We could really use laws that force, once again, some sort of separation between production and distribution. Better stuff gets made in this kind of ecosystem.
Piracy is competition to bad content behavior. It's a meaningful consumer response to monopoly, balkanization and other anti-consumer practices.
No it isn't. It's a workaround. This is an 8 billion dollar deal, there would have to be an impossible amount of piracy for it to count as "competition." This is precisely the reason why government regulation here is correct, as consumers, we don't have a lever long enough to have any real impact on the core problem.
And we're just one side of the deal. These types of distribution setups are not just bad for consumers, but for actors, directors, producers and anyone who makes a living on any part of these productions.
The knee jerk responses to avoid meaningful government regulation are always baffling to me.
Sure, but it's a trivially easy workaround.
Our focus of attention on matters of regulation ought to be in those areas where working around the problem is not nearly as dead simple as a torrent client, a NAS, and a Plex server.
I'm a computer geek, and I'm LONG past the point where setting up safe VMs and signing up to half a dozen services like newsgroup server and directories and search engines and what nots, download software with impossible names like sabnzbd (I'm waiting up for somebody to scream how nobody uses sabnzbd anymore, it's been replaced by jidwiaj and iqerqip, which are super easy, and that just proves my point:P), setup my own webservers that talk to themselves internally so my downloader would work with my cataloguer that would work with the sorter that talks to the video player, figuring out a VPN to keep me somewhat safe while introducing a whole 'nother threat vector... gawd I get a headache just thinking about it. And I end up paying the same as I would for 2-4 monthly legit services. And then my wife wants to watch this movie that's just come out and I download eight versions of it but four are fake and two have hieroglyphic subtitles in three languages baked into video stream and take up half the screen. And then it stops half way through. And then I'm on a business trip (remember those? hah!) and my family wants to watch something and now I have to spend 47 minutes on the phone trying to guide her on how to do that before we all quit in frustration.
My few friends who still do that try to get me back on board, and their "quick & easy explanation on how to do it because it's so easy now" is still three pages long, while skipping 70% of crucial steps & detail.
Just, NO. Whoever thinks piracy is "trivially easy" has a very specific mindset (Hey, it's OK, I used to as well...!), and lacks empathy for those with different mindset/circumstances/skills/priorities... who happen to make up the clear majority of public.
2. Pay $5-$10/month for a seedbox that pre-hosts rTorrent. Zero configuration. It will give you a web address, you visit it, and boom, torrent client.
Wait, should I pay for it in Bitcoin? I mean, you can. But you don't have to. It literally doesn't matter. No one gets caught doing it this way, unless you're a real Whale.
3. Go to {any-number-of-piracy-websites-even-that-one-everyone-knows-about-yeah-it-still-exists-and-its-fine}.com
4. Download torrent -> Upload into your rTorrent
You can, alternatively, skip all of that, pay for NordVPN or whatever, and just use your favorite local torrent client. Same thing.
A whole 3 pages, to be sure. I've got friends who wouldn't know a Mac from a PC, and they still pirate all the latest movies. Its startlingly easy. Experientially, there's near-zero risk of getting caught. It hasn't changed even a millimeter in a decade. Its the same process we all used back in middle school (or, you know, wherever you were ten years ago). Its just gotten cheaper, and also less interesting because of the Golden Days of streaming, but I think it'll come back if streaming continues splintering as it has.
I have been using that same setup for… 10+ years? With BiglyBT replacing Vuze after Vuze was purchased and turned in to garbage.
I've read all the comments, and they're helpful, illuminating, insightful, and I've learned a lot (genuinely).
But overall they did not change and rather enforced my perspective:
1. the "Easy, out of the box, set-it-and-forget-it, everybody knows this" method to safely and easily to this seems to still change every 6-12 months, and still doesn't compare to convenience of just pushing a button on Netflix.
2. Paying for VPNs or Seedboxes etc easily equals the cost of a "just works" streaming service, while incurring new and exciting security & privacy threat vectors.
3. Most importantly, they don't take into account on what I will put forward is the actual mainstream public scenario: family that just wants to watch stuff . Between spouse who cannot be bothered with three remotes and two computer keyboards and six devices and 7 steps to watch something they could otherwise just stream on their phone, parent-in-law who wants to watch NBA/NHS/Soccer/Whatever reliably and in real time with no interruptions, kids who want to watch Paw Patrol safely now now now, all of this at the same time and all of them expecting six nines reliability and utter convenience across all their devices all the time always.
I'm off that particular wagon train, and if that makes me less of a computer geek, then so be it :-)
Then as a computer geek you don't seem to be aware about the modern tools to do that.
Like, what even is all that other stuff?
At several points the studios had the upper hand which meant that actors would only appear in a single studio's films. When more regulation freed actors from those types of contracts then celebrity actors were the major selling point. And for a while individual directors had a lot of power including final cut privileges which is why older in the 80s often had a theatrical release and a directors cut.
It seems that overall we are moving back towards studio control as single companies once again control production and distribution. For the most part this has worked out OK since most of these companies (Netflix, Hulu, etc.) were actually competing with the 'legacy' studios. However, now that major consolidation has taken place including the growth of Disney, etc; we are likely to see the industry and content itself shift to meet their interests. You can already see that, outside of small players and foreign sources, most studios focus on single annual big budget films marketed to an international audience (read: US & China). Just look at the top 20 films from 2015 vs 1995 vs 1985.
[2015] https://www.imdb.com/list/ls073655785/ [1995] https://www.imdb.com/list/ls057887703/ [1985] https://www.imdb.com/list/ls057991323/
Piracy can have many reasons behind it, including just not wanting to pay for things in general. And it’s easy for companies to dismiss as just an expense to manage, like shoplifting (“loss”) in the retail channel.
Amazon shouldn't be ten companies in one.
Google shouldn't be able to set web and mobile standards, then reap ad monies by forcing everyone to accept their anticompetitive changes.
Apple shouldn't be the sole guardian of iPlatform. You can't have a protection racket on 50% of all commerce (phones >> gaming consoles) and enforce what gets put on the device.
These companies don't have moats the size of an ocean. They have moats the size of a Schwarzschild radius, and they're sucking up everything in their path. Google, in particular, is being lazy as fuck because they don't have to actually do anything anymore.
Microsoft is literally the only tech giant behaving correctly, and it's probably because they got slapped with antitrust in the 2000s.
Competition is supposed to be good for the economy. These companies should have to try harder. The minute they no longer face existential risks, they become destructive.
Ask Slack if they agree. Microsoft used the dominance of Office to take over that market by bundling Teams.
Compared to Amazon, Google, & Apple, Microsoft's is incredibly litigious when it comes to licensing their products. It can seem baffling that most other tech company grants access to what you are licensed to use but Microsoft, perhaps deliberately, makes their licensing confusing and imprecise. Since not everything that requires a license is enforced via software, you can pretty easily be breaking their licensing rules.
Additionally, Microsoft products are deeply entrenched business best practices and auditor requirements:
Use Windows? Pay for it. Need centralized antivirus for your organization? Pay for it. Need to enforce MFA for Windows accounts? Pay extra for it. Use Linux? Aren't you glad that Windows Defender supports it? And yea pay more for it.
Meanwhile Office 365 is a mess compared to AWS. Maybe Azure is better but it's still obvious that Microsoft uses its dominance in the OS space to pander more products to service its own OS which means they have no incentive to actually make Windows easy to manage.
Microsoft buying up the good will of developers is just an extra twist of the knife.
Anti-trust is good, and keeps them in check.
I remember Verizon controlling what OS version was installed and what firmware and what updates were even supported by them.
Remember when Cell Service providers charged us PER SMS text?
I do.
I really wish we had the bandwidth we have now, back in the Napster-era.
Napster, and others forced, persuaded and cajoled the music industry to consolidate, whether they liked it or not, on Spotify, and iTunes.
If we'd had easy free sharing of movies, it's not hard to envisage something similar to what we see now in the music industry forced on the movie companies. Now it's honey pot torrents all over the place.
No customer wants to spend X on Shudder, Y on Netflix, and Z on Prime, plus Hulu, HBO, and your cable/satellite fee either. Paying 200 GBP/USD a month is utterly absurd.
Frankly, I'm glad I have a waning interest in modern movies as I get older, and I'm actually more interested in watching old black and white movies that are "free to air" in my country.
Even if that is true, I am pretty sure it is specific to US only. I dont believe any other place in the world are paying that much for monthly TV content, where Free ( paid by Tax or not ) OTA TV are the norm, and paid are mostly for Live Sports Content.
In US it seems you need "Cable" for everything.
Amazon did not take over online shopping because it had the lowest prices at any cost. It grew dominant because it was the everything store and any higher prices they charged were not higher enough to make it worth the time to comparison-shop or look for specialty retailers.
I switched back to cable TV a few years ago. It's just cheaper for me now. The price of streaming has risen, and the price of cable has fallen.
My mother recently gave me a sub-account to Netflix and while I was thrilled to rewatch some shows I liked (like the OA or good old star trek) I was quickly submerged by the sheer amount of YA novels adapted in TV shows or movies that are really mediocre. Now I see there's a lot of content on Netflix but I feel like I am swimming in an ocean of never ending content produced with the same recipe.
I'm with you on the old black/white movies.
I actually think Amazon got a great deal buying MGM.
If TCM was available, Nefflix should look into buying it. They have a great library of old movies.
This is what machine learning, pattern recognition will get us.
I watched one show in Amazon prime. One shocking thing I noted besides repetitive plots every few episodes, is that one character say something and after few minutes or next episode another character spoke exactly same sentence in different situation. And it happened so many times I thought I knew what is about to be said.
(see Avatar is Dances with Wolves with Blue Aliens)
When we’re done talking about the quantity of movies, let’s talk about quality.
If an awesome movie goes to the cinema, like Twilight, you’ll be able to watch Werewolf on Netflix. With abysmal plot and acting. If you type Mission Impossible, you’ll certainly get Suits.
The search is so abysmal, always suggesting the same 40 series on and on, that people exchange numeric codes which allow them to discover new categories (but half the titles will be already seen). A/B testing probably shows that after seeing a title for 6 weeks and dodging it, you end up watching it, because, there’s only that.
It’s not that I don’t want to pay $40 a month for 4 services, it’s that even at that price, I still can’t watch the quality movies.
And let’s not even start with ideology-pushing in movies.
I can't fathom how someone can pay to streaming sites month after month unless they have quite a lot of stuff they want to watch.
A lot of people just can't be bothered tracking their usage over time of a bunch of services and keeping track of what lives where. I don't have a lot of services so it's not worth optimizing to save $10/month or something like that.
My experience has been that old (black and white or otherwise) movies are hard to find now. Especially if you just want to watch it once and don't want to buy an old DVD or VHS.
https://www.filmstories.co.uk/features/talking-pictures-tv-t...
And your argument assumes that the shows you want are clustered into one of the providers. But what if you like one show from Netflix, one from Hulu, one from HBOMax, etc. You still have to pay for all the shows you don't care about from each of those providers. The different streaming services is roughly equivalent to the different channel bundles that cable companies offered before.
Sure, the streaming situation isn't any worse than cable was, but it could still be a lot better. Imagine if streaming services had to compete on the quality of the service itself instead of the content available on the network. If you are ok with ads if you get a lower price, use one service. If you are willing to pay more for 4K content for everything, use a different service, etc.
Also, the free-to-air reception in some parts of the UK is still so poor, you need cable or satellite to watch any TV at all.
Forcing consumers to sign up to 10 platforms to watch 10 movies will no doubt lead to a shift back to torrents.
YouTube is pretty good in this regard, as it allows paying for renting a single movie for a weekend for a reasonable price.
And indeed, our process is: "Can we rent it? No, fine let's fine a pirated copy". Not going to get cable for one night to watch this one movie. Everybody's losing by hanging on those old outdated systems.
Have you ever heard of the indie mubi?
Maybe they'll make a comeback?
Consumers are willing to pay more for VOD because its easier. Having to return the disc is a pain in the ass.
If you're basically just walking by the box anyway while doing something you'd be doing otherwise, sure it's cheaper to drop $2 for a disc.
If you have to make a deliberate trip, you've transportation & opportunity costs. 2 round trips to the box, just to get/return the disc, is 6 miles total (1.5 miles one-way by road & parking lot) for me; at >$3/gal gas (wear/maintenance not included) that's >$1.50 plus the $2 rental. Then there's the time spent getting the disc, as several people wait around for someone to fetch it; if we're already at cumulative $4 cost, I'll pay the extra $1 (<$0.25 each) just so the group can watch what we want right now with a mere wiggling my thumb and not wait around half an hour.
Regardless, the end game of these streaming services is probably going to be consolidation or partners, if it makes since because the market is too diluted. We're coming off, wha, $60-100 a month cable bills? The streaming providers are still siphoning this value before we start seeing consolidation of the losers with the winners.
Depending upon how you allocate the cost of Amazon Prime though, I'm saving a lot compared to when I had cable--albeit at the cost of losing live TV.
By the way, has anyone checked out the free movies on Youtube? There's some good 80s and 90s classics on there lately. Supposedly it's with ads, but I don't see too many when I watch, certainly less than Hulu.
In that light it makes perfect sense for Amazon to enhance their offering, as they are third or fourth in streaming.
There never seems to be something to watch consistently on Prime at least here in Europe.
My neighbor got busted a few years back by Xfinity, and it was a big deal.
It's my understanding that Xfinity sends a few warning notices, just a little slap on the wrist, before they end up terminating your account or something (though a quick cursory Google brings up a Reddit thread where someone claiming to have worked for Cumcrust said they never saw any accounts terminated for that). I know I received one letter like 7 years ago for downloading 'Christmas Vacation' and nothing else ever happened. Speaking from experience, if you use a VPN to torrent then they'll leave you alone.
I'd be curious how much - and what - your neighbor was doing to have made it a big deal, and what Xfinity's response/reaction was.
And/or only use private trackers. Stay away from the public ones.
If any one "stream everything" service popped up with every providers content, it would cost $200+ a month, and essentially a cable tv subscription all over again just without the cable box, and everyone would complain it's too expensive and go back to piracy.
I've watched more black and white classics in the last 15 months than I have in the last 20 years. Particularly the old sci-fi, horror, and slapstick films. Harold Lloyd, The Three Stooges, and Chaplin. Plus all the old St Trinians, and Sherlock Holmes. Abbot and Costello and so on. So pleasant to watch.
https://harpers.org/archive/2020/10/no-time-but-the-present-...
This was tougher growing up when kids all watched the same shows and talked about them, but with content so all over the place now that common thread seems to be mostly gone at school (outside of internet video stuff).
My girlfriend somehow grew up completely unaware of Star Trek, so I introduced her to The Next Generation last year and we've been watching it (rewatching in my case, but for the first time in over two decades) one episode a day.
It's so relaxing, in a way that almost no modern TV is. No end-of-episode cliffhangers or other mechanisms trying to make you binge-watch. We can just watch one episode to unwind, discuss it a bit if it's one of the better thought-provoking ones, and then go to bed.
Is that really your determining factor while deciding to watch a movie? It isn't mine. I watch a movie because its a good movie, I don't go searching for diversity, I like watching a movie because of its entertainment value. You should try it.
I don't only watch a movie or a TV show for the intrinsic entertainment quality, I also do it so that I can talk about what I watch with others.
That artsy Swiss movie from 1929 is not as popular a theme as the latest episode of Ozark.
YouTube & others provide a large library for free (with ads). I assume most here are Amazon Prime members anyway, so that vast library is practically free. Apple TV always has some good $5 movies.
As I get older, the less I care about seeing the latest stuff - as there's always more I want to watch than I can get to.
(And if there really isn't enough for you to watch, you really need be doing something else.)
The Third Man is classic, classic noir. Between the on location shooting in Vienna, fantastic performances by Joseph Cotten and Orson Welles, and really distinctive cinematography, it's just stunning.
A Man Escaped. To quote Godard, "He is the French cinema, as Dostoevsky is the Russian novel and Mozart is German music". If you like simple, but beautiful films, watch Bresson. A Man Escaped makes all other prison break films, with their endless plot twists and convolutions, seem utterly pointless. Instead Bresson focuses on the character, the drama and the methodical process of breaking out.
The story depicts the machinations of a racist named Adam Cramer (Shatner), who arrives in the fictitious small Southern town of Caxton in order to incite white townspeople to racial violence against black townspeople and court-ordered school integration.
Dead of Night
Modern times
The third man
The laws take time, need to be tested in courts and are generally not as effective.
If you're constantly under threat of losing your entire income stream and there's nothing you can do to prevent that (because the only way to prevent piracy of digital content is to ban the internet) it's a pretty decent motivator to do the right thing.
Everyone could have stolen cable back in the day and caused a decrease in cable prices and increase in customer experience. They didn't.
It does feel like we're approaching a tipping point now in the other direction with all of these streaming fiefdoms.
My household has Netflix, Hulu, D+, and Prime streaming now - that's already too many and needs pairing IMO.
All these stream platforms produce their own exclusive shows and chances are that you're only interested in one or two flag ship series and the occasional movie or so. I believe this will hurt hulu the most then hbo before the rest, because compared to netflix and disney they have less exclusive content. This leads to a downward spiral, where you need more exclusive content to attract users which leads to more fragmentation and eventually drives costs, which is bad for platforms with less (exclusive) content, because user may ditch first because of unattractive content/cost ratio...
Pirating is great if you're just interested in a particular new show but nothing else, for me that's HBO. What you're missing out on with pirating is discovering new shows/movies that you actually like just by browser the platform.
This is like complaining you have to pay for NBC to watch Friends when you'd much prefer to watch it on ABC so you can avoid paying for both.
I can't speak for the Android ecosystem, but the iOS ecosystem's Apple TV app (Netflix notwithstanding) aggregates channels into one nice experience, and the App Store makes these channels trivial to subscribe to and cancel, making it easy to decide month-to-month what I want to pay for.
For a few years there; it felt like I could watch ~anything i wanted on Netflix or Crunchyroll. Now it feels like I need 10 services. Maybe my viewing habits have changed; but I haven't started a torrent in a decade and I've been tempted recently.
Now they are on different platforms, because no good reason at all.
A copyright holder of a creative work should be able to set the price, but should not be able to use their monopolistic powers to control who pays the price. Let each channel decide if they want to buy a given show at a given price.
Fragmentation still hurts this to an extreme, and - worse - God-awful region locks. As a fan of obscure, cult and independent cinema in particular it’s a wasteland of titles strewn across 5 different services, and being Canadian, piracy is just a fact of life for us.
Nothing beats the convenience of typing in what you’re looking for and actually finding it right away. That pretty much defines convenience. It’s what I expect.
I don’t want to Google what platform my current obscure interest is on, only to maybe find out because I didn’t bother with Paramount+ I’m going to have to torrent it anyway. :P
It’s literally just one extra search to find what streaming platform it’s on - which is an inconvenience* - when I can just do a quick Torrent search, and have a nice high quality copy of pretty much whatever usually within (on my connection) about 5 minutes.
By the time I make my popcorn, the torrent is done, I stream it through my Plex on my Roku, and Plex even gets the metadata for me. It’s kinda scary how good it is.
And talk about how inconvenient region locking is to the point where VPNs actually advertise* the ability to get around this inconvenience as a point of sale.
Piracy’s convenience and case for existence has only gotten seriously stronger as more and more competing streaming services open.
If there was a way to combine search results for services into one like overall UI that would then just direct you to the content even that would be better, but anecdotally most people I know are tired of the fragmentation issue.
Practical example: "Mockingbird Lane" was released by NBC in 2012, they decided it was 'not worthy' and removed it from their streaming library.
Can you guess what's the only way to watch it now?
I do understand the concept of 'What NBC giveth, NBC taketh', but that doesn't mean I have to be happy with it.
You can do this for most items. For example, go to apple’s TV app or play store and purchase or rent the item.
I'd argue that Sonarr, Radarr, etc, have made this process far easier and better than paying for it.
That's similar to saying that stealing candy bars is a meaninful consumer response to high prices at convenience stores.
That friend uses Kodi (and a NAS) now, but it's still a bit arduous to use for his family. She wants profiles, availability on any device over wifi and 4G and movies and series only.
The best thing about Jellyfin is that it is free software: open source, permissive license, and no paid features (which alternatives like Plex have).
You can host Jellyfin on your own VPS, I host mine on a Hetzner VPS for just over 10 eur / month but that is very overkill, you can host one for far less. The only thing to keep in mind is that transcoding (streaming in a different resolution to the stored media) is quite computationally expensive so if lot's of people are transcoding at once you will need a good CPU.
Then any family member can just visit the IP address of the server in their web browser (or you can buy it a domain name). Jellyfin has a native iOS app they can use from their phones. For viewing it on TVs, there is an app for AppleTV which has Jellyfin support (cant remember the name right now but I can find it if you need it).
Right, the copyright holders effectively get to dictate the price and prevent redistribution (how does someone resell their digital [non-physical] copy to me without running afoul of DMCA and the like?). It's not a normal market, and the MPAA and similar organizations have lobbied to dictate the market rules to funnel as much money as possible to them.
For example, copyright terms these days are absurdly long--70 years beyond the lifetime of the original author.
DMCA/etc vastly favors content owners who also lobby hard to maintain their ownership by extending copyright and similar protections.
Anti-competitive behavior must be countered but unless it's well funded and focused will end up like the IRS and DMCA today, going after small fish due to lack of resources to challenge those that can afford to fight like players as big as Amazon and MGM.
But still people insist that they must pirate because the "studios" for some amorphous reason related to preexisting hatred of corporations or whatever.
Some people would just prefer to not pay for shit I guess. I just wish they'd be more honest about it than the mental gymnastics used to defend piracy.
This is not a good faith reading or interpretation. The frustration is in the fragmentation; having to subscribe to multiple services to get the content you want because it's otherwise siloed.
Hitting that point - having to subscribe to 3 or more services to get a small subset of that service's offerings is driving people back to piracy.
You get ALL of their offerings.
The idea that you should pay less than $8 for Disney Plus because you only want to watch Mandalorian when you actually get access to literally dozens of extremely high quality titles is just fucking dumb.
The previous option was pay $14 per person to go to a theater and that's the only thing you get to watch. Or pay $120 a month for cable.
It's all just ludicrously deranged mental gymnastics to justify the fact you don't want to pay for anything.
Which you can do, that's fine, just be honest about it!
This is incredibly backwards. I want to pay for what I want. That's how it works with literally every other product on earth, including the movie theater you brought up. I don't have to spend $80 for 4 movies when I only want to watch one. I don't have to spend $20 on bananas, apples, grapes when I only want a mango.
For example all Apple TV shows are full of Apple product placement every minute or so.
It's not something new, Disney creates most of their characters with merchandising in mind. Look at baby Yoda.
But it also goes deeper, when it aims to spread ideologies and behaviors.
Now that a James Bond villain write the show, I wonder who the bad guy will be.
They may try for that, but recent star wars is a merchandising disaster. Baby Yoda is the only real success with Cara Dune coming in second before they nuked that.
I don't do that with Discovery, Picard, Wandavision, etc, because they are available.
Then they completely cocked up Lower Decks and wouldn't take my money. Bittorrent to the rescue.
There is always competition.
Same issue with sports streaming. Why pay six different services to watch a 720p legal stream when i can watch a stream from Russia in 1080p with questionable ads?
This is not a technical problem anymore. It's a business problem. The company who can make these nebulous "licensing problems" and "distribution rights issues" go away can make a fortune. I don't care that Company A can't distribute the digital version of Company B's product because Company C has the exclusive rights to it and Company D only has a license with Company A to distribute optical discs. That shouldn't be something the end user has to worry about or be limited by. These media execs are so smart, why can't they untangle this problem?
I'm not going to subscribe to a dozen different services each with their own bill, their own account, their own password, their own rules and terms. Easier to hoist the Jolly Roger and move on with my life.
For this, don’t expect to get this kind of service for 10 or 20 bucks a month; be prepared to shell out at least $100 or even more. Would you be willing to do that? How many people would be willing to do that?
If they want to be consumer hostile, we should be hostile as well.
What is and isn't legal is not an unchangeable property of the universe. These things can change. Piracy for personal use was (and still is) legal in many places before the RIAA/MPAA started exerting political pressure. Heck, piracy was the primary selling point of VHS recorders and tape decks. Only recently have we shifted to read-only media that's hard to copy.
[1] - https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/aw/d/0415312612?psc=1&ref=ppx_po...
EDIT: one of the Amazon reviews gave a very good summary of the above point:
One of the more interesting conclusions is that the old movie studio system understood implicitly that this business was unpredictable. Until the antitrust laws were used to break them up, the studios contracted stars, script writers, directors, distribution networks and movie theaters in order to own the entire stream of revenues all their movies would generate.
This way the old studio bosses could diversify their risk in what was essentially a portfolio of movies. They knew that they could not predict which of their films would be a hit so they insisted on owning them all and on managing costs so that the hits would pay for the turkeys, while leaving shareholders with a healthy return.
At the same time, movie theatres ceased to be these lavish 'palaces'. So what 'going to the movies' meant shifted in consumers' minds. Film productions also shrunk in size and scale so there is that. I would assume the business side actually deteriorated while cultural relevance rose. Probably not everyone on the consumer side was happy with all of that.
If we're talking about that studio era though, these portfolios of movies being managed from the top definitely made films bland and predictable. But then on the other hand they also forced the talent to hone skill through repetition. So you had some specific aspects of the films being executed on a high polished level like the noir cinematography. I'm feeling/seeing something similar going on right now with the VOD offering. Even though it's all really well produced and shot and put together, I just sense everyone is following the same seemingly risque but safe playbook optimized for social media marketing.
Seen in another way, the internet aspect of these distribution systems really can make all of the above completely irrelevant too. I find my satisfaction with MUBI and weird niche shit on YouTube. A piece of my money still goes toward partially paying for the very same infrastructure. As someone else mentioned here already - I'm not physically limited from seeking what I want to find online, and it's all there side by side for me to view. This was not at all the case in the 1950's.
In my mind one thing is certain, and this is just my take - I don't really want to watch a James Bond that has been developed by a goofy logistics e-commerce corporate giant. I just really don't see it.
Interesting. I was entirely unaware of that history. I was always impressed by Michael Ovitz's bundling play at CAA. Seems like he in fact "just" rebundled what he could at the agency level.
1- https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Paramount_P....
They did not have to. They could have let market forces dictate how it played out.
When I was a kid, if you wanted to watch an NBC show, you had to watch it on an NBC network. What is the difference?
At least nowadays you can just pay, watch, and cancel at your leisure with the click of a few buttons.
From about 1970 to 93, antitrust regulations were put in place because only three networks could determine over 90% of broadcast media. A judge ended that rule under the rational that upstart networks like Fox and CW were now competitive. https://www.nytimes.com/1993/11/13/business/judge-rules-netw...
Critics said this would be bad because the networks would be incentivized to broadcast lucrative content over quality content, and subjectively I would say that is exactly what happened. But fortunately the Internet came along and made TV kind of moot… but anyway if you are of the opinion that radical centralization and corporate consolidation lead to crummy content, fewer opportunities for creators, and in a macro scale a widening wealth gap, this all just kinda sucks.
Yes, that’s the difference. There used to be a gatekeeper to reaching your audience, but now there is none. A kid can take their 4K phone and make their own TV show with their friends and distribute it worldwide, or a company can get a professional crew and spend a couple billion dollars and distribute it worldwide.
If the contention is that a few companies owning all the content will raise the prices, then that solution would be removing/reducing copyright protections, or compulsory licensing, but in the current environment, who owns what is mostly immaterial to customers.
This is going to force subsidization of all entertainment. Then big tech will gobble it all up.
We're going to have a lot of Netflix Original-caliber shit that gets cancelled once viewership changes.
At a labor value of $50/hour, watching ten hours of content a week imposes an economic cost on the viewer of $825/month. By comparison subscribing to all the major streaming platforms would cost about $100/month. Let's not even get into issues of higher quality content and huge on-demand libraries. It's pretty clear ad-free streaming subscription is a massive improvement for consumers over "free" broadcast TV.
Point is content is more accessible and cheaper than it has ever been in history, and that is partially due to the elimination of middlemen like cable/satellite TV distributors.
But media is always going to have an owner, who is always going to be able to license it to whoever they want at whatever cost they want.
There's nothing stopping production companies from producing content, if it's compelling enough they'll still be able to license it out to the big players.
When everything's online the primary drawcard to different video subscriptions is exclusive content, which the giants are funding the production of themselves. Can't see how you could impose a law banning them from producing their own content, if they did and all content is licensed to everyone, there will be nothing distinguishing the different services.
How do you see this playing out when there have been so many big investments by traditional players to put forward new streaming services?
The major players went from Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon and have now added Disney+, HBO Max, Peacock, Apple TV+, and Paramount+, with more on the way.
Untangling all the licensing deals is quite confusing as well and starts to get into the innards of production. I always associate Friends and Seinfeld with NBC, yet they aren't on Peacock, they're on HBO Max and Hulu, respectively. That and content shifting from one platform to another constantly, makes the web even more confusing and it's hard to determine which services you really want.
The major players I expect to be around after the streaming wars ends is: Netflix, Amazon, Disney and Apple. I expect most of the other platforms are going to end up as premium channels that you can subscribe to and watch on the other platforms, which you can do already in AppleTV+ and Amazon Prime.
HBO and Hulu will be around as long as they have exclusive content they can't stream on other platforms. I don't expect HBO's content & licensing strategy of limiting it to higher margin cable services will last. In Australia you can only watch HBO through Foxtel which I'll never do, basically anything that's not accessible from Netflix, Prime, Disney+ or AppleTV+ doesn't exist for us.
If the platforms were banned from producing their own content I expect it would dramatically favor platform owners like AppleTV+ where most iOS users would use to watch their content on as they can do now. Owning the UX would make them like Amazon.com storefront for 3rd party sellers, giving them unilateral power over the discovery of content, e.g. over time they could favor their own content, which is behavior I'd expect from Amazon, for Apple I think they'd be happy to just own the streaming platform as another lock-in & drawcard for iOS users.
Now you can search for what you want to watch, follow the prompts, and it shows you the price, and you agree or disagree. And then you cancel if you do not want it anymore. Some of the purchasing flows can surely use more work, but it’s leagues better than it used to be.
But it's definitely still structured to kinda slightly force your hand towards a subscribtion, and then towards maybe forgetting to cancel it in a couple weeks etc.
Pricing and UX?
But even though some companies are incapable of making good UIs, UX isn’t much of a moat.
At the same time, differentiation through pricing leads to races to the bottom and unsustainable / worthless markets (and, in our case, probably diminishing content quality).
Major personal gripes:
1. No watch history. Have to visit the web, dig into account settings to view it, having to click through 5 items at a time!
2. Content added to your list is displayed randomly, not by date added. No option to sort with various standard parameters such as aforementioned date added, popularity, year released, genre, etc.
3. Licensed content disappearing with not so much as a "we know you saved this to watch at some point but it's no longer available". Instead you're left second guessing yourself as to whether you suffer from dementia or not. (I get the business aspect of this, but still!)
4. Suggests content you've already watched and/or rated multiple times. At times recommends said show or movie immediately after watching/rating it.
5. Originals have trailers. Other content sometimes has trailers but most licensed content does not despite said trailers being available elsewhere for free. Most (all?) content used to show trailers but that's recently changed. (My guess is trailers convert better so you're more likely to watch original content)
6. No ratings history. Tangential to #1 I guess.
7. Can't click through to 'Coming Soon' titles to explore synopsis, trailers, cast, etc. Even for shows with prior seasons available; have to first search to access. To exasperate frustration, releasing soon titles are shown in searches where you can't do anything besides stare at a thumbnail.
Pretty sure I have other issues with their UX but these are the most irritating.
Broke up recently. What do I do with my former girlfriend’s profile?
Delete it and make her loose her watchlist and where she was in some shows?
Keep it and get that awkward moment when I invite someone over and we want to watch something?
Give her my account and lose my profile?
Ridiculous
We will complain about it, mock it, but rare are those willing to pay more for it (or even merely change products), unless the advantage is significant (ie Netflix vs P2P & streaming websites)
Regarding Netflix, honestly, their UX is a mess.
Are we not currently living in a content golden age? Is there any measure of quality and quantity now vs the past? It feels like there's a new amazing mini series and movie and show every week.
The funniest thing of course is I bet the studios would make more money than trying to charge me $4.99 to rent movies and absurd sums to "buy" them...
Last night was one of those nights. We settled in a bit early for TV (minor celebration) and decided we had time to re-watch a movie, and our kid-still-at-home would join us. But we couldn't get it and ended up watching some junk (background while we talked mainly) and, of course, losing the kid's interest.
The alternative was to try to call CS and spend perhaps an hour troubleshooting.
If, however, we owned our own physical copy we could have watched it.
My evening, crippled by tech failures of the vendor, and no recourse for compensation for loss of use or our time.
Sounds like you need to go and produce some content and distribute it this way to show the world the way to englightenment. Please come back and post a Show HN on how well it worked out for you.
It's like...$1 for a DRM-free song right now, and tbh that's not unfair.
Even if I could buy movies DRM-free right now for $10, older movies for $5, that'd be fair; I think. :)
That was actually the situation early on with videotape. The price of the tapes was set at something like $100 to make more money (indirectly) by renting because the rental stores had to pay a much higher price.
Over time, tapes started also being "priced to buy" (often things like Disney animation that kids would want to watch over and over again). Eventually, I think pretty much everything became priced to buy.
I think it would be very challenging to set compulsory licensing rates for TV and Movies.
too bad it's not about making better stuff but more profit.
it's like the market has been distorted out of its ability to better reward better stuff.
I've no skin in the game, really, except that I do love film and I hope good films are increasingly made.
It's not as if those films or productions are requisite viewing. It's casual entertainment or philosophy. I'm not sure what the pressing concern there is.
Amazon, however, is a different beast and should probably be broken up to some degree for other reasons—not this one.
It's definitely a streaming service arms race, though.
https://hbr.org/2014/06/how-to-succeed-in-business-by-bundli...
Forcing this would also have many downsides:
- if you make content that others don't want to distribute, are you not allowed to distribute it yourself? Freedom to publish whatever you want feels very valuable for society, IMHO.
- costs for consumers might rise because you now have two sets of costs priced in, instead of one set of costs.
- It's harder to launch new companies. If content providers don't want to work with you as a distributor when you're small, it's hard to get off the ground. If distributors don't want to work with you because your content is unproven, it's hard to get off the ground. Etc.
- I don't see the sets of costs argument - any price is made up of infinite sub-costs. You buy a carton of milk, it came from a distributor who bought it from a wholesaler, who got it from a carton plant and so on and so forth. At each step of the way someone verified the quality to ensure reputation. In a vertical corp quality control can be difficult.
- The opposite - easier to launch new companies. This is already how it is in places like Europe. No problem to sign 'distribution' deals, and no problem in seeking 'distributors' if you have the content. What's more a ton of other types of incentives make it easier to start new efforts.
I don't think you understand that mostly, this is how it all already works, by itself. That's the whole point of a 'free market'. Until Amazon rolls into town and starts buying everybody up and integrating it all into something else.
Really? Have you enjoyed the drek that has been released over the past decade? HBO started the bucking of the system, F/X and A&E followed. But since they were cable ops, I guess they get a pass? When Netflix started producing and pushed everyone's game, content started getting so much more interesting. Obviously, Amazon/Apple followed. I'm waiting for Google to get involved so we can have a full FAANG entertainment.
All of the Paramounts/WBs want to do is take the one franchise and squeeze every drop from it with endless sequels to the point I have completely lost any interest in explosions, cars, and super heroes.
My impression buying a historical piece of the entertainment industries is a lot like buying a company with large patent portfolio. No one knows whether the buyer is going to use the pieces "offensively" to cut off the rights of others or "defensively", to get leverage for cross licenses and so-forth.
Why? We’re not talking about food, water or the environment. There is where laws should be enacted or enforced.
This is a classic 'culture is not important, doesn't matter' line of thinking. Cultural products influence people a great deal. Especially when they are young.
If monopoly power is influencing culture, the way it can with any industry by incentivizing low-quality or bad pricing, then it should be to some extent over-seen.
Culture is important and so is entertainment but the later is not always the former, and none is vital. There’s plenty of unmonopolized cultural options and one could even argue that much more benefiting than big blockbusters, it’s like worrying that pizza hut would monopolize the pizza market and losing nutritional values in the community.
It’s an interesting phenomenon, not necessarily something to be “worried” about.
If there was some kind of anti-trust to go on with streaming sources it might be more likely to be about something like Amazon only having its content on Fire devices or forcing Roku to only have Amazon content and not Netflix or something.
Today, you can get Peacock and Paramount+ and Disney+, etc on virtually any device. Even Apple, who has been historically resistant to distribution on other devices has Apple+ on Roku and Amazon devices
Because antitrust favors impact on consumers, I doubt we’ll see any substantial legislation is this space.
I do have my hopes on some sort of anti-trust regulation, but it's not going to be focused on film - it's going to be all about software and gaming.
I have a Roku and Samsung SmartOS TV. The only independent playback experiences that come close to Netflix, Prime Video, and Paramount+ in my limited experience are Plex, Apple TV, and for legacy stuff, TiVo.
I'll take this weird world of locked-in distribution channels for a few years while innovation progresses, and hope Plex and Apple TV win once innovation stops.
Why though? I wasn’t aware these laws exist(ed). Why are they needed?
Or the TV business throughout all of TV history. You know, if you want to see an HBO show, you can only watch it on HBO. If you want to watch _new+ episodes of Seinfeld, you have to watch it on NBC.
Seriously though, who cares? It's just mindless time wasting entertainment. It's an art form who's time is rapidly passing.
Let's get back to doing things together, like live music, any kind of hobby, just anything other than watching moving pictures.
On the contrary: stop trying to use the law for everything!
Such strategy works a million times better than the horror of copyright law.
The companies should be free to do it, and it's awful that someone wants to involve the force of the state to stop them from doing so, instead of seeing it as a way to get rid of the burden of copyright law to society.
Netflix, Apple TV, etc are broadcasters and crunchyroll is thematic.
We have those laws for cars and beer and they are considered ongoing disasters. Why are films different?
Currently the best catalog is with illegal streaming services and BitTorrent VOD and (for the cost of VPN).
This is a massive opportunity for someone to do what iTunes did to music and what Spotify did after. It just might end up being Amazon...
If you think to today's U.S. government would willingly choose to fight the U.S. vs Paramount battle again, you'll probably be disappointed. They're far more likely to close libraries.
And they will blame PLATFORM X (or just the ol'piratebay) for the losses of revenue, when in reality it's just a matter of people not being able to access content because everything has a paywall gate.
It's like they want to bring cable TV back to the internet, and you had massive bills just for channels subscriptions.
Like bundling stuff you would never subscribe to.
Basically, yes. More precisely we have a handful of companies who worked to "disrupt" the cable TV business only to realize that in fact, they could become the new cable TV.
None of that applies anymore. Content was always going to be owned and sold by someone. What other situation should we have expected?
Nowadays it would be rather difficult to install a piracy app on your phone (not impossible, but definitely harder than simply downloading a binary from sourceforge). So you're left wish shady streaming sites who in my experience have terrible usability.
iPhones attractive a different sort of user who would probably prefer to keep paying .
Yes, at least a few of those 1500 major Hollywood studio movies are quite good.
Looking at the last few years of MGM's output, Creed and The Cabin in the Woods were both good. I didn't like Skyfall but mine seems to be a minority opinion, and AFAIK it's considered one of the best Bond movies by many people (for whatever that's worth). Stretching back closer to the 15-year mark... The Mist is pretty good. Casino Royale sneaks in right at the 15 year mark, and it's really well-regarded.
I don't watch that many movies anymore.