How the dream of cheap streaming television became a pricey, complicated mess

After a marked decrease, piracy appears to be on the rise again [1]. The timing coincides with the peak content availability of Netflix, and then the fragmentation as every studio decided they needed to build their own streaming service.<p>It&#x27;s kind of frustrating to see how close things came to actually getting to the ideal (imho, anyway): any show, streamed on demand, on any device, for a reasonable fee. Instead, the studios are going to try to compete on content - which is not really competition. I don&#x27;t care what studio makes funny_show (either when deciding what to subscribe to, or when trying to figure out what app to launch to watch it), I just want to watch it. I don&#x27;t want to watch similar_but_not_as_good_knock_off on another service.<p>What&#x27;s crazy is the seemingly unstoppable train wreck the industry is currently involved in. It&#x27;s bad enough to not only see what the music industry was forced into (which is basically ideal for consumers, at least without dismantling the entire way music is produced), but the movie industry already went through this a half century ago, when theaters used to be owned by the studios and only show their own exclusive movies [2].<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.maketecheasier.com&#x2F;internet-piracy-is-on-the-rise&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.maketecheasier.com&#x2F;internet-piracy-is-on-the-ris...</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;United_States_v._Paramount_Pictures,_Inc" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;United_States_v._Paramount_P...</a>.

Yes, if you want what you had before, then streaming isn&#x27;t going to save you money. However, with the current system, I can pay $50&#x2F;month for cable and then get whatever else I actually want when I want it. I get YouTube TV but only during the football season. I enjoy and pay for Netflix. I rent movies occasionally on Amazon, which I have Prime for, but I&#x27;d be paying for that anyway for package deliveries. If I had a kid at the right age, I&#x27;d probably shell out for Disney.<p>Overall, I pay a lot less than I would for cable and I get 90% of what I&#x27;d use anyway. So I pay a medium amount, but use everything I pay for. Compare this with cable where you pay a lot and use very little of what you pay for.

There is a view that has been expressed several times in HN when this topic is touched: &quot;Netflix has enough current or future material (Netflix Originals) so that I can see it for the rest of my life, I do not really care if the quality is 10&#x2F;10, I only use it as a form of light entertainment.&quot;<p>However, for other people, like me, the quality of art is essential, and we do want to see the best that has been produced this year and the past 100 years. Where is this material? How can I consume good European cinema from the 50s and 60s? Where can I consume the best Latin American cinema from the 80s? etc.

I feel like too many people don&#x27;t value how easy it is to signup and cancel these services. As others have mentioned in the comments, I usually rotate my subscriptions quite a bit throughout the year depending what shows are coming out, and that context is huge. Hulu, SlingTV, PS Vue, Netflix, Prime, etc. all make it SUPER easy and hassle free to deactivate&#x2F;resume all the services on any whim. You can do it all in their interface in minutes. That&#x27;s such an underrated feature that many forget about. Trying to cancel and resume cable with companies like Comcast is nothing short of a nightmare. They have 0 respect for the user&#x27;s time, and they always try to hit you with sketchy hidden fees and dark pattern UX&#x27;s.<p>I&#x27;m personally very happy with this new system of being able to rotate, and juggle services where it makes sense and get the content I want, wherever it is offered. I don&#x27;t mind putting that burden on myself to manage because it&#x27;s easy with all the services, and at the end of the day, having no commercials and that freedom to choose is all I every wanted. Not to mention, it&#x27;s still all cheaper than traditional cable.

The dream of cheap streaming television will always stupid. Given that there&#x27;s zero marginal cost to distributing content, &quot;unbundling&quot; doesn&#x27;t ultimately reduce providers&#x27; costs at all (of course it&#x27;s not quite this simple, you have several players involved in providing content - studios, cable operators, aggregators like netflix, etc - but in the long run these details don&#x27;t matter). So given that the costs of production haven&#x27;t been lowered, why would anybody expect the cost to the consumer to decrease? On average they should remain the same. Maybe everybody expected to be on the lucky side of average? Or maybe people just hadn&#x27;t thought this through at all.

I rotate through streaming services every few months, catching up on the latest shows then canceling.<p>I much prefer this to traditional cable!

&gt; Disney’s service will cost just over half the monthly price of the most popular Netflix plan... The goal is to achieve revenue through reach, not overcharging.<p>That sounds exactly like what Netflix promised originally: cheap subscriptions, growing revenue through reach not higher prices.<p>Y&#x27;know, like when they offered a $11.99&#x2F;month subscription in 2017... which now costs $15.99&#x2F;month - a 33% rise in 1.5 years, whilst reducing the amount of content available.

What we have now is the À la carte I always wanted that old media said we couldn’t have.<p>I still pay less than I ever did with cable, I don’t have to subsidize ESPN or Fox News and I don’t have to waste time watching or fast forwarding through ads.<p>I think what we have now is fantastic.

The golden age to be really was around 2009 when I was able to buy pretty much every show I wanted for download on Amazon or iTunes and pay for just that. Now with Netflix and Amazon prime etc. we just traded one form of bundling for another.<p>The only advantage is that I can rotate between some streaming services (e.g last month Netflix, now HBO bc GoT, then Showtime for Billions..)

I think the dream was that Netflix would actually become the one-stop-shop for absolutely everything old and new. That you could watch the latest GoT as well as get your fix of all of the old Schwarzenegger movies for 10 bucks a month. Obviously that never worked out. For me it&#x27;s clear that in the near future every production house will have its own streaming service and they will essentially become stream-channels once an aggregator comes in and gives you a package deal. You&#x27;ll save 10% if you bundle up 10 different streaming services, etc. I&#x27;m sure the next step after that will be to re-introduce commercials? Why not profit even more by having people pay monthly and serve them ads at the same time? At that point the cycle will restart as a new wave of piracy will begin because obviously people don&#x27;t want to pay a fortune to watch ads and have access to a bunch of crap they never watch.

Unpaywalled&#x2F;GDPR-friendly: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.is&#x2F;2S7ib" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.is&#x2F;2S7ib</a>

I suspect that This will inevitably lead to more legal battles and a violence in copy right enforcement not seen before.

NPR also recently had a story with this conclusion.<p>It doesn&#x27;t seem all that pricey or complicated to me. Perhaps I&#x27;m missing some of the big picture, but it sure seems odd this angle has been hitting main stream media in a reinforcing manner.

Good thing I still have my massive media archive drives.

Like music, the internet supplied the dream of ridding us of the expensive middle man, instead, it was the dawn of the middle man. In time, software gets easier, and I&#x27;m still optimistic that the middle man will disappear and we will get very large, cheap distributed systems, with payments, that will allow peer to peer. Mix in UBI and the future will be bright, I mean, except for a couple of revolutions along the way.

I wish Netflix&#x2F;HBO would start to tier their subscriptions. E.g. I just watch the odd documentary and none of the new big series on Netflix&#x2F;HBO and it feels like I&#x27;m paying a lot of my subscription money into Game of Thrones...

There&#x27;s a perfectly acceptable solution to all of this that has been used many times in the past: Compulsory licensing. The same thing that happens with music broadcast on the radio for example.

I signed up for Disney Theatre in Japan the other day to catch up on some Marvel movies before seeing the new Avengers movie.<p>I’ve seen a few comments about how it’s easy to create and cancel accounts for these services. In this case it was extremely complicated and I almost gave up.<p>Step 1: download the Disney theatre app on my Apple TV.<p>Step 2: After it opens, use the resulting QR code to open the registration site on my phone and create an account<p>Step 3: Link the account to another account for docomo (one of the main cell phone providers and the only way to pay)<p>Step 4: Make a docomo account since I don’t have one<p>Step 5: add payment to the new docomo account<p>Step 6: login to my new Disney account when prompted<p>Step 7: Download the Marvel, Disney and Disney Theatre apps when prompted<p>Step 8: Open the Marvel app on my phone and login with my new Disney account<p>Step 9: Find the movie I want to watch. Oops, it’s not there, find another one. Click on it and it opens the Disney theatre app on my phone, which I have to login to. Here I realize that the Marvel app is for extra content.<p>Step 10: Realize that the app on my Apple TV is not authenticated yet, go back to the authentication site, which allows the app to work<p>Step 11: Find and watch a movie<p>They truly messed up the experience here. First, content here is even more fragmented in Japan and often bundled to mobile provider plans. This was a failure for consumers until Netflix gained enough content to blow the other streaming services out of the water. I suspect the docomo deal was made years ago when it was the norm and someone convinced Disney it was expected. I doubt the equivalent (eg link to your T-mobile account) will be required for payment in the US version. Second, downloading and signing in to multiple apps is a hassle. The extra apps have content such as interviews with actors and... themed cupcake recipes. It feels very corporate and I wouldn’t predict that the potential extra added value will surpass extra confusion.<p>All of that being said, I could probably tolerate HBO and Disney as unique subscriptions, plus Netflix, Amazon and specific sports leagues. Any more fragmentation than 4-5 services and I’m more likely to unsubscribe from all of them.

Much shorter version:<p>- Good content costs a lot of money to produce.<p>- That money has to come from somewhere.<p>- That money has to come either directly from viewers or from advertisers (or some combination).

Can&#x27;t open the site because it blocks users with ad blockers.<p>Online newspapers have trained me over the last 20 years to need an ad blocker, without one they will serve up horrible experiences.<p>* The Cost of Mobile Ads on 50 News Websites - The New York Times || <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;interactive&#x2F;2015&#x2F;10&#x2F;01&#x2F;business&#x2F;cost-of-mobile-ads.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;interactive&#x2F;2015&#x2F;10&#x2F;01&#x2F;business&#x2F;cost...</a><p>What&#x27;s frustrating about all this, and I suspect it&#x27;s somewhat relevant, is that I really just want to pay a flat fee to get all the content and never see another ad. And because Netflix, Hulu, Disney, Amazon, etc. can&#x27;t agree... I&#x27;m left to go back to Rarbg -- who gives me easy access to content, for free, without making a fuss if I use an ad blocker or VPN.<p>Remember that video about Jeff Bezos talking about customer experience, and how it was paramount? Right, so I need modern Jeff Bezos to be like, &quot;Hey, all the streaming services need to get their act together... what we&#x27;re doing now is really shitty customer experience and we&#x27;re making it easier for people to pirate than to simply pay for our services.&quot;<p>What&#x27;s fucked up, I pay for Netflix, Amazon, and CBS... and still I&#x27;d rather torrent it so I can stream it from my Plex because I have no idea when Amazon will make changes to their content library, or Netflix will decide that I don&#x27;t deserve true HD experience due to their bandwidth issues. So... back to good ol&#x27;, never-let-you-down, BitTorrent... all because these content sellers can&#x27;t get their heads into modernity.<p>Anyway the whole thing is fucked.

Global Public Licence. Paid by everyone, according to their abilities, available to everyone. Revenue is split according to views. &quot;Streaming&quot; platforms just do that : streaming, and compete.

I&#x27;d like access to every platform, service and channel then only be billed for the amount I watch.

There needs to be a &quot;Movies Anywhere&quot; for streaming.