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There Are Way Too Many Streaming Services
Cord-cutting promised us that we won't have to pay the ludicrously large cable bills. But it turns out, as long as you do not just want to watch a very limited set of movies and TV shows, you will have to subscribe to any number of these services: Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, HBO Go, Hulu, and Disney+ (and more.) For some living outside the US, the situation has become even more dire as they browse through as many as three dozen services. This, in addition to making watching TV expensive, is also creating a number of other confusions. No wonder piracy is on rise again.
s/again/still/
Too many choices? Bad? Are you fucking kidding?
A universal streaming service, available world wide, usable on Linux/BSD.
This is what unbundled, a-la-carte, service looks like. You actually get a choice as to what you want and you don't have to take a bunch of crap with it. Quit complaining. You could, you know, just watch less TV.
I haven't found Amazon Prime Video to be "very limited". There's a vast catalog, from every genre imaginable, more than I could ever watch.
Now sure, if you absolutely must have {something that Prime doesn't have}, then you'll need to add something else. And that's your choice.
But "doesn't have everything on earth" != "very limited"
I don't have to pay for the things I am not interested in, and if I am interested in something and don't feel like subscribing to the service, well, tough luck, I am not entitled to everything I want in this world.
...and now they are complaining.
There are too many webpages, I can't read them all faster than they get updated and some require me to pay to access them!
It's not "too many streaming services", it's "too much fragmentation". Having more places to shop is always a good thing, having content creators say "we only sell here" is not. If the content you want to watch is not available where you watch, send a message to the content creator that they can go f*** themselves.
500 streams and nothing good on.
rewriting history since 2109
WSJ:
My options are preposterously good—this is the Golden Age of Television, after all.
By what insane standard?
z nice antenna and an OTA compatible DVR. Some new content, and better resolution than cable companies provide.
It's a one time purchase of a couple hundred bucks. Some OTA DVR services have a monthly charge for things like television guides or cloud services, I'm surprised that a whole lot of little companies haven't popped up to install stuff like this.
It already exists. It's called transmission.
You can click on a link from pirate bay, and it automagically opens and starts downloading whatever you want.
I take no responsibility for what I say. Even though I'm never wrong
Simple: they auction the rights to the highest bidder. They get more money that way, and the streaming service gets exclusive access to stream the content. Win-win for them, lose-lose for us.
Why don't you losers get it? You are VOTING every day; under capitalism, you VOTE by choosing to purchase this or that.
You are VOTING for these independent services, and you are VOTING for services which do not support your precious Linux/BSD.
Live the world you want to see. Do not pay people for products that don't meet your needs.
Guess what, though? You 're surrounded by dumbfucks who don't give a shit about Linux/BSD, and they'll gladly VOTE you down every time.
The problem with these streaming services is that they all have their own content that in terms of entertainment, if you want to watch all that you want to watch, then you need to buy them all. Granted I am talking in terms of entertainment, we should have self control to determine if it worth a monthly fee for only for entertainment. However, with the death of the Video Rentals, we need to find the streaming service to find the movie or shows that we cannot get on cable, being that Cable TV has degraded so much, you cannot even find what you want to watch on that.
That is why I wouldn't get CBS All access to watch Start Trek Discovery, even before it proved that it sucked, I couldn't justify paying for an other streaming service for one show that I would at best have a moderate interest in watching.
Now competition should mean that these places are competing for more content, however, it seems they all seem to focus on having specialized content, that the others don't have. So they are not competing against each other, but just trying to pick up the specialist field.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
People neither want to feel nickel-and-dimed, paying $10/month for half a dozen services, nor do they want to feel taken advantage of by a $200/mo Comcast bill.
Each content provider wants to make the most money, and is using their content as leverage for their streaming subscriptions. The only thing that aggregates them all right now is The Pirate Bay. Roku does this to a certain extent, but having a middleman to aggregate billing and to give users a single, consistent UI with which to stream whatever content is desired.
To which everybody says, "Congratulations Voyager, you just invented the cable company."
I get it. However, the issues with Comcast and Time Warner were never their existence in the abstract, it's that they are inconsistent with delivering their service and that they charge a whole lot of money. If the average cable bill was $50/month and cable only went out during an actual-hurricane, I think there would be far less cord cutting, because there is still value from an end user perspective in the existence of an aggregator.
However, the content companies don't want to be 'just another option', and they're having to play the game because of the issues with the aggregators that people are leaving, so we're stuck with a dozen different smaller libraries and an equitable amount of bills to pay as a result.
...if it was done right. I would have no problems with one service per show, because then I'm buying the specific shows I want and don't have the overhead of effectively buying the lot. It would cost more than buying from a single vendor, but we don't have a universal vendor (be it a commonwealth or a cooperative or some vendor that has bought the rights to everything). If we did, that would be the best solution of all.
I want at most one or two shows from a large number of vendors. If I got to do micropayments and get just those shows, I'd save a fortune over the current situation. Of course, to be workable, you'd need a standardized protocol so that you've one aggregator that collected the shows that you wanted, regardless of vendor.
Since neither of these options is open to me, I do the only sane option left - I go back to reading books.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Suddenlink Internet only (400/50): $50mo; SlingTV Orange $32. Total cost after tax $82mo. I have and use nothing else.
The problem is that the streaming services are also content producers, and make their content exclusive to a single streaming service... meaning I have to subscribe to multiple streaming services to get all the content I want! If all content was cross-licensed to every streaming service, it would be an easy economic decision -- I would just subscribe to whichever service was currently cheapest!
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
then hopefully people will stop watching news all together.
Libraries let you borrow practically any movie or TV show you want- especially through inter-library loan. The only triviality is waiting and the cost is already covered by taxes.
Hey look- no buffering, great quality, and trivial to rip if you're feeling particularly dishonest.
And its 4 services. Once you sustain 4 or more services, then you are better off getting cable. I guarantee you that most people's favorite shows or movies are going to be on one or two services, so it really isn't hard to limit the amount of services you subscribe to, with the occasional additional service for that 1 hot show once a year.
Netflix was too cheap, cable became too much. There's a happy medium in between the two, and its still able to be found.
Itâ(TM)s the content segregation. There is no clearing house of content. Instead the ball is still in the court of the content producers. If you want to watch X, you have to subscribe to A. If you want to watch Z, you must subscribe to B. The ideal way is to pay a central clearing house to get all the content. Think a paid version of BitTorrent.
"Trickle-down economics"?
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Why cant one just cancel the subscription A when not finding enough stuff to watch there and only then paying for subscription B? Unlike with broadcast TV, one can actually have the whole library available at any time, and so I cannot really understand the point of having to have all of the services subscribed all of the time.
It's not the choices that are bad, it is limiting content to single streamers that is bad... meaning choosing just one gives you, uh, limited choices of content.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
I spend $70/mo on streaming services (Hulu/Netflix/Crunchy Roll/). The closest equivalent from cable TV would be at least $120/mo (accounting for the DVDs I get from Netflix that count as about 4 pay per views/mo). Plus there's no cable equivalent of Crunchy roll. As a consumer I'm still coming out way ahead. And when the kid graduates college and pays her own bills I'll kill the Hulu.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Subscribe to one of them. Watch everything that interests you. Cancel . Subscribe to another.
don't watch. Go do something better with your time.
The problem is not too many streaming services. Competition is good for consumers. The problem is too many exclusives. Game of Thrones only on HBO Go, Star Wars only on Disney+, Star Trek only on CBS-All-Access. All of them are charging as if they were a full cable replacement instead of a single cable channel.
Support Right To Repair Legislation.
Foreigner msmash also said "No wonder piracy is on rise again."
Major media firms FINALLY understand that the internet isn't their enemy, and that streaming is a way to deliver their content? Great.
Major media firms balkanize the shit out of it, trying to build their own little walled gardens assuming every idiot out there wants to pay $15/mo to access their crappy content? Ha ha ha, ....no. A-pirating we'll go.
My favorite is when Network TV tries to **charge you** for the shit they put on air for free. I guess I can see the idea if they are streaming it commercial free, but then the price should be about the $0.025 in ad revenue they'd have gotten from your eyeballs on broadcast TV. In most cases I've see it's charge-per-episode AND there are ads.
-Styopa
Back in the day when you had an 8 foot dish in your backyard, you had to buy your TV from each individual producer ( HBO, Viacom, WGN, etc.) Eventually companies started up which negociated deals and provided packages.
Exactly. People said "I want to be able to pay for just the content I'm actually interested in without having all this other stuff bundled into 'one size fits all' packages." What we got was an incremental improvement over cable that lets you find a streaming service (or multiple) that sometimes covers the content you are interested in more closely at a better price. It's not streaming services fault that the content is distributed by media conglomerates with disparate content channels that want to make sure that in order to get any of their content you need to pay for all of it. At least we got a little closer to what we really want. I won't complain about that.
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It's not unbundled, it's just bundled differently. Every streaming service has nearly the same batch of old movies and TV shows, to which they each add a few exclusive, internally produced titles. To get the good stuff, you've got to re-buy a ton of stuff you already have on the other streaming services.
Support Right To Repair Legislation.
It's working exactly as I described; it I didn't say there should be any particular outcome.
That being said, there is a lot in the system that is NOT capitalism, because Big Business has been corrupted by the temptation to use government coercion to pick winners and losers.
For most of us outside the US, we can't even subscribe to most of the services, evev if we want to. Or, if we can, the vast majority of the stuff that would motivate us to subscribe is unavailable due to assinine geolocking of content.
If it works in theory, try something else in practice.
... of everything...
There are too many streaming services, books, TV stations, movies, songs, politicians, political parties, and so on..
There should ever be only one of anything.
Digital OTA TV is still free. Still getting 56 channels in my area. Access to all the major networks, news, sports, etc. I can live without most of the other worthless cruft.
All of Hollywood would need to do this. You pay to get a login
Various tiers. To get newer stuff cost more.
Enforce a seed limit. Sure download all you want, but once your ratio is bad, no more leeching.
Reward those with a high one with free service.
http://progressquest.com/spoltog.php?name=Son+Of+Son+Of+DarkRookie
While cable was a monopoly, with only one cable service in a given area, nobody is forcing you to sign up for streaming services. Cord-cutters subscribe to the two or three streaming services that represent most of their desired content, then complain about the number of services they would have to get to see allthe content they want.
As content providers realize this (watch for online surveys and use complaint feedback contact opportunities that may be available) we will see more opportunities for a la carte trials of additional content. Many sites already offer 30-day trials and other temporary offers. Make use of these, cancel at the end of the offer and tell them why you made that decision. Some sort of multi-site subscription to individually chosen specific sets of shows will emerge.
Ha! For years customers complained about cable companies bundling channels and demanded piecemeal selection. Now there is more choice, and people complain about that!
To get the content from Hulu, Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, HBO - all for one low monthly fee.
TPB/Lime etc have really simplified this for me. Most these subscription services are 95% shit, and 5% desirable but exclusive content. At around $10 a month each. No way I'm fucking paying that for the five things a month across each channel. We have no cable or satellite of Amazon or Netflix services anymore, and just watch what we want to watch. I don't see any of the cunts in Hollywood starving, do you?
Exactly this. It's exclusive licensing that allows for the balkanization of content among increasingly various streaming services. Instead, we should insist on FRAND type licensing like we do for many patents. That along with separating the content creation from distribution will allow a competitive market to develop rather than the monopoly on creative content we are trending toward.
Knowledge Brings Fear
My son and daughter, who both live in large cities, do this. It's great. However, even with a nice antenna on a rotor, a booster amplifier, and minimal cable runs, I can get just one major network (ABC) on my suburban TV. I can get many PBS-type channels, and a lot or foreign language stations that I don't watch, plus a shopping channel. Definitely not as good as what I got on the old analog television system with its VHF stations.
You people expected bundle/meal deal/combo pricing per item on a la carte product. Sorry it doesn't work that way.
Think of soft drinks. If you buy a bundle (a 12 pack of Coca Cola) the cheapest it will run you is $4, which is 33Â a can. Not bad.
But if you say "hey I don't drink Coca Cola too often, just want to buy what I want when I drink it and for it to be cold" the store will say "that's fine, we have a vending machine outside. 75Â please".
Same concept here. Buying unbundled will always cost more.
And as soon as I subscribe to WSJ I can read TFA.
I don't have to pay the ludicrously large cable bills. No one does, nor streaming bills either.
Just say no. That easy. Get a life instead.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
Few years ago, I used to read satirical articles about how you can spend $2500 and convert your PC into $500 TV. Same thing goes for replacing cable with streaming for now. I have switched to Netflix and Amazon Prime couple of times only to go back again to cabal. Streaming is way too restrictive for live programs and quality depends on your internet service and too much lag time when switching shows.
Unplugging cable TV creates more competition between content providers, like Netflix, Hulu, etc. That should be perceived as a positive outcome in the USA. The major television networks need to do more to install digital broadcasting stations around the country. Only the major urban markets have adequate digital broadcast networks over the air. If powerful 4G and 5G networks blanket the country with coverage, then it would seem that television station networks could provide the same, or better, coverage beyond the urban areas. It will require many more cable subscribers to unplug their service in order for the major networks to wake up and start installing wider digital coverage over the air.
I see a lot of talk comparing the sum cost of streaming services being higher than the price of cable, and they are absolutely right. If you subscribe to everything it is. But, here's the catch: most subscription based streaming services operate with No Commercials during the stream. You get to binge watch an entire series without seeing a single commercial. Cable TV is heavily subsidized by advertisements.
The second thing I see a lot of people doing is including the cost of internet service with the cost of subscription streaming services and saying that it's much higher than the cost of cable, and it is. But, what they ignore is the fact that most people are buying internet service regardless of whether or not they have cable TV service. Now, you might opt for more bandwidth/larger caps/unlimited when you "cut the cord", but that's not necessarily something people wouldn't do anyway.
The third thing: streaming services are for the most part not directly comparable to cable. When it comes to cable you watch what they broadcast when they broadcast it (or you DVR it and watch it shortly there after). Some stations will let you stream episodes from their websites shortly after broadcast, but access still tends to be restricted (and I'd bet those streams are laden with commercials just like the on air broadcast). Streaming services are more analogous to a library. You get to browse the content and pick and choose what you want to watch, when you want to watch it, no matter how much of it you want to watch.
Now, are multiple streaming services anti-consumer? It certainly feels like it when previously Disney licensed it's library to Netflix and now they're pulling it all off and demanding you pay them more money if you want to watch any of it. But, you also have to admit that by doing that Disney is going to put it's money where it's mouth is and produce more content for it's service to keep people engaged than they would have if they just continued licensing their library to Netflix. So, there's pluses and minuses to the change. Ultimately, it's a decision that you the consumer have to make with your wallet. If their service flounders then they'll probably go back to licensing to the other services. If it takes off, then they'll end up producing more content.
This is a case of there's no winning.
If content creators offer a streaming service, people complain there's too many service providers, and piracy ensues.
If all the content creators glom on to one major provider, then they get accused of collusion and price fixing. Piracy ensues again.
If they opt to not provide any streaming for specific content, then they are accused of holding back content, and providing justification for piracy. The lack-of-access issue. And of course, piracy ensues.
Is there any way to win?
In hindsight, I guess I found more than one thing to remember.
"You scratch my back, I'll piss on yours, then we repeal the Magnitsky Act." *(Muffled sounds of traitor sex)*
The ball is always in the owner's court.
With cable it's all or just basic cable.
With streams it's what they can get a deal on.
The benefit with streams is not dealing with the cable company. No need for a tech to waste your day to bring a box out. No hassle sign up and cancellation...try that with the cable co.
Maybe content creators need to set up something similar to how Ultraviolet works, where a centralized database is maintained, which keeps track of who has access to which content. You pick the stream provider, attach your account, and stream content you have access to.
Seems to work great for movies using UV. I remember when Flixster died off, instead of losing all my content I had on Flixster, I just moved over to Vudu and they provide access to all the content I have under UV's system.
This was because the underlying licensing was done through Ultraviolet. Perhaps this system should be widened to include more content, and stream providers.
I've always said this. ISPs should never have been allowed to buy content providers. The gov builds roads, and not vehicles.
Not everything is at Pirate Bay. If I want to see all of Highlander: The Series, I can guarantee it will be hard to get every episode in ANY resolution, much less original broadcast quality.
Even more recent series have these issues. I had a hell of a time finding eps for season 10-11 of Bones. Eventually I found some in crappy 480i resolution. And this is 2018!
You people expected bundle/meal deal/combo pricing per item on a la carte product.
Except you have it backwards. People are expecting a la carte products on a system that only allows bundle/meal-deal pricing.
It's like if you wanted a steak with a coke and a slice of apple pie, and the only way to get it was to first buy the steak meal, which has soup, a roll, steak with a baked potato and peas, and a blueberry muffin; and then you have to buy the coca-cola bundle, which consists of a 24-can case of coke, and then you have to buy the Early dinner special, which is salad, chicken-pot pie, a glass of milk, cole slaw, and an apple pie. To get what you actually want, you need to buy three different bundles, and throw out most of it.
Most of what you get with the bundle is stuff you don't want.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Didn't the US sort this out decades ago by severing the movie studios from the movie theaters? Why is it allowing the same thing on television?
I can subscribe to nearly half a dozen streaming services before I approach the cost of a single cable bill. Still a win.
...because we wanted to increase the information accessibility on the net, as well as to increase the number of information providers (digital multiply). Each provider claimed that they add something original to offer to the end user (digital add). We now discover that each provider wants nothing but money from our pockets (digital subtract).
Unlike bundling, when you purchase a streaming service, you're not moving up to another tier that requires all the previous tiers. That's the ala carte aspect. It means that each service has to compete with better unique content; I'm not going to get every service; maybe I'll have three of fifteen. But that still means I'm getting 20% of the excellent content (more than I can watch), instead of 100% of the okay content because their is no competition.
Your ad here. Ask me how!
So back around 2000 or so, there was all sorts of bitching and moaning about cable operators giving gobs of channels no one needs. At the time the call was:
'Give us a la carte!'
So now we have a la carte, the cry is 'put it all on one service, but don't charge a lot for it!'.
I personally would love a federated, unified interface to content that spans services, and wouldn't mind paying 'a la carte'.
Of course as it stands the content holders ownership is pretty random. People have to give money to Disney, whether they are really wanting some Star Wars sort of experience, or comic action movies, or animated kids movies. Thematically the link is not particularly correlated with who takes money for what sort of content...
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
It ends your polluting yourself with all the vacuous repetitive garbage they call entertainment. Haven't you noticed how the script writers have run out of ideas? Years ago. Are you that blind? But, you know, it's basically a free country.
"Dire" is not a word I would associate with any issues relating to television, other than the case where a TV set has fallen on someone from a great height.
That's not dire. It was a lucky shot
Surely the more services there are, the more you can join for a free month before leaving and joining the next. Once there's enough to cycle that take you into a new debit/credit card number each time they come round again, you'll never need to pay another penny for service :3
I actually do want to watch a limited selection of movies and TV shows. Far more than half of any existing cable package is utter garbage and actually manages to deliver negative value by wasting your time and boring you to tears if you try to use it.
try idmb / metacritic.
It's not streaming services fault that the content is distributed by media conglomerates with disparate content channels that want to make sure that in order to get any of their content you need to pay for all of it.
This.
Take Disney for example. If I want Disney for my kids I also have to pay for ESPN and other Disney owned channels which I don't watch. Disney won't let streaming subscribers pick just one channel. So my current attitude; if Disney wants an arm and a leg for their content, and I don't want to pay for that, I won't sign up for their service. Problem solved on my end. While Disney likes to believe they have the upper hand and control the content, without my money all they have is an over-priced IP. Eventually they will want that money, then we can bargain.
At the end of the day, with all the money I save in not buying their streaming services I can buy copies of the media I want (about a box set a week). Then I just make a legal backup copy to my Media box. Now I can watch it anytime/anywhere I want with no ads until the end of time.
I strongly suspect that there will be at some point a consolidation of all these streaming services under a single umbrella, where you pay one bill and get access to a collection of services (including some you don't want, but are included in your tier whether you want them or not) plus a bunch of other features bundled in that nobody really needs. There will be an attractive introductory price offered followed six months later by an outrageous monthly cost.
There will be a set top box that you have to rent. Probably with a DVR that you don't need (violating the whole concept of "on demand") but have to pay for anyway.
I can't wait.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
In my youth, I would have no qualms with pirating software or videos. Today, I feel that it is wrong and I rather than using proprietary software, I just do everything open source. As for videos and entertainment, I can live without it altogether. For the little bit of TV that I do watch, the over the air programming is fine and dandy.
FRAND isn't reasonable for media for various reasons. The constitution requires giving the creators "exclusive right" of the work. Mandatory licensing isn't viable because of that. This hasn't been tested in the court system, but I think being too pushy will encourage someone to try it.
Anyone who tells you otherwise is full of crap and/or has a hidden agenda. Always remember that you are now living in a world where you have to rent EVERYTHING. Everything has some sort of monthly fee to it. But people cheerfully cough it up because, "Hey, it's only $19.95 a month! I'm really sticking it to 'the man'" No, you're not. You're now sampling the addictive drugs and you'll be hooked very quickly.
So true. Common sense.
I hate stories like this. IMOHO it's folks who don't want to see the cable companies take a dump (this article is from the WSJ), so I always assume there's a conflict of interest. Are there a lot of choices? Yes, and that's actually a good thing. The down side is you have to do a bit of research and you have to use a few different apps instead of having everything right at your fingertips. There are tons of sites out there that will tell you what each service carries.
When I cut the cord two years ago, I spent all of 20 minutes comparing the services out there that carried the channels that I wanted (OTA isn't an option for me since I have a mountain blocking most of the signals not to mention a huge tree). Vue had about 90% of what I wanted, and there were "free" channels (so to speak) for the other content that I wanted to access. Once Hulu has live access for Discovery content, I'll probably make the switch over to them instead.
Folks, it's really not that hard, even for those who aren't familiar with technology. Most people who have cable also subscribe to Netflix and Amazon, so all you're really doing is cutting down your cable/satellite bill. I went from paying almost $250 a month to paying about $100. Good deal for me and many others.
Until Roku, Amazon, Apple, etc come up with a device that can truly interpret all of your subscriptions it's going to be a bit of a hodgepodge but you get some extra $$$ in your pocket. With cable/satellite you're spoon fed the content in an "easy" to consume format. With streaming services you may have to do a bit more work. Is the convenience worth the extra money those companies charge? Well that's up to you. For me, it's easy enough to go to a couple more apps instead of having my experience spoon fed.
Remember when all the cord-cutters demanded ala carte? This is the result. Your prices are higher, but you get to pick and choose what you want to watch. As someone in the cable TV industry, I'd just like to offer up a hearty "We told you so."
Most streaming services have no commitment, in fact since you've been able to add things like Showtime and HBO to Amazon Prime it's made it super easy to have them on a month to month basis.
Wait until the season of GoT has ended and then sign up for HBO for a month and binge it. Then get a month of netflix for the latest House of Cards, or perhaps get a month of Hulu to watch The First. You don't need 5 streaming services all the time, you can cycle them.
However that obviously doesn't work well with current affairs or sports, and so I expect those will end up driving perpetual subscriptions. Things like Last Week Tonight or Patriot Act are likely disproportionately valuable to their owners simply because they go stale quickly.
Too many choices. This all arose from the deregulation of the internet by Republicans. If you want something wholesome like masterpiece theater or kids shows, best of luck
There really are better things to do with your time than watch TV.
Amazing thing is once you leave it behind for a few weeks, you will realize that you really don't miss it.
There will be things you will miss but it will actually make you realize those things are valuable to you, whether it is sports, movies, a tv show/series, etc.. then you can make the choice to find those things and pay for them.
We have been without cable for about 3 years now.
Kids don't miss it.
Wife doesn't miss it.
Dogs don't miss it.
I don't miss it.
We do have a shared Netflix account with family and we also have Amazon Prime (more for the shipping). Wish I could convince wife to drop those. We rarely use either, especially Prime Video - there is almost nothing there worth watching and Netflix isn't much better. In fact we had both of these services before we cut cable tv so...
I still have to buy internet service from Comcast and there is literally no other option for where I live but my bill was ~$200 and is now only ~$70
Best part is that the ~$1500 a year I save by not having cable TV we have used for fun things each year. Disney (well a lot of it anyway) one year, Beach Trip another and a week in an absolutely awesome mountain cabin one fall. Gotta plan what we are gonna do with it next year - think the family wants to go back to the beach.
Who would mind a little competition? Certainly, not the consumer.
https://www.youtube.com/c/BrendaEM
Sling? Works for me on Ubuntu with Chrome.
I know what you're thinking. Did I forward 65,535 packets or 65,536 packets?
If the streaming service has good content, then I will pay them.
Netflix? Absolutely, they have tons of stuff I want to watch.
CBS? Nope, only one show that possibly interests me. Not worth the cost.
Hulu? Maybe, they have lots of content but I absolutely hate their UI.
The upcoming Disney service? Depends on the cost. If they do $10 - 15 I'll probably do it, as I like all the Marvel, Star Wars, and other Disney titles. If they try to grab $20 or more I'll balk.
Why isn't it reasonable? What are these various reasons?
As far as the constitutionality, the "exclusive right" applies to patents as well. How come FRAND patent licensing hasn't been shot down in courts yet? Copyright owners would still have the "exclusive right" to choose the terms of their license and FRAND wouldn't violate that. The terms would still be solely up to them. It would just mean that they cannot exclude another entity from accepting equivalent terms.
Knowledge Brings Fear
yay! channel bundles!
The weakness is that most people don't *really* want to watch X, they just want to watch "something like X" (genre, quality, etc), and the competitor's options are good enough. Sure, there's a few long-lived franchises with dedicated fans (Star Trek, Simpsons, sports) that might go where they need to get their fix, but it's going to be really hard to attract new fans to your network.
I mean if NBC makes a great new show I hear about, it's unlikely I'm going to pay for an NBC streaming subscription for JUST that show, and my existing streaming providers probably offer several shows that scratch a similar itch. At best I'll wait until I'm bored with the library of my current providers, and drop one of them for NBC for a while, until I get bored with them and move on to someone else.
I suspect it will prove more profitable to continue (or revert to) establishing cross-licensing agreements so that popular shows are available on many platforms. Yeah, maybe neither NBC or Netflix makes as much money from me watching one of their shows on the other's network - but there's almost always going to be a MUCH larger population of people on other networks than on the one making the show, unless most people sign up for most networks - which seems very unlikely. Better to make 30% of the money from 5x as many people - which means either cross-licensing, or charging such a low subscription fee that it's hardly worth the overhead.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Yep. And the solution is staring us in the face. IP isn't real, Lockean property. It's make-believe property that we instituted explicitly because these limited protections (real property protections aren't time limited - first clue!) were thought to produce a public benefit. Whether they do or not is probably irrelevant now. But the underpinning of the IP system still is. If it exists in order to produce a public benefit, then it should be so administrated. Today (if not always) that means mandatory licensing terms. Artists (or rights-holders, really) get paid for their works, but neither they nor any middle-man can choose the terms or enact exclusive policies. 1 song = $1, 1 album = $12, 1 movie = $20, etc. Likewise at different rates for renting and streaming. Then streaming services becomes competitive on their own terms instead of being a proxy for license auctions. The USSR did it this way, and while they probably did it badly their underlying thinking was sounder than ours. More consistent, anyway. We built out a property right on communitarian principles but won't run it that way.
The problem was partially minimized in the 1980s by court rulings that clarified that it was in fact legal for independent rental shops to purchase movies and rent them out against the industries wishes. copyright is a distribution monopoly by definition and it undermines the very notion of a free market and in any other business would be illegal. I don't get to dictate whether or not a shop opens up across the street from me. The problem is the narrow ruling in the 1980s regarding physical rentals didn't extend to streaming. This led to a small number of distribution outlets because the monopolies get to dictate who can and can't do business. They then proceed to complain when people aren't willing to cough up insane amounts of cash for access to a severely limited amount of streaming content of which only a sliver is any good. If the industry was wise they would be promoting competition in the market place via making it easy to license and stream content. Otherwise they too can be held to account by the monopoly distribution platforms (Netflix, etc). If they each setup there own distribution platforms which has only there own content then people will merely revert to piracy. And there is zero chance that a crackdown on piracy will succeed particularly given that there is no 'legitimate' or cost effective outlet to obtain a wide variety of content easily. If the industry were smart they would come up with a way to decentralize distribution behind the scenes such that users could easily access anything they wanted via any number of platforms while still maintaining individual platforms/marketing in terms of eyeballs. So for example an organization like the MPAA setup for the purpose of setting up infrastructure behind the scenes that would give every other distributor access to each others libraries which at the same time the distributors could setup there own platforms to prioritize there own content on these platforms without inhibiting the user from accessing other third party content from other distributors on there platform. You will never lose customers to a competitor because your customers have no reason to look at another distributor's platform for that distribitor's content. There would still be some level of competition at an eyeballs level presumably as one platform might suck compared to another, but the main crux of the problem leading to piracy, that being it is too challenging to access all the content relative to piracy would disappear.
We use a NUC with Windows 10 as our TV box. We ditched Netflix+Prime for $20 Sling 'Blue' about a year ago, then about 4 months back added $10 to that to get Sling 'Orange' + Lifestyle Bundle which ended up taking the original 40ish channels to 70ish channels. Comparable DirecTV would be about $90 a month after the fees and taxes, cable locally would be about $75. These are nearly all live, main-line cable channels with only about 10% of filler channels (Bloomberg, TheBlaze, Afro, etc). They also include replays and on-demand of about 75% of what airs available. Including the price of Internet in there--$100 a month for gigabit service with a 1TB cap, we're still under $140 including taxes and fees total for Internet+TV. The Internet/TV bundle would be about the $160ish ($150+taxes and fees) but wouldn't be gigabit and would have a lower cap (100mb + 500gb cap).
I know what you're thinking. Did I forward 65,535 packets or 65,536 packets?
The constitution requires giving the creators "exclusive right" of the work.
No it doesn't. It allows congress to give the creators "exclusive right" for limited times.
U.S. Constitution - Article 1 Section 8:
The Congress shall have Power [...] To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;
And I would like to add for the record that 5 nanoseconds satisfies "for limited times" quite well.
Canadians are dumping cable for android boxes pre-loaded with Kodi or similar app. Ditch Rogers/Shaw/etc. Boxes can be usually picked up for the cost of a month's cable. Also usually pre-loaded with netflix for the things you just can't find. BTW netflix in Canada sux compared to what's available in the states.
Solution? A cheap VPN connection to tie it all together.
Monthly cost? High speed internet and VPN. Cut the cable!
Now I can illegally watch it anytime/anywhere I want with no ads until the end of time.
You forgot a word there. Or above where you meant "format shift" instead of "backup." If you guys don't actually know what you're talking about, please stop using words like "legally".
Mandatory licensing happens ALL the time. Turned on a radio lately? Used an audio streaming service?
are you sure he's not an appy app apper or luddite software writer?
Content delivery and content making need to be separate companies, unconnected, completely.
There should be 200 content delivery choices, but each should have access to all content makers who offer content to everyone for the same price.
A lack of choice will just end up with different effective monopolies like Comcast, Disney, Cox, AT&T, or Verizon. We've been there and it sucks.
Back when I subscribed to DISH, I got 200 channels for about $120/month. That works out to about $.60 per channel. Only I wanted to watch about 10 of those channels, so I wanted to have those for much cheaper. Instead everyone wants to charge $8 to $10 per channel or 10x what cable wanted.
"Cordcutting" never promised me anything. It's not a person or a company with a marketing plan.
You don't HAVE to sign up for any number of streaming services. You can have any number from zero on up, no 2 drink minimum that I know of.
You are not forced into piracy by anything except the childish inability to distinguish wants from needs.
Pay for it or give it up, I don't care. But don't expect any sympathy when you whine about wanting something without paying for it.
Capitalism does NOT require "rational" actors (well, by definition, every actor is rational, because every actor is in pursuit of happiness, which is to say every actor is pursuing self-interest).
Similarly, Capitalism does NOT require "perfect" information, because it is an iterative and evolutionary process of variation and selection.
The so-called "rational actors" and "perfect information" are straw men fabricated by would-be Intelligent Designers, who are trying to convince you to defer to their own supposedly superior will.
Live the world you want to see means exactly that: Either make use of the service the dumbfucks are paying for, or do something else (e.g., do without those services, or pay the necessary premium to support some other service, or put your capital into creating the services you want to see).
Chinese streaming services go for $1-3 (usd). Subscribing to a dozen isn't a problem then. You can find the some shows repeated on many of them, so picking a few services that best match your preferences isn't so hard.
The problem is that the US have a few big content owners that keep their content as an exclusivity, so you don't have dozens of streaming services to chose from, you have a few, very expensive choices (yes, $15/month for a fraction of what you'd like to see is too expensive).
It's time copyright's "limited time" of exclusive rights start reducing to the reasonable 5 years it once was.
I don't watch Netflix, but other folks in my house do. Same for Hulu. But I do watch Crunchy roll, which nobody else does.
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Over here there is at least Netflix, or there would be zero.
Why not have one base package like PlayStation Vue or Direct TV Now then rotate between Netflix, Hulu, etc. as you deem necessary to watch what they are putting ou? It requires making changes every month or two but if you want to save money it makes perfect sense.
What if there were a way to select the networks you want and have it spit out your best option to achieve your dream list? Just make sure you make the selection with only one nerd present
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
Read, bitches!
Our reign has gone on long enough. Indeed. Summon the meteors.
How exactly is a format shift illegal in the US? Genuinely curious; I'm a Norwegian, and we have court rulings saying that it's e.g. legal to break any encryption on DVDs you buy in order to make copies in any format for yourself. If I recall correctly, the court compared it to breaking into your own safe, which is again legal.
So which is it? Does competition keep prices low and service innovative or is it, as this lead in would have you believe, causing prices to be high? How does that work again?
I just love the way everyone's talking about this, as though it's shocking, and somehow unexpected. But this is economics 101. When the consumer demand exists for any given product, and the marketplace does not supply it, channels will rise in order to attempt to address the market need. The way this goes in history is pretty straightforward. First, one or two products show up. Then, you have a lot of copycats that offer the same or similar products as the market expands. Then, the market contracts and corrects, solidifying the businesses of the players who fill the need and make the most reasonable business decisions.
We're at an awkward moment in streaming. The market is exploding with platforms and venues at the moment. The consolidation and correction phase has not hit yet. But it will. Just give it time.
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I would like Ronald Reagan to piss on my dick!