The thought of putting most movies in my pocket for a few hundred bucks is ... stunning.
Netflix could solve the bandwidth problem by just mailing the whole library to customers. "Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of magnetic tapes."
I'm hopeful in that I'm looking forward to the day that shipping 24TB of data by package delivery would be considered too slow.
Each movie cost something like, well, let's just ballpark $10M average (the >$200M blockbusters are relatively rare, balanced by old & cheap filler content made down around $1M each). Lead article notes Netflix has 8900 movies. Round both up sensibly, and we're looking at $100B to create the content.
Netflix has some 44M subscribers. Assuming all that content was made for & paid by Netflix subscribers, that's $2272 per subscriber. 8-O
Talmand SWAGged the storage hardware cost at $1000. Storage prices being what they are, that will be $300 in a year or so.
Would you pay $2500 to own, in a box the size of a pack of cards, the entire Netflix library? With updates (package deal, you get 'em all as they're made to cover production costs) of every movie added thereafter for $0.25 each? Could we persuade the entire 44M Netflix subscribers to sign up?
Not sure what to do with those numbers, but they're fascinating.
Now, if production costs were completely covered by subscribers, it would be interesting to see what sort of movies get made.