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There's nothing wrong with à la carte offerings. The failure is charging $10/month for every service.

Yeah, perhaps a Blendle model would be better. I recently got Netflix as a present, one show I like is not on there, we generally watch one show at a time, something like 2-3 episodes a week. So now I won't use it for months, apart from the occasional (once every 3 weeks?) movie. I pay (if it wasn't a present) the same as someone who watches 4 hours of Netflix per day.

My son used to watch Thomas the Tank engine occasionally. Guess what recently got removed...

So what should HBO, Netflix, FX, ESPN, et al be charging then? Creating content isn't cheap.

No but the supply of content keeps going up and the demand can't keep growing. At some point, the price for a generic hour of entertainment has to drop. The cost of producing content is mostly irrelevant.

> The cost of producing content is mostly irrelevant.

How is this irrelevant? Everything about making the product costs money and if there is no ad revenue they have to charge for it elsewhere.

I suddenly find myself wondering how successful a Game of Thrones season kickstarter would be. ;)

Because sunk costs are sunk, and fixed costs are fixed. In a commoditized market, the cost of the product is most directly impacted by the marginal cost to produce one additional copy. It doesn't matter if you had $100M in your production budget, or just $1k, because all it takes to make one more copy is a few squirts of electrons and a pinch of network bandwidth.

For digital goods, marginal cost of production is so near to zero that the only thing you can really sell profitably is an artificial legal right to distribute the copies.

iTunes has à la carte television with a small lead time. It's had it for years. I guess what people want is unsustainably cheap à la carte offerings.

I for one would be happy with either:

Pay per view (multiple sources ok)

All-you-can-x from one place like Spotify

What I don't like is paying monthly to a number of services.

Also (honest question, I might send money Apples way if the answer is yes:)

Do iTunes work standaloneon Windows (and preferably Linux) and can I legally watch stuff there even if I sit somewhere in Europe?

As far as I now, the answer is yes to Windows (not Linux), and you can legally watch US stuff in Europe as long as your iTunes account is associated with a US account as far as I know (98% certain I did exactly this a couple of years ago).

However, iTunes is only pay-per-view for some films, and hasn't been pay-per-view for TV episodes for some time. TV episodes you must buy (either one at a time for typically ~$3 or you can buy a whole season, or you can pay the remainder of the season cost if you've already bought episodes from it). Some films are rentable ($3-$6, once you've rented I believe you have 30 days to start watching and then 24 hours to finish/watch as many times as you want), but most are for sale rather than rent. It's not unusual for me to run across a film I'd like to watch, but ends up not being rentable so I have to decide if I want to full-on buy it (which is closer to $15-$20).

Not the greatest solution, but usually better than other solutions for me.

Ok, guess I wasn't clear enough. I'm not a US citizsn, so I guess this means a bunch of VPN trickery && buy gift cards using EBay && enter fake zip codes or is there a simpler way?

I, like many others really want to buy. For me pirating is last option (after "let's just do something else, I don't need to see that movie after all")

No, that's correct. If you're not a US citizen unfortunately this does not help at all :/

> As far as I now, the answer is yes to Windows (not Linux), and you can legally watch US stuff in Europe as long as your iTunes account is associated with a US account as far as I know (98% certain I did exactly this a couple of years ago).

Sorry, but according to content right owners (Sony being named among the chief ones), that's not legal or acceptable. If they say you're not allowed to watch a movie in EU, it's copyright infrigement for you to pay for it in EU via US iTunes account.

Welcome to 21st century.

Then I guess Apple doesn't enforce that legal restriction ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

That seems unlikely to me, though. More likely there is more subtlety to it than that.

Yup.

I have Netflix and iTunes. I nearly always end up using iTunes. It's more expensive but iTunes UK has a great selection and I only pay when I use it. Also it streams to my Apple TV. For me the additional cost is worth the control and selection.

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