Media content is typically sold based on the populations’ purchasing power. It is why the same book is sold in Asia for $5 that is $50 in the US.

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.

Would it be legal to ask for a paysheet and determine the price based on that? When I hear price discrimination, I do understand that it’s always been the deal, but I wonder whether we’re trending towards something proportional to salary.

I am sure it is legal to ask for the pay sheet, but no seller would give you that. Sellers usually do not price discriminate merchandise that is not differentials within the same country since commerce within the country cannot be easily restricted.

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.

Outlets get differentiated too. You can buy last years hardcover books at Family Dollar at 50-75% off. You used to get softcovers at the supermarket at a discount as well.

Between the time element and snobbery, the market is segmented and revenues maximized.

That would not be prohibited, but it might not be a good business idea due to customer resistance.

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.

Interestingly, much higher quality internet/mobile network access seems to also be cheaper outside the US. I was kinda shocked when I heard how much some acquaintance paid for gigabit internet/ 4G mobile in Spain.

Canadian mobile networks are more expensive than the US, and are some of the most expensive in the world [1].

[1] https://openmedia.org/article/item/2021-rewheel-report-shows...

Yes. Internet has always been 30€ here in France, and nowadays 20€ per month for fibre. Mobile is 12€ for 50-100GB. Many people thank the EU’s competition watchdog for that, and it’s probably politically desired. It still didn’t create a Silicon Valley ecosystem, though ;)

This is only true in letter (rather than spirit) because subscription television in the UK was delivered by satellite (“Sky”) rather than cable - a fully loaded sports and movies package would easily dwarf $170/mo, and still required a separate phone line from BT in addition.

I've never met anyone paying >£100/mo for Sky. Is/was that a thing?

Sky don't show their prices on their website, but according to [1] the "Sky Complete bundle" costs £111/month. And Virgin Media have a £99/month bundle [2] (although admittedly it includes broadband and mobile phone)

[1] https://www.offersnewcustomers.co.uk/sky-tv/complete-bundle/ [2] https://www.virginmedia.com/broadband/packages

It is - and it’s not so long ago that it was $2 to £1, so the requisite amount for a $170 cable bill in the heyday of US cable would have been ~£85.

They weren't a thing inside the USA unless you loaded up on premium movie and sports channels. From 2004~2018 I always paid around 45-60 for basic cable. Sometimes less if I bundled with internet.

Surely you mean outside of North America. From my understanding, the cable situation was always even worse in Canada.

Sure, but even the $20/$30 minimum cable packages in the US were more than Netflix is today, without even including inflation.

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?

> the $20/$30 minimum cable packages in the US were more than Netflix is today

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.

No. In NZ we only got what the local broadcasters had licensed.

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.

But any payment to Netflix is on top of the (significantly higher) ransom one pays to Comcast/Spectrum/etc for leasing bandwidth on the pipes (which cable bills include in the default). So cost of streaming content today is Netflix + internet connection with enough bandwidth.

Yes, but the cost of N streaming services is not N * (Netflix + Internet), it's (N * Netflix) + Internet — and the internet has utility outside of streaming services as well. The internet price is the same whether you subscribe to 0 or 100 streaming services. If you just want to stream from one provider and otherwise not use the internet at all, I guess counting them together that way as the "price of entertainment" makes sense. But I don't think that's a very common situation.

I don't disagree with anything you said. But I should add or clarify to parent post that there is some difficulty in installing and maintaining infrastructure that affords a company power over the customer. Said power is how they "easily" achieved a monopoly.

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"