This was solved for with music where pretty much every service has pretty much every song. People don’t need multiple music services, they just pick the one that best fits their style and needs. This is what the movie and TV industry needs to do if they want to beat piracy. This is what they should have done 15 years ago. Their greed is hurting them more than it’s helping.
Music is literally a textbook example of why it doesn't work.
And they likely lose subscribers to they literally get poorer.
Spotify knows it's only way out is exclusive content, hence the Rogan deal et al.
Then Spotify would have to charge whatever they need to charge to remain profitable without exclusive content. And the labels would have to charge Spotify whatever they need to charge for Spotify to exist, because otherwise they wouldn't have anywhere to sell their content.
I wish somebody could get all the media execs in a room and just deliver a simple message: "You can't compete on price; your competition is free. You must compete on experience if you're to compete at all."
With just a few hours worth of time and effort, it's possible to get a pretty sophisticated and automatic system set up that essentially makes getting a copy of a movie a literal one-click operation. You won't be able to watch it _right then_ as the find, download, process, import ... etc pipe takes time to run but at the end you'll have a high quality copy that will work on any device anywhere in the world.
Other than the immediacy, piracy is cheaper and less burdensome.
Unfortunately, there is the House of the Mouse, aka. Disney Legal Military Industrial Complex, and they don't let individuals or governments tell them what they can or can't compete on.
Not having to care about which platform something is on is so nice.
The end result is searching for legitimate content is a terrible experience. If it's a result from Prime, I just pass. If it's from Crave, I pass. If it's on Netflix, I don't see anything at all.
At least a decade ago streaming boxes had one search box and it would return results from all the sources, and if it appeared you knew you could watch it.
What the streamers provide today is a significantly worse experience than piracy, and I don't know how they haven't realized this.
Yum! Brands (KFC, Pizza Hut, Taco Bell, etc.) is slightly larger than Restaurant Brands International (Burger King). McDonald's is larger than both of them put together. Or if you want brands rather than corporations, there are a zillion burger chains.
> CVS vs Walgreens
Rite Aid and Walmart, among others.
> AT&T vs Verizon
The US wireless carrier with the largest market cap is T-Mobile, with only slightly fewer users than Verizon. There are also many smaller ones.
> Democrats vs Republicans
This isn't a result of consumer preferences, it's a result of the first past the post voting system creating a powerful incentive for the most similar parties to merge until there are only two left. (Score voting fixes this.)
> Apple vs Google
This is the only real market duopoly here, and it's the one they have to worry about.
Either they can license their content to multiple services so it's convenient for customers to subscribe to one service and get everything, or those two companies will eventually figure out a way to get the same effect and most likely end up sucking in 30% of their industry's revenue in the process.
That's how it used to work. They all started making their own platforms and pulling content off of Netflix because they thought they could get the same numbers as Netflix and keep all the payments instead of whatever slice Netflix was giving them.
Not sure if Tidal is profitable but they aren’t popular and are much more expensive than people are generally willing to spend. It’s also potentially subsidized by a corporate parent.
There’s also a trail of unprofitable or tiny businesses like SoundCloud and Bandcamp that may or may not survive quarter to quarter.
It’s not a solved problem.
Their stock value doubled in the last year
Their CEO Daniel Ek is worth 3.7 billion dollar.
But, in fairness, this is an industry that is adjacent to Hollywood. It is conceivable that they have some sort of weird profit-laundering scheme going to make sure not too much of the money goes back to the artists or something.
> The company posted a third-quarter operating income of 32 million euros ($34.1 million), its first quarterly profit since 2021, helped by a higher gross margin and lower marketing and personnel costs.
https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/spotifys-user...
The problem feels a lot like the situation MoviePass worked themselves into where they priced it unsustainably low but cheap money allowed that to run long enough to train a generation of customers that their content was only worth that much. I imagine Netflix would dearly love to say that your subscription includes a certain number of movies but you can add on more, or that there’s a premium tier, etc. but there isn’t an easy way to try something like that now that everyone is used to the current model.
The other side of the problem is that studios really don’t want market pricing. Subscriptions are banking on the idea that you’ll still pay $12/month and find something else to watch even if the big series/movie they’re promoting isn’t very good, and they’re keeping the prices for rentals really high which makes means people are often looking at 1-2 months of streaming charges for a single movie rental.
The combination of the two seems likely to make a lot of people pirating for years to come. Most people do not want to juggle multiple services and if they’ve learned how to pirate anything once it’s always going to be there the next time someone jacks up prices or plays games with availability. I think that’s going to last until someone has the courage to let services like YouTube or AppleTV offer rentals of everything at reasonable prices.
If I invested a weekend (4 days, maybe 2-3 weekends...) I could probably figure it out, and never ever ever again deal with the BS streaming services. It takes one person pissed off that they missed Ozark and that will be 1 click install, game on, open source tech only ever moves forward, its antifragile, unlike any individual business.
Which HDDs should you put in the synology (or are there SSDs that make more sense; need to check $/GB…)? Which VPN service makes the most sense? Which RSS thingy is as good as Prime, Netflix, HBO, etc, etc, combined?
That takes a while.
Setting up the rss is just minutes.
But that means companies must also realize the tech industry is a really bad business for 99% of companies in it.
Anyway, it's not my problem. It's their problem.
(Which is not a big loss, because I can’t imagine producing the Netflix knockoffs be a hundredth the price of a 007).