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Netflix's streaming never made sense to me even when they were the only game in town. I think they benefited from a halo effect from their compelling DVD mailing service which actually had a ton of great content. But eventually people figure out that the streaming service only has a few thousand movies, which means the odds of the particular movie you want to watch being offered is very low.

I used to work in a video store, and even though we had a lot of movies available, most people only wanted a relatively small number of new releases.

I really miss when Netflix DVD had a truly vast back catalog of obscure films, but I suspect a lot of them didn't circulate all that much.

With streaming, the movies that people want always seem to be available somewhere. You might have to subscribe to a half-dozen services to get all of them, or rent them a la carte. Each of those services has some back catalog as a kind of nudge to keep watching this service rather than cancel and jump to some other service while waiting for the next big movie to come out. But they don't seem to expect any individual item to get much play.

Netflix in particular seems to mostly want to cut out the middle man and produce its own content. A lot of Netflix's most popular items are their own. I'm not sure I understand the economics of that -- they're spending major-studio-money on films ($100M+) and then using it as a "loss leader" to for their all-you-can-eat service.

People used to pay a lot more than $75 for cable. Between that and the loss of DVD sales we are seeing a lot of money leave the industry.

>there's a lot fewer people willing to pay $75/month for five different streaming services;

People had no problem paying more than this to cable TV and satellite TV distributors.

They did? Hence why netflix?

Netflix provides on demand, advertisement break, watch on any device media. Streaming is objectively a better product than linear cable or satellite TV.

They didn't mind paying for google but when something better comes along for less they clearly will take that. Netflix came along and the studios sold their content to them as an extra. Now that their cable business is gone they need Netflix to make up the revenue but everyone is locked in at $20/mo

>HBO already was a premium service that had demonstrated they were able to produce content people were willing to pay for but...is anyone really shocked that CNN didn't have enough draw to maintain a profitable streaming service?

To be fair to CNN, the creation of that service was a weird saga where an outgoing CEO wanted to push it front and center as a pet project and spent an enormous amount of money on it.

But then when he was forced to leave due to a scandal just as the service launched, the incoming CEO had no love for his predecessor's pet project. So he pulled the plug immediately after all the money had already been spent.

Its a textbook example of the C-suite not actually caring about the business as a whole. Maybe the product could have been successful (although it is hard to see how people would pay for a product they don't want to consume when its free), but due to circumstances unrelated to the product, it never got a fair shot.

What surprised me is the number of companies that declined free money from Netflix and decided that the cost to actually make a streaming service was negligible. They could just 2 or 3x that money in a year or two with massive subscriber numbers, because those roughly 5 shows in 40 years of back catalog were just that good.

My own experience as a child in the UK was 1 commercial, 2 state. It became 1 pure commercial, one semi commercial (C4) and 2 state before I left. I believe the UK is now up to BBC5.

The Australian experience I emerged into was 3 commercial, 2 state/semi-state (ch 7,9 10 commercial, ABC/SBS state/semi-state)

I posit, purely from interest, that in the H-H interest sense of 'monopoly' 5 independent agencies broadcasting and either taking Ad revenue or state revenue or a combination is actually pretty bloody good: they have economies of scale, and they can commit to both make shows, and screen shows.

Now, we didn't lose any of those. So 5 in OZ is joined by Foxtel, Stan, Binge, NetFlix, Disney+, HBO+, Amazon, Paramount. You might say "well from an HH index point of view, this must be better" but the experience is no: it isn't. They can't make enough ad revenue to make content, and they compete with the IPR holders for content, and the content is now more diffuse. Its actually not as "good" as old school TV. W I actually miss pre-streaming TV. I miss the sense of unity which came from watching the 6 or 7 o-clock news with millions of other people. Timeshifting existed in VHS days but most people didn't time-shift and couldn't binge-watch unless one of 5 broadcasters decided to binge-programme.

What we lack, and the UK has, is time-shifted. So, keep 5 (ok now 25) basic broadcasters but allow them to run their content on 3 distinct time feeds so you can "watch" things without missing them. I think THAT was smart.

TL;DR I watch some streams, but I miss 'channels' and I don't want to have to pay for bundles, or streams, as much as other people seem to want to.

What are your thoughts and experience with ads to support the channels? I'm not sure that I could go back to watching US broadcasts in real time without a DVR to skip the ~20 minutes per hour of commercials. US public television at least puts the non-content filler between shows, not in the middle.