I think that what the industry will move into will be into something very similar to cabletvm, so, instead of buying subscriptions from a few services, you'll buy a package from a bundler. On the bright side it won't be as bad as it was with cable, because it will be on-demand. But also, probably the MBAs are going to come out with infinite combinations of tiered-services that nobody will understand, at first, it will be cheaper to buy a bundle, but as it becomes popular, the consumer value extraction machine will go full throttle.

>But also, probably the MBAs are going to come out with infinite combinations of tiered-services that nobody will understand

Like bundling stuff you would never subscribe to.

Yes, and then you get a bundle with Prime, Netflix, Disney whatever. For the first year it will be great, SSO, maybe unified search, whatever. But then, this will become "basic netflix, basic prime". All the good stuff will be in a "new" premium tier. You'll have to add those to your subscription, and then you'll endup with cable tv over ip.

We just need to shove advertising somewhere and we're golden.

I'll start making the pitch deck and crunch some numbers for the boys upstairs.

"Subflix Prime TV+" sounds good to you?

> It's like they want to bring cable TV back to the internet, and you had massive bills just for channels subscriptions.

Basically, yes. More precisely we have a handful of companies who worked to "disrupt" the cable TV business only to realize that in fact, they could become the new cable TV.

The defining part of cable TV is that you had to deal with the company who owned the wire coming into your house, or the 2 satellite companies available in the US, assuming you could put satellite dishes on your residence. And you could not watch on any of your devices at any time and subscribe and cancel at your whim.

None of that applies anymore. Content was always going to be owned and sold by someone. What other situation should we have expected?

It's still a matter of distribution.

You won't have to deal with the company that owned the wire or the satellite service, but you'll have to deal with one of the few companies that are purchasing IPs left and right (Amazon, Netflix, Apple, Disney).

In the end it's just different people controlling the distribution.

The difference was that the content owners still had the choice to have their content available in other media formats, now it's the distributors that own the content and will (probably) limit it to their distribution channels.

The content owners are also the distributors now.

I wonder if the rise of smartphones will dampen this. Back when PCs were the standard piracy was relatively simple, you downloaded bittorrent or edonkey and sailed the high seas.

Nowadays it would be rather difficult to install a piracy app on your phone (not impossible, but definitely harder than simply downloading a binary from sourceforge). So you're left wish shady streaming sites who in my experience have terrible usability.

Torrent clients are widely available for android.

iPhones attractive a different sort of user who would probably prefer to keep paying .

Torrent clients are readily available in the Android app store (not sure about Apple), and web browsers can still get to any websites. Since the resulting download is DRM free, it can be viewed with standard video players.

There are Telegram channels that post full episodes of tv series. It is really convenient to watch them as you can download for offline use.

I mean maybe but so many people have prime for the shipping that I doubt it will do anything to stir piracy.

You need to be ordering from Amazon weekly to break even on Prime for shipping costs. It’s likely worth it for some people but it really doesn’t fit my habits.

Like this, you mean? https://www.wired.com/story/2021-platinum-age-piracy-streami...

Have they been releasing material worth pirating in the last 10-15 years? The movies coming out aren't even worth the bandwidth.

If by "they" you mean big-studio Hollywood, then there've been about 1500 of those movies in the last 15 years. There are another 600-700 or so non-major-studio films that see a wide release per year, which I think includes foreign films with US distribution, but also US productions outside the major studios.

Yes, at least a few of those 1500 major Hollywood studio movies are quite good.

Looking at the last few years of MGM's output, Creed and The Cabin in the Woods were both good. I didn't like Skyfall but mine seems to be a minority opinion, and AFAIK it's considered one of the best Bond movies by many people (for whatever that's worth). Stretching back closer to the 15-year mark... The Mist is pretty good. Casino Royale sneaks in right at the 15 year mark, and it's really well-regarded.

I was a fan of GoT, I loved ST:P.

I don't watch that many movies anymore.