I agree with the point of your post, however I question whether streaming's utopian moment even actually happened. I was a very early adopter of Netflix streaming and their catalog was quite poor for a long time. Just tons of cheap no name filler content, old public domain type stuff, and a surprising amount of softcore pornography. There were high profile movies and shows sometimes too, but they were the exception and even back then they would get removed regularly. Today's streaming landscape, greedy as it may be, at least offers the ability to stream premium content that Netflix never would have had even in their days of solo dominance. Perhaps the streaming golden age is closer to something that could have been, rather than something that actually was.

Perhaps people are remembering DVD rental Netflix. It was slightly less convenient but had literally everything.

I still use Netflix's DVD service, despite it being a pale pale shadow of its former glory. It makes me sad when I browse their catalog and either fail to find a movie, or find that's its only available in DVD. I find at least 25% of the movies I search for unavailable in Blu-Ray format, and I get furious. Blu-Ray has been out since 2006 and watching a DVD today is like looking at 640x480 jpegs.

Netflix streaming had literally everything for a time. Now it's literally all Netflix productions.

No thanks.

> Netflix streaming had literally everything for a time.

No that's not true - it was never even remotely as extensive as their DVD catalogue, which was almost literally every commercially available DVD. I wouldn't be surprised if the majority of films have never been available on any streaming service. Streaming rights entirely different to them buying some DVDs.

You can operate a rental service for physical media with zero licensing required. The cost to Netflix to rent out a niche DVD only five people care about is the cost of buying one copy of the DVD and shipping it out to five people. The cost of a streaming license could be hundreds of thousands of dollars, minimum, no matter how niche the work.

For us it was. There was a ten-year period when we had young kids and didn't do anything. Once that was over we caught up with tons of movies we hadn't seen, on Netflix.

Maybe they've never had newer releases, but for seeing nearly everything from 4-10 years ago at one point was very much possible.

> For us it was.

This just isn't a truthful statement.

Netflix's DVD catalogue was like 100,000 titles. They've never had 100,000 titles on their streaming site. There aren't 100,000 streaming titles anywhere today across all streaming services!

"At its peak, in fact, the number of DVD titles possessed by Netflix would have dwarfed the entire streaming libraries of all the major streamers today … combined."

https://www.pastemagazine.com/movies/netflix/netflix-dvd-ser...

The reason is that the rights are different.

https://www.quora.com/Why-does-Netflix-still-have-much-of-it...

You're right. I'm lying. I didn't watch any movies. I just have ESP or something.

It’s pretty hard to judge catalogue sizes from scrolling, so I don’t know how you’d know from just using the services?

That article I linked gives actual data. Do you think it’s wrong?

There was a period when they had a content deal with Starz that their catalog was pretty beefy. They also had a lot of Disney's stuff for a long time.

I'm ok with content being spread across competing services. If Netflix was the only game in town (like it pretty much was for a while) we'd see less content.

I don't find the pricing of any existing service objectionable. I can pay about $15 and watch whatever I want in their catalog for a month, then cancel if I decide to try a different service. It'd be different if I were stuck in some long contract but I've yet to see that in the streaming market.

"I can pay $15 a month" is literally ignore the article we're commenting on. Can you pay $100 a month for TV? Because many households can't. Streaming briefly made it affordable for them, and then everyone went "actually, no, instead of paying service X, who pays us a license fee, you get to pay service X without our content, and then the same amount on top for our own service Y". Repeat some ten times, and we're right back to "guess I'll just pirate everything, because I can afford internet, but not internet plus another $100 for all the streaming services because the five shows I like are all on different platforms".

> Repeat some ten times, and we're right back to "guess I'll just pirate everything, because I can afford internet, but not internet plus another $100 for all the streaming services because the five shows I like are all on different platforms".

... or you wait to watch a show when you subscribe to the platform it is on. I just don't buy the argument that we must have access to everything at every moment from a single provider.

It's not a given that a show will ever end up on the platform you already subscribe to. And this seems to be increasingly more likely with the ongoing emphasis on exclusivity as a way to lock in users.

The obvious alternative is for the platforms to charge for actual use, and then they'll get paid for the fair share of my attention that they manage to attract. But their pricing kind of implies that they expect most people to only have one subscription.

Agreed. Just subscribe for a time to watch what you consider their AAA content and then move on to next service. Suits the binge series watching habit.

You can sign up with trials that require a CC and utilize something like privacy.com to create hard limit virtual cards so you aren't chasing services around to determine when it'll pull from the card and the unavoidable PITA it is to cancel said services.

They're planning on clamping down on users like you. One of their next moves will be getting rid of the binge model and returning to trickling out episodes over months.

They're going to try to stop me from resubscribing? I'm small time but I'll still say it: their loss.

The likely first step will be heavy discounts for paying annually rather than monthly.

Frankly, I doubt it. There's no way they want to give "heavy discounts" for anything. They want to get the maximum they possibly can, period.

At most, you might get a discount equivalent to about a dollar a month. Whooo, I save $12 by committing for a full year.

Heavy discounts can be reworded as sharp increases to monthly.

A couple months ago, prior to the latest season of Better Call Saul, I signed up for AMC+ to catch up on old episodes. I was very surprised to see _none_ were available to watch. Furthermore, there’s a banner warning now at the stop stating the latest season (now over) is only available until August 30th.

I’m not sure what happens after that, but the assumption that all released episodes will always be available is no longer true.

This is why everyone should pirate.

People on here love to complain about Facebook hating their users.

I don't see any companies that despise their users quite like Comcast and At&t and Disney.

I'm starting to think the NFL really hates their viewers. It's quite expensive and challenging to watch every game a single NFL team plays in a season.

The local games are all broadcast over the air, even the ones that are shown on the pay services. (I live in Philadelphia, and I watch all the Eagles games with a TV and an antenna.) However, if you're a fan of an out-of-market team, it may be a pain to see all their games, as you say.

> it may be a pain to pay to see all their games

FTFY. It's never been easier.

> I don't see any companies that despise their users quite like <snip> Disney.

I don’t get this take. Disney spends billions of dollars to make movies and TV shows that I and my family want to watch. I pay them $8/mo, and I get to watch all of them, whenever I want.

How is that a bad thing?

Oh boy, where to start? Screwing up copyright and preventing things from going public domain when they were supposed to for generations? Suing little girls over their fan websites?

Or back in the 80s to early 90s, pricing their movies' VHS tapes at $89.95 (about $234 adjusted for inflation) while also refusing to ever allow the movies to be shown on TV (because people might record them), thus ensuring that poor kids missed out on all the Disney classics?

Admittedly, that last one is not a really strong argument - a company should be free to price stuff however they want. However, if you were one of the kids that couldn't afford Disney movies, it left a lasting impression.

Maybe their streaming service is ok, but the company that owns it has a well-deserved reputation for being evil.

After an update, my tv got unavoidable disney ads on its home page. I had to downgrade it and disable updates. And I dont even have Disney app is installed. I consider them to be pretty evil

Sounds like you made the mistake of enabling your TV to gain access to a network. There's dozens of articles that spell out why that's a horrible idea, your experience is one of those reasons.

Never allow a television access to your network, you get a dedicated device to do the streaming/airplay/chromecast features and that's it.

The fact that connecting your TV to the network is a mistake is just more proof of current dystopian trends.

You're not wrong but that's the world we find ourselves in. No idea why my comment got down voted considering anyone in the tech industry knows that TVs don't belong on networks.

It's not that simple. Providers simply can't go back to the old days. They will push consumers to their limit, but I just don't think people are interested in paying $150/mo for scheduled programming with ads any more.

In the end it will likely be a compromise. But it's a good time to vote with our wallets.

I never said it was sustainable, but the chain of events definitely is that simple. Netflix ran into the fact that it offered literally too good a deal for others to not cash in on by making the ecosystem worse so that they can charge people to make it convenient again instead. The fundamental principle behind making money is having something that people want, and then making sure it's inaccessible to them unless they pay you for it.

The "making things terrible" comes from content companies going "we have a licensing system in place, we've used it for cable providers for decades, and we even used it for streaming services, but now we're going to cancel that and start our own vertically integrated lock-in service because we'll make way more money that way". While it makes sense, and everyone could have, and very much did, see it coming, it's still the kind of move that historically would have gotten your company broken up. But that's a power modern government seems to no longer want to wield anymore, despite our wishes they did.

As long as barriers to entry to hosting content and releasing streaming apps remain low, this all seems fine. Where is the potential to abuse the vertical integration?

Even if Disney owned Akamai or something, there's decent competition in CDNs.

> I just don't think people are interested in paying $150/mo for scheduled programming with ads any more.

They were never interested in that, it's all that was available. "Pay TV" started off with no ads. Eventually, it will be all that is available again.

You'll always be surprised at what peoples' limits are when you push them slowly enough.

I don't know, where I grew up in the Midwest in the 90s there were many different cable packages and people always prided themselves on having the all inclusive package even if it was not that financially prudent. But maybe that was not the norm.

Piracy is still better and cheaper.

Piracy has always been better and cheaper, but it (thankfully) isn't how the vast majority of people consume content.

Piracy isn't all about price though. It's about convenience too. And it's not actually free. You're not paying the rights holder but pirating these days requires a lot of storage, a VPN perhaps a pay site or Usenet subscription.

But also all the time to set up a media server etc. Connecting it to the TV (and all the tablets and phones) in a way the wife and kids can also grok. They don't want to search for Westworld_S04E01_H264_1080p_BLAHBLA.mkv in a long list. Oops no that's the one with the audio glitch, you need to find the PROPER instead. But why are the voices so quiet compared to the sound effects? Must be a Dolby Atmos downmixing problem. This stuff can really ruin the mood after a long work day.

When you come home you just want to click on the man with the hat and not have to worry about issues. So you'll need time to review the downloads, categorise content or pay for Plex and a beefy server for the transcoding etc. Fix it when it's down. Keep it all updated. It's not very convenient.

Netflix really beat that out with just click & play for a decent price. It was a good deal even being more expensive than piracy because it saved so much hassle. Most people have a life and more money than time to spare now.

But the insane fragmentation is now screwing this up. Soon it may be more convenient for the masses to pirate again. Who wants to juggle 10 different subscriptions and player apps on all their devices, each with their own UI peculiarities? Having to deal with all the ads? But what show is on which service now?? Oh Prime Video has the movie I want to watch but it's only the Spanish dubbed version??? The industry has to do a very bad job to make piracy interesting again but they are well on their way.

I'd pay €50 a month (which is a lot here in Spain) for a service that carries everything. If I watch all of Westworld this week they can send a big chunk of that HBO's way. If I watch for all mankind the next they can pay Apple. This is what Spotify etc do. Why does it have to be so difficult with video :(

Early in 2012-2014 I worked for a SaaS paywall provider that offered what we called a National Model. You would pay once and get access to all major newspapers in the country. The fee you paid was divided into provider fee/a reward for the newspaper you bought your subscription at/time spent reward divided by user behaviour.

The company has a successful business selling single instance paywalls. Why? You're in essence asking competitors to cooperate. One of them has higher costs and needs to raise the price? All the others need to agree on it. There's all kinds of complexities in this kind of system.

I never paid that kind of money. At least in my circles nobody ever had extravagant cable packages. Just the basic and perhaps one special interest package like sports.

There was never a time that Netflix streaming had a majority of the popular movies available.

It didn't need to, we were still happy enough to go the cinema for box office releases back then. Remember that streaming, despite how it might feel, is a stupidly recent thing. Disney went "let's get in on this cash cow" less than 5 years ago.

Netflix started streaming in 2007. It came to mobile in 2010 with the introduction of the iPad. Hulu was also launched in 2007.

Netflix streaming was unexceptional. I dropped it when it became an extra cost option and didn’t pick back up again until House of Cards. Sadly their DVD service has decayed considerably.

They were on the way to free over the air free HDTV till the cable companies started trying to kill it.

To me it is messed up the commercial/programming/cost ratio if you look at providers like youtube and Hulu. We are all getting less for more money.

And all this streaming just fragmented society even more. I remember when we all used to (locally) talk about the recent show that we all watched at the same time, or the same news program. Now you have to catch up to all your friends because they streamed a whole series in one night. I mean we should just call them extended length movies anyway.

Streaming shows can drop weekly. HBO and Apple do it. Arguably it would help keep people from hopping around services.

Strange thing though that the music industry managed to do fine without resorting to this. Dr Dre is not exclusive to Apple music.

So why does it have to be this way with video?

The music industry sells music by the minute, not by the hour. If you could only buy entire albums, the music industry would have guaranteed moved in this direction too.

They totally managed it in the video rental days though. There were no exclusives then, at least not where I lived.

Problems for Netflix started when they started competing against other content providers with their own original content. If they didn't produce their own content and just provided a distribution platform for others I think we would still have everything on Netflix

I wish it could be that way, but the content providers started to jack up their prices and withhold certain content a long time before Netflix started their own content factory. Hulu, owned by one of the largest content providers out there, was the turning point. In retrospect it might have been a good time for government to step in and declare that content providers and streaming services must be separate for the good of consumers.

Interestingly, the same thing almost happened with Spotify, but most artists eventually came back instead of defecting to other services. I know there are some exclusive artists on each platform, but we've somehow dodged that same bullet with music streaming. Maybe because there are 3-4 relatively popular services, and artists have a little more sway over their distribution? Of course, Spotify is currently commiting this same sin in the podcast space so it's not like their hands are clean.

This is a huge point that I bet there will be many business case studies around: why didn't what happened to Netflix happen to Spotify?

I thought Tidal was going to be that. Remember their first promo video [0]? Full of A listers pretty much declaring that they're making an artist collective? It had every reason to occur...except it didn't. Why?

[0] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cYYGdcLbFkw

Spotify is not exactly a shining beacon on the hill for a successful company. They aren’t profitable and they are total beholden to the record labels. They are forced to give 70% of their revenue to record labels. Their fixed cost go up in lockstep with their revenue - not exactly the model of a successful tech company.

Netflix paid a fixed amount to license content and then could spread that cost as it gained customers. It’s the same with their own content. They never have to pay the content producers again for the content they fund.

...until Netflix's licensing agreements expire, which they do regularly. Then the networks demand twice as much money and they have to either keep growing to outpace the cost of licensing or jack up subscription fees, or both.

Or they “become HBO before HBO becomes them”. That was the entire reason for them doing their own content.

I would argue they are in a much more stable position vs Netflix. They are the one stop shop for every kind of audio. Retention will be the true barometer here.

How is a company that is not profitable and will never make more than a 30% gross margin on a customer in a more stable position?

They are also suffering from the “DropBox problem”. Streaming music is not a product. It’s a feature. Their largest competitors don’t have to make money on streaming music. Streaming music for Apple and Amazon are just features to sell hardware.

Is this were the case, why is Amazon's and Apple's pricing the same as Spotify's?

Spotify isn’t profitable. Apple and Amazon don’t need for their streaming products to be profitable as stand a line services.

Just like Microsoft doesn’t need for OneDrive to be profitable by itself - hence the “Dropbox problem”.

https://www.inc.com/will-yakowicz/why-dropbox-founders-said-...

Do you think AppleTV+ is profitable as $7.99 stand alone service?

Reason #1: if your work is still available on a cheaper, bigger platform, people are not likely to switch to the the more expensive, smaller platform.

If your old work is still available on the cheaper+bigger platform, but the new work is only on the more expensive+smaller platform, maybe the true fans will switch, but A-listers don't make money just from the true fans.

It is my understanding - and correct me if I'm wrong - that a-listers have the leverage to move their entire catalogue over if they wish.

Could they have, en masse, done this over to Tidal? Would that have broke Spotify?

Was it not that Spotify let record companies in on ownership, making it a joint venture of sorts?

Is that how it happened? My memory is more: Content started disappearing so Netflix started producing original content as a safety net.

Doubtful. The studios were always going up launch their own competing service and not license their content to Netflix. HBO plainly refused to even entertain that conversation and then the race was on - could Netflix become HBO faster than HBO could become Netflix.

Nope. That's the fast lane to getting ground down by content owners; they'll determine how much profit you're allowed to make. See also: Pandora, Spotify.