communications/can-david-zaslav-make-it-in-hollywood https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-communications/can-...

BlackjackCF 3y ago
Imagine being the person who took a rock solid brand like HBO and flushed it down the toilet…
- spondylosaurus 3y ago
  There was another really good New Yorker piece recently about Howard Schultz (the Starbucks CEO responsible for elevating the company into the juggernaut chain it is today) and his insistence on rolling out these Oleato drinks that are literally just coffee with olive oil drizzled in. Granted, I don't think Oleato is enough to kill Starbucks, but my takeaway of the whole thing was that sometimes these C-suite guys end up in positions where everyone around them is too afraid to say "what the fuck are you doing."
  - jquery 3y ago
    I don't know anything about Oleato, but some people swear by the coffee+MCT oil (bulletproof coffee) combo. I see several brands at Whole Foods that are basically this (Super Coffee and others). Oleato doesn't sound too far off from that, and looking it up, it looks intriguing. But reading more about it, seems they put way too much oil in the coffee. Super Coffee has 3 grams of MCT oil, I'm seeing Oleato with 34 grams of oil reported in a Grande.
    - mlinhares 3y ago
      Trouble here is that “Some people” isn’t the public for Starbucks, they have to cater for a wide swath of the population for them to make sense as a business the way they have shops all over the place. So trying to convince people to drink something bitter adding something else that is also bitter, like olive oil, is something only someone completely disconnected from reality would do. The super rich are definitely lost to the rest of the world.
  - MisterBastahrd 3y ago
    What a better way to give your customers the shits than to drizzle oil in coffee.
    - jrflowers 3y ago
      Coffee + oil + magnesium citrate + sennosides = Maximizing spatial awareness in record time.
  - shepherdjerred 3y ago
    I've loved the Oleato drinks that I've had, although they are very caloric
  - mrbadguy 3y ago
    Oleato? Is that pronounced like “Aviato”?
- schleck8 3y ago
  Afaik they were or are planning to add a bunch of low quality content to Max from Discovery or something like that and didn't want to destroy HBO's reputation. Not sure though

aodin 3y ago

> "One thing that we have learned is that piracy is not a pricing issue. It’s a service issue" Gabe Newell of Valve, Oct 2011 [1] https://www.gamesradar.com/gabe-newell-piracy-issue-service-not-price/ https://www.gamesradar.com/gabe-newell-piracy-issue-service-...

throwaway5959 3y ago
I struggle to understand how services like Netflix or Max have an issue with providing service. How could they possibly make it easier to access their content with various apps?
- manuelmoreale 3y ago
  The issue is that Neflix, Max and the others are a bridge between you and the content you want to watch. When this content starts to shift around and things that were available in one place now are in another, consuming content becomes problematic. In addition to that, prices are going up while overall catalogue size seems to be going down (at least the catalogue of quality content) On top of that you have an increasing tendency of just canceling things left and right because the ROI from the companies perspective is not as high as they were hoping and so fuck the people who were invested in that TV series. The end result is that the entire streaming landscape is a mess, everything is becoming more expensive and you get no real benefit in return and at a certain point, if I want to watch TV series X or Movie Y my best bet is to just pirate the damn thing and call it a day.
  - throwaway5959 3y ago
    MAX, YouTube Premium, Spotify, Netflix, Disney+ can all be had for about $100/mo. Even assuming someone only makes $20/hour, that's about 15 minutes of work per day for a month to access effectively unlimited content. If you can't find what you want to watch there, swap providers or just buy the content on Apple TV/Google Play/etc. Again, I struggle to see how these platforms don't provide massive value. Like that's one meal out any more for a family of four. Pirating content when it's so cheap seems entitled to me, like not tipping when you go out to eat (in the US) because you have personal issues with tipping.

matheusmoreira 3y ago

These copyright owners always defeat themselves. Netflix used to have a rich selection of content. Now every single studio has its own shitty streaming service instead. You subscribe to one of these things and you find they have like 5 films you like. You watch one of these things and you find they compressed the "high definition" stream so much it has artifacts in 90% black frames. Meanwhile "pirates" have everything humanity ever created in Blu-Ray quality all in one place and thoroughly catalogued. Makes me feel like a sucker.

jquery 3y ago
My lifetime Plex pass I bought a few years ago is paying off in spades.
mdasen 3y ago
Netflix used to have a rich selection of content because content creators licensed it to Netflix without realizing how streaming was going to eat into physical media sales. $15 Netflix wasn't going to replace a $75 cable TV package, $30 for a couple premium channels, and a $10-15/week Blockbuster habit (around $150/mo) over the long term. Once studios realized that licensing their content to Netflix was cannibalizing their revenue from other sources, they weren't going to decide they didn't actually want revenue. $150/mo buys you way better entertainment today than it used to. If you remember the 90s, you should remember the absolute dearth of content to the point that you'd end up watching infomercials - we'd watch commercials as entertainment because there was nothing better. Yea, the current situation definitely isn't perfect and it sucks any time companies are trying to grab more of your cash. I mean, $73.50 buys you Netflix, Disney+, Hulu, Max, Paramount+ and Showtime all without ads and with way more and better content than a cable package offered in the 90s or 2000s. Plus, it's easy enough to sign up for one, watch a bunch of its content for a month and then jump to another service (paying for only one or two at a time). It was unrealistic to believe that we'd have one extremely cheap service that everyone would license their content to over the long run. For those born in the late 90s, you wouldn't remember the absolute garbage that was entertainment before the mid/late 2000s. It isn't perfect today, but there's so much to watch at your fingertips in a way that there just wasn't back then. If it was 11pm, there was just nothing on TV and if you didn't have a DVD you were just out of luck. Being realistic, the copyright holders would have "defeated themselves" if they continued licensing content at low rates when they realized that streaming was cannibalizing other revenue streams. What we're experiencing sucks - it was better when Netflix had a richer selection and things were cheaper. No one likes companies getting more money out of them - especially when we had better years before they realized we were all moving to streaming. However, it was bound to happen. The alternative would be them seeing their revenue drop to an incredibly low level.

mdasen 3y ago

It's not that baffling. For a time, they were trying to grow their subscriber base and luring them in with low prices. Now that they have their subscriber base, they want to get back to the revenue they were getting before. Realistically, entertainment companies weren't going to accept lower revenue than they previously had for their product. As the industry transitions from physical media and cable TV to streaming, they needed to get users over the hump of signing up. It isn't harder to pay than to pirate. It's just getting more expensive. Max's move to charge $4 extra for 4K doesn't make it harder to pay. You say that people will pay for media if it's easy and a good experience. C'mon, Max isn't changing the ease or experience. They're just changing the price. We got used to paying less for entertainment and now we're all annoyed that they're trying to get us back to paying what we used to pay 20 years ago. I'm not suggesting that cost isn't an important factor. It is. But an argument many people made was "I'd pay for it if they'd just make it available." Turns out, we don't like the price. Tons of people with cable used to pay $15/mo for HBO. Max has more content and is more convenient than what HBO offered 15-20 years ago. It's really not baffling and they aren't making it harder. They want more money and we don't want to pay as much. I'm not saying that it doesn't make the price hikes garbage. It's just not baffling: they want to get back the revenue they're losing in declining physical media sales and declining cable TV subscription rates.

arcticbull 3y ago
> It isn't harder to pay than to pirate. It's just getting more expensive. No, it's harder too. Shows I want to watch bounce between the various silos of un-indexed content, without notice, as licenses shift and expire. Each silo behind their own separate paywalls. New ones pop up and shut down. Their feature matrix changes. They introduce geo restrictions, device restrictions, they force you to sign in from your 'home location' every few weeks to keep features like live TV running. Of course they'll charge you even if you don't, because you've been traveling for a while, in a geo where you can't even access the content you're paying for in the first place. I don't care about the money, within reason. I care about being able to sit down and watch the show I want, in 4K, with Dolby whatever whatever. Without having to think about it. I'm trying to relax here dammit, lol. This isn't about Max wanting a few extra dollars, it's just a price hike. We'd whine if they moved the price point up in the same way we're whining they kept the price the same but de-contented it. That's not the part that sucks. Chasing down which of the 11 streaming services has the TV show you want to watch on a Mario-esque "the princess is in another castle" adventure sucks. When you find it, being greeted with a message saying that you've changed IP address too many times this year so better luck next year sucks. Then trying to figure out why it looks like it was filmed with a potato because you missed the email saying unless you act now and pay more, you're only getting 480p - sucks.

yieldcrv 3y ago

> The barrier to piracy is non-existent these days and you actually get a far better experience I hadn’t used a torrent in a decade and revisited the concept due to this streaming service convulsion I found that: VPN to another country was a 1-click in a chrome extension I already had that for other reasons, and all the torrent sites remind you to enable it or install one thats just as simple My TV was running a DLNA server on my network with a lot of storage space I never knew about. I had only connected it to the internet for an OTA update once, and never used any of the “Smart TV” stuff. But it also has USB ports. It runs the latest video formats and can read subtitles packaged with them The torrent downloaded directly to it at gigabit speed over my Wifi 6 network the ISP had already setup with their gear The quality is far higher than what gets streamed over the internet. Something I was willing to overlook as long as the streaming services were more convenient. I think a lot of people have similar infrastructure already right now, without needing to be an enthusiast in electronics or home entertainment really is better at the moment

miki123211 3y ago

Not if your main devices are a smartphone and a smart TV, maybe a gaming console or a TV stick, which is the case for most people these days. Outside of the tech bubble, many people barely ever use a computer, especially outside of work.

owenpalmer 3y ago

I've often pondered the idea of a pirating site that lets you donate to specific individuals/teams of the production. For example, if you particularly liked the movie's animation but hated the writing, your donation would be sent to the animators. Basically a cinema meritocracy.

janosdebugs 3y ago
I can't quite put my finger on it, but this sounds legally problematic. Maybe even for the receiving party as they may be violating their contract by accepting the money.
ShadowBanThis01 3y ago
Same. I was thinking about this in terms of rewarding music artists. We could have invented PayPal!
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

AniseAbyss 3y ago

[dead]