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Comment by pgrote | Hacker News Reader

It is funny how the thing that is breaking the cable stronghold is the same thing that will bring it back. By 2020 there will be at least 15 competing streaming services backed by large entertainment companies.

How many subscriptions will people end up paying for then? Someone will then have the idea to consolidate it into one or two packages. Rinse, repeat.

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This time it’s without commercials, at least.

I recently watched plain old tv again (after not watching any for several years) and I can’t believe we used to put up with those! It was like I suddenly turned off my adblocker.

Its truly incredible. I also had to stop using ad-block due to some work-related regulations, and I should demand compensation from the state on that.

What is most noticeable to me is how wasteful advertising is. I've seen some of the same ad 1000 times, and im just not going to buy that damn car. I cant drive!

> I also had to stop using ad-block due to some work-related regulations, and I should demand compensation from the state on that.

I'd love to hear more about this if you don't mind.

I'd guess it's either "browser plugins are banned" or "one of the advertising companies might sue us."

I work in healthcare: any plugin with access to your rendered pages is a massive liability.

Interesting that having ads profile the browser - and in many cases the ads or metrics have access to the page - isn't. I wonder if you could persuade them to drop a few domains at the router.

Get the IT guy to switch to Zscalar, Adguard, or similar ad blocking DNS:

https://adguard.com/en/adguard-dns/overview.html

At home, I believe the software defined mesh routers from Eero offer a subscription with Zscalar’s malware and ad blocking DNS, 1Password Family, and VPN.

I tried to watch a half hour episode of "Strange Inheritance" last night. There was probably only about 10 minutes of show - the rest was commercials, "after the break" previews, and post-break recaps.

> This time it’s without commercials, at least.

That's how cable was sold, too.

Some channels still respect that (TCM) but most others don't.

Well, depends - the lowest tier of Hulu has ads. Nothing's stopping anyone from being greedy and introducing ads anyways.

Cable originally had no commercials as well...

Now the commercials are inside the show and make the whole show unwatchable, at least for me.

And on demand. When I come home from work at night there's nothing on television but I can watch an episode on Netflix before going to bed.

Jim Barksdale:

“in business, there are two ways to make money. You can bundle, or you can unbundle.”

https://hbr.org/2014/06/how-to-succeed-in-business-by-bundli...

Barksdale was the veteran of IBM, FedEx and AT&T Wireless (he mostly worked at it when it was called McCaw Cellular) who was brought on a few months after Netscape’s founding to provide adult supervision as its CEO.

Yep, this works in software. Bundle disparate technologies into a solution.

That idea is easy to come up with but impossible to implement. Netflix, Amazon, and probably Apple have no incentive to be bundled.

I'm surprised that consumers on the whole are quick to suggest they'd rather pay for one streaming service only, by which they mean one consolidated service rather than one over a competitor. I'd rather see it as competitive as possible. It's OK NOT TO SEE EVERYTHING.

I imagine most people don't want to see everything, but want to see ten things which are split across five different streaming services (with five different bills, five different user interfaces, and five different sets of quirks) by nothing but licensing. Television is not necessarily fungible.

Indeed. Television is definitely not fungible, and TV shows are not substitute goods. What you want to watch is a combination of your interests and the cultural context in which you want to participate.

If the top 3 shows talked about by my co-workers are each exclusively on a different paid service, you can be sure I'm gonna dig out my trusty Torrent client.

Quite right. Wouldn't it be possible to cut out the middle-man, have a Steam-like storefront producers could unload to? Games are now billion dollar affairs and they don't need to rely on the likes of Viacom or the like.

This is basically what Netflix used to be before the existing distributors realized they wanted in on the new action. The same pattern is playing out in games as well, though slower. Origin, Uplay, Battle.net, and most recently Epic are all trying to cut in on Steam's dominance and using exclusives as leverage to do it.

Services will be launched, but it very much remains to be seen if consumers actually will pay for them. I don't plan going beyond my current 3-4.

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