It requires more overhead (i.e. manually cancelling and re-enabling services), but it saves probably $200-300+ per year vs. having 4 simultaneous subscriptions.
- pay them a percentage of the price of the rental, which could not go below a certain amount,
- pay a yearly license (~3500€/year just for my country for a popular movie) per language audio track,
- handle on their own sending technicians to rip the masters to then host them on the platform.
I don’t exactly remember the minimum price per rental, but the economics didn’t make sense in terms of what we wanted to attempt, so we gave up. One would have to pay an enormous amount in upfront license costs without being able to generate a big volume of views by undercutting the competition in the case where technical excellence could allow us to cut prices.
I guess this explains why Netflix will have different audio options for the same movie dependent on region.
You can get more tracks to appear if you change Netflix UI language in settings, as described here in 2015 by Netflix CPO: https://www.quora.com/Why-arent-all-subtitles-available-in-a...
This is also mentioned in various Netflix help pages, like here, which says 5-7 subtitle languages are shown by default, and you need to change UI language to see the rest: https://help.netflix.com/en/node/13245
Also, your seedbox is that NAS or it's remote and the NAS just syncs it?
I've found that seedbox providers tend to have very helpful irc nerds if you run in to trouble.
Currently Netfix gets some cash out of me because i have no interest in giving Amazon or Disney any more money than i have to.
many people might have prime on an annual basis but amazon seems content with offering prime on a monthly basis as well. In fact the only way to get prime video (without prime) is monthly. https://www.amazon.com/amazonprime
Even Netflix has shifted their drops this way.
It could be a great startup idea - buy proxy access to all these content services for you, and in turn, you have to maintain only one account
Obviously the privacy and payment details is an issue. I like the NetFlix "guest account feature" reminds me of the "gym membership model" of the 90's bring a friend.
They lost the Supreme Court case because they were considered the same as cable broadcasting companies, but then were denied the same legal rights as cable broadcasting companies by a lower court?
I am not a lawyer but what the fuck happened there?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Broadcasting_Cos.,_In....
For this discussion - let's say there are total of 10m users for these services but they all would never be online at the same time. So, the aggregator can buy 5m Netflix accounts, 1m Apple, 1m hulu, 2m HBO, and so on.
I think it's a very fragile idea. Once Netflix, and the gang would figure out about the "Aggregator", they might start blocking it. There are ways to handle that but how long are you going to play this cat and mouse game?
This could be done as a power of attorney to avoid almost any TOS issue they could draft.
The "proxy" could be a network node or a person/service/entity which contractually takes the place of one side of the contract.
Venmo me @chinolex today and I'll give you a months free (I'm the Founder).
Source: Wild speculation
The annual discounts and bundles are already here!
Tools like youtube-dl get banned from github, and private torrent servers are taken down, and the data the site has is used to subpoena email providers and ISPs for individuals to sue.
I know we all come from the background of imagining information wants to be free, but it's only going to be another 20 years or so until having a general purpose computer in your house will be as suspicious as having a chemistry lab in your basement.
The next step I'm expecting is some blurring of the line between civil and criminal penalties for piracy, and for police to seize someone's house because it was used for piracy.
Though even residential proxies (https://luminati.io/) are being detected with greater and greater frequency.
And streaming services realize that a lot of people use it that way, so they have nice individual profile functionality within a single account, so my shows and my recommendations don't get mixed up with those of other people using the account. Not every single streaming service had that feature at the beginning, but by now iirc they all got it.
You are correct, I think it is one of those technically grey areas. However in my scenario, given that the same group of 5 shares pretty much every single service subscription and physically spends a lot of time watching it together, I think, even in the intended spirit of household sharing, it sorta follows.
Regardless of that, imo there would be a lot of outrage if streaming services started cracking down on that, and, my guess, streaming services are intentionally not letting that happen.
It's been a while, we went full circle. Look at youtube, they display more ads than the TV channels I was watching 10 years ago. The content is spread over more and more services, so you end up paying for a few of them, exactly like we used to do for TV channels, it's ridiculous.
Streaming just allowed cable networks to unbundle in the most lucrative way possible... and when users stop subscribing to various services because their prices have gone too high they'll scream "see, it doesn't work, we have to sell packages!"
Meanwhile the users are back to either pirating or suffering shitty overpriced services, of which Netflix is on a quick pace to make themselves one as their catalog narrows from TV producers moving to their own platforms and they continue to cancel their native shows and give ridiculous fortunes to D-list movie directors churning out flop after flop.
TV streaming services have come full circle and are repeating the same cable tv mistakes that caused piracy to flourish in the first place.
[1] random source: https://www.businessinsider.com/how-do-musicians-make-money-...
> According to a recent Citigroup report, the music industry generated a record $43 billion in 2017, but recording artists saw just 12% of that revenue, or $5.1 billion, and the "bulk" of their revenues came from touring.
I think we've been trained towards seeking out specific shows to watch in order now, so a you can't pick exactly what to watch model wouldn't really fly, but even if it did, it wouldn't cost any less, or be able to include nearly everything.
Spotify would probably be dead by now if Apple and Google didn't do such a poor job.
Actually Rhapsody was the first. But I guess conditions at the time weren't such that it really went mainstream.
Is it, really? Not OP but I think there is a lot of room for alternative business models that doesn't have to depend on copyright. It's just that copyright already taken a hold on most people's mind so they default to it.
The thing is, someone has to pay for that content to exist... if that's not the pirate that pay for it... who does? Oh yeah, me by paying for that uncompetitive service.
counterfeit != stolen
At least counterfeited come with some kind of effort to produce the product in some similar manners. That come with it's own issues, the quality of the product is a big one.
> with BB I can return the item in a week if I don't like it, claim warranty, etc.
Yeah, never got theses issues over media files luckily. You could argue that a rebate high enough justify not being able to return an item. I'm sure plenty of van guy could allow you to return it too ;). I bought a 1060 on Kijiji and the guy told me that he would replace the item if it wasn't working. He got just as much incentive to do this than the van guy ;) hell maybe he even stole them, who knows.
> Meanwhile, I've gotten better service from private tracker staff than any streaming service.
Sure, when that's all you pay for, it's easy to offer great service. Believe me, there's a MUCH bigger part from Netflix price that go toward paying for content than from your private tracker. Not by choice... they need to pay for that content, someone has to pay for it.
Let me give the creative forces the money they deserve for the content they produce, but let me keep the file without being bound to a subscription service where I lose everything the moment I cancel.
(Spotify on the other hand is in a different league because there is almost no such thing as exclusive music. It's still way more convenient and time-efficient than torrenting. In my experience you can't even find music torrents anymore unless you go down the private tracker rabbit hole (which definitely doesn't scale)).
I've wondered if that is intentional, to discourage casual piracy.
Also, how is the money getting to the creator exactly?
When I downloaded a movie from Netflix I couldn't watch it on vacation because of region locking.
P.s. I’ve worked in this space.
The biggest issue is to unsubscribe each time on the different service. At one point we will have a middle man that does this for us, we will go full circle.
Now with more services than ever I'm only have access to two services:
a) Netflix - (via gf account)
b) Amazon Prime (own account). The last year or two I'm back to doing a lot more torrenting !
We've never had it so good in terms of overall content, yet we have never had it as expensive to access say my "top15 Films/Shows" if they are widely spread across service providers.
PS/Sidenote: I do miss channel hopping (click-click oh what is this ?)
Not to mention trying to remember what is where etc... was so much easier when I had a list of shows, I'd check the torrent site(s) about once a week for new episodes, snag them all to a seedbox and download and watch local over the following week as time permitted. At least with less TV I'm getting more done.
Take it further instead, just give me the option to rent a single episode/movie.
Maybe in 20 years these streaming services will collapse and be replaced by something better, and then those services will once again split up.
It doesn't really matter whether you send information over an ethernet cabel or a satellite dish.
Most of my watching is mainly looking for stuff to kill the time and not specific movies or shows so this works for me.
In the next 12-24 months it'll be obvious the way to consume media will change from a monthly netflix/apple/cbs/peacock/hbo/anyone else fee to a 30 day run. People will sign up and churn based on what they want to see. Services will pop up around this and handle your memberships for you. Those service will become the new cable companies.
Netflix is still a good value for the money charged.