Comment by bugufu8f83 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bugufu8f83 | Hacker News Reader

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That's an interesting question. I'm not sure. We sort of had that one-stop shop experience with Netflix's DVD service, where you would pay a subscription fee and in exchange you would get to watch movies from a huge catalog. But this didn't translate to the streaming era.

P2P film piracy, at least for the quality-minded, has a few strong competitive advantages over film streaming. It doesn't have to deal with rights issues, for one, which can present huge roadblocks to film distribution. Films are also huge files and the interests of a streaming platform (low bitrate) are in tension with interests of quality. Even in comparison to physical media--the highest quality release of a film might be from a different market than yours, or there might be many competing releases over time. There might be different factors that are better in one release and other factors better in another release, where the pirated copy can combine all the best parts. It's actually somewhat remarkable how good film piracy has gotten these days for those who care.

I don't think quality is really much of a concern for the majority of people, only enthusiasts. I suspect, analagous to 128 kbps opus (on youtube music), most people can't really tell the difference between a 1080p bitstarved stream and a 4k bluray rip.

The library for the music streaming platforms is much bigger than for films, of course (about 250 million for Spotify), but there's also a much lower barrier of entry. So perhaps the higher work needed to produce a film necessitates more profit, to a degree that only the fragmented streaming platforms can fulfill. After all, netflix started making originals to counter studios launching their own streaming platforms to raise profit margins, and pulling their content off netflix.

> I don't think quality is really much of a concern for the majority of people, only enthusiasts. I suspect, analagous to 128 kbps opus (on youtube music), most people can't really tell the difference between a 1080p bitstarved stream and a 4k bluray rip.

They might not care but anyone who literally can't tell the difference of a good 4K source and a 1080p source on an appropriate display needs to go see an eye doctor. But that most people don't care about quality also isn't particularly shocking.

And as gp indicated, quality isn't just about the encode resolution and bitrate but also about the master itself. Unfortunately not all directors and companies behind great movies have the resepect for their creations that it deserves and the current release which might be the only release on streaming platforms might have significant flaws such as unwanted cuts/restorations, missing audio tracks, replaced sound effects, inaudible mixes, missing subtitles, bad upscales, excessive denoising, reframing from the original aspect ratio that cuts of content and/or shows parts of the originally captured film frames that were never meant to be seen, or various other "enhancements".

But physical DVD rentals is even more restrictive than a streaming library. You'd literally hit a physical limit on the number of patrons at any one time.

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