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Comment by trh0awayman | Hacker News Reader

Netflix's mail-order service was bar none one of the best things that ever happened. They had a very, very good film and TV library. We would receive 2 DVDs at once, usually watch them and send them back, sometimes on the same day. It was really easy to use, too.

The library was clobbered at some point, or maybe slowly over time. What happened? They don't even have 1/10th of what they used to have. It's not surprising people are unsubscribing.

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They let the dvd-by-mail service degrade and die from neglect. Turn around time got longer and longer. Discs were regularly scratched and unplayable. But it was great while it lasted.

The reason the streaming selection is worse is simple: content licenses. Netflix didn't need permission from studios to mail discs. They do for streaming.

Netflix has made themselves dependent on their biggest competitors for content. The moment they switched to streaming, their death warrant was signed. They have been living on borrowed time while the big studios ramp up their own streaming service.

The constant back and forth of classic favourites like Friends, The Office, and all the various Star Treks, being listed and delisted certainly makes me wonder if I should just subscribe for a month, watch what I want, then cancel for a few months.

If you like watching the same things all of the time, why not buy your own copy of those shows and watch the local copies?

Yeah, I'll just torrent them.

The studios decided that rather than to lease (not sure if that's the right term) content to Netflix they can release their own streaming services and make more money. Disney, Paramount, Sony all have their own services and those are just off the top of my head, I'm sure there are more...

Yes but this will lead to what is now a pretty clear balcanization of the streaming services.

The point of streaming is convenience, if I need to collect 5x or 6x film and music streaming services to have the experience I want, then I might as well just go back to sailing the high seas.

Don't worry someone will reinvent cable TV packaging soon enough.

There is only so much money people are willing to pay for entertainment.

Bundling allows them to squeeze out that extra euro for stuff the customer doesn't really want.

We understand that, but I don't think the streaming services do, or more than likely, they're chasing quarterly numbers and don't care that in a few years piracy will skyrocket- the execs would've gotten their bonuses by then.

Zoomers can't pirate, they don't even know what directories are.

Maybe physical distribution still has some advantages. Instead of sending DVD/BR by mail lets sell disk and drive in the cloud?

I know that https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aereo failed in supreme court by trying to argue they were renting remote antenna/tuner. The difference is:

1 they were leasing

2 it was OTA broadcasts, made them look like a cable company

What if you could buy a movie disk and a dedicated drive. After your first purchase you would have right to resell it back to company (at a fixed price) or anybody else wanting to watch it with a drive in same data center at whatever price you wish (open market). Subscription would cover power/colocation and egress VPN. No Video streaming would be taking place - your drive would be mounted remotely over the network and work with any DVD/BR player.

Would that survive lawsuits?

I think there was a service that operated similarly, for the sake of offering content filtering for parents. They were sued and shut down.

In general, DVD/BD streaming over the Internet would require breaking the DRM, which is a big no-no.

Its not video streaming. Real SATA BR drive is mounted remotely, either with a movie already slotted in or connected to custom bulk disk loader/changer. It shows up in your desktop as another drive letter and requires normal bluray player to operate thus No DRM bypassed.

The question is can you legally play your own disk using your own disk player .. over the network?

My understand is that having the copyright they have the right to acknowledge any copy happening even if it’s in a cache somewhere, on a wire somewhere. If you mount a drive remotely copies happens. Actually with dvd copies happens in memory too but those have been legally authorized.

In my scheme:

the disk is explicitly yours - bought at full retail price

the drive is yours, every user gets a dedicated drive in the infra - again bought at full retail price at the moment you sign up

They have content deals, and when they expire they have to renegotiate. The problem is, there are so many territories and so many little competitors now, someone will likely outbid them and the service will then lose that content.

competition maybe. seems everyone and their dog is running a subscription service now.

i contracted briefly for lovefilm who ran a similar system in the UK. they were eventually bought and merged into amazon prime video.

In the UK, Lovefilm has been shut down, but CinemaParadiso.co.uk is a great rental service I found.

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