A friend works in TV and film and deals with the licensing for this kind of thing. It seems like a colossal disaster at best. It's complicated, convoluted and greedy. We've discussed it many times before, but it doesn't look like the TV/film industries will ever get themselves to a Spotify-esque point.
Which is a shame, because it'll be to their own detriment (as it will be for the music industry again, if 'stars' persist in exclusivity for streaming rights) when people revert back to torrents (as one comment here has already stated). The fact is, most people are prepared to pay for a VOD and/or music service. We just don't want to pay for 3 of them. Money aside, it just isn't convenient. "Can we listen to The Beatles? Yes, I'm not sure whether it's on cassette, CD or vinyl, so search through all three collections, then make sure the appropriate player is plugged in. If it's not there, we'll need to look at buying the minidisk. Or shoplifting it."
Anyway, I appreciate the point of the article wasn't purely a rant about VOD/DVDs, and it was a point well made.
1) What's good for the consumer isn't necessarily good for the creators. In other words, they have an incentive to fight the future rather than embrace it.
2) The extra efficiency of distribution created by technology is hell on legacy business models. Streaming media is an example of disruption shrinking the whole pie. Craigslist wrecked the classifieds business and became wildly successful but it did so NOT by moving 90% of the industry's revenue to Craigslist; it did so by capturing 10% of the revenue and destroying the rest.
I tend to agree but this is really a separate conversation. These days, the struggling musician will give away music for extra exposure in the hopes of becoming famous so they can make money touring. That's the best they can do because nobody sells 50 million vinyl records anymore, although that's probably more likely than selling 50 million CDs (note I didn't say albums).
Still, regardless of where these dollars flow, to creators or the "industry," it's fewer dollars.
In the past struggling musicians were handed cash by benificent record cartels. /s
In the past the struggle was to even get any distribution or publicity, radio play was sewn up so artists accepted terrible terms from the distribution monopolies.
We agree. It's more possible than ever to succeed without a label or big company behind you. That doesn't mean there's more money in selling music media.
There is more money if the 98% monopoly cut is removed.
I cite Drummond & Cauty's The Manual, how to have a number one and make a million quid * as the KLF they did just this, repeatedly & using pseudonyms. That was in the 'bad old days', Cauty & Drummond proved that without a record company bleeding them dry artists could make a lifetime's cash with a single hit.
Todays 'problem' is everyone wants to create, sample, share, remix, transcode, &c but copyright maximalism largely prevents this.
I believe that a distribution scheme could pay creatives directly, just as a little extra, they can still sell stuff - my thesis is without the 98% loss due to the cartels this is workable and everyone can play & innovate. Ireland does this in reverse, artists don't pay tax there & get tax credits (~£50 per week).
Also restore copyright back to 20-40 years putting the 20th century in the public domain where it belongs and destroying the back-catalogue leverage the monopolists abuse.
So your argument is that the artist's slice of the pie is larger than it once was? That may be true, I don't have an informed perspective. However, for the industry, my original points stand.
I argue that the secret deals between the big labels with Spotify and Youtube rip off the artists just as much as before. *
They are trying to reassert control over distribution by shutting down those who won't pay what they want (grooveshark) or attain censorship power even in excess of copyright- like Youtube & DRM ( trumps transcoding rights & fair use ).
There are just as bad for artists as fans, just as bad as they always were, their death grip has slipped because they were too set in their ways to comprehend the internet was the future.
They also stop or cripple technologies they don't like.
They big label cartels are a social ill supported by monopoly lobbying and governments doing their bidding.
They extended copyright for so long that they own the rights to nearly the entire 20th centuries cultural output.
It will only get worse, monopolies should be broken up they destroy free-markets and build barriers to entry.
The funny thing is that no one ever really sold that many copies of an album. The music industry, for all its reach and visibility, is tiny compared to a single 'blockbuster' movie.
I mean, a "gold record" which is pretty rare and often takes months or years for an album to reach is 500k sales. Compare that to movie tickets (which are now about the same price each, and are only a single viewing!), where 500k sales can be a disastrous failure.
well, digital sales only (which are still less than CD and I think streaming/radio + public performance make much more now than by then) are currently worth more than total music sales in the seventies, which I don't think were a particularly bad time for music creativity. (http://publicradio2.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/files/2014/02/un...)
This chart is comparing dollars (CD sales) to units (digital singles, which probably avg less than $1.29 each). So at their peak CD sales were worth >10x what digital singles sales are now. It's not even close, and if this chart were inflation-adjusted the difference would be much larger.
Forgetting about the Musician's share, all the streaming/satellite radio revenue collectively wouldn't cover the shortfall (terrestrial radio doesn't pay).
I can't comment on public performance but it's certainly become the definitive way musicians make money now and their share has always been high in this category.
> Streaming media is an example of disruption shrinking the whole pie.
Is that really the case for movies/tv shows though?
"Back in the day" I used to get Netflix to ship me DVDs for around the same cost per month that I now pay for streaming. And they had all the latest titles available.
Surely at least as much money is going back to the content creators as it was then?
Yes. Netflix is causing a similar shrinking to the RENTAL market that Craigslist did to classifieds, albeit less severe. However, the SALES of Physical Media (DVDs/Blu-Rays) are down huge over the last ten years and there hasn't been anything to replace that revenue. Essentially selling 30 DVDs to you and all your friends was replaced by selling 1 DVD to Netflix.
One more piece of history that you may already know: in the prime days of the rental market companies like Blockbuster paid ~$100 per movie and had access to the titles before a consumer could purchase them. Netflix didn't play ball, rather than pay those prices they'd wait until the DVDs were generally available and buy at consumer/bulk prices.
I wouldn't shed any tears for the industry though, they'll survive. Besides, just to be clear, I love Netflix, they're great.
As others already indicated I'm not sure if music in general, or Spotify in particular, should be a role model for other industries. Sure, it's convenient for the user but artists and labels (I'm not talking majors, but small, caring labels) can't survive with these rates.
What the movie / TV industry could learn from music is how to sell their content conveniently and without DRM in a digital, high quality format. I'm not interested in physical discs, yet have no option to legally buy a digital 1080p copy of [insert almost any movie here] and play it in Kodi or wherever I want. Meanwhile I've been buying at least 10 lossless albums monthly for years - so it's not aas if I'm not willing to pay for my content.
I suspect you're in a minority buying lossless albums. Most of the 'youth' I know don't buy at all. They do pay for Spotify, or at worst use it ad supported. I used to buy lots and lots of CDs. I had a few years of iPod, but now I'm pretty much exclusively Spotify. I might buy a vinyl if I go watch a band. It goes straight on the shelf and never gets played.
Spotify may not be the ideal, but it's better than Napster or Limewire. If you grew up getting music for free, it's a logical stepping stone. It's easier than stealing it, and it's legal. Giving addicts methadone may not be a cure, but it's better than the heroin trade and all the risks attached. Until we can find a cure, or in this case, a better(/fairer?) way for the artists and industry, that's where we're at.
As per my parent post, unless the 'cure' is as least as good as the substitute (or you can fundamentally change how people think), the user will go back to what they had before.
> Almost all clinical trials have found treatment with methadone or suboxone to be more effective than traditional rehab. Even Cochrane Review, which is notorious for never giving a straight answer to anything besides “more evidence is needed”, agrees that methadone and suboxone are effective treatments.
> Society is fixed, biology is mutable. People have tried everything to fix drug abuse. Being harsh and sending drug users to jail. Being nice and sending them to nice treatment centers that focus on rehabilitation. Old timey religion where fire-and-brimstone preachers talk about how Jesus wants them to stay off drugs. Flaky New Age religion where counselors tell you about how drug abuse is keeping you from your true self. Government programs. University programs. Private programs. Giving people money. Fining people money. Being unusually nice. Being unusually mean. More social support. Less social support. This school of therapy. That school of therapy. What works is just giving people a chemical to saturate the brain receptor directly. We know it works. The studies show it works. And we’re still collectively beating our heads against the wall of finding a social solution.
I understand that I'm a minority but the point remains: Why would the movie industry follow the streaming model when Spotify shows that nobody's earninng a living with that solution?
Spotify isn't competing with other industry distribution methods. Distribution is a solved problem: there's no technical reason why anyone can't listen to any recorded music ever whenever they want for near-zero distribution cost, through torrents.
"Only allowing distribution methods that get paid" is the problem. The content industries are now in the business of preventing distribution, which turns into an eternal war on the open internet. The streaming model de-escalates this and provides a way of paying for convenience.
That's the problem: 10 bucks a month, ad supported or simply torrenting...it hardly matters unless people keep buying (not renting) content. You're not going to save any artist who depends on it, no matter how good you feel about your legally flawless Spotify subscription.
Furthermore I don't see how the availability through torrents is of any importance - with the same argument we might as well stop paying for any digital goods...including software, apps, you name it.
People do stop paying. Moral heckling doesn't work. Trying to guilt people about artists doesn't work. Prosecution looks absurdly heavy-handed and costs more than it brings in. How are you going to get people to pay?
And how are you going to compete with the ever-increasing amount of free content out there, using up people's finite leisure time?
Because we're not going to go back to DVDs. And eventually, something like popcorntime will just become the ubiquitous, go to solution that ultimately hurts them further, because it'll do what can't be done legally.
I still don't see how this makes streaming an unavoidable development, or a desirable one from the creator's perspective.
Nobody wants to bring back DVDs - I haven't bought a CD in years, but that doesn't stop me from buying a lot of music as digital, lossless download. I can't do the same with movies. That's the problem I'm facing with the movie industry and the solution is easy: Allow me to buy DRM-free, high quality video files and we're good - that is a very legal and easy solution.
Just because streaming is popular with users, it doesn't have to make financial sense - in fact it doesn't. Just ask most people working in music.
DRM free, high quality videos will get bought once, shared with friends, etc. And I'd suspect a whole load of people will just go back to torrenting (or whatever is popular at the time) because they know they'll find a perfect copy straight away. If you give them the model to buy and play immediately (the convenience of a streaming service), you're just iTunes. Or you may as well stream. You can't argue that for John Everyman, Netflix/Spotify/etc. are super convenient. I make one payment a month, of a set fee for which I have budgeted. I open the app, I choose, I press play. Or I don't. I can do it once a month, or all day long.
I understand your point regarding financial sense and artists, but times change. Just ask most people driving taxis. They'll tell you Uber is destroying an industry. It may be. But we're all using it. I don't know the answer. But clinging on to something that's slipping away, rather than letting go and channeling your energy elsewhere usually hurts more in the long run.
I think the way forward is something like the Distributed Library of Alexandria. The artists distribute their own content for micropayments, p2p networks provide the CDNs. Done properly there's still room for real value-add services in the middle to provide different interfaces and curation.
I wanted to watch "Wild" (2014) the other day. My only option is to pay $13 to buy it, from either Amazon or iTunes or one of the other online legal video sites.
I find this very frustrating.. I'd like to pay 3 or 4 bucks to rent it for a single viewing, but even though it is from 2014 none of the sites offer to rent it. I'm probably going to torrent it.
Your choice not to have a dic player is what is limiting your options then. That's not the future coming to fast, that's you cutting off the present too fast for your own interests. For that, only one person is to blame.
Yes, I think we see this happening now as the streaming part of the industry (Netflix, Amazon, etc) start producing their own content. They will slowly supersede the old industry. It seems to take longer than for the music industry, though.
>The fact is, most people are prepared to pay for a VOD and/or music service. We just don't want to pay for 3 of them. Money aside, it just isn't convenient.
Sounds like an opportunity for a Dogpile-type[1] service to come in and build an app that sits on top of your Netflix, Hulu and HBOGo subscriptions and allows you to discover/search/launch from one place.
It would probably be hacked up and functionality could be broken by one of the VODs at will, but if it lasts long enough to get some traction it would have done its job as a proof of concept to the media dinosaurs and you could make an exit.
www.canistream.it does some of this data aggregation. I believe the problem you would encounter if you put all of this into one slick interface and it became popular is that the VOD services would fight you.
They don't want you discovering what they don't offer. They want you to user their service. Otherwise you may find yourself using the other service more than theirs and cancel.
Plus this doesn't ultimately deal with the pain of dealing with multiple bills and, essentially, paying for the same thing multiple times where there is overlap.
I doubt anyone in entertainment thinks that avoiding the fate of the music industry would be a shame. Spotify is great for us users but there's no money in music anymore (not that that is specifically Spotify's fault).
I wonder how much of that is simply due to an explosion of supply driving prices down. It's so much cheaper to record and distribute music that there's no scarcity at all.
I'm inclined to agree with this - I've got a backlog of albums to listen to, either recommended by friends, new releases by artists I already know I like, or from monthly playlists like BIRP. According to Banshee, it would take me about a month of 24/7 listening to hear all of it once. By the time I polish off that backlog, I'm sure that I will have found another couple hundred albums to replace it.
So, right now my biggest problem is search and categorization by mood, rather than supply or even discovery.
On the contrary, the future isn't arriving anywhere nearly fast enough. I'm old too – but when I was a teenager, I expected that by now there would be a moonbase or three, not to mention thriving orbital colonies, Mars expeditions, self-driving cars for sale, solar power satellites, and maybe even brain-to-computer direct interfaces or augmented reality a la Rainbows End. The future ain't what it used to be, dammit!
The article has nothing to do with the "actual" future of things like energy. He's being cheeky that, due to general silliness on several levels of media companies, he cannot get content he wants as easily as he used to despite streaming being "the future" where every content ever should be instantly available for purchase and view, and all parties should be happy about that.
When I was a little kid in the fourth grade, I remember doing a book report about nuclear power, and how fusion research meant that we'd be done with fossil fuels forever any decade now.
Still waiting for any serious attempt to get off fossil fuels. Oh well, there goes the planet.
The future is never, then, because you'll still have to pay for how much copper (and everything else) is tied up in the delivery of power from the free power plant to your house. Which isn't free.
They never said "free" they said "too cheap to meter". The costs you mention are typically infrastructure related taxes, and aren't done on a per-usage basis.
So we're going to buy power based on our theoretical peak consumption? Like if I want 100 amps of 220V single-phase service to my house that's $X and if I want 200 amps of 3 phase 220V that's $2X? Or however it works?
I'm not necessarily opposed to something like that, but then we'll be getting back into the "you sold me unlimited internet but it's not really unlimited because even if I use it at 100% capacity I can't consume infinite bandwidth, so there is in fact a real limit"
Augmented reality is coming along nicely actually, you may get your Rainbows End augmented reality sooner than you think. Between the virtual reality solutions already being sold, the recent advancements made to get there, and the experiments with things like google glass and meta, it may be a reality sooner rather than later (see hololens).
As someone who did a pilot's license, real flying is pretty complicated at the moment by the time you've checked 20 things, radioed air traffic control etc. To get a movie flying car like experience I think you'd need self driving car type AI to deal with that stuff. Which could happen before long.
But here the problems are clearly in the laws. Don't complain to the engineers where the flying cars are, but complain to your representative for deregulation in the laws.
And then complain about evil government not doing enough about half-ton metal bricks falling out of the sky and killing people.
Humans are too dumb to be able to drive cars safely, as evidenced by over a million people dying in traffic accidents each year. That the air travel industry has so little accidents is a miracle, and in big part owed to all those pesky and annoying regulations that can coordinate thousands of people on the same task and make them do their jobs right.
Maybe among the people who think deep about those issues. You'd be surprised if you talked to the general population. It's "deregulate all the things!" but then they complain that the food they eat is crap and companies keep screwing them over.
Much of the stuff with flying is for safety rather than legal compliance. For example radioing air traffic control is to avoid crashing into other aircraft. It would be nice if there was some automated google maps like system to do that instead but I don't think it exists currently.
Flying cars are one of those things that make sense until you think about them carefully and with the benefit of hindsight. I wonder what our "flying car" is now in 2016.
Privacy? Democracy in USA? Democracy makes sense, until you notice that the sheer power provided by data and the speed it pivots gave citizen too little time to upgrade their democratic process. I'll even throw the hypothesis that the Snowden files would have happened, no matter how solid were the democratic traditions, culture, institutions.
What doesn't make sense? The Transition looks fairly OK, though it probably only suits flying to places that are small and don't have rental cars.
Flying car now is a better idea, if they're automated. More complicated flight systems are no problem for software. And safety will be far better than humans. Though if we get fully automated roads/cars, the speed improvement might not be so big. (Automated roads might be able to go at what, 200Kph? More on highways?)
Flying cars are a horrible idea. Flying requires a 20x higher energy output than driving. It's extremely weather sensitive. It requires space for landing, unless you go VLTO, then your energy usage skyrockets even more. There are huge privacy concerns, last mile and noise issues. Not to mention it would be a further move from mass transit to (much less efficient) private transportation.
I'm not sure that's always the case. Take a look at the PAL-V, which is in production right now (there was a short item on it on Dutch TV, they're currently looking for investors to boost international sales).
According to their specifications [1], it can do 6 km/l when flying, and 12 km/l on land. The specs they give aren't directly comparable sadly, so I had to do a short calculation to get the flying mileage (180 km/28 l), but it suggests that your 20x figure is one order of magnitude too high. The vehicle's range also suggests a 3x difference, not 20x.
I just see it as a personal plane that doesn't require a taxi or rental car. If they were more common, then the limited amount of space needed for a light-car runway would be easier to pop in. Also note that Jetsons, to use a fictional example, had no qualms about building up, in comparison to apparently everyone in the West.
That should finally be close? Just add drones and self driving cars together. Soon we will have drones to deliver larger stuff than a small package from Amazon, so all the basic parts will be there.
Take a drone which can carry two people's weight and put a transparent box with a door on it. Add small wheels and some minimal parking capacity. Add a parachute for emergencies. (Note that there won't be a long educations for pilots. You just choose an address in Google Maps. If the drone can land vertically you might have to select a flat area at the destination, but it should be negotiated (along with parking fee) before going there.)
Instead of flying cars I'd rather have the cheap launch capacity of the Shuttle, which must have set some record when it was ~ two orders of a magnitude more expensive per pound than promised. :-( With so low launch costs we would finally get real giant space telescopes and an industrial infrastructure outside the atmosphere.
That was my explicit point in the first two sentences. The parts are here. Add a transparent box to a soon existing drone, add self-driving and you have a flying car.
Military drones fly themselves already. There will be routing systems for drones when e.g. Amazon starts to deliver packets to the home. And so on.
(But not necessarily helicopter. Note the "If the drone can land vertically". You could do this with a drone air plane. If the transparent box (passenger compartment) is moved automatically to/from an automated taxi to a drone, you have a point-to-point taxi service anywhere.)
Edit: The next logical step is a trailer home with solar energy -- move it anywhere with a taxi large helicopter airlift. Drones deliver groceries, while you enjoy the view from your mountain top, far from any roads.
The Netflix ambition of a smorgasbord streaming product has slammed straight into the reality of the murky world of internationally licensed content.
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it"
The public has seen the future with Spotify, and wonder why video can't be the same. But there are a lot of people with influential positions in the industry whose livelihood depend on this red tape. Byzantine licensing laws fund entire departments of faceless middlemen, greedy regional affiliates and dark armies of lawyers.
Music wasn't particularly different, it's just that we are further along in the capitulating-industry-dinosaur story there.
In fairness, the raw product of music has the advantage of being very cheap to produce. A lot of the value that the industry provides is in marketing. There's also an extent to which bands can afford to give away music on generous terms, because they can use it to publicise other, non-reproducible forms of entertainment like gigs.
By contrast, with the exception of a small minority of films that rake in on merchandising, in the movie/tv industry the film is the only real product. That product is extremely expensive to make. If everyone only streamed Netflix to consume video, the industry would have to drastically reduce investment in making original content. That might be an acceptable outcome to many people, but I can see why the industry would want/need to fight it.
I do wonder whether the licensing snafu that is the movie world is, in the long term, going to kill it or at least badly damage it as an artform.
We already know it's hideous and irritating from a consumer's point of view. But what you may not know is that it's horrendous from a creator's point of view too, at least if you're making a film with a less than $20m budget.
And that accounts for a great deal of the talent entering the industry.
In order to sell a film the conventional way, you have to visit multiple film markets to meet potential buyers, do a festival run for social proof (and go to all those festivals), potentially pay out of your pocket for a cinema run, negotiate with a bunch of people who all have far more information than you do as to the value of your film, employ third parties (sales agents) who have a near-universal reputation as crooks, and finally, quite likely sue to get anything beyond the advance you're promised.
(And other stuff. Lots of other stuff, which I'm not going into here. Masters, E&O insurance, delivery formats...)
Selling a film - not making it, just selling the finished thing - takes 1-2 years, and can easily require a $50k budget.
(Yes, you can sell the film as an MP4 from your own website. But the problem is that people won't buy it because that's not how the public are used to getting their films. At a film festival I recently attended, a very respected sales agent - and that's a rare breed - asked the audience and other panel members if they knew of anyone who had made a profit selling their narrative film digitally from their own site. Nobody did.)
By contrast, selling a book involves uploading that book to Amazon, setting a price, and promoting it. If you're being thorough about your launch process it might take 3 weeks.
I've been a filmmaker for 20 years. I'm currently dipping my toe in the world of games development, for pretty much exactly these reasons.
>(Yes, you can sell the film as an MP4 from your own website. But the problem is that people won't buy it because that's not how the public are used to getting their films. At a film festival I recently attended, a very respected sales agent - and that's a rare breed - asked the audience and other panel members if they knew of anyone who had made a profit selling their narrative film digitally from their own site. Nobody did.)
What about Horace and Pete (Louis C.K.'s self produced/distributed "web series")?
Webseries are a slightly different kettle of fish to feature films, and generally in the indie world people draw a distinction between indie movies from relative unknowns (which can cheerfully include people with multiple features under their belt, but doesn't include A-list movie stars, for example) and things made by people who are genuinely extremely famous.
Obviously if Tom Cruise, say, decided to fund his own $100k feature film he could probably distribute it at a profit.
>but doesn't include A-list movie stars, for example
Surely you aren't still talking about Horace and Pete. Aside from Louis C.K. himself being one of the top comedians (among other things) in America, Horace and Pete starred Alan Alda, Steve Buscemi, Jessica Lange, and Edie Falco, among others.
They, and the format of the series itself, is why I used quotes in "web series". I think it would be hard to argue that it wasn't a successful self produced distributed piece of cinematography that didn't include a cast of stars.
That said, I agree to an extent -- I haven't seen a feature length, stand alone film that has been successfully produced and distributed independently like that.
That cast's vastly beyond the reach of anyone not spending $50m on a movie. Steve Buscemi alone is enough to open a picture.
And I'd argue Louis CK is, at this point, big enough to qualify as close to A-list by himself. He's famous enough to get a TV series greenlit essentially on the strength of his personal brand, for example.
Essentially, that example shows that if you have a lot of very famous people who are willing to be in your series, and you yourself are also very famous, you can self-distribute. No-one's really denying that.
> At a film festival I recently attended, a very respected sales agent - and that's a rare breed - asked the audience and other panel members if they knew of anyone who had made a profit selling their narrative film digitally from their own site. Nobody did.
Has that ever happen at all? I didn't hear about that yet.
Various people have tried it, but it usually works somewhere between "not well" and "terribly".
Although information flow in the film world is so limited that it might well be there's someone out there who has cracked it and is making a healthy profit - they're just not telling anyone.
Arguably the film business is already dying, and all it has left to offer the mass market is bigger and bigger cinema spectacle in increasingly stupid superhero movies.
A lot of talent and longer, more complex storytelling is moving to TV, which is itself moving to Netflix.
The weird thing about the law that we ended up with is that if you receive the digital bits via a plastic circle you can do whatever you want with them including make money off of them without giving any of it to the copyright owner. But if you receive the bits via the internet the copyright holder can get you thrown in jail if you try to hand the bits off to anybody else. It makes no sense but Hollywood outmaneuvered everybody on the lobbying in the 90s and it seems this is what we're stuck with going forward as they get their rules codified into international trade agreements that will last decades.
> Streaming may be preferable in some cases, but it’s clearly not the only means of distributing some movies. That
remains the plastic circle.
What's still lacking are digital stores which sell video files. DRM-free. Who needs circles if you can have a file and use it any way you want? But DRM poison prevents the future. So I wouldn't say it's arriving too fast. It's arriving way too slow.
But why buy a movie when you can just rent it on demand? That way you're not locked in to a particular format or quality level and don't have to worry about backups.
> But why buy a movie when you can just rent it on demand?
If it's something I like, I prefer to have a backup of it and watch it where I want and how I want. I always do that with music, games and e-books. If it's one time use, then not making backups is more acceptable. You can ask same question about physical books. Why buy it and not just get it in the library? Similar answer will apply.
Secondly, unless that streaming is using some ubiquitous cross platform technology (like Web browser without DRM garbage), it won't be available on many platforms and will be tied to provided application. DRM-free file makes it platform independent.
Thirdly, I find it weird that streaming should be equated to inability to get a DRM-free file. Streaming is simply convenience (no need to download). But it shouldn't preclude ability to download itself. They are not contradictory, except in the mind of DRM pushers. For instance GOG's failed video service provides ability to stream video, and download it as well. Equating streaming to renting is incorrect.
This exactly. None of my machines can read plastic circles anymore anyway. Behind the stream and the physical object there is a file that could be downloaded.
At this point, Netflix is almost like the streaming company that acquired a plastic disc company, and hasn't quite gotten around to killing it yet. Search also feels biased towards streaming, to the point where it will suggest several "not even close" streaming movies before the literal title that you're searching for.
I think Netflix intentionally provides bad suggestions. The last week I've tried several times to use Netflix. In each instance, I spend 10+ minutes trying to find something, fail, and give up. Netflix "recommends" stuff that it rates at 1 star. Terrible junk.
And they don't even have the decency to make it easy to see 3rd party ratings or trailers. And if you start something that sucks, it's hard to tell it to stop showing it to you. They also removed the easy way to mark "Not Interested". It's become a much worse experience, perhaps bounded by their limited catalog.
They must know this. They must see the stats on how long people spend browsing vs cancellation rates.
I'm also confused by their approach to interface. Perhaps there is some hidden benefit to having people accidentally start watching films when they just want to learn more about it, even if they immediately stop?
Maybe it somehow satisfies some arcane distribution requirement in a way that saves them licensing fees on the more popular films? Maybe it helps some department improve some metric that some other department cares about?
> Search also feels biased towards streaming, to the point where it will suggest several "not even close" streaming movies before the literal title that you're searching for.
This is not true if you have a DVD plan. There's a big "add" button next to the dvd-only results.
The biggest hindrance in the country where I live is licensing agreements. Companies buy exclusive rights to popular content, limit it to their restrictive and expensive platform/service. This license will often last from 6 months to a year. I'm tired of getting the, "this content is not available in your region" because its either unlicensed or been elusively licensed.
I understand the benefits of exclusivity in distinguishing products, but rather than 6-12 months (or sometimes more), it should be more like 2 weeks, or a month. Unlike exclusivity on xbox/ps4/pc, where the content is specifically designed for those platforms, there is no technical reason for exclusivity for media content.
Half the time the rights holders don't even license some content for my country until a few weeks to months later. Occasionally, not at all. They could license it on netflix for my country, or other similar service, but refuse to do so. Yet this is in spite of netflix having a license for the same content in the US, or other regions.
With the internet, regional licensing just makes no sense for digital goods. A service like netflix should be able to obtain a license for content and distribute it to whom ever they want to, where ever they are. The only barriers to this are artificial.
So while the future may be rushing forward, in many ways, we are partially stuck in the past, held back by archaic and antiquated systems of past generations that are unable to let go. Its a matter of perspective. For some the future isn't coming soon enough, for others its rushing by.
Content is rarely/never designed specifically for a games console. Game engines are always mostly portable and the porting costs are quite low. Video game exclusivity, when it happens, is nearly always a business decision to try and boost the popularity of the platform.
The main problem is that the big audiences are still on the older platforms, not Netflix or equivalents (and if all audiences moved from older providers which are at least competing, to Netflix, would that really be better? Or just replacing the devil you know with the devil you don't?)
Speaking as someone who has ported games to other platforms before, it's not as easy as you say. There's almost always platform-specific issues to deal with. It's rarely as easy as "Export -> to Xbox" (although Unity tries real hard to do this, it took us several months to convert one of our games from PC to iOS).
Differences in input, resolution, screen sizes, and RAM often become hurdles that take real time and manpower to overcome, and can be insurmountable, depending on how the game is structured. The companies might have legitimate concerns over whether their time is better spent on porting to new platforms, or spent working on the next title.
That's why you see so many third parties handle the ports, so the core team can move on to new projects.
On this note, I met an entrepreneur in Maryland making hundreds of millions by buying (or getting for free) used music cassette tapes and scratched cds, and cleaning them up, repackaging them and selling them at gas stations throughout the US.
There is still gold in them circle things and them thar hills.
You cannot do millions doing that kind of job all by yourself. So I guess that you need a whole company for it, which implies managing people, money, paying salaries, taxes, etc. It's not only "cleaning scratched cds".
I understand how some people might buy CDs, but I can't believe there is a multimillion market out there for them. Maybe he made his millions one or two decades ago?
I think you might be out of touch with reality. Consumer technologies die slowly.
CDs are in decline, but they're still a huge market (many, many millions). Consider just the millions of used cars out there which only take CDs and you can see why the market is still probably a huge business.
46% of music industry revenue still came from CDs in 2014. [0] That's at least hundreds of millions of dollars.
I wouldn't have believed it if I didn't see it. (we were running a p2p used video game marketplace, and went to him to help cover inventory gaps.)
The next time you are driving through any random state and stop at a gas station or truck stop, you will see cassette tapes for sale. Those are from this guy.
You also have to consider he operates on massive margins. He gets his good for next to nothing and sells it for several dollars.
New cars only started getting streaming or aux audio input capabilities in the past 5 years. Most people still own CDs to play when they're driving because they have no other option.
An FM transmitter that attaches to a smartphone gives a perfectly clear signal, costs less than $7, and only requires a cigarette lighter, standard in cars since the 1920's, and FM radio, standard since the 50's.
I have an FM transmitter, and I still keep a CD in the player in the car and use that more often. It takes time to get everything hooked up.
On drives greater than 30 mins, it's worth it, but if I'm just going someplace ten minutes away (i.e. most of my driving), well I'd be adding an extra 2-3 minutes just hunting down the cord, plugging it in, launching the player, choosing what I want to play, etc.
Meanwhile my CD player starts the instant I turn on the car.
That being said, I did get a Bluetooth FM transmitter recently that has a built-in SD card slot and starts transmitting the SD card music the instant you plug it into the cigarette lighter, so that may eliminate my need for CDs.
A different way to look at the author's point is that rather than Netflix streaming everything the problem is actually that they don't maintain feature parity between their desktop and mobile websites. If he could manage his disc queue from his smartphone he wouldn't have neededto write this blog post. And that is a very valid point - huge numbers of people use their phone as their primary way to access the internet, so having features that are only available to desktop users alienates a big chunk of your market. For a company the size of Netflix to fail in this regard is quite irksome.
These people need to learn about "request desktop site on mobile". It's buried in Safari, but still doable.
> For a company the size of Netflix to fail in this regard is quite irksome.
As a shareholder, I applaud them for not spending resources to include little-used features on their mobile site. Being a big company doesn't mean you can do all things for all people.
Request desktop quite often fails. I'm assuming the browser is passing a desktop use agent so I can't imagine why it does. But it seems to happen more on sites with the "m" subdomain.
I've never seen it work on a site with an m subdomain. But Netflix serves both sites from www.
Edit: I take it back. Somehow it works right on my own site, Kongregate. I wonder what the trick is?
Edit: The trick seems to be a session variable that remembers the browser used to say it was mobile. Then a request to 'm' with desktop headers should redirect to 'www'.
The DVD mailing is really a separate business from the streaming. Netflix were right trying to split it off. Unfortunately they did it too early and there was a big backlash. Had they waited a year or two longer few would have cared. Qwikster would have been a separate company with its own leadership and its own app, focused on those who want plastic circles in the mail. Ok, you would need two subscriptions if you want both services, but I am sure there would be a cross-promotion package deal.
Not for movies that we old people like. Either the movies are not to be found, or the quality is lousy, or it's seeded by one person with a dial-up connection.
Reddit's OpenDirectories subreddit sometimes has non-bittorrent servers with older movies in what I assume is good quality (judging from the file size).
Of course that's not a solution for when you want to watch a movie in the next few hours.
Netflix only supports DVD queue management from its desktop page. That's a mildly annoying work if a particular service (but since the desktop page world fine on mobile, only mildly annoying), and hardly worth the overblown drama of this article, which is our histrionics.
A good friend has an extensive pirated media content library.
He insists, and I believe him, that this is not primarily because he is unwilling to pay for the content, but simply because getting it on demand through a commercial channel is too difficult and inconsistent.
We are the mindless, soulless, mass of consumers and we are the future! New is good, old is bad. Forget the past, forget history - we are forging the future without any of that! An ideal future! Quality is measured in Megapixels, truth is what our prophets tell us, and individuality be damned. Now off to the future we head for the sake of it! Follow us over this cliff - redemption lies at the bottom. Anyone who claims otherwise is a racist troll!
Don't get left behind, old man. You will surely be a miserable person without the latest apps on the latest iGadget. Besides, there is no place in our ideal world for people like you.
We recently encountered a situation where (brought to mind by recent political events) my wife wanted to watch Bob Roberts[0], an obscure "mockumentary" about an outrageous wealthy political candidate.
I'd never heard of it. She asked around, and almost none of her friends had either. She was so insistent regarding its relevance that we set up a viewing party to see it.
Being naive, we both assumed it could be streamed... somewhere. We haven't used those plastic discs in a while either, but we figured we would not need them. We didn't know whether Netflix would have it, but we figured somebody would take our money so we could see it.
Nobody. Nowhere. It was completely unavailable.
I figured that the rights were tied up to keep those physical discs moving from shelves. I thought I'd run to the nearest big box store and pick it up. I went to their web site to see if they had it.
Nope. Not there.
I mean, I suppose you can imagine how my story ends: I go to a shady looking site where I can find this particular movie for free and have it saved on my hard drive with no restrictions. Just as I was becoming annoyed with the future, I was reminded of how senseless this problem is.
It was a good movie, and it was good that our friends could enjoy it. But it's easy to imagine a future where it disappears forever, for everybody.
The tl;dr is "Netflix has no way to request 'plastic discs' via the mobile app or mobile website".
I guess that's fair. Personally I don't even own a device that can play "plastic discs" anymore, which I think is kinda the point (of Netflix not making that a first class use case).
Some commenters for some reason have seemingly just taken the title and extrapolating to the entire content industry (did all these people actually click on the link?).
A lesser point is finding content. Movie A is on Netflix and Amazon. Movie B is on Hulu. Movie C is on plastic discs only. This is a general problem (for consumers) as the content producers fight the inevitable commoditization.
The movie industry is suffering not from piracy or streaming (IMHO) but from TV. Streaming and "plastic discs" made long form serial content viable. There's something deeply satisfying about the almost 48 hours of Breaking Bad vs the 2-2.5 of almost all movies (most of which these days seem to just regurgitate the same superhero formula time and again).
Additionally, good TV can be produced pretty cheaply too compared to any modern movie budget.
Because I am also old (getting there, okay), I remember doing this thing called 'writing stuff down' on like a bar napkin and then going home to my PC and looking something up, like little plastic discs that could be sent to me. Yes, I frequently still carry around an analog user interface communication device...yeah, a pen. Just sayin'.
As demand goes down, supply will too. There comes a point where it isn't worth making something anymore. Those that demand it still will miss out. To me, this is an acceptable outcome of capitalism.
But I don't think that's what the article is saying. I think it's saying, "There's a difference between wanting and liking (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incentive_salience). Demand is determined by wanting, not liking, and so that's what the market responds to. People don't do a good job of wanting what they like, and thus the market is reducing supply too quickly."
Ie. plastic circles (and their analogs) really make people happy. If people were smarter, they'd realize this demand for them would be higher. But because they're mistaken, supply falls too quickly.
Just decided to go through a ton of super hero movies with my kids, mostly catching up with the Marvel time line.
Impossible without the Netflix Plastic Circle service. Overall, the First Sale Doctrine makes the Plastic Circle service much more valuable than the Netflix Bits service, in my opinion.
Seems more and more difficult to find something we haven't seen, appropriate for all of us to watch, and decent artistic quality on streaming. I think our need for immediate gratification is leading us to give up long established legal rights. Watching bad content because we're too lazy to put something good in our queue and wait for the plastic circle to arrive.
What'd Apple do to kill the floppy? I remember that floppies really only died after pendrives became common. Even with CDs before, there were still floppies around, since it wasn't as simple to copy data to CD (not to mention lack of removal).
The future's been arriving too fast since velocipedes (bikes) were corrupting our youth. This sounds more like a business problem Netflix has invented to solve a (to them) bigger business problem, and such tactics have always existed.
Yes. So the basis of this rant is a poor UX decision on the part of Netflix.
It would be fine to sort of hide that there are discs... if my account didn't include that. But if it does, there should at least be a button somewhere near the top that takes me to the DVD website from the normal mobile / streaming website. There's certainly one going the other way!
Everything is amazing and some people aren't happy. The amazing new things make them forget that the crappier old things are still around. They just need to look underneath the big pile of amazing new things.
The unfortunate part of this situation is that the only good content Netflix has is their own TV shows.
They don't have rights to stream any decent movies, those are all still just discs. Exactly one time in the last three years when I've gone to search for a movie I wanted to watch was it available for streaming.
Several of those movies were ones that I did search for closer to when they were out, so they must have acquired the rights in the meantime. But that's another of their problems: why would I look again when it wasn't there before?
Contrast this with the DVD/Blu Ray model: if it's available for sale you can rent it from them. There's not a mishmash of rights and availability dates.
This is a common and unfortunate knock against Netflix. People conflate Netflix not having what they like with not providing good content. Most of those movies are massive critical hits and huge cult films.
yet they might disappear from Netflix at any moment... I don't track contracts renewal dates so I don't know exactly when they might or might not stay on Netflix. (Netflix’s US Catalog Has Shrunk by More Than 2,500 Titles in Less Than 2.5 Years, https://www.allflicks.net/netflixs-us-catalog-has-shrunk-by-... )
So this is a list of largely older movies that have been in their collection for years.
...I've had Netflix for years, and I can knock out two movies a night.
Rapidly running out of quality content here. They don't acquire at the rate people consume. If you've been watching Netflix for a while, most of what's left to you is Asylum/Sci-Fi Original movies.
>> "I can knock out two movies a night."
>> "Rapidly running out of quality content here."
>> "They don't acquire at the rate people consume."
I think you consume movies at a much higher rate that the average person. The stats I can find estimate on average people watch between 1-3 movies per week.
My point is I "can", not that I "do". Though, in fairness, I might if Netflix still had content worth watching.
At the moment I do have some Daredevil episodes queued up, but Netflix doesn't produce original content I watch at a rate worthy of keeping my subscription. Out of laziness or habit, I have my subscription year round, but the smarter thing would be to sub up for a month or two per year to binge watch Daredevil, Jessica Jones, and Orange is the New Black.
I only found 2 decent movies in your list (in fact, I'm not sure if you're trolling, I got a good chuckle when reading your list). We all have different definitions of quality.
Yes. In terms of content, most of Hollywood's movies don't reach any more depth than your average comic. The PG rating system is only concerned with maintaining a standard of purity, it doesn't reflect a movie's story depth.
I was shocked the other day when I tried to watch Lilyhammer, one of Netflix's own TV shows, while in Singapore - it's not available! I can understand licensing issues for other content, but their own? Why would they do that?
I believe Lilyhammer was originally produced by the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation, not Netflix; Netflix just obtained American distribution rights.
Yet they brand it Netflix. Same for Better Call Saul. Started it up, no subtitles in English (I was not in the US). Contact support and they say "Oh licensing."
The lack of same-as-audio-language subtitles should be an issue for some association of hearing impaired people to fight. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if legislation mandating access is required in some cases. Seems rather discriminatory to let people select audio language, but then require them to be able to hear just fine.
Of course, torrents almost never have this issue. (And have proper rewind/forward/skip/audio adjust[1] features.) At least half the time of the rare times I found something on Netflix, I just torrent it anyways as it's a superior experience.
1: Seriously, Netflix has been around for how long? And still no dynamic range compression for nighttime watching? Or "volume boost" for really quiet sources (or shitty playback systems)?
We don't have the 4th season of House of Cards on Netflix in Germany (and I also think other European countries), because they sold the rights to Sky. This is why I quit my Netflix subscription.
Which I understand they had to, but they did a poor job explaining that. Afaik, only after lots of people rage-quit their accounts they kind of explained what happened...
Often it's because they already licensed their original content and gave exclusive rights to a local company before launching Netflix there... And it may differ season by season for the same show!
I can't help but agree. Increasingly, things I want to watch just aren't there. It didn't feel like this five years ago. Then, it felt like most anything I wanted to watch was there. Maybe my taste has changed.
Back in the DVD/Bluray era, I wonder how many hundreds on tonnes of plastic was consumed, and how much carbon was burnt shipping it? And how much of that now sits in landfill?
An iMac doesn't even have a CD/DVD drive any more. And the movies that I want aren't offered for sale, but only for rental. Apple is destroying my present.
Yes, increasing the clutter. iMac is a failed design that forces me to add mess and clutter in order to get to an appropriate functionality. The computer itself is not extensible and hardly serviceable. The alternative, Mac Pro, is now only for rich people.
Netflix can buy DVDs at retail prices and rent them out over and over. If it want to put pressure on content companies it wants the DVD part of the business to be as robust as possible. That way it can say "We'd love to stream your stuff, but we don't really need to. We're really sort of doing you a favor here."
First, that the advances of technology are outpacing the scenarios which they are used. As I have voiced elsewhere here, it is alarming to see billions and trillions of dollars flowing towards people who seem incapable of balancing, let-alone considering, the higher-order consequences of their actions, like, say, shutting-down the home-automation systems your customers bought as a consequence of being absorbed by a competitor. Or, denying random people things and services they used to have access to.
More disturbingly, it seems that many do see these later effects, and they're sacrificing their customers' interests on the altar of the almighty dollar. Is this really what we want?
Secondly, modern media consumption via streaming is simpler, yes, if you're a first-world citizen with money and typical interests. It does a disservice to people who do not fit this mold, and they are legion. The older, peer-to-peer model of file-sharing (and, in some cases, sneakernets) thrives and survives in this adverse environment, in addition to providing personal independence and privacy.
Thirdly, the chain of variables in a streaming economy is so much longer than a world of plastic shiny discs. As an example, to watch a movie via a DVD you bought or rented, you need:
* viewing device with electricity and a screen (one-time cost)
* a DVD player, properly connected (one-time cost)
* software on said device able to execute and play the disc (one-time cost and not even a consideration historically)
* the disc, in a workable condition (edit: and a compatible region), and the funds or means to acquire it (one-time cost)
* knowledge to operate the DVD player
... and thats it. Compare with Netflix, Hulu, et al:
* viewing device with electricity, internet access, and a screen (one-time cost)
* a working, high-bandwidth internet account that can reach your servers with an acceptable latency (recurring cost)
* a current account with your service provider(s) of choice (1x+ recurring cost)
* current software, able to execute, on said device (recurring cost due to updates)
* a provider that is online and accessible
* knowledge to operate the media player, but also possibly the web browser, on a phone, or tablet, or computer (one-time cost)
* knowledge of current account credentials (sometimes difficult for some)
The cost side of streaming media is so much higer, and entails significant recurring obligations. If you can't pay your streaming bill, much of this goes away. There are many more points of failure. This is simply unacceptable in many parts of the world.
Well you forgot the region code problem the DVD had. At least in the beginning it was really hard to get around this. It's definitely easier if you were in region 1 and only wanted to watch content for this. But in the beginning it was pretty hard to get around that if you were living somewhere else.
I've bought a region 1 DVD (beeing in a region 2 land) and had to reflash my DVD drive to play this DVD. And don't get me started on store bought DVDs which were in English and German, but if you wanted to watch the English version you had to watch it with subtitles.
>And don't get me started on store bought DVDs which were in English and German, but if you wanted to watch the English version you had to watch it with subtitles.
Assuming you are talking about playback on a computer: Only the officially licensed software did this, along with blocking fast-forward during movie previews etc. But VLC for example let you select whatever audio track and subtitle track you wanted.
is this guy serious? Ambitious title for some lame words that leave my heart weeping.
Could've searched and completed a torrent download before finishing the second sentence. Obviously not many people experience your roadblock, otherwise there would be a market and it would be filled. Maybe there is a market. Get off your ass and get to work.
I thought this article was on some Wait but Why, AI, tipping point or something.
This guy is missing out on the present waiting for a future where Netflix has all content availaible to stream for 9.99$ a month.
As far as I know, you can stream much more content from say Amazon, Google Play, iTunes, Crackle, etc. Just need to be willing to pay. You can also buy plastic discs from a lot of places. And if you don't want to pay, you can torrent the world.
So I don't really understand what's his complaints about? He preferred it when Netflix was a mail rental company? I doubt that's worthy of HN.
Not worthy of HN? How? He wants to watch old movies, now. (Not in the future.) He used to be able to but now he can't. Tech "innovation" took that away from him. That is an opinion worthy of HN.
On another note: personally, many don't want to deal with Netflix+Amazon+Hulu+whoever. This attitude that one should have faith in the streaming market is an affront and slap-in-the-face to collectors, people with shitty internet, critics, teachers, historians, archivists, remixers, and anyone else with an interest in private use or working with the bits.
Sure, additional services can be provisioned to fill in those gaps... but those gaps never existed when data sharing was about files and not streaming services. This business model of the cloud looks more and more like windshield-repairmen walking around parking lots with baseball bats at 3 A.M.
Really old movies are surprisingly hard to find... Outside of Turner Classic Movies (thanks, Comcast, for dumping that from my package and leaving all the other shit), and the Criteria Collection, it can be kind of difficult to find anything that isn't Oscar-winning or older than 30 years. Torrents don't even really help - you might have 4000 seeders for the latest shaky-cam movie theater rip of a super hero movie, but for a somewhat obscure John Ford western from 1947, you might have two, three, maybe.
I wonder how much of that is due to the reign of terror of the hollywood monopolies in their fight against torrenting? Of course the consumers of obscure movies are less common than the latest blockbuster, but they're out there, and there are enough of them. They're turning off seeding and peering once the download's complete so that they won't get caught. Torrenting can help preserve those old/obscure things and make them available even when the owners don't care and think it isn't worthwhile. But because of the fight to protect the new pop things, the old /obscure ones vanish. Meanwhile, the new pop things have so many more people interested, that they are readily available.
So in a bar he gets a Movie recomendation, send a SMS to his home server which dumps the stream, rips and burns it to a plastic disk, ready when he gets home.
If he can't code hire a dev, $200 should suffice.
I found the problem in the past was licensing 'issues' prevented whole swathes of old movies ever being shown in the UK - this is pretty efficiently fixed now.
Solving the legal issues is a separate problem that was trivially solved for previous disruptive innovations.
Compulsory blanket licenses, existing media taxes, distribution agencies - just like when radio & libraries were innovations would allow outdated laws to catch up with technological reality. Maximalist copyright is an anti-capitalist protection racket devised by ancient distribution monopolies.
I think you misunderstand. He's not objecting to streaming and does not prefer a physical DVD. Instead, he's saying that the movies he is recommended are rarely available for streaming. If he could legally stream the movie rather than waiting for a DVD in the mail, he would do so.
I beg to differ, my last sentence suggests compulsory licensing to solve this. Pay musicians just like radio & libraries from the existing media taxes. This would allow all modern expression and access.
Which is a shame, because it'll be to their own detriment (as it will be for the music industry again, if 'stars' persist in exclusivity for streaming rights) when people revert back to torrents (as one comment here has already stated). The fact is, most people are prepared to pay for a VOD and/or music service. We just don't want to pay for 3 of them. Money aside, it just isn't convenient. "Can we listen to The Beatles? Yes, I'm not sure whether it's on cassette, CD or vinyl, so search through all three collections, then make sure the appropriate player is plugged in. If it's not there, we'll need to look at buying the minidisk. Or shoplifting it."
Anyway, I appreciate the point of the article wasn't purely a rant about VOD/DVDs, and it was a point well made.