Comment by Houshalter | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Houshalter | Hacker News Reader

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On the other hand it's not really fair that Netflix becomes a monopoly and everyone has to agree to Netflix's prices or lose most of it's audience. Even if Netflix is completely fair about it, they are still have to somehow divide $30 per month per family, among all the videos they watch (and no advertising revenue either.)

But you are right that 50 different competing video services would be absurd. Perhaps it would be better to distribute videos in a marketplace, like steam did for games. They set their own prices so they don't have to worry about "exclusivity". And then they could allow for subscriptions to watch unlimited content for a set price, for people that value that.

The weird thing about movies is that they aren't like other commodities. People want to watch a specific movie, even if there are others that are just as good. Supply and demand doesn't work as well.

But I am worried about Netflix becoming monopolistic. They aren't now because they do have competition and have only a fraction of movies and TV shows available. But if it or something like it becomes the dominant video streaming service, they could charge consumers or producers whatever they want (within reason) because there are no other platforms to distribute your movies, and no one else has the ones you want to see.

"I don't necessarily want there to be just One Uber Aggregator either, so you're going to have to deal with Amazon and Netflix and iTunes, but you can't go it alone."

In fact, I'd suggest a better defense for WB et al against Netflix as the uber-distributor is to make it easier for someone else to set up a distributor rather than harder. Of course nobody's going to run a major video distributor out of their metaphorical basement, but putting in place relatively clear expectations about policy and pricing, and opening the content to anyone who meets those expectations without too much grinding negotiation on a per-service basis, will tend to undermine Netflix's singular power. If, say, Wal-Mart knew they could get fair and nondiscriminatory pricing on a whole whackload of content while they were still kicking the idea around, they'd be that much more likely to jump into the game.

The more content that becomes accesible, the lower value each piece of content can command.

If artists were pissed about being paid pennies by Spotify and Pandora, film houses are about to sail down the same river of hurt.

Wait? What's that you say? You'll hold your content hostage? Compete with free (Pirate Bay, etc).

"The more content that becomes accesible, the lower value each piece of content can command."

Not many people realize this fact. As our ability to record and retrieve stuff increases, the prices for 'entertainment' or 'art' will drop. Production of any unit that is not consumed (i.e. used up/destroyed) will result in surplus. The counter-example is food. Food production will still be valuable in the future because the old food is used up or destroyed. Movie and music production, book writing, etc. will be near worthless for most folks because there will be infinite choices.

Might want to start planning your children's future careers appropriately!

I could see Amazon and Hulu becoming competitive with Netflix, so they're hardly a monopoly. And there are a ton of non-subscription competitors: iTunes, Sony, MS, Amazon, etc.

But the problem is, if one has exclusive content that none of the other services have, people will go to it first. Not many people want to subscribe to 5 different services like gp said. Then people who distribute their content agree to their terms, because they want to get on the platform with the most consumers. Which attracts more consumers, repeat.

I'm not saying it's going to happen for sure. It didn't with music or games, however those industries are not exactly the same. I'm just worried it could.

Is the "fair[ness]" you demand in the same terms under which Comcast, AT&T, et al operate for cable? Why is a prospective NFLX monopoly, which is even more unlikely due to the differences in infrastructure compared to existing TV monopolies, worse than the current ones?

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