> you can bounce between streaming services at will, and they're all still far easier to cancel than cable.
Add to that cheaper, since you don't have to deal with connection fees. If you know that you're not going to have the time to use the service for a couple of months because you're too busy with work, you don't have to pay for it. If you have decided that you are going to spend most of your summer pursuing outdoor recreational activities, you don't have to pay for it. If you're going on the road for a few weeks (vacation or business), you don't have to pay for it. If you decide that you want to watch programming on two different streaming services, you can simply rotate through the services on a monthly basis and only pay for one service at a time.
Why do I bring all of this up when it's not directly related to the article: it's because these articles reek of entitlement. Yes, there are times when licensing causes shows or movies to fall through the cracks. On the other hand, the situation is also far better than it used to be when using the same metrics. Not only that, but it can be a heck of a lot less expensive even when factoring in the cost of an Internet connection.
I think what makes people frustrated is that cable channels were _themed_. I was frustrated that I was paying for TLC and Bravo because I didn't watch reality tv. I was paying for Discovery even though I didn't watch nature shows. I was paying for Lifetime even though I didn't watch cheap shows for women. I was paying for ESPN even though I didn't watch sports.
I wanted to pay for the comedy, the scifi/syfy, the cartoons, and the kids programming. That was, like, five or six channels.
Which streaming service do I go to now for the science fiction? Which streaming service do I go to now for the horror or the feel-good sitcoms?
Streaming arose during the collapse of genre channels. There are now three genres of programming: prestige, drek, and children's.
When it comes to that business sense, we probably have the closest thing to perfection today. Streaming services are forced to compete against each other, with the only real constraints being the cost/restrictions of licensing content and the cost of distribution (i.e. not controlling infrastructure to the home). It is very easy and relatively inexpensive to pick and choose, provided that you are willing to defer your viewing. You also have the choice between large streaming services that offer a broad range of genres and smaller ones that offer more specialized programming.
Yes, that closest thing to perfection is far from perfect. On the other hand, I very much doubt that we are going to get anything closer unless we are willing to pay the price.
Themed packages did and do exist, though most channels for cable were normally available mainly through stacked tiers. But alongside the main generic tiers, language-specific (especially spanish language) and some other (sports, often) themed packages were available from many cable providers, and premium channels were often available in themed groups as well as individually.
This is something I've been feeling for awhile but haven't managed to articulate this clearly. All new programming is either a mega-budget tentpole or it's something to fill out the menus.
Some of it is genuinely a failure. Funding an entertainment project is always a pig in a poke. Even promising things sometimes just flop. But streaming makes it possible to lower the opportunity costs of those flops, so they can take bigger chances.
In the sense that an F-22 is used for CAS / bombing in The Tomorrow War (which I'd assume was one of Amazon's better funded efforts).
A lot of them just feel like "Oh, you just gave some money to people, removed the usual checks and balances that exist in filming, and told them to deliver a movie ASAP."
It'd be one thing if they were making niche or more interesting content, but it feels like they're mostly just making more action movies and baking shows... faster and at lower quality.
Describes Red Notice by Netflix
How does one even write lines like:
"We need to work together!" "I won't give up on you!"
It's like an AI bot wrote the dialog.
The thing is so ripe it would have been easy to take the next step and make it a sly comedy.
Yes, sometimes you just want to watch a specific show and you want to watch it now, and the streaming services are great for that.
But sometimes you just want to turn on the TV and watch something, anything, without really making a choice. I still have cable because it's included in the rent, and sometimes it's nice to just switch the channel to FXX or something and get maybe an old episode of the Simpsons, or a new episode, or maybe some Family guy, or maybe an old episode of some other comedy series, or maybe something completely new.
And that's nice and has value, but streaming services absolutely suck at that, because you always have to make a choice yourself with them.
It was relaxing to me, post- many cable channels (81?), pre- guide/DVR, to just click through.
"Oh, Armageddon is on again. Hercules. (flip, flip, flip)" and then settle on something random, pulled from what's currently playing.
It used to be: survey and then choose from a very limited but rotating subset of all content.
Now it's: choose from all content ever and then find where the content lives and then figure out how much of it you want to watch.
For movies, the new way seems superior. For TV, it feels like a lot has been lost. And overall, I feel like the new system definitely leads to winner-take-all.
It's why I still subscribe to satellite radio.
(and yes, I've thought about subscribing to video service from Spectrum, but I'm not a huge TV watcher)
https://about.netflix.com/en/news/play-something-netflix-doe...
It can pick either something you're already watching (TV series or unfinished movie), or guess something based on what it has learned about you. Of course it's just the Netflix catalog, but that's pretty extensive.
It sounds godawful to me, so I've never used it. But it sounds like almost precisely what you just asked for.
Today, I have about 700 movied ripped from DVDs (and the DVDs still in boxes somewhere), and 500 movies purchased on iTunes. I don't subscribe to Netflix, Amazon Prime, HBO, or any other streaming service because, again, 99% of it is dreck I can't stand. So instead I have a collection of 1200 movies that I like and specifically chose and purchased. Some are better than others, but they're all ones I like.
iTunes sells licenses, not movies. Providers can pull content from iTunes and you lose access to whatever you paid for.
There have been cases where users thought they lost a purchase, but it ended up being an issue where they changed storefronts to one where the purchase wasn’t available. The movie reappeared when they went back to the original storefront (and I believe even that behavior was a bug that’s been fixed).
I keep an eye on this because I’ve also purchased a lot of movies from iTunes.
But we don't. It's worse than ever now. Shows are fragmented into way too many different subcriptions (netflix, etc) each with their monthly fee and a bunch of stuff I won't be watching.
True a la carte would mean eliminating all those exlusive distributions so I could get any show from any streaming vendor for a one-off price (say, 25 cents for a show, $2 for a movie, or whatever) without having to subcribe to any recurring service.
I've given up, I'm not going to subscribe to half a dozen things, that's way too inconvenient and expensive.
Exactly. Every company has segmented their content by company, not by type. Sure, I can buy a subscription to Boomerang and get a lot of cartoons, but it's just the cartoons owned by Warner. But not all of them, because they've moved some of them--like Dexter's Laboratory--off to be HBO Max exclusives.
There's no way to say "I want a science fiction themed service" that includes Paramount and HBO and the old PTEN and the like, because no company would stand for another service mixing their IP like that.
I remember most people, including myself, would get the full DirectTV/Cable subscription, hook up TiVo, and just record/watch on demand whatever you want. Those days seem impossible now. It certainly feels like things have regressed.
To replicate that today I'd need to subscribe to many different services all with separate monthly fees and way less conveniece (a single unified interface through MythTV was magical).
So I don't watch any TV anymore, oh well. More time to code.
Plex shares or even Pseudo TV Live partially could replicate this. But it’s a grey area obviously.
I canceled my cable TV as I increasingly realized I simply was watching either live or recorded on my TiVo stuff once in a blue moon.
I could get DSL, but it's shit here and anyway only ~$25 cheaper than the cable (which is 5x faster...).
For $15, I could get cable tv, apparently diverting what I currently pay for internet away from profit and over towards channel fees.
I've never fully digested them, but Michigan seems to have shitty franchise laws written in service of the large cable companies.
High-quality, daring, inspired, more than superficially controversial, world-changing movies are another casualty of the rise of streaming.
1: https://old.reddit.com/r/movies/comments/qx4rtu/i_think_movi...
Of course, I could be missing something about the industry and how streaming has shaped it. I just struggle to see how the streaming ecosystem has different content requirements than a normal movie studio.
Yes. Movie studios and streamers have different business models. Movie studios also deal with more "legacy" actor contract negotiations and the like (see disney v scarlet). Theater released movies make most of their money upfront, and make money out on a per-view basis. So they need as many viewers as early as possible.
With streamers, they can lose the subscription any month, and only gain it back if they lure you - so they're incentivized to give you "anchors" that keep you there. Think game of thrones keeping people subscribed to HBO month over month or Squid Games that gets lots of attention. Once you're there, they just have to have "something" for those days you don't really know what to watch. That "something" is different for everyone, so they have to make lots of low budget generic stuff that appeals, collectively, to a wide audience. Each show/movie can have few viewers, because its going for niche targeting en mass - think themed cable channels but one company has to make something for each theme. Once a streamer makes a show, its "free" to them to share it with as many people as possible, but also doesn't cost them anything to not show it.
Ben Thompson (stratechery) has talked about this a lot, check him out!
yes, if streaming movies well-produced, middle of the road, not terribly expensive is most profitable - as per this recent discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29247571 on red notice
if cinema, big expansive events most profitable (currently)
if shows, high quality addictive, dramatic, character driven, etc. is most profitable
why is quality series more profitable than middle of road? because you have to get people to make the investment of spending 10+ hours.
why are medium quality competence streaming movies most profitable? because many people are willing to spend 90 minutes passing the time with something mildly enjoyable, despite the many draws on our time it's still not seen as a serious investment.
why are big events blah blah blah - because it costs a lot to go out it is a hassle compared to staying home, I tend to go to restaurant as well when I do it so for me at least it definitely has to have been a night worth it at the end, and something big is more likely to make everyone like whoa I had an experience I can't have at home.
I have no inside knowledge and am fully speculating, including some random tidbits I've read here and there.
Think about how Netflix changed when moving from DVD to streaming. They used to optimize for recommending you movies you would rate highly. Now it's all about what keeps people viewing the longest.
2 middle of the road acceptable movies that you rate a 6/10 is more viewing time than 1 higher quality production that you'd rate a 9/10 -- I doubt the costs are they cut and dry but I think that's the idea. More content that is passable wins out against less content that is of higher quality.
I'm curious if they actually have scientifically valid data to back that up, or if it is just assumption and common knowledge from industry people with the common trait of not questioning if the assumptions are actually right. It is very hard to tell from where I'm sitting, because there is so much puffery and fake numbers tossed at the public. Actually comparing apples to apples would be difficult, as there are so many variables such as advertising budget and media placement to account for.
Yes, but what has maybe replaced the movie is the high-quality, daring, world-changing series. Squid Game, Outlander, etc. Directors and consumers are now no longer limited to a 3 hour time in the theater, as far as the art of the motion picture is concerned.
In what sense is "International Audiences" part of "The lowest common denominator"
So if you are selling a global movie, you are not going to be able to rely on cultural references, witty banter, or sophisticated plots. You will not even be able to rely on a lot of dialogue as the movie will need to be dubbed and subtle dialogue doesn't translate well.
You will rely on boobs and explosions, because that's the lowest common denominator that will sell well in New York, Indonesia, Nigeria, Italy, Egypt, Chile, and China. And if many nations don't allow boobs, then explosions it is.
There just isn't a lot that the world has in common, which forces movies with a global audience to be extremely shallow.
One reason, for example, for the dearth of good comedy films is that it's really hard for comedy to translate across different cultures. Maybe something like slipping on a banana peel will work, but more sophisticated stuff doesn't work.
I feel like people say they want a la carte but that's not actually what they want. What they want is all the good content and none of the crap filler content, for cheap. People pushed for a la carte because in their mind all content costs the same, so they figured that by removing the content they don't want and only keeping the content they do want, they would save tons of money. They don't understand that the good content (live sports, FX, AMC, HBO, et al) is precisely what studios are charging a premium for and what is driving most of the cost in packages in the first place.
It's roughly akin to someone looking at a Vegas buffet that costs $100 and features 100 entrees and saying "well there are 100 entrees but really all I want is the cheese, prime rib, crab legs, and caviar, so if I remove the other 96 entrees then this should cost $4" then being shocked when they are still charged 40 dollars. Sure it's cheaper but in their minds it should be an order of magnitude cheaper than it is.
but would streaming services rather compete with piracy than another big player?
With piracy, they have the law on their side - they can lobby for rules to punish piracy using state resources, rather than their own. They cannot do so for their competitors.
Since the marginal cost of selling an additional unit is near zero, it makes sense for sellers to heavily price discriminate such that poorer people are charged what they can afford and richer people are charged what they can afford.
That is where brands come in for differentiable products. The generic brand lotion and the name brand lotion might come from the same factory. Maybe it is even the same product, or the different in quality is only slightly better for the name brand. But now the seller can target people willing to pay $x for lotion, and people willing to pay $2x for basically the same lotion.
Or you implement “binning”, where products of worse quality get branded differently, even though the sale price difference between the better quality product and the generic quality product is disproportionately larger than the cost to produce the better quality product than the generic product.
Anyway, you cannot do this for a movie or tv show, so the sellers of movies/tv shows do it more crudely via country or region of the world.
Between the time element and snobbery, the market is segmented and revenues maximized.
Classic economic theory on pricing lists commonly used options that essentially try to achieve that but with various indirect methods:
1. provide discounts to various demographics that are known afford less - e.g. students, seniors, etc.
2. provide different prices at times or places that have customers with different average ability to pay - e.g. geographic discrimination, and also discounts provided at times when traditionally employed people can't take them.
3. simple "inconvenient obstacles" e.g. coupon schemes, intentionally created queues, etc where people who accept the inconvenience get a better price, and people who can afford to pay more simply don't bother and pay.
4. Direct, prolonged, serious personal bargaining and haggling, resulting in an individually negotiated price that depends on your willingness to pay.
But IMHO people would not like if it was explicitly based on their ability to pay, so companies try to disguise that.
[1] https://openmedia.org/article/item/2021-rewheel-report-shows...
[1] https://www.offersnewcustomers.co.uk/sky-tv/complete-bundle/ [2] https://www.virginmedia.com/broadband/packages
What was the situation outside of the US if you wanted to watch The Sopranos or Sex and the City or something else on HBO back then? My assumption is that this wasn't all free and over the air?
I highly disagree with that sentiment. Cheap cable packages maybe had 40 channels which barely expanded on the local broadcast availability, littered with advertisements. No real dedicated movie channels, movies were often cropped and edited to fit the time slots and ratings allocations for the channels when they did air. Time shifting meant having to keep a VCR well stocked, or later buy/rent a DVR. And if your VHS or DVR was full, well, you're out of luck, you just missed that episode. Decide you want to start watching some TV show that's been on for a few seasons? You're out of luck, better go rent some tapes or DVDs to get caught up. Want to watch on the go? Sorry, you're out of luck, the only place you can consume this is at home, or lug around a TV, VCR, and VHS tapes with you.
For less than half the price of your supposed $20 cable package (before adding additional expensive hardware) I can watch literally thousands and thousands of movies and shows at a moment's notice anywhere I have an internet connection.
In retrospect, they did a great job of curation.* I seem to spend more time looking for something to watch than watching, and often just give up and go to bed.
* Up til subscription satellite TV became available. Quality was inversely related to the number of available channels.
I think the focus should be on keeping the market fractured. If content is of poor quality that just means the population is ok with poor quality. There is business to be made on poor quality. /s
Once upon a time I worked as a CSR for a cable company, and a couple customers, old honest people, opened the conversation along the lines "I only come back because, impossible as that might appear, the other company is even worse than you are"
In almost every case like that, the answer is "we can't figure out if this is licensed for streaming because it didn't exist yet". Usually it's music, which they licensed for "broadcast and video cassette release" or some similar language. In most cases they've decided DVD is close enough to VHS to still count, but is streaming? Courts haven't really decided yet.
[1] https://www.markhneedham.com/blog/2012/09/03/a-rogue-3572732...
This is mentioned in other comments, but a large part of the reason streaming services got going was because piracy was so much more convenient than the brutal grind of actually paying for something. Users could be sitting in their living rooms with wallets out ready to go, and still choose piracy, because the only other alternative was waiting for a physical CD or DVD to arrive.
If the streaming wars do too much damage to consumers, they'll just flip the playing board and go back to piracy.
I think that's already happening among the tech literate. The difference now is that the majority of consumers are not technically inclined and don't mind paying for several streaming services to get easy access to their favorite content, so the industry generally doesn't care about losing a small fraction to piracy.
Pirating content is now more technically difficult than paying for a service, but the benefits are still there: DRM-free content that can be consumed on any device, accessed offline, safe against removal, licensing issues, region locks, easily shareable, etc.
Paying for a streaming service now has the same issues as paying for cable did: you get access to tons of low quality content you don't care about just to watch the few shows and movies you actually do. Content curation is still an unsolved problem and the industry is ripe for disruption once someone figures out what I actually want to watch and how I can pay for only that.
Or pirating will become easier and they'll continue to lose revenue.
That's an odd argument and reminds me of the situation with science publishers that led to scihub and friends: Publishers were offering package deals to universities which technically had a wealth of content, except the vast majority of it was garbage. Nevertheless, universities had to buy the packages, because of the few flagship journals that were embedded in the packages.
> Careful what you wish for? The big desire then was a la carte, and right now you can bounce between streaming services at will, and they're all still far easier to cancel than cable.
Who was wishing for anything here? Streaming has always been pushed by the industry as an acceptable alternative to piracy. The supppsed benefits of streaming were always part of the sales push.
This is the issue for me. My lineup of currently-"airing" shows requires subscriptions to Netflix, HBO Max, CBS All Access, Disney+, and Amazon Prime Video. And I feel like I'm forgetting another one or two.
To be fair, these subscriptions, in total, do cost less than what I was paying for cable back in 2005 (last time I had cable).
I don't want one streaming platform to rule them all. A monopoly doesn't sound great. So ok, we keep the idea of several competing streaming platforms. I'm sure there are downsides to this, but maybe a legal requirement for compulsory licensing to competing platforms under RAND terms might help?
I would even settle for a way where I can ask, "Where can I stream X?" There used to be canistream.it -- which is apparently now being rebuilt but has long been mostly useless. Fingers crossed that it becomes useful.
Now if only someone would combine all of these search engines...
"a la carte" means I don't subscribe to anything and instead I have access to "all the things" with a separate charge for each thing. The whole idea back then was to compete with the ease and access of piracy like Steam did.
That said, "careful what you wish for" currently applies to sitcom episodes for rent on Amazon costing more per minute than mega budget movies.
It’s been good for me, I just watch a whole lot less crap and get more sleep.
For example, the current used car market has insane values with used vehicles costing more than the MSRP on new ones sometimes. Likewise, when Netflix had no competition, they were able to sign deals with content providers for almost nothing because content providers thought streaming was worthless. Either streaming was going to fail and that $10 deal would go away or streaming was going to succeed and content providers wouldn't license content so cheaply. That era was an odd thing in the market before content owners realized that streaming wasn't just a little additional revenue, but a replacement for their service.
I don't think you can really compare a market blip to a sustainable business model. HBO and others weren't going to continue licensing their catalogues to Netflix once it was clear that streaming was popular. They made the mistake of licensing to Netflix assuming that they'd be getting a little extra pocket money rather than cannibalizing their services. That mistake is probably the reason Netflix is the giant it is today. Netflix signed deals to license content before content owners realized the value of streaming. They used that content to gain subscribers until they could afford to build their own library of first-party content.
Even from Netflix's side, they might have been spending more on content than they wanted to long-term to try and gain subscribers that would be sticky as their library waned and they transformed from "we licensed most of the content you want" to "we're another HBO with a limited content selection".
These things happen. We saw MoviePass come and go because it was an unsustainably good deal.
I think it's also important to remember that back in that era of Netflix, most people were still paying for cable and renting DVDs. Maybe you weren't, but most people were. I think it's important to think about the whole amount that people were spending and people were spending a lot on their entertainment. It was perfectly normal to head to a Blockbuster and spend $10 renting two DVDs each weekend. That feels like such an alien concept today, but people were spending $100 on cable plus $40 on rentals and getting a lot less entertainment than they are today.
Sure, if you were one of the few that only had Netflix, it was a glorious time. $10/mo never bought so much entertainment! Likewise, if you were a MoviePass subscriber, no one had ever gotten so many theater tickets for so little money. But it wasn't going to last because it was unsustainably good. Once MoviePass found that people would actually use the service, it was dead in the water. Once content owners saw that people would cancel their HBO subscription because Netflix had HBO's content, the era of Netflix having such an expansive library for so cheap would end as the deals ran out.
Comparing current prices to a market blip isn't really a fair comparison - but there was a pretty great 5 years in there.
But now if all you wanted was HBO, you could get it for under 20 bucks if you have anything but the slowest internet packages!
I agree with the parent. Without live TV, a streaming bundle you assemble is clearly cheaper than you were paying for cable TV (or cable TV plus Netflix) in the US. Today, add a live TV streaming service and you're probably back to about price parity with a lot more choice of content.
A la carte might only make sense in a world of themed channels. After that, pricing gets hard because no one wants to pay $3 for an episode of Friends (I suppose the season is only $10), they want to rent access to everything like with Spotify, but it's complicated because sports cost a lot more than most other content, and content like reality shows is dirt cheap to make. Then there's pricing streaming movies. Everything older than 2 years included, add-on charge for new releases? People don't like microtransactions. And this is in a hypothetical world where video streaming isn't balkanized.
It would not cover a typical US internet bill with speeds to support streaming, plus a couple streaming services.
Good internet is becoming more of an overall utility than just a luxury.
I have that feeling that internet is boiling frogs making people think it's that amazing christic thing when a few phone calls and organization would go as deep. Plus kids and teachers are often computer illiterate, a single file format can delay information for days if not weeks because people don't know how to mail or open something.
- The only major loss with the current system is local programming. You may be able to get it with free OTA channels, but people subscribed to basic cable in the 1980's and 1990's simply because cable was more reliable than a good residential antenna tower so it is justifiable to count this as a loss.
- The current system is much better in that you can watch commercial free programs when you please, any given streaming service is usually less expensive than any given cable bundle, and the content in any given streaming service will usually have more in common than the channels in any given cable bundle. (Cable companies were notorious for putting similar channels in different packages.) As an added bonus: the "watch when you please" aspect means that you can defer viewing, may that be to switch between streaming services to keep monthly costs down or to simply cancel during the months when you have better things to do than watch television.
- The current system is also better in that Internet service can replace many other products and services. Subscribing to newspapers is a novelty these days. If it wasn't for societal expectations, people would have dropped phone service since the Internet provides far better communications options than traditional landlines.
I don't think it's realistic to assume "no internet" is a standard default these days, though, regardless of if/how you watch TV.
> I don't think it's realistic to assume "no internet" is a standard default these days
About 1 in 6 US households has no internet access, nowhere near a small enough number to start rolling up alternatives.
https://datareportal.com/reports/digital-2020-united-states-...
That also claims:
"The number of mobile connections in the United States of America in January 2020 was equivalent to 107% of the total population."
I'm not sure how to disaggregate that to humans. I do personally have more than one device with a data plan, although I'm not sure how typical that is.
Streaming only was able to take off because broadband (back then this wouldn't even have been that much, >~2Mbps) was already widespread. So I'd say yes, nobody liked waiting for slow connections.
You could say the same in an alternate reality where everyone is still putting up with using Sourceforge and getting the occasional binary download bundled with malware. People would have forgotten how much more difficult it was to receive CDs by mail, so by your definition these poor alt developers would be winning.
Music licensing?
After all, TCM seems to do well running their back catalog of movies.
Dear Lord, this! This!
I would dearly love to be able to get a good copy of Love is Never Silent with working subtitles but sadly since it was a Hallmark made for television movie it's simply not available to me. There are certainly others like that, half remembered movies that I'd watched in my youth that would be worth revisiting as an adult or to share with others but they're simply unavailable except through IMDB to remind myself that I didn't imagine them, they do exist.
I'm paying twice as much for cable internet as I used to pay for basic cable, before even starting to pay for a streaming service.
Do not pay Disney, and send an email to the US Tennis Association or whoever keeps contracting with ESPN.
If you keep paying Disney to watch Tennis, you will never get it a la carte.
What there isn't is a good way to get a single subscription to watch anything you want. The cable bundle was close to that for TV content, but very lacking for movies. So if you want to watch a really wide sampling of TV content, it can feel like we're going backward, since there's no more one-stop-shop.
Careful what you wish for? The big desire then was a la carte, and right now you can bounce between streaming services at will, and they're all still far easier to cancel than cable.
Some things have fallen through the cracks, particularly long-running (going back to the pre-streaming era) major-network content like the aforementioned Survivor (a random missing episode seems like a weird problem, would love to know what was going on). And getting US content stuff internationally is often sub-par, although... I don't recall stories of this being easy at all two decades ago.
So consumers are overall definitely winning, but it's not a perfect victory for everyone.