Re:Technical Feasibility of Building Hitchhiker's Guide to t...
by thenmar on Tuesday April 01, 2014 @11:56AM
(#7509220)
That's only temping because of the high resolution. I'm not sure if it's Comcast being intentionally awful or just incompetent, but I can't seem to stream HD anything on netflix. I turn on manual buffering and HD options just aren't there. If that problem didn't exist, there's basically no benefit in making paying the large up front cost.
Now, if production costs were completely covered by subscribers, it would be interesting to see what sort of movies get made.
Each movie cost something like, well, let's just ballpark $10M average (the >$200M blockbusters are relatively rare, balanced by old & cheap filler content made down around $1M each). Lead article notes Netflix has 8900 movies. Round both up sensibly, and we're looking at $100B to create the content.
Netflix has some 44M subscribers. Assuming all that content was made for & paid by Netflix subscribers, that's $2272 per subscriber. 8-O
Talmand SWAGged the storage hardware cost at $1000. Storage prices being what they are, that will be $300 in a year or so.
Would you pay $2500 to own, in a box the size of a pack of cards, the entire Netflix library? With updates (package deal, you get 'em all as they're made to cover production costs) of every movie added thereafter for $0.25 each? Could we persuade the entire 44M Netflix subscribers to sign up?
Not sure what to do with those numbers, but they're fascinating.