For HBO/Max's foot-shooting specifically, David Zaslav is why.

https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-communications/can-...

Imagine being the person who took a rock solid brand like HBO and flushed it down the toilet…

There was another really good New Yorker piece recently about Howard Schultz (the Starbucks CEO responsible for elevating the company into the juggernaut chain it is today) and his insistence on rolling out these Oleato drinks that are literally just coffee with olive oil drizzled in.

Granted, I don't think Oleato is enough to kill Starbucks, but my takeaway of the whole thing was that sometimes these C-suite guys end up in positions where everyone around them is too afraid to say "what the fuck are you doing."

I don't know anything about Oleato, but some people swear by the coffee+MCT oil (bulletproof coffee) combo. I see several brands at Whole Foods that are basically this (Super Coffee and others). Oleato doesn't sound too far off from that, and looking it up, it looks intriguing.

But reading more about it, seems they put way too much oil in the coffee. Super Coffee has 3 grams of MCT oil, I'm seeing Oleato with 34 grams of oil reported in a Grande.

Trouble here is that “Some people” isn’t the public for Starbucks, they have to cater for a wide swath of the population for them to make sense as a business the way they have shops all over the place.

So trying to convince people to drink something bitter adding something else that is also bitter, like olive oil, is something only someone completely disconnected from reality would do. The super rich are definitely lost to the rest of the world.

What a better way to give your customers the shits than to drizzle oil in coffee.

Coffee + oil + magnesium citrate + sennosides = Maximizing spatial awareness in record time.

I've loved the Oleato drinks that I've had, although they are very caloric

Oleato? Is that pronounced like “Aviato”?

Afaik they were or are planning to add a bunch of low quality content to Max from Discovery or something like that and didn't want to destroy HBO's reputation. Not sure though

> "One thing that we have learned is that piracy is not a pricing issue. It’s a service issue"

Gabe Newell of Valve, Oct 2011

[1] https://www.gamesradar.com/gabe-newell-piracy-issue-service-...

I struggle to understand how services like Netflix or Max have an issue with providing service. How could they possibly make it easier to access their content with various apps?

The issue is that Neflix, Max and the others are a bridge between you and the content you want to watch. When this content starts to shift around and things that were available in one place now are in another, consuming content becomes problematic.

In addition to that, prices are going up while overall catalogue size seems to be going down (at least the catalogue of quality content)

On top of that you have an increasing tendency of just canceling things left and right because the ROI from the companies perspective is not as high as they were hoping and so fuck the people who were invested in that TV series.

The end result is that the entire streaming landscape is a mess, everything is becoming more expensive and you get no real benefit in return and at a certain point, if I want to watch TV series X or Movie Y my best bet is to just pirate the damn thing and call it a day.

MAX, YouTube Premium, Spotify, Netflix, Disney+ can all be had for about $100/mo. Even assuming someone only makes $20/hour, that's about 15 minutes of work per day for a month to access effectively unlimited content. If you can't find what you want to watch there, swap providers or just buy the content on Apple TV/Google Play/etc.

Again, I struggle to see how these platforms don't provide massive value. Like that's one meal out any more for a family of four. Pirating content when it's so cheap seems entitled to me, like not tipping when you go out to eat (in the US) because you have personal issues with tipping.

100/month can be A LOT depending on where you live.

Only referring to the US here as I’m not sure of pricing in the hundreds of other countries out there.

You said that you struggle to see how these platforms don't provide massive value which is fair from your point of view but I personally struggle to see how any of the platforms provide 5€/month worth of value, let alone 10 or 20.

I guess it's a matter of perspective and what do we find valuable in life.

As for tipping, that's a can of worms I'm not going to open because as a european I find the whole concept insane.

You struggle to see how Netflix provides five Euros a month in value. I… ok.

Yes. There’s Netflix set up on the tv at my home. I don’t pay for it and I watched < 10 hours of content in the last 3 years.

That’s definitely not worth 5€/month for me.

Not saying it’s not worth it for everyone, just saying the value streaming services provide is not all that absolute.

People want the same for TV shows and movies that they already have with music. They want a spotify like experience but with movies. One subscription where they can access everything they want. This is how you could make it easier.

I am not saying it is realistic as the hosting and production costs are just not the same. And exclusives are a standard way to attract subscribers.

If I remember correctly as well while music has consolidated, the revenue artists get from it is much lower than what they used to get with the old model. I can see why that does not really motivate the industry to provide a more convenient solution. Spotify showed them that it might hurt their bottom line so why would they go that route.

These copyright owners always defeat themselves. Netflix used to have a rich selection of content. Now every single studio has its own shitty streaming service instead. You subscribe to one of these things and you find they have like 5 films you like. You watch one of these things and you find they compressed the "high definition" stream so much it has artifacts in 90% black frames.

Meanwhile "pirates" have everything humanity ever created in Blu-Ray quality all in one place and thoroughly catalogued. Makes me feel like a sucker.

My lifetime Plex pass I bought a few years ago is paying off in spades.

Netflix used to have a rich selection of content because content creators licensed it to Netflix without realizing how streaming was going to eat into physical media sales.

$15 Netflix wasn't going to replace a $75 cable TV package, $30 for a couple premium channels, and a $10-15/week Blockbuster habit (around $150/mo) over the long term. Once studios realized that licensing their content to Netflix was cannibalizing their revenue from other sources, they weren't going to decide they didn't actually want revenue.

$150/mo buys you way better entertainment today than it used to. If you remember the 90s, you should remember the absolute dearth of content to the point that you'd end up watching infomercials - we'd watch commercials as entertainment because there was nothing better. Yea, the current situation definitely isn't perfect and it sucks any time companies are trying to grab more of your cash. I mean, $73.50 buys you Netflix, Disney+, Hulu, Max, Paramount+ and Showtime all without ads and with way more and better content than a cable package offered in the 90s or 2000s. Plus, it's easy enough to sign up for one, watch a bunch of its content for a month and then jump to another service (paying for only one or two at a time).

It was unrealistic to believe that we'd have one extremely cheap service that everyone would license their content to over the long run.

For those born in the late 90s, you wouldn't remember the absolute garbage that was entertainment before the mid/late 2000s. It isn't perfect today, but there's so much to watch at your fingertips in a way that there just wasn't back then. If it was 11pm, there was just nothing on TV and if you didn't have a DVD you were just out of luck.

Being realistic, the copyright holders would have "defeated themselves" if they continued licensing content at low rates when they realized that streaming was cannibalizing other revenue streams. What we're experiencing sucks - it was better when Netflix had a richer selection and things were cheaper. No one likes companies getting more money out of them - especially when we had better years before they realized we were all moving to streaming. However, it was bound to happen. The alternative would be them seeing their revenue drop to an incredibly low level.

It's not that baffling. For a time, they were trying to grow their subscriber base and luring them in with low prices. Now that they have their subscriber base, they want to get back to the revenue they were getting before. Realistically, entertainment companies weren't going to accept lower revenue than they previously had for their product. As the industry transitions from physical media and cable TV to streaming, they needed to get users over the hump of signing up.

It isn't harder to pay than to pirate. It's just getting more expensive. Max's move to charge $4 extra for 4K doesn't make it harder to pay. You say that people will pay for media if it's easy and a good experience. C'mon, Max isn't changing the ease or experience. They're just changing the price.

We got used to paying less for entertainment and now we're all annoyed that they're trying to get us back to paying what we used to pay 20 years ago.

I'm not suggesting that cost isn't an important factor. It is. But an argument many people made was "I'd pay for it if they'd just make it available." Turns out, we don't like the price. Tons of people with cable used to pay $15/mo for HBO. Max has more content and is more convenient than what HBO offered 15-20 years ago.

It's really not baffling and they aren't making it harder. They want more money and we don't want to pay as much. I'm not saying that it doesn't make the price hikes garbage. It's just not baffling: they want to get back the revenue they're losing in declining physical media sales and declining cable TV subscription rates.

> It isn't harder to pay than to pirate. It's just getting more expensive.

No, it's harder too. Shows I want to watch bounce between the various silos of un-indexed content, without notice, as licenses shift and expire. Each silo behind their own separate paywalls. New ones pop up and shut down. Their feature matrix changes. They introduce geo restrictions, device restrictions, they force you to sign in from your 'home location' every few weeks to keep features like live TV running. Of course they'll charge you even if you don't, because you've been traveling for a while, in a geo where you can't even access the content you're paying for in the first place.

I don't care about the money, within reason. I care about being able to sit down and watch the show I want, in 4K, with Dolby whatever whatever. Without having to think about it. I'm trying to relax here dammit, lol.

This isn't about Max wanting a few extra dollars, it's just a price hike. We'd whine if they moved the price point up in the same way we're whining they kept the price the same but de-contented it. That's not the part that sucks.

Chasing down which of the 11 streaming services has the TV show you want to watch on a Mario-esque "the princess is in another castle" adventure sucks. When you find it, being greeted with a message saying that you've changed IP address too many times this year so better luck next year sucks. Then trying to figure out why it looks like it was filmed with a potato because you missed the email saying unless you act now and pay more, you're only getting 480p - sucks.

I only recently got into this pirating thing. I was completely willing to have a Netflix subscription, and Amazon Prime, and HBO/Max. Now I feel like I am being milked. So screw it, I literally spent money on some stream pirating software, going hog wild. I have JustWatch and spreadsheets. My targets are listed and I knock them down. Sure, I'll do your service for a whole month, during which I will slurp down the TV shows (anywhere from two to twenty) I want for myself, my mother, and some friends. Then move on to the next. If I do my homework beforehand, that week-long free trial is all I need most of the time. Track movies that are coming on whatever service that month, grab what I can get. I'll manage all of that later. Tubi, despite the low-res films, is the great equalizer, but Roku and Freevee don't hurt either.

I would have been fat, dumb, and happy at a hundred bucks a month but they can't resist The Squeeze. We're dropping the resolution. We're limiting the number of simultaneous screens. We're tightening out catalog. We're putting out Originals, locked to us, instead of your old favorites. Just another two bucks a month. We're introducing ads into your tier. Any and every kind of shrinkflation, with a service almost like you're used to just another few bucks a month away. They can't help it, they just see it as leaving money on the table if they can't tighten the coils just a little bit every year.

"Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats."

That sounds more expensive than just paying money for content.

It's even more striking in comparison to music, where with a subscription to either Apple Music or Spotify you've covered pretty much the entire 'current mass-market music' ecosystem.

Something Apple Music tried to change by dumping money into exclusive deals. Which luckily failed.

I think the core difference is upfront capital investment required between music and TV/Film content. Which leads to different incentives and effects down the line.

One of my most common google searches is "what service is ____ on" because I never know where the hell to find anything.

I find justwatch to be reliable. Sometimes I even find something new to watch on there too.

This is something that JustWatch is useful for.

> It isn't harder to pay than to pirate.

lmao, you've obviously never watched anyone over 50 try and use streaming services in 2023.

If I had a one use time machine, fuck killing Hitler, I'm using it to go to the day I taught my parents about Netflix.

People over 50 invented Netflix, dude. Try harder.

Used to pay 20 years ago, during an era of cable TV monopolies and resultant sky-high pricing.

Netflix refuses to serve me HDR/4K content unless I jump through a series of hoops and use the correct browser, OS and whatever else I'd have needed to do. Now I just refuse to pay for it, especially given how easy it is for me to just pirate quality content.

I have no problem paying Floatplane for LinusTechTips content, because they just provide the high quality content, where I can even just download the VODs easily. I'm tired of corporations fucking me at every angle when possible...

[delayed]

IIRC I needed to use Microsoft Edge, and some codec from the Windows Store. Then I HAD to use HDMI (all my monitors are display port). There was something else too probably

Point is, if I can't just use my Firefox browser on Linux to get high quality content for money that I will happily pay, I'll just go get it for free.

Today it absolutely is harder to pay than to pirate.

It was easy when everything noteworthy was on Netflix. You payed for Netflix and got easy access directly on your TV to most trending content. This was more convenient than piracy.

Now the landscape is balkanaized and no one subscribes to all streaming platforms. You can never predict if something of interest will be present on the platform you subscribe to. Do you then subscribe to another service? Now you have to remember to unsubscribe. Do you rotate services and binge watch? Now you are not up to date and risk hearing/reading spoilers. This is less convenient than piracy.

I mean I pay the $20 or whatever for a whole season of a given show on Prime Video, you don't need to subscribe to a streaming service.

[delayed]

I took the "harder to pay" comment as "harder to justify" for families balancing rising costs on all fronts. For the one or two shows mom or dad have time to watch after the kids go to bed, piracy is still a convenient option to consider. Perhaps pay for Disney+ for the kids, and consolidate every other streaming service into automated piracy on a low-cost media server

its ironic that the best anti-piracy feature the "content industry" has going for them wasn't even developed by them, just the simple PITA of self hosting. From setting up a VPN, to finding torrents, to using a NAS, to setting up plex/jellyfin, to having codec issues on players, to annoying subtitles/dubs, to shitty interfaces on some protocols (dlna comes to mind), to difficulty in ripping blu-ray/DVD, I can see how an average (non-techie) family doesn't want to mess around with this shit and just pay for the content.

> The barrier to piracy is non-existent these days and you actually get a far better experience

I hadn’t used a torrent in a decade and revisited the concept due to this streaming service convulsion

I found that:

VPN to another country was a 1-click in a chrome extension I already had that for other reasons, and all the torrent sites remind you to enable it or install one thats just as simple

My TV was running a DLNA server on my network with a lot of storage space I never knew about. I had only connected it to the internet for an OTA update once, and never used any of the “Smart TV” stuff. But it also has USB ports.

It runs the latest video formats and can read subtitles packaged with them

The torrent downloaded directly to it at gigabit speed over my Wifi 6 network the ISP had already setup with their gear

The quality is far higher than what gets streamed over the internet. Something I was willing to overlook as long as the streaming services were more convenient.

I think a lot of people have similar infrastructure already right now, without needing to be an enthusiast in electronics or home entertainment

really is better at the moment

Not if your main devices are a smartphone and a smart TV, maybe a gaming console or a TV stick, which is the case for most people these days. Outside of the tech bubble, many people barely ever use a computer, especially outside of work.

I've often pondered the idea of a pirating site that lets you donate to specific individuals/teams of the production. For example, if you particularly liked the movie's animation but hated the writing, your donation would be sent to the animators. Basically a cinema meritocracy.

I can't quite put my finger on it, but this sounds legally problematic. Maybe even for the receiving party as they may be violating their contract by accepting the money.

Same. I was thinking about this in terms of rewarding music artists.

We could have invented PayPal!