That's not true though. It's not like the people who currently spend lots of time watching niche videos on YouTube (myself included) would start ordering flash memory with those videos instead if only it wasn't for copyright. The case for movies is a bit stronger, but my family's movie/TV show routine is to figure out what we want to watch last minute, then find that on netflix or crunchyroll or piracy sites and then stream it.

I also think the current copyright system is insane, but streaming genuinely is more convenient than buying physical media. If anything, DRM makes media available through streaming _less_ convenient.

No, but they would download their content once and store it locally instead of repeatedly re-streaming it every time.

IF you have children, you're probably familiar with the concept of streaming Frozen for the 50th time. If you're using netflix or spotify or similar, you're probably also familiar with the concept of something that was previously available just vanishing because of circumstances outside of your control.

Streaming is mostly a DRM/copyright enforcement tool. The only time streaming is actually adding value is live streaming.

Agreed. If 5G delivers as promoted, there is no reason to 'stream' any static content...it simply caches to your flash memory in milliseconds (song) or seconds (movie, Netflix already has mobile downloading). I can see a case for streaming in VR/AR or active content (live/multiplayer,etc), but streaming static content isn't efficient.

That doesn’t happen now though - the video doesn’t download comptlelty as fast as possible, it downloads 30 seconds or so ahead of the play position.

4G is perfectly fine for that, but if I Street watching a 40 minute video before I go on the tube, I can’t finish once underground

That is the promise of faster networks. Static content would no longer need 'streaming', as in caching these bit chunks...you would simply get the entire segment, and the device would deliver it to you at the appropriate 'speed'.

I don’t need a faster network for that - YouTube doesn’t download at line speed, it downloads in real time.

If it was line speed, a 40 minute episode would download with current 4g while I was waiting for the next train. On WiFi it would be down before I walked out of range.

As chipsets improve it also means the same download should require less power from the device’s battery, if you believe the race the idle argument, which has always held in the past.

> No, but they would download their content once and store it locally instead of repeatedly re-streaming it every time.

That's like saying "people don't need to listen to the radio for the same pop songs, they can just play a CD with them"

That was a multi billion dollar industry.

Which was killed by streaming, not by people storing songs locally.

No, it was killed by piracy. Streaming broke Apple’s dominance.

I get that you would want something local if you happen to re-watch the same things again and again. I don't, and keeping local copies of something in case I want to re-watch it is a waste of space.

Stuff being available exclusively through streaming is certainly a way to enforce DRM, but that doesn't mean people wouldn't still largely be streaming even if stuff was available for download without DRM too.

If you choose to download and not store your copy after consuming the media, that's your choice.

Streaming takes that choice away from the user in the first place. With nothing gained in exchange.

The efficiency of flash doesn't matter much if I have to wait for it to physically get to me, vs just opening up my browser.

People binge-watching a TV series could certainly anticipate their near-future media demands and download the series through means other than cellular networks. Downloading video and storing it on flash memory could eliminate a huge chunk of the demand for streamed video.

Streaming is just downloading in order. Data downloads while I watch/listen. That's super convenient. That's the big advantage of streaming. Keeping that data or dumping that data is a different issue.

Streaming is downloading, but without the timeshifting properties you get from storing the media to flash. With properly downloadable media, you can download in the evening, on your wired residential connection, and watch during the day when you only have a cellular connection.

Conventional downloading methods do not order the packets. So you can watch/listen during the downloading process.

They could, but...they don't want to. So they won't!

You don't know that. Currently consumers don't have the (legal) option, so extrapolating their current behavior to their potential desires is fallacious.

I download entire seasons of TV series with my Android Netflix client all the time. It's fantastic for travel.

I could've been doing this with iTunes for TV shows for years.

It would be way less convenient, though. So I don't. I don't know which device I'll end up watching on, and don't want to deal with syncing and all that shit.

> iTunes for TV shows for years.

Which is way more expensive than streaming services. Prohibitively so for wide swaths of the general population who don't have tech industry salaries. The cost of one TV show from iTunes can approach the price of several months of Netflix.

With copyright reform, that needn't be the case.

(Note that for many consumers, Netflix is already considered too expensive. Several people sharing the cost of one account is pretty common from what I've seen.)

Netflix and Amazon Prime Video already offer the ability to download and play later, so there is no need to extrapolate, and we do know that.

As I understand it, those features come with considerable DRM limitations. So no, it's really not the same.

They don't come with any practical limitations, so it is really the same.

Netflix has downloads.

Alright, so I should just download a significant portion of YouTube and news websites because I may want to watch those videos randomly? Or I have to wait to get home. Unless we're talking about terabytes of storage on my phone, I don't think this is feasible (for all the video and music I could want at a given time).

Fact is that streaming is just convenient. Like really convenient. I wish there was more stuff that I could download and listen to offline, but it's naive to suggest that streaming has no advantages. We stream while data connected because we download things in an ordered manner (vs how normal downloading is done). That's nice that I don't have to wait for a full movie or song to be completely downloaded to listen to it.

Is there any particular reason why your phone or laptop couldn't opportunistically download all the latest videos from your YouTube subscriptions on WiFi while you sleep?

Maybe you don't subscribe to channels and the system could never anticipate your whims and desires... but I wager it would work great for most users.

I subscribe to a lot of things but I'm not quite sold on the predictive algorithms. Mostly because the recommendations I get aren't really what I want. I have this problem with YouTube, Netflix (which used to be spot on), Spotify, and prime. So I'm not sure if I really trust their prediction models.

What copyright reform do you think we need for this?

Revoke the force of law for DRM circumvention.

Sane copyright expiration. e.g. damn the mouse.

The movies most in demand tend to be recent movies, so unless "sane copyright expiration" means a few months, I don't see how it would change the streaming situation.

If that truly is the distribution of demand, then the media industry should have little to fear from such dramatic copyright reform (of course they would disagree!)