I really like this movie and think it's the best the Spider-man franchise has to offer, and am excited what similar creative teams do with the property.
I really like this movie and think it's the best the Spider-man franchise has to offer, and am excited what similar creative teams do with the property.
As someone who has studied a bit of animation, it is a technical and cinematic masterpiece. The amount of attention to detail in Spiderverse is superb.
As someone who has studied a bit of animation, it is a technical and cinematic masterpiece. The amount of attention to detail in Spiderverse is superb.
Strawpoll: who here used to pirate, stopped when netflix became a thing, and started again now that the industry's greed is forcing absurd spend and inconvenience with service fragmentation?...
Strawpoll: who here used to pirate, stopped when netflix became a thing, and started again now that the industry's greed is forcing absurd spend and inconvenience with service fragmentation?
(Aside: if anyone is interested, I know a good paid plex server which I've been using ever since I got fed up with netflix not having certain series and seasons)
I see it differently. There's now so much great content between the various services I'm subscribed to, or get free on YouTube, I just stopped caring about the content that I didn't have access...
I see it differently. There's now so much great content between the various services I'm subscribed to, or get free on YouTube, I just stopped caring about the content that I didn't have access to.
At some point, the backlog grows so much you have entertainment stacked up for years.
And when you're patient enough, things always come back in various ways anyway.
I feel the same. A few weeks ago my spouse and I were talking about TV show theme songs. Somehow the theme from "The Greatest American Hero" came up. I asked Siri to play the song and she did....
I feel the same. A few weeks ago my spouse and I were talking about TV show theme songs. Somehow the theme from "The Greatest American Hero" came up. I asked Siri to play the song and she did. Then I went on Netflix and searched for the show because I wanted to watch an episode since I could barely remember it. It wasn't there. I went to the AppleTV's general search feature and it tells me it's available on Peacock. Well fuck that. I'm not subscribing to a service for a single show, especially one from my childhood. But also, I'm not going to pirate it because it was just a random whim I had. So NBC has lost out here. I lost nothing because I'm pretty sure the show was canceled before the first season ended, so it probably wasn't very good to begin with. But I don't really care because I have a stack of shows on different services all lined up waiting to be watched.
Yeah but there is that feeling when a particular show or movie would really hit the spot so you search your streaming channels only to find them gone. That really sucks. Sure there’s thousands of...
Yeah but there is that feeling when a particular show or movie would really hit the spot so you search your streaming channels only to find them gone. That really sucks. Sure there’s thousands of options but without that one you’re looking for it all feels empty.
Yep, absolutely. Growing up I pirated a shit ton of movies, music, and tv shows. With GPM (and now Spotify) + Netflix suddenly I wasn't downloading nearly as much. Over the last year and a half or...
Yep, absolutely.
Growing up I pirated a shit ton of movies, music, and tv shows. With GPM (and now Spotify) + Netflix suddenly I wasn't downloading nearly as much. Over the last year and a half or so I've found myself expanding my Plex quickly. I even bought my own NAS server.
People are all crazy if they think that the industry could afford to put its entire yearly output on a single $15/mo subscription. I get it, that's what you want, but the industry choosing not to...
People are all crazy if they think that the industry could afford to put its entire yearly output on a single $15/mo subscription.
I get it, that's what you want, but the industry choosing not to adopt a business model that would lead to either bankruptcy or a drastic reduction in the amount of new content being made is probably a good thing.
When Netflix first rolled out their streaming service, the amount of good TV shows being made was a lot smaller than it is today. I would argue that the value proposition hasn't changed much, there is just way more quality content competing for your money than there used to be.
Also I wouldn't go blabbing about some paid Plex server unless you want it to get shut down.
The problem is most people only care about, like, 1% of that output. It just happens to be scattered across $150 worth of subscriptions. And even if you were down to pay the $150/month you can't...
People are all crazy if they think that the industry could afford to put its entire yearly output on a single $15/mo subscription.
The problem is most people only care about, like, 1% of that output. It just happens to be scattered across $150 worth of subscriptions.
And even if you were down to pay the $150/month you can't get to like, a single portal to browse it all. You have to jump from site to site or app to app. They outright refuse to allow aggregators to list their content. Apple tried to set up such a service but Netflix told them to pound sand so their TV app has a big Netflix shaped void in it. (I think Amazon Prime video also isn't listed but I'm not sure about that).
But if you only care about 1% of the shows on a given service, why do you feel the need to subscribe to it every month? Just subscribe for one month to catch up on that one show and then cancel....
But if you only care about 1% of the shows on a given service, why do you feel the need to subscribe to it every month?
Just subscribe for one month to catch up on that one show and then cancel.
This is infinitely better than the old way of doing things where you paid $100+/mo for a cable subscription that still made you pay for the 99% of crap you didn't want.
It's annoying, but since everyone else got on board, it hardly matters. I have 2 queues instead of 1. One that's only available on the Netflix app and one that has all the other services on it. I...
Apple tried to set up such a service but Netflix told them to pound sand so their TV app has a big Netflix shaped void in it.
It's annoying, but since everyone else got on board, it hardly matters. I have 2 queues instead of 1. One that's only available on the Netflix app and one that has all the other services on it. I mean, with old-school TV, I had to go to different channels to get different shows, or put in different DVDs, so pressing a different button to open a different app doesn't really strike me as being too much of a burden. Would I prefer they were all available with all the other shows on my device? Sure, but I'd also like a lot of other things more.
I dare you to actually do some napkin math on this. This whole "the industry would collapse" is utter nonsense; propaganda peddled by the MPA at best. First of all, I'd happily pay more than the...
I dare you to actually do some napkin math on this. This whole "the industry would collapse" is utter nonsense; propaganda peddled by the MPA at best.
First of all, I'd happily pay more than the cost of a netflix subscription for this. It just needs to be convenient. Read: not six fucking different services.
Second, the industry didn't collapse when netflix first arrived on the scene. It boomed. It then got greedy and everyone wanted a bigger piece of the pie.
Third, content whales are rare. Most people just watch whatever they find, once in a while. Direct sales suffer due to streaming, but they have been suffering for years already, that doesn't change whether there is one or twenty streaming services.
The music industry figured it out. The movie industry is just stuck in the past.
I've heard this tune so many times... Spotify killed piracy, not the industry. Steam similarly killed games piracy. Netflix temporarily killed tv piracy and now it's back in force.
As for the netflix value prop, the problem isn't the amount of content, it's exactly what content. They're losing fan favorites such as The Office. As for me, they lost me when I found out they didnt have the last season of Brooklyn Nine-Nine. Call me impatient if you want: I wasn't going to wait for whatever licensing bullshit to clear to finish my binge.
My napkin math shows that Netflix's annual subscription revenue in the US is roughly equivalent to 2019's domestic box office totals. So they make enough to cover just the movies. Now they have...
My napkin math shows that Netflix's annual subscription revenue in the US is roughly equivalent to 2019's domestic box office totals.
So they make enough to cover just the movies. Now they have pay for all the TV that gets made. The math doesn't add up.
Second, the industry didn't collapse when netflix first arrived on the scene. It boomed. It then got greedy and everyone wanted a bigger piece of the pie.
You're viewing the past through rose-tinted glasses. Netflix didn't really have more content in 2009 than they do today. At no point did they actually host everything. For the first several years of it's existence, the service subsited off the leftovers of the industry, getting movies that were already running on cable and TV shows that aired a year or two ago.
Netflix doesn't replace cinemas though? Like, the only thing we're talking about here is consolidating streaming services in one place instead of twenty (or at least making the content available...
Netflix doesn't replace cinemas though? Like, the only thing we're talking about here is consolidating streaming services in one place instead of twenty (or at least making the content available globally). Having twenty services instead of one doesn't 20x the revenue. People have a limited amount of entertainment money they're willing to spend. Optimizing that money (eg. with a larger catalogue in a single subscription, distributing based on views, exactly what spotify does in other words) is going to be a better yield to the industry. Individually, services may get less, but that's just tragedy of the commons.
My best guess is they all know this, but they're still pulling away from netflix in order to get more leverage for better licensing fees. Because aside from Disney, most of these dinosaurs can't pull off a streaming service on their own.
My napkin math shows media revenue from the big four media conglomerates to be ~$130 billion per year, including both television and film. Assuming 100 million subscribers, you’d need to pay ~$108...
My napkin math shows media revenue from the big four media conglomerates to be ~$130 billion per year, including both television and film. Assuming 100 million subscribers, you’d need to pay ~$108 per month to access that content. Round it up to $125 or $150 if you consider independent companies or internet media. Round down some if you charge a premium for first run movies.
… okay, again, netflix does not replace cinemas. I'm sorry if I sound frustrated, but what's getting lost in translation here? You have N streaming services with silo'd content. This is not a good...
… okay, again, netflix does not replace cinemas.
I'm sorry if I sound frustrated, but what's getting lost in translation here? You have N streaming services with silo'd content. This is not a good situation for consumers. A better situation is anywhere between 1 and N streaming services, as long as most of the content is globally available. In short, I'm asking for broader, more permissive license deals with all streaming services. There's no $130 billion (or whatever) that needs to all come from Netflix, there.
It's a bit weird to lump them together, but movie & TV get their revenue from (in no particular order):
Merchandising
Advertising
Direct sales (DVDs etc)
Box office
Broadcast licenses (this includes netflix!)
Broadcast licenses are just one part of their revenue.
(PS, netflix revenue != industry's revenue from netflix. They license their content to netflix and get a piece of the pie, not the whole pie!)
Furthermore, whatever revenue they're making now is not an exact figure of what they need to make. That number might be too high, or it might even be too low. Higher numbers could boost the industry further, create even more jobs in the arts. The claim that the industry would collapse can only be valid if they start making significantly less simply because they consolidated their streaming services into one.
I’m not assuming that Netflix will include cinema (although I believe it is likely they will, given the format similarities), it was just easiest to get the data for the larger media divisions...
I’m not assuming that Netflix will include cinema (although I believe it is likely they will, given the format similarities), it was just easiest to get the data for the larger media divisions rather than separating out movies and TV. I thought it was an interesting data point that was pertinent to the conversation. While it isn’t a final target, I would certainly argue it is a starting point. Regardless, excluding box office grosses, you’re still looking at more than $100 billion in revenue for the major TV studios. Now, that does still include merchandising and their other sources, although I suspect advertising would likely also take a hit in a consolidated streaming model. Ultimately I’m not sure what a breakdown would look like, if advertising and licensing constitute a majority of revenue, a solution will need to be worked out. Maybe the efficiencies of having a streamlined model outweigh lower revenue. Who knows?
I get your overall point about more permissiveness in licensing and ease of streaming. Your earlier comments did seem to support the idea of a single streaming source (at least, that’s what I read into them). I personally agree that it should be easier to watch without going from streaming service to streaming service.
Well, sort of. I prefer competition, and there is no real gain from having only a single source as long as the content is available globally if there is more than one (cf. Pandora / spotify...
Your earlier comments did seem to support the idea of a single streaming source (at least, that’s what I read into them).
Well, sort of. I prefer competition, and there is no real gain from having only a single source as long as the content is available globally if there is more than one (cf. Pandora / spotify situation). But it's easier to just say that all the netflix competitors should consolidate... Specifically, they should consolidate their content.
I agree $100/mo is a starting point for a discussion but it is definitely not a target price. And if it were, it would exclude so many people that it's not reasonable to think about it this way.
I also do concede that advertising is pretty badly affected by the VOD industry... Hm, well.
I'm too tired to keep doing math right now but probably the way to figure this out is compare the numbers with spotify's. Look at how much the music industry is making, how much it spends, and what kind of revenue spotify brings to the table. What the breakdown looks like there would be informative as well: direct sales, advertising, streaming licenses are all relevant for music.
Apple, Amazon, and Hulu seem to be working towards this to an extent. A lot of the smaller premium services can be subscribed through them, consolidating a lot of your content in one "app". None...
I personally agree that it should be easier to watch without going from streaming service to streaming service.
Apple, Amazon, and Hulu seem to be working towards this to an extent. A lot of the smaller premium services can be subscribed through them, consolidating a lot of your content in one "app". None of them are very comprehensive though.
Frankly, I find the idea of having everything in one place nice, but as it is right now I hardly find it inconvenient enough to justify switching to piracy.
If you consolidate them into one though, we end up in the same situation we were with cable 10 years ago. Having everything in one place would be a little more convenient, sure, but my monthly TV...
If you consolidate them into one though, we end up in the same situation we were with cable 10 years ago. Having everything in one place would be a little more convenient, sure, but my monthly TV budget is not $100/mo. I prefer being able to just choose a couple services that have lots of content I like, then occasionally subscribing to another for a month or two to catch some show I don't want to miss.
Having a few different apps to look through for content on my TV isn't nearly inconvenient enough for me to justify piracy. Not when I still easily remember what the ecosystem used to be like.
Isn't this more NBC's fault than Netflixes? I'm sure Netflix would love to keep those shows, but since NBC needs some sort of value proposition for people to justify downloading Peacock to...
They're losing fan favorites such as The Office. As for me, they lost me when I found out they didnt have the last season of Brooklyn Nine-Nine. Call me impatient if you want: I wasn't going to wait for whatever licensing bullshit to clear to finish my binge.
Isn't this more NBC's fault than Netflixes? I'm sure Netflix would love to keep those shows, but since NBC needs some sort of value proposition for people to justify downloading Peacock to themselves they're probably withholding it.
Oh yeah I'm not blaming netflix in any of this. I'm pretty sure they know what it means to lose this stuff, and they'll be the first ones to know the impact this sort of stuff has on their...
Oh yeah I'm not blaming netflix in any of this. I'm pretty sure they know what it means to lose this stuff, and they'll be the first ones to know the impact this sort of stuff has on their subscriber base.
I wouldn't have thought of it that way, but actually yes. Spotify is terrible. Terrible for net neutrality, terrible for artists, and terrible for ad-blockers. I'm done with them and now either...
I wouldn't have thought of it that way, but actually yes.
Spotify is terrible. Terrible for net neutrality, terrible for artists, and terrible for ad-blockers. I'm done with them and now either listen on youtube or pirate music.
As for television and movies, I'll use Amazon Prime or Netflix, or Disney+. Lots of great content. If I'm looking for something specific, I'll pirate it... but that's usually older more esoteric stuff. I like going to the theater and will watch new releases on the big screen.
I haven't pirated games for a long while. Steam has a lot of sales all the time and it's honestly way more convenient than piracy.
All services that I know of are terrible for classic movies. Trying to find Hitchcock, film noir, western, Bergman, and early Woody Allen, some of my favorite things, is a waste of time. I...
usually older more esoteric stuff
All services that I know of are terrible for classic movies. Trying to find Hitchcock, film noir, western, Bergman, and early Woody Allen, some of my favorite things, is a waste of time. I definitely pirate those. I would probably pay a reasonable amount for a service with a huge catalog of old movies.
Well there is the Criterion channel, but it’s $100/year and may or may not be available in your area. Also if you’re a serious movie fan they also only stream at 1080p IIRC so it definitely leaves...
Well there is the Criterion channel, but it’s $100/year and may or may not be available in your area.
Also if you’re a serious movie fan they also only stream at 1080p IIRC so it definitely leaves something to be desired as an offering. Then again, Criterion Collection Blu Rays also aren’t in 4K despite the film masters having enough resolution to support it. Can’t win.
Yeah this is the whole issue with why they don’t offer what we want. “There’s no money in it/not enough demand.” Great so your product is worthless stop prosecuting people for piracy. Same with...
Yeah this is the whole issue with why they don’t offer what we want. “There’s no money in it/not enough demand.” Great so your product is worthless stop prosecuting people for piracy.
Same with Nintendo, they won’t sell their old catalogue of games anymore even though they could, but they’ll sure as shit sue ROM sites into the dirt and claim massive damages. Their product is simultaneously worth nothing and everything and they just get to hold it hostage forever.
Why not Tidal or Apple Music? I do wish YouTube didn’t brutalize recordings with its audio compression. It would be nice if official music by the artists or studios, at least, could be done...
Spotify is terrible. Terrible for net neutrality, terrible for artists, and terrible for ad-blockers. I'm done with them and now either listen on youtube or pirate music.
Why not Tidal or Apple Music?
I do wish YouTube didn’t brutalize recordings with its audio compression. It would be nice if official music by the artists or studios, at least, could be done losslessly. I find it useful to try new genres out, but to actually listen I usually flip to iTunes.
I never really stopped pirating, but what was once an almost daily habit became a very occasional need. The fragmentation of services mostly means that there is more content legally available...
I never really stopped pirating, but what was once an almost daily habit became a very occasional need. The fragmentation of services mostly means that there is more content legally available overall, which is a good thing.
But, because many services are not really available in Brazil, the services we have still concentrate a lot. In Brazil, Hulu, CBS All Access and HBO Max are not a thing and Friends is still on Netflix, for example.
I have five subscriptions but only pay for three. Netflix is the one with the most content, but Amazon Prime Video has better originals. Disney+ is garbage. I also have Globo Play, a local platform from the Globo Group, the largest media conglomerate of Latin America (a Brazilian company). It’s surprisingly awesome, with loads of local and international content. It has movies, TV shows, local news, Brazilian soap operas (the best in the world :) and live television on the same app. I also have Crunchyroll, but I should cancel it because I’m not using it these days. The content is good enough but there are no apps for Smart TVs and using my phone to cast it is kind of a bummer (I’m super lazy, as you can see).
With all that, pirating video content is rarely something I care enough to do. I’ll probably download the new Wonder Woman movie.
Just for completion, 100% of my digital comic books and manga are piracy, as well as almost all of my ebooks.
I've considered hoisting the black flag once again, but the ecosystem is very different now. I feel like everywhere I might go is being snooped and the only real action is on private trackers. But...
I've considered hoisting the black flag once again, but the ecosystem is very different now. I feel like everywhere I might go is being snooped and the only real action is on private trackers. But I'm not as plugged into the scene as I used to be so I can't get into them. And even if I could I don't have the spare time or inclination to keep up with ratio requirements or whatever.
Gabe Newell posited the model where likelihood of piracy is a function of the cost of going legit over the risk/cost of the work involved in piracy. As the numerator has increased I feel like the denominator has actually increased faster.
I haven't really used torrents in this "new ecosystem". Once in a while to fill fairly specific holes, or when looking for rarer things (dubs in specific languages and such). Most of it is just Plex.
I haven't really used torrents in this "new ecosystem". Once in a while to fill fairly specific holes, or when looking for rarer things (dubs in specific languages and such). Most of it is just Plex.
I've followed a similar arc but not because of service fragmentation as it is odd regional restrictions or generally bad app quality. I live in Canada, and some content just plain isn't available...
I've followed a similar arc but not because of service fragmentation as it is odd regional restrictions or generally bad app quality.
I live in Canada, and some content just plain isn't available because services are US only, or they're locked to a platform that streams at an aggravatingly bad quality. HBO Max content here only streams through one of our major telecom's applications, Crave. The stream quality feels like YIFY 1080p quality at best, and it doesn't even support surround sound over Chromecast like Netlfix, Prime, and D+ do.
It's not even like I don't have access to Crave—I do. But it's just so bad, I'd rather pirate so I can have better quality files.
I really like this movie and think it's the best the Spider-man franchise has to offer, and am excited what similar creative teams do with the property.
As someone who has studied a bit of animation, it is a technical and cinematic masterpiece. The amount of attention to detail in Spiderverse is superb.
Strawpoll: who here used to pirate, stopped when netflix became a thing, and started again now that the industry's greed is forcing absurd spend and inconvenience with service fragmentation?
(Aside: if anyone is interested, I know a good paid plex server which I've been using ever since I got fed up with netflix not having certain series and seasons)
I see it differently. There's now so much great content between the various services I'm subscribed to, or get free on YouTube, I just stopped caring about the content that I didn't have access to.
At some point, the backlog grows so much you have entertainment stacked up for years.
And when you're patient enough, things always come back in various ways anyway.
I feel the same. A few weeks ago my spouse and I were talking about TV show theme songs. Somehow the theme from "The Greatest American Hero" came up. I asked Siri to play the song and she did. Then I went on Netflix and searched for the show because I wanted to watch an episode since I could barely remember it. It wasn't there. I went to the AppleTV's general search feature and it tells me it's available on Peacock. Well fuck that. I'm not subscribing to a service for a single show, especially one from my childhood. But also, I'm not going to pirate it because it was just a random whim I had. So NBC has lost out here. I lost nothing because I'm pretty sure the show was canceled before the first season ended, so it probably wasn't very good to begin with. But I don't really care because I have a stack of shows on different services all lined up waiting to be watched.
Believe it or not, it's stuck in my head. The earworm won't go awaaay...
Sorry to do that to you! But now you understand why I was looking for this moderately obscure, not very good, old show. 🙂
Yeah but there is that feeling when a particular show or movie would really hit the spot so you search your streaming channels only to find them gone. That really sucks. Sure there’s thousands of options but without that one you’re looking for it all feels empty.
Yep, absolutely.
Growing up I pirated a shit ton of movies, music, and tv shows. With GPM (and now Spotify) + Netflix suddenly I wasn't downloading nearly as much. Over the last year and a half or so I've found myself expanding my Plex quickly. I even bought my own NAS server.
People are all crazy if they think that the industry could afford to put its entire yearly output on a single $15/mo subscription.
I get it, that's what you want, but the industry choosing not to adopt a business model that would lead to either bankruptcy or a drastic reduction in the amount of new content being made is probably a good thing.
When Netflix first rolled out their streaming service, the amount of good TV shows being made was a lot smaller than it is today. I would argue that the value proposition hasn't changed much, there is just way more quality content competing for your money than there used to be.
Also I wouldn't go blabbing about some paid Plex server unless you want it to get shut down.
The problem is most people only care about, like, 1% of that output. It just happens to be scattered across $150 worth of subscriptions.
And even if you were down to pay the $150/month you can't get to like, a single portal to browse it all. You have to jump from site to site or app to app. They outright refuse to allow aggregators to list their content. Apple tried to set up such a service but Netflix told them to pound sand so their TV app has a big Netflix shaped void in it. (I think Amazon Prime video also isn't listed but I'm not sure about that).
But if you only care about 1% of the shows on a given service, why do you feel the need to subscribe to it every month?
Just subscribe for one month to catch up on that one show and then cancel.
This is infinitely better than the old way of doing things where you paid $100+/mo for a cable subscription that still made you pay for the 99% of crap you didn't want.
It's annoying, but since everyone else got on board, it hardly matters. I have 2 queues instead of 1. One that's only available on the Netflix app and one that has all the other services on it. I mean, with old-school TV, I had to go to different channels to get different shows, or put in different DVDs, so pressing a different button to open a different app doesn't really strike me as being too much of a burden. Would I prefer they were all available with all the other shows on my device? Sure, but I'd also like a lot of other things more.
I dare you to actually do some napkin math on this. This whole "the industry would collapse" is utter nonsense; propaganda peddled by the MPA at best.
First of all, I'd happily pay more than the cost of a netflix subscription for this. It just needs to be convenient. Read: not six fucking different services.
Second, the industry didn't collapse when netflix first arrived on the scene. It boomed. It then got greedy and everyone wanted a bigger piece of the pie.
Third, content whales are rare. Most people just watch whatever they find, once in a while. Direct sales suffer due to streaming, but they have been suffering for years already, that doesn't change whether there is one or twenty streaming services.
The music industry figured it out. The movie industry is just stuck in the past.
I've heard this tune so many times... Spotify killed piracy, not the industry. Steam similarly killed games piracy. Netflix temporarily killed tv piracy and now it's back in force.
As for the netflix value prop, the problem isn't the amount of content, it's exactly what content. They're losing fan favorites such as The Office. As for me, they lost me when I found out they didnt have the last season of Brooklyn Nine-Nine. Call me impatient if you want: I wasn't going to wait for whatever licensing bullshit to clear to finish my binge.
My napkin math shows that Netflix's annual subscription revenue in the US is roughly equivalent to 2019's domestic box office totals.
So they make enough to cover just the movies. Now they have pay for all the TV that gets made. The math doesn't add up.
You're viewing the past through rose-tinted glasses. Netflix didn't really have more content in 2009 than they do today. At no point did they actually host everything. For the first several years of it's existence, the service subsited off the leftovers of the industry, getting movies that were already running on cable and TV shows that aired a year or two ago.
Netflix doesn't replace cinemas though? Like, the only thing we're talking about here is consolidating streaming services in one place instead of twenty (or at least making the content available globally). Having twenty services instead of one doesn't 20x the revenue. People have a limited amount of entertainment money they're willing to spend. Optimizing that money (eg. with a larger catalogue in a single subscription, distributing based on views, exactly what spotify does in other words) is going to be a better yield to the industry. Individually, services may get less, but that's just tragedy of the commons.
My best guess is they all know this, but they're still pulling away from netflix in order to get more leverage for better licensing fees. Because aside from Disney, most of these dinosaurs can't pull off a streaming service on their own.
My napkin math shows media revenue from the big four media conglomerates to be ~$130 billion per year, including both television and film. Assuming 100 million subscribers, you’d need to pay ~$108 per month to access that content. Round it up to $125 or $150 if you consider independent companies or internet media. Round down some if you charge a premium for first run movies.
@babypuncher
… okay, again, netflix does not replace cinemas.
I'm sorry if I sound frustrated, but what's getting lost in translation here? You have N streaming services with silo'd content. This is not a good situation for consumers. A better situation is anywhere between 1 and N streaming services, as long as most of the content is globally available. In short, I'm asking for broader, more permissive license deals with all streaming services. There's no $130 billion (or whatever) that needs to all come from Netflix, there.
It's a bit weird to lump them together, but movie & TV get their revenue from (in no particular order):
Broadcast licenses are just one part of their revenue.
(PS, netflix revenue != industry's revenue from netflix. They license their content to netflix and get a piece of the pie, not the whole pie!)
Furthermore, whatever revenue they're making now is not an exact figure of what they need to make. That number might be too high, or it might even be too low. Higher numbers could boost the industry further, create even more jobs in the arts. The claim that the industry would collapse can only be valid if they start making significantly less simply because they consolidated their streaming services into one.
Do you see how this is starting to sound absurd?
I’m not assuming that Netflix will include cinema (although I believe it is likely they will, given the format similarities), it was just easiest to get the data for the larger media divisions rather than separating out movies and TV. I thought it was an interesting data point that was pertinent to the conversation. While it isn’t a final target, I would certainly argue it is a starting point. Regardless, excluding box office grosses, you’re still looking at more than $100 billion in revenue for the major TV studios. Now, that does still include merchandising and their other sources, although I suspect advertising would likely also take a hit in a consolidated streaming model. Ultimately I’m not sure what a breakdown would look like, if advertising and licensing constitute a majority of revenue, a solution will need to be worked out. Maybe the efficiencies of having a streamlined model outweigh lower revenue. Who knows?
I get your overall point about more permissiveness in licensing and ease of streaming. Your earlier comments did seem to support the idea of a single streaming source (at least, that’s what I read into them). I personally agree that it should be easier to watch without going from streaming service to streaming service.
Well, sort of. I prefer competition, and there is no real gain from having only a single source as long as the content is available globally if there is more than one (cf. Pandora / spotify situation). But it's easier to just say that all the netflix competitors should consolidate... Specifically, they should consolidate their content.
I agree $100/mo is a starting point for a discussion but it is definitely not a target price. And if it were, it would exclude so many people that it's not reasonable to think about it this way.
I also do concede that advertising is pretty badly affected by the VOD industry... Hm, well.
I'm too tired to keep doing math right now but probably the way to figure this out is compare the numbers with spotify's. Look at how much the music industry is making, how much it spends, and what kind of revenue spotify brings to the table. What the breakdown looks like there would be informative as well: direct sales, advertising, streaming licenses are all relevant for music.
Apple, Amazon, and Hulu seem to be working towards this to an extent. A lot of the smaller premium services can be subscribed through them, consolidating a lot of your content in one "app". None of them are very comprehensive though.
Frankly, I find the idea of having everything in one place nice, but as it is right now I hardly find it inconvenient enough to justify switching to piracy.
If you consolidate them into one though, we end up in the same situation we were with cable 10 years ago. Having everything in one place would be a little more convenient, sure, but my monthly TV budget is not $100/mo. I prefer being able to just choose a couple services that have lots of content I like, then occasionally subscribing to another for a month or two to catch some show I don't want to miss.
Having a few different apps to look through for content on my TV isn't nearly inconvenient enough for me to justify piracy. Not when I still easily remember what the ecosystem used to be like.
Isn't this more NBC's fault than Netflixes? I'm sure Netflix would love to keep those shows, but since NBC needs some sort of value proposition for people to justify downloading Peacock to themselves they're probably withholding it.
Oh yeah I'm not blaming netflix in any of this. I'm pretty sure they know what it means to lose this stuff, and they'll be the first ones to know the impact this sort of stuff has on their subscriber base.
I wouldn't have thought of it that way, but actually yes.
Spotify is terrible. Terrible for net neutrality, terrible for artists, and terrible for ad-blockers. I'm done with them and now either listen on youtube or pirate music.
As for television and movies, I'll use Amazon Prime or Netflix, or Disney+. Lots of great content. If I'm looking for something specific, I'll pirate it... but that's usually older more esoteric stuff. I like going to the theater and will watch new releases on the big screen.
I haven't pirated games for a long while. Steam has a lot of sales all the time and it's honestly way more convenient than piracy.
All services that I know of are terrible for classic movies. Trying to find Hitchcock, film noir, western, Bergman, and early Woody Allen, some of my favorite things, is a waste of time. I definitely pirate those. I would probably pay a reasonable amount for a service with a huge catalog of old movies.
Well there is the Criterion channel, but it’s $100/year and may or may not be available in your area.
Also if you’re a serious movie fan they also only stream at 1080p IIRC so it definitely leaves something to be desired as an offering. Then again, Criterion Collection Blu Rays also aren’t in 4K despite the film masters having enough resolution to support it. Can’t win.
Yeah this is the whole issue with why they don’t offer what we want. “There’s no money in it/not enough demand.” Great so your product is worthless stop prosecuting people for piracy.
Same with Nintendo, they won’t sell their old catalogue of games anymore even though they could, but they’ll sure as shit sue ROM sites into the dirt and claim massive damages. Their product is simultaneously worth nothing and everything and they just get to hold it hostage forever.
Digital goods and copyright are a nightmare.
Just checked, not available in Brazil.
Why not Tidal or Apple Music?
I do wish YouTube didn’t brutalize recordings with its audio compression. It would be nice if official music by the artists or studios, at least, could be done losslessly. I find it useful to try new genres out, but to actually listen I usually flip to iTunes.
I never really stopped pirating, but what was once an almost daily habit became a very occasional need. The fragmentation of services mostly means that there is more content legally available overall, which is a good thing.
But, because many services are not really available in Brazil, the services we have still concentrate a lot. In Brazil, Hulu, CBS All Access and HBO Max are not a thing and Friends is still on Netflix, for example.
I have five subscriptions but only pay for three. Netflix is the one with the most content, but Amazon Prime Video has better originals. Disney+ is garbage. I also have Globo Play, a local platform from the Globo Group, the largest media conglomerate of Latin America (a Brazilian company). It’s surprisingly awesome, with loads of local and international content. It has movies, TV shows, local news, Brazilian soap operas (the best in the world :) and live television on the same app. I also have Crunchyroll, but I should cancel it because I’m not using it these days. The content is good enough but there are no apps for Smart TVs and using my phone to cast it is kind of a bummer (I’m super lazy, as you can see).
With all that, pirating video content is rarely something I care enough to do. I’ll probably download the new Wonder Woman movie.
Just for completion, 100% of my digital comic books and manga are piracy, as well as almost all of my ebooks.
I've considered hoisting the black flag once again, but the ecosystem is very different now. I feel like everywhere I might go is being snooped and the only real action is on private trackers. But I'm not as plugged into the scene as I used to be so I can't get into them. And even if I could I don't have the spare time or inclination to keep up with ratio requirements or whatever.
Gabe Newell posited the model where likelihood of piracy is a function of the cost of going legit over the risk/cost of the work involved in piracy. As the numerator has increased I feel like the denominator has actually increased faster.
I haven't really used torrents in this "new ecosystem". Once in a while to fill fairly specific holes, or when looking for rarer things (dubs in specific languages and such). Most of it is just Plex.
I've followed a similar arc but not because of service fragmentation as it is odd regional restrictions or generally bad app quality.
I live in Canada, and some content just plain isn't available because services are US only, or they're locked to a platform that streams at an aggravatingly bad quality. HBO Max content here only streams through one of our major telecom's applications, Crave. The stream quality feels like YIFY 1080p quality at best, and it doesn't even support surround sound over Chromecast like Netlfix, Prime, and D+ do.
It's not even like I don't have access to Crave—I do. But it's just so bad, I'd rather pirate so I can have better quality files.