It would be all better (for the customer) if video streaming services was like music streaming service.

Want to hear an album? it's on Spotify / Apple Music / Deezer / Qobuz...

You pick the one that offers the best user experience (or unique features like HD songs).

Exclusives are basically non-existent.

This is quite hard to achieve with original comment getting the spotlight and being a differentiator between services. For "the rest" of the content, I think the situation is pretty much close to streaming services with music.

A solution could be time-based exclusives.

Stranger Things is on Netflix only for X days (a month?) and then it's everywhere.

The hype train will still give Netflix its edge, because a lot of people want to watch in the first few days after release.

And it completely devalues the content and their catalog.

Agreed, but I think it only works to a point. Content is becoming more commoditized/more generic (maximise margins/cash in on some big trend). This, coupled with way too many new services claiming exclusive originals and people are deciding to not even bother watching it or just to sail the high seas. It's much like at one point the music streaming services had exclusives too. Sorry Spotify I'd rather just not bother listening to Rammstein than have yet another subscription.

So an independent studio would produce a show, put it on all the platforms and the platforms would pay based on views? Sounds like youtube. The current model works because producing a television show is way more complex than making an album, it is way too much risk for indie companies to absorb.

Where precisely is the risk? If you already produced the content why not make it available on multiple streaming sites? Is it the production studio asking for exclusivity or the streaming outlets?

    The economics just don't work the same. 

the most lucrative scheme for productions, while also staying within that invisible boundary of not alienating consumers, for films and series: the exclusivity deals.

How's that dr watson?

    In an extreme example you are paying a long term subscription, let's say $200, for the exclusive privilege to access say 2 shows. That's $100 for one aficionado, per production.

    What you are advocating for is 

for each production to be made available on dozens of platforms each having most other productions, you end up with a prorata/ratio of that aficionado who viewed yours, but also happen to have viewed 8 other productions. Unless the viewer pays up 20x or 30x for some universal subscription, that's far less revenue than $100. In practice subscribers simply won't even spend 10x. Why? Because they are only ready to pay 10 times more for certain beloved productions, but very little for those that aren't deemed that necessary to watch. So they tend to accept to pay a lot for a few hits, even if they have to give up on all the rest.

Why does it not work the same for music?

    First, it used to. Apple, in the good old Steve Jobs days, did it good to break the practice. With iTunes. Which managed to catch up with every other platform and integrate well to provide a UX leaving the competition far behind.  Pressure power, and master maneuvers accomplished the exploit. Apple TV didn't show the same prouesse, maybe Jobs started to fade away, Apple didn't make a great screen display like they did with the iPod to gain that consumer pressure against the trad distributors, and it was simply a much harder battle due to the second reason below.

    A great tune is played many many many times. An average one at least far less. So the prorata formula used to compensate the owners, works OK. The pareto distribution applies where great hits get accordingly rewarded.
 
    With movies/series, unless it is one of those rare non thriller/mystery gem, it is watched once and for all. A one to one view to reward system puts greater productions at a deficit.

I doubt the Entertainment industry saw all of this from the get go, but they have decades of accounting experience and shaped it up once cable/satellite tv with network channels became prominent. It roughly applies the same with with streaming.

    Does it make it right? Legally it seems that they win, those exclusivity contracts are legal. Building a platform and funnel your productions through it only as well. Although legislators needs to step up their game, end the lobbying thr led to this abuse of Intellectual Property rights, to finally enforce what it is and just it: ownership of the art, not of its distribution.

As an old movie kind of guy: I don't get why nobody wants me to have a big economical catalogue of all the movies. If you want to watch stuff from before about 1990 your best bet is pirating it off Youtube, oddly. Or hoping it's part of the 20th Century Fox that ended up on Disney+.

The most generous film studio is .. Mosfilm. I suppose it's fitting that the Communist movies are available for free.

(Criterion looks promising but is a long way from all movies and US/CA only)

That's the paradox: everybody wants to build and operate that since it's obvious everyone would subscribe to such a service, it'd be a cash cow, a golden goose, etc. But nobody wants to share their slice of the copyright and licensing pie with anybody else for revenue reasons, brand reasons, whatever, so we're slowly moving back toward the cable model with 200 subscriptions and nothing to watch. Torrents will be back, big time, since they actually provide the service everybody wants.

This is essentially the ridiculous copyright laws backfiring.

The entertainment market is stagnating (if not quantity, at least quality-wise) because the copyright laws stiffle innovation instead of fostering it. Early-comers (Hollywood & co) are comfortably sitting on their stash of content, content with rehashing the same franchises. New-comers are forced to low-risk - low-quality content, sprinkled with anything they can get their hands on from other sources.

What part of that is about "ridiculous copyright laws backfiring", though?

It seems like it's copyright laws working as intended. (I may not love that I have to pay to access a 25 year old movie legally, but it hardly feels objectively unfair or ridiculous that I have to do that.)

The unfairness comes from the fact that society is paying to enforce those copyrights via expenses on judges, lawyers, police etc, but society is not getting a commensurate return on investment.

The purpose of copyright is to incentivize creativity, but society does not need to pay for 180 years of monopoly protection to incentivize creativity.

> society is not getting a commensurate return on investment.

What investment is “society” making in tv shows and movies?

The cost (or part of the cost) of the law enforcement apparatus around copyright.

I'm quite sure that the tax receipts from the sale, rental, and performance of the copyrighted material more than adequately covers the portion of those costs borne by society. (In fact, that's probably a fair part of the reason that government is willing to support lengthy and obstructive copyright protections: because it adds government revenue far in excess of the cost.)

I don’t know how one would tease that out of any tax receipt date, compared to economic loss due to suboptimal allocation of society’s resources.

Suppose copyright law was 15 years instead of 100 years or whatever. Society still gets the tax receipts and benefits from creation of the media, but the shareholders who own the media do not get to collect a price premium from the extra 85 years. That money can now be spent by consumers elsewhere as opposed to supporting media owners who already had sufficient incentive to create the media.

The question at the end of the day is, does a 100 year copyright term incentivize the creation of media with so much utility compared to copyright term of 15 years such that it makes sense for society to transfer extra resources to the media owners for an additional 85 years? Amongst other externalities to consider.

We are also paying for it with the loss of our shared culture to a few individuals.

The real question is why do people feel like they deserve to have access to absolutely everything? The home entertainment landscape has continually moved towards more options, better technology, and more access, and always at a cheaper rate per hour of programming than before. Of course, if you want to maintain access to absolutely everything, then your cost is always going to go up, because the pool of absolutely everything continues to get larger and larger, not just from new content, but from the inclusion of old content that wasn't available in any form before. There is a disconnect that comes from the fact that people can't/don't actually watch that much.

The only thing keeping cable alive today is live sports, but that eventually will be folded into existing streaming services or they will have their own services. Which brings me to my next point. There will very likely be 200 subscription services (if there aren't already), but the more there are, the more niche and specialized they will be. But importantly, you will be able to choose what you want (a la carte). This is a far cry from cable because cable has never been a la carte. They've always required you to purchase at least a basic package with 30-50 + channels, and each channel getting a couple bucks each month. The consumer's total cost is at least $50 / mo, probably more

Compare that to one of the typical big streamers which are $10 - $15 per month. Netflix, Max, Hulu, Disney - each of these alone has more content than you could ever watch. As long as they are all around to stay in competition, then prices will remain low. The absolute worst thing that could happen for consumers is for streamers to combine and form a conglomerate. Now that would be like cable - they'd have a monopoly and they'd end up charging you more overall than you were paying before, and then singling out "premium" content for even more money.

If you feel like you have to subscribe to all of them, that is simply a marker of their success in marketing to you. There is enough content (good content that you WILL enjoy) on any one of them. Or hell - even on Youtube which you can watch for free, there will be enough content to keep you from getting bored.

I don't know if I'd use words like 'feel like they deserve'. I'd rather use 'feel like it isn't possible because somebody said so'. It evidently is possible technically and people (IMHO correctly) are fed up with studios not being able politically to work together to provide a good service - IOW they vote with their wallets.

Mubi (https://mubi.com/) is nice. You don’t get a huge catalogue but they cycle it very regularly with varying thematic focus and showcase a mix of old movies and new art releases. It feels a bit like a cinema club. I recommend.

Sadly people focus as definitely shifted toward serial shows rather than films so movie streaming is not really an interesting market to address. I’m really confused by that because the feeling I get from 90% of the show I try to watch and always fail to finish is that there is a good movie hiding in the indulgent editing. Even prestige TV shows are full of padding.

Mubi's catalogue is tiny, and I find their marketing and interface (which strongly imply all the shows that have ever been been on the platform are currently on the platform, misleading). Criterion Channel (https://www.criterionchannel.com/) is a similar art film / critically acclaimed film network, which an enormously larger and more diverse catalogue. Officially it's only available in the US but if you sign up through a VPN it works everywhere.

> your best bet is pirating it off Youtube

From another old movie kind of guy: it's full of beautiful 1080p Bluray x265 torrents out there. Teams like VXT or RARBG release more old movies than one can watch.

I’m just terrified of using torrents. The risk/reward doesn’t match up for me. It’s easier for me to just buy the discs on eBay and call it good.

I host a weekly 80s/90s obscure movie night (mostly Hong Kong action Z-movies, Godfrey Ho and the like) and RARBG has come in surprisingly clutch. If the movie got a HK theatrical release it's the first place I look. Japanese stuff too.

Other surprising sources: Tubi which often has better quality video processing for the stuff where the VHS/DVD master is all that exists (protip: yt-dlp works), and Internet Archive where people upload all kinds of stuff, including Blu-Ray rips.

A ton of stuff is also on YouTube but it's often a low-quality master and/or edited for content so it's usually a last resort.

I’ve been subscribed to Criterion since the beginning and it’s the only service I’ve kept without cancelling, or desiring to cancel, since. If the catalog is up your alley, highly recommend.

That said, I also buy their Blu-Rays during the sales, so I might just be a fanboy.

This is so very true. I've been listening to Quentin Tarantino and Roger Avary's excellent movie podcast, Video Archive[1].

Some of the films they review are either only available on YouTube[2] or on second hand VHS tapes.

1. https://videoarchivespodcast.com/

2. Until the someone helpfully gets them taken down. Cheers for that.

This is because the free market is a killer for monopolies, unless government regulation kicks in.

I'd rather pay for the single item I'm consuming than for thousands I'm not paying.

The big innovation streaming services really brought was lowering the price for the crap content people watch and subsidising with people who buy the service and don't use it a lot. That's how they become better than piracy, not by centralisation (piracy is also incredibly decentralised) but by offering content at a reasonable price.

Let's say netflix costs 10$ a month and I watch 20 movies a month. 50c is a reasonable amount so I'm happy with my netflix subscription. Of course if I could pay 0.50$ to watch a movie I like I would just outright buy it - and not pirate it.

The problem with the industry is that content is overpriced. When piracy was a thing that just meant people were valuing the content at less than it was being sold. Sure, a percentage would convert anyway no matter the price, the rest would pirate it.

I sincerely hope we get rid of centralised services and we just end up with micro transactions to buy movies for cheap.

I think once AI will be used more in content production we will get there.

The only good one these days seem to be movie rental on youtube. That has the biggest catalog

If your IP is outside the US, say German, then you often don''t get the original audio offered. Piratebay has the best user experience.

It's so weird that they still haven't learned to provide multiple audio tracks and subtitles. I don't know how sizable the portion of the market is that they lose this way, but people like you and me won't ever consider one of Google's services to rent films. Presumably, US-centric decision-making is to blame.

Prime Video on apple tv box is awful for this too. English shows, dubbed in German with absolutely no way to get the original audio.

Urgh.

The competition against another media giant, Blockbuster, created Netflix in the first place. It wasn’t a state-owned monopoly.

Yeah, but there was no real competition for Netflix' main business, streaming, for at least 5 years, when everyone was happy with the show selection.

That’s correct, and I’m personally dissatisfied with the content currently available on Netflix, as well as the distribution of content across too many services. But it would be disingenuous to describe it as a market failure when the market was responsible for creating the industry in the first place.

If there’s a critical mass of consumers unhappy with the current streaming landscape, the providers will be forced to improve or risk being replaced by superior competitors. That’s what happened to Blockbuster as well, and what I suspect is going to happen to many major providers in the coming years.

Customers benefit from benevolent monopolies. If you can get everything you want from one place and for a good price, why would you ever shop around? One place caters to all of your needs, so you always know where to go. The problem is that having a monopoly doesn't incentivize benevolent behaviour.

If Steam is the only platform to get PC games, then I can just install Steam and get access to any game I want to play. I know how the service works, I don't need to install multiple things, my credit card is only tied to one service, etc. But if it's not, and I need to juggle between multiple places, then I need multiple clients, know how multiple different things operate, give my information to multiple companies, etc. I'd much rather only have Steam if Steam keeps their prices and service quality good. Would they if they were the only game in town? No idea, but the incentive wouldn't really be there.

That's only if you consider streaming services a separate market than cable television. With the decline in cable subscriptions, that's clearly not the case.

Netflix as one-to-see-all was never sustainable at the old price. Netflix have been raising prices the last few years, and stopping account sharing as per this article. All while having less content than ever.

What you describe doesn't sound like a free market, which assumes the product is freely available.

Free market isn’t the right concept to apply. Neither your understanding nor the use in the parent comment are right here.

Free market just means the market movements aren’t controlled, regulated, or otherwise changed by outside forces like a government.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but I doubt anyone considers a non-free market for entertainment like this. Isn’t entertainment the epitome of what you want to be a free market?

I enjoy YouTube movies model for that reason, I wouldn't mind an overlapping service of all streamers and just pay to rent / buy almost everything on-demand.

> It's interesting to see that free market competition actually worsened the customer offering when it comes to streaming services.

There is nothing "free market" about the crazy copyright regulations we have today.

Nothing in your post has anything to do with free markets... markets maybe, but copyright is not a "free market".... it is by definition a monopoly

a free market in content would be requiring the copyright holder to following something like FRAND for patents, and disallow them from making "exclusive" deals with one provider, this would then mean the market would be on price, speed, other competitive factors not on content library

Jup, gp was talking about unregulated markets. Those surprisingly often have winner take it all outcomes. I don't want to go back to company towns.

BTW back to the current situation with streaming services, we nearly would have had the same with movie theaters. But United States v. Paramount Pictures, Inc. shut that down, thankfully. Wouldn't expect such a ruling these days, though :(

It isn't an unregulated market. Copyright is a regulation.

There are no unregulated markets. Property rights are a regulation.

> If we don't regulate streaming services to have exactly one really good service that I prefer, then we will go back to company towns.

What are you talking about?

A free market for content provider essentially means that they can do whatever they want with their content and rights to it.

The number of movies I wanted to watch in the last few months that where actually available anywhere on streaming was devastatingly low. Some where available, but only dubbed (which I don't watch), most where not. Not even to buy.

So I now either go into my basement and look for the BluRay/DVD like twenty years ago or ... :)

> Back in the days, Netflix was a one-to-see-all service and that was also one of the reasons why it took people from torrenting to paying for movies.

Netflix streaming never had a good library of the most popular movies - especially after the initial STARZ partnership.

> It's interesting to see that free market competition actually worsened the customer offering when it comes to streaming services.

I don't know why anybody could possibly be surprised by this.

Businesses do not optimize for customer satisfaction, they optimize for profit. Customer satisfaction is merely a pathway to profitability.

When $STUDIO decides to pull their content from Netflix so they can put it on their own streaming service, nobody should be surprised. They're trying to optimize their profits. They don't care customers will be annoyed paying for two streaming services, they're betting they'll make more from customers paying them directly than from Netflix's licensing fees.

> Back in the days, Netflix was a one-to-see-all service

I think you mean "the only game in town" because the selection was worse back then!

Plus HBO and Hulu were around. I still remember Hulu commercials with Alec Baldwin. He hadn't shot anyone yet, that we know of.

I also remember getting GOT dvds mailed from netflix because i didn't want to pay for HBO service.

Yes! People who claim things are worse now were either not around then, or they have bad memory.

Competition has forced all these streamers to up their game and produce more good shows to stay popular. Netflix has never been a one-to-see-all service. When Netflix was the only major streamer, other networks and studios were also producing great content. It's not like they came out of nowhere. You still had to find other ways to watch the very best shows and movies across all of TV, which at the time means you would've had to have a cable subscription with premium channels like HBO and Showtime. And if you just decided on a random movie, there is a way better chance it is on Netflix now than there would've been ten years ago.

Nowadays, there are more shows, including more prestige shows, more movies, more comedies, more kids shows, as well as a lot of stuff that never would have been made twenty years ago. And it's all cheaper now than having cable ever was, even when you add them all up. And that's making a big assumption that you actually want/need to see "all". Which you don't. Any one of them would be totally sufficient to fill your time with quality programming. Netflix today is filled with way more content of all types than Netflix ten years ago.

> free market competition

Ah yes, free market competition funded by insane amounts of quantitative easing pumping equity into NFLX which took that money and lowballed customers to pick them up early. And of course, this is all somehow "worse" than the universe before Netflix existed, when you'd have to physically go rent movies and return them.