It's a bit depressing how similar that sounds to how cable networks work. Or platform specific app stores.

If you actually had something like that, it could know that you watched Cosmos on Netflix and then suggest physics lecture videos from Open Courseware. It could suggest YouTube videos alongside Hollywood movies.

Which is exactly what the studios don't want, because they want you watching only their content. That is the real reason they're so obsessed with DRM -- they want creating that to be prohibited by law, because it would allow a free market for content curation instead of allowing the major studios to control it.

It's the same reason they don't like Netflix. Netflix is producing their own content and is happy to accept content from small players. It's not a fully open market but it's still too much like real competition.

But fragmentation isn't going to save them. People aren't going to subscribe to a dozen separate streaming services each with their own incompatible interface.

Hopefully they'll realize that sooner rather than later and decide that it's better to have open interfaces and protocols than let someone else (i.e. Netflix) have market power.

That said, I think that the curation aspect is something that studios aren't overly concerned about - they just hate that a direct competitor is stealing their profit and making their own content. If Netflix wasn't being as aggressive (or wasn't being so damn profitable; or wasn't negotiating prices with the studios), I don't think that the content creators would be trying to run away so quickly.

I hope that open protocols win out, that's the best solution here for everyone (and would be the ideal "major marketplace" in my parent comment). That said, it may just wind up being an organisation owned by a consortium/cartel of studios (or even some other third party) that's contractually obligated to "fairness".

https://hbr.org/2014/06/how-to-succeed-in-business-by-bundli...

"largest streaming search engine in the world [...] with around 12 million unique visits per month" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14842083

--

http://www.canistream.it/ by former HN user SeyelentEco

Just now I did a search for "all the presidents men." Top hit was "All The King's Men" but the right movie did show up second. It says "Not available for streaming, rental, or purchase. Click below to set reminders."

So I hopped around and did a few quick searches:

streaming on Netflix (i think) https://www.netflix.com/watch/243547

streaming on amazon (with Cinemax) http://a.co/605SHmD

for rent or sale on iTunes https://itunes.apple.com/us/movie/all-the-presidents-men/id5...

for rent or sale on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZAGNFnI7mZ4

The page also says it's not for sale on DVD or Blu-Ray (showing an Amazon logo): http://a.co/aoa6bG8

Click "Watch the Movie" and it will show you several ways you can watch it (including all you've listed above and more).

Roku and AppleTV seem to do a decent job of aggregating this information, but that UI isn't always handy and I'm usually more flexible about my viewing options than just those devices.

https://www.cinesift.com/ by reddit user yombato (not sure of their hn alias)

px1999 1 hour ago [-]

Long term, we'll probably wind up with a couple of major marketplaces that provide a UI that ties together content bundles that you've purchased from different distributors (who will actually serve up their catalogs).

FXX themselves do not seem interested in my money and require that I have cable so I continue not consuming their content.

In reality, they are likely to trigger a backlash that increases piracy instead.

Steam is a rampant success. You'd think people would catch on. Have the content, make it easy to access, make it easy to pay, and people will give you money hand over fist.

Nobody will purchase, for instance, all the seasons of M.A.S.H. if they know that there is a risk that the rights owners will pull their content off of the platform in a few years and the person loses the ability to watch what they paid for.

The platform should also have the ability to "import" previously purchased rights. If someone buys a TV show on iTunes, they should be able to import that purchase into the platform so they can consolidate all of their purchases into a single platform.

Lastly, the other thing that made Steam a huge success is the sales. Daily sales of some content, quarterly sales of large swaths of content, etc. That would have to occur for a media platform to have the same kind of success.

I'm an unabashed pirate because it's easy... but if I could use a platform like this that didn't have a recurring monthly cost I would use it.

If Pixar put their upcoming movie available for pre-purchase (like Steam Greenlight) at 40% off, I would likely pre-purchase it. If Disney wanted to drum up interest in their new Duck Tales reboot by putting the original series up for sale for $20, I would be all over that. A TV series in its 4th season with struggling ratings could put up a flash sale of previous seasons in order to get new viewers to binge watch before the new season starts. A TV series could also sell a season pass BEFORE the new season starts for an infusion of cash and release the episodes on the regular schedule.

A steam-like platform could work wonders for media consumption, but it'll be hard to get companies to do it.

Steam took off because it was required for an awesome video game that Valve released. Eventually Steam was more valuable than the game.

That's the only way something like this happen for media. A small studio with a hot property could build the platform for their own offerings but invite other media owners to participate. Adult Swim or SyFy or FX could probably pull it off.

Even Valve doesn't believe in Gabe's statement, and never did. Dozens of media companies have much larger market caps than Valve's estimated value.

The statement conforms to the prejudices of a lot of Hacker News, but there is significant evidence that it's not empirically true.

As for third party indexing tools, I read that to mean scraping the site for various reasons. Which I can understand they might not want due to the extra load it generates.

Steam was successful because it combined advantages for producers and consumers with minimal changes to the business model. The old business model is people buy games that come on a CD or DVD in a small cardboard box for $30-50; the new business model is people buy games that finish downloading in a few hours for $30-50. Not really much of a change in revenue stream.

Cable TV, however, relies on splitting up the channels people want into different packages, that each come with lots of channels they don't want. They also need to overcharge you so they can afford to cut the prices for the "package deal" (TV/Phone/Internet bundles). What people want instead is more à la carte options, with a discount from package deals because they're asking for fewer channels.

So moving to a service that would cut piracy would still hurt financially. Another advantage of piracy is that they can blame their financial troubles on "filthy criminals" and use that to extract some benefits from compliant government allies. Offering a less profitable service that reduces piracy robs them of that as well.

Maybe that's not true anymore. But I'm sure contributed to steam's success.

Back in the day where GMail was heralded as being amazing, and offering 1GB of storage for your mails, Steam came out and said "don't worry about how to install Half-Life/CS, or which patch to apply, I'm automating all of it."

"You don't need to worry about your CDs any more. I'll give you the content, for free, anytime you change PCs."

"Just log in with your Steam account on the cybercafé computer. All the games you own are already installed."

Steam was made mandatory to install the new version of CS (was it the 1.6 release?). That was Valve's best move ever (even though I hated it back in the day).

My steam library is full of games I'll never play, never would have bothered to pirate. Why? because steam sales.

I'm sure the same could be achieved for Hollywood. Not only could they make sure people are paying for the content they watch, they could have saps like me paying for content they never watch.

I'll look to see if something I want to watch is on Netflix. If I find something looks interesting, great! I'll sign up for one month of the service and then cancel it immediately.

I also do this for football season. I signed up for Sling TV + Red Zone and paid for a few months. When football season was over, I canceled it.

As a result, for these services to be successful, we'll probably see some renewed fighting against piracy and some work toward increasing regulation on the internet. Unfortunately, the political climate is probably pretty good in the US right now for Disney and other big content creators to start pushing for these.

Overall, it's not so different from cable channels, except that it's on-demand.

That's not really a marketplace, which would have individual vendors selling their own subscription bundles.

You pay $12 to Netflix and you can watch it officially on 4 devices, which means it's $3 for any of your 4 friends, but you can "oversell" it actually more if you've some friends in different timezones. Many services work this way just fine. Streamwarez(tm) is here for a long time already.

That's my biggest pain point as well. I already have to switch between Netflix / Hulu / Amazon to figure out who has the content I want. I've always been a huge Stargate fan; Netflix and Amazon used to have it, now only Hulu has it. Amazon is the only one that has the latest episodes for shows that I like, (although I have to pay extra, I'm willing to bite the bullet for my favorite show).

People who want to watch Japanese cartoons get to pay for yet another streaming service, and for years there was a split where we had to pay for both Crunchyroll and Funimation. We finally saw light at the end of the tunnel with the advent of a partnership to share content. Only it turned out to be an Amazon freight train in the form of Anime Strike, which not only requires a $99/yr Prime account, but an additional $5/mo surcharge.

And now once again, we have a service cannibalizing half the important shows each season. And I'm just ... out. Amazon is not getting more money from me. I'm not supporting this balkanization of media content. And I will likely drop Crunchyroll because it doesn't have half of what I want to watch anymore.

These companies are never going to learn. I am happy to pay for content, but I'm not going to sign up for one streaming service per show I want to watch. Like most people, I simply can't afford that.

They're not trying to learn, they already know. If you continue to think they are optimizing for your happiness you're the one who'll never learn.

An ad-hoc cable subscription. Few people really wanted all the channels they were getting and would gladly have paid less to get only what they wanted.

Another thing we might see here though has happened to me a lot with music because of Spotify.

If you music isn't on Spotify or Soundclound... I'm just going to listen to it less. Its too much trouble to go download/buy from so many different sources.

I can't be bothered to spend the time anymore.

If more of your favorite artists were not available on streaming services you'd probably be ok with spending the time.

This problem was solved for me by Roku search on my roku device. It still is something I'd rather not need to do, but the search interface is just as good as the dedicated ones for amazon or netflix and shows you the results across all services.

Still better than a cable subscription. That's my biggest beef. I want 2 channels and I can't get them for less than $150 a month. So they get nothing and neither do I.

Do I really have to go over econ 101 with you? The past distro channels look to "not work" while there's a better alternative; once the latter have a monopoly - oh fuck it, just sit back and pay attention.

Just a heads up - HBO is pulling their shows from Amazon in mid-2018[1]. They essentially view it as competition with HBO Now.

[1]http://variety.com/2017/tv/news/hbo-amazon-shows-leaving-str...

Now what will be interesting is seeing which studios cannot float their own streaming service and combine either with another studio or group of them under an all inclusive banner. I figure we will go nearly full circle and end up with an aggregator like cable was but this time without too much junk.

my beef with some of these "premium" sites is they think that ever after they get $15 from me that I have to watch THEIR ads. Really? I paid for the shows, not 30 to 60 seconds of your ads.

Does uBlock Origin block YouTube ads?

I'm asking because it's been years since I saw/was forced to watch a video ad on YouTube. Sure, there are occasionally the banner ads at specific times in the videos, but no video ads.

So either the channels I watch have somehow opte out of video ads, or uBlock is taking care of them?

Or maybe this is a geographic thing and YouTube in Germany doesn't show video ads?

Anyway, if you have Android and want to watch on mobile, I highly recommend NewPipe (F-Droid). Lets you: watch, listen, download, repeat YouTube videos and I've never seen an ad in it. Really awesome app!

I guess greed?

(derp.)

$150/month on top of your cable bill. And let's bundle it.

Actually, I'd love to be able to pay BBC even $20/month for iplayer access in the USA.

Agree, especially when most doesn't work nearly as well as Netflix. I prefer to use the TV app and the horrible user experience I had with HBO (for instance) made me quickly stop using it.

For a streaming company user engagement should be taken very seriously, but it seems that most studio-turn-streaming-company miss this. They think content is everything because that's what a studio is about. But content doesn't matter if I can't stream it easily and many studios are so over-protective of their content that they forget about usability.

Disney Channel used to be a premium, ad-free channel.

Maybe on demand Disney movies are valuable enough to enough parents to justify this?

When this happens, I will drop that service, full stop. I don't pay to be advertised to.