I would do a whole lot more digital rentals if the prices weren't so damn high. How is it that it can be significantly cheaper to rent the physical disk than to stream the movie once? How can I watch 20 hours of stuff on HBO in 4k for like $10 or $12 or whatever that runs now for a month, but a single 2-hour movie is $5?

It'd also help a lot if I didn't need a different "app" for every store, with its own player UI. Learning how to use yet another designer's cute "experience" just to do the same thing I used to do with a few buttons on the front of a VCR that were the same for every single movie, isn't my idea of fun.

> How is it that it can be significantly cheaper to rent the physical disk than to stream the movie once?

Price discrimination or price segmentation is the technical name.

If you are selling an identical good which has near zero marginal cost to reproduce, then the way to maximize your profit is to sell it to each person for the maximum they are willing to pay.

Ideally, you want to sell (or rent) the same movie or tv show or song to someone willing to pay $5 for $5, $10 for $10, and $1 for $1.

In practice, it is logistically infeasible to target each and every person’s maximum price, but you can try to target populations as a whole. For example, grocery stores with no discount to people who are willing to pay more, versus giving out paper coupons or online coupons to those willing to spend time to save money.

In media’s case, I am assuming that the media sellers are betting the people willing to buy online are willing to pay more, on average, than people willing to go through all the trouble of renting a physical disk.

At least in my case, it would ring true. If I really wanted to see something, I would not care about paying $5 in the moment on my TV and start watching in seconds, rather than remembering to get and dealing with a disc from a Redbox kiosk for $1. But there are people who would want to save the $4, and so the content sellers are able to get $5 from me and $1 from the person using Redbox (although they are also losing sales from people not willing to buy at $5 online, and not willing to pay $1 at a Redbox, but the bet is that population is smaller than the total of the other populations).

To put it another way, you're literally paying for convenience.

If you want to sugar to help the medicine go down...

Compare the current digital rental prices to taking yourself to the theater. While the digital rental rate is high, it is less than one ticket for admission. If you buy concessions, it only goes up. If you take someone else, it gets higher. That one digital rental starts to look less steep from this vantage point. That being said, I still don't do the digital rental.

> How is it that it can be significantly cheaper to rent the physical disk than to stream the movie once?

Note you're not just paying the marginal cost, you're also paying for the streaming infrastructure they invested in setting up.

Yes, of course, but that's still much cheaper than physical disk distribution.

Is it? Stamping and shipping discs costs very little, the license is the major cost in most cases.

Edit: very old numbers can be found here. https://arstechnica.com/uncategorized/2006/03/6400-2/

How do you know? I’m a highly paid engineer who is oncall on a SAAS, it’s been a wild ride. It’s expensive to keep this crap running. But a DVD burner and fedex? That sounds cheap and simple to me.

They don't even use burners at that scale, they use replicators. Takes seconds to stamp a DVD. Here's a place in California that charges as low as $.075 each per copy, and this is low volume pricing...

http://discreplicator.com/Price.html

There are companies that provide on-demand pricing for just the steaming component (edgecast for example). Then just throw up a DynamoDB table and some simple apis in lambda and you have a pretty cheap (relatively) way to deliver streamed content.

Good point but that’s just MVP; to maintain their competitive edge they have to maintain a lot more features on top of that.

They probably are making a significant profit off it, I'm not saying that's not the case. I'm just saying you can't figure that out by just looking at the marginal cost; you have to look at the investment and ongoing costs and planned payoff period too, which is information you probably don't have available.

> How is it that it can be significantly cheaper to rent the physical disk than to stream the movie once?

The cost to build out the infrastructure to stream movies is tremendous.

Is it somehow cheaper when it's a subscription, and when the set of things you might start streaming isn't "this single thing I just paid for" but "anything in your catalog"? Because they don't just give a discount for that—they give a tremendous discount.

First Sale doctrine - you needn't pay any licensing fees to rent out a purchased disc. Practically speaking, Blockbuster that was did have special arrangements with the studios, but this paved the way for Netflix to rent out DVDs with little barrier to entry.

The problem with pay per item is that they try to stretch and tretch the amount of items/movies/episodes you watch.

Netflix overdid it with making everything a serie. It's super annoying, and I simply don' have the energie to start another serie simply because Netflix's analytics say that it's better for engagement that you have use the serie format instead of a simple movie. It has very little to do with the actual story telling.

I kind of long for the sitcoms of my youth. Something like Night Court, where it's a half an hour of jokes and then you're done. It's nice and relaxing and doesn't try and hook you into watching hours on end.

This niche has largely been replaced by casual mobile games. Pop open Candy Crush and play for as long as you have time. You're never really done, but each session is basically independent of the past and doesn't require a whole lot of mental effort.

TV in general is losing viewership to games. A decade ago, the watercooler conversation at work would be "So, what TV shows are you watching?" Now, it's "So, what games have you installed lately?" This may be a big part of Netflix's problem.

I have trouble imagining what the games / movies hybrid of the future will be. It's clear something is changing (game revenue exceeds hollywood - even if that's not a totally fair comparison).

There is a VR-movie called Pearl by an ex-Disney director - you basically sit in a passenger seat watching the plot but can turn your head etc.

Take that one step further and be at the table with Michael Corleone and the Police Captain. But what happens if you wonder out into the kitchen and check on the veal. Linearity and emotion get sacrificed. But the techniques games designers find to bring our attention will undoubtedly be useful for journalists and campaigners to highlight real issues, and marketers to highlight crap.

My guess is we either find you cannot get the mass of humanity to focus on one thing, and that news cycles and games will just be sharded - the people who know about and care about this space battle are limited, just like those that care about the fifth series of this tv show or the text of an a to of parliament.

I doubt we shall all have a more curated world - it's hard to imagine any media outlet having the sort of range of power TV stations of the 60s and 70s did. But maybe we can all have a better shared mental model of the world - so what is truly(!) important is perceived important by most people. This might be a bit naive - it if games are simplified models and faithfully represent the world maybe we will learn. Most Sim games generally teach co-operative politics in the end

I can sense it matters. I just don't understand it. I do wonder if i played more games it might help !

I've started watching Cheers on Hulu for exactly this reason. Next will be Mash.

A family show that holds up surprisingly well is The Brady Bunch. There’s some weird 70s things in it — but overall maybe better than I remember it.

I've been watching some of them recently. It's amazing how relevant All In The Family still is today. The Jeffersons is still good, Cheers is relaxing after a stressful day. That easy-watching episodic nature is nice for a change.

There are some good recent sitcoms, but you don't get the same sort of 12 seasons of 22 episodes run.

Netflix have a category called “30-minute laughs”, which might have something for you. Space force wasn’t bad, but that’s about all I’ve found so far.

Tried modern family?

Modern Family became unwatchable when they doubled down on the incredibly long awkward pause reaction shot sequences.

I think your s key is broken

"serie" is the singular for series in a bunch of languages, which honestly makes more sense than having a singular noun ending in s and the plural form being identical to the singular.

Too bad it triggers Apple's digital assistant.

The post is written in english.

ok, to be clearer, i don't think their s key is actually broken!

This happened irrespective of Netflix streaming. Breaking Bad, The Sopranos, BSG, Lost, etc. The thing is serial was fairly annoying if you had to be in front of the TV on Wednesday at 9pm every week to watch something. People would do it for a must-watch miniseries. But as soon as you could do on-demand it was a nice format for a lot of things.

Totally disagree, all of my favorite shows would have made terrible movies. Breaking Bad is just barely long enough as it is, trying to compress that down into even a long movie would have destroyed the story.

Yes, but that’s not a Netflix original, and one of the older series

A brief, incomplete list of Netflix series that would be horribly diminished by being movies:

Stranger Things, The Queens Gambit, Narcos, The Crown, basically all of the rest of them.

A complete list of movies that would be worse as series:

Anything by Michael Bay

Netflix used to be an unlimited dvd rental service. It turned into the same thing without the mail step, so of course we stopped using it. I think if we had known what streaming would look like today, a lot of people including myself would have held on tighter.

I let go of DVDs for quite some time but have re-enabled https://dvd.netflix.com recently. Good selection, plus the much slower act of selecting, receiving and exchanging is sort of a welcome restricted diet compared to the endless buffet over the past decade.

It's OK although the back catalog has rotted a lot. I suspect that they repurchase a lot fewer disks that have been reported as defective for older films. I agree in general that most people dismiss this as an option--or even consider it weird--but many people I know who are much more into films than TV find this a good option. I do off-and-on myself.

The one thing about the DVD aspect of it is that DVD content just looks bad on my current viewing screen. Blu-ray discs are okay. However, the DVD catalog is much much larger. Whachagonnado

I admit I'm still at just HD. And getting rid of that TV with a higher-res one would be something of a task. So I mostly just stick with regular DVDs and HD streaming content.

Except back in the DVD rental days, Netflix could rent out basically everything instead of having to fight for exclusive content rights. You could subscribe to Netflix or go to Blockbuster but you could get the same selection more or less at either.

used dvd stores can be fun