Comment by naasking
1 year ago
> In other words, we got competition. If Netflix remained the sole streaming platform of significance it would be lumped in with the monopoly talk that clouds Google, Amazon, Apple and the other trillion dollar corporations.
This "competition" increased prices, which is not the desired result from competition. The problem is that copyright holders have too much power over their content, especially older content. If copyright holders were required to license content to anyone who wished to publish or redistribute it after, say, 10 years of initial publishing, that would be a form of competition that would decrease prices.
> This "competition" increased prices
That would have happened anyway.
The only reason early Netflix was so cheap was because they negotiated streaming access to large swathes of content, because the rights holders thought licensing for streaming was worthless and leased them for a pittance.
That sweetheart deal was never going to last past Netflix's original gen contract expirations.
Right. This "competition" isn't, because most of it is run by the same folks that determine whether or not Netflix exists as an ongoing concern.
It's a HUGE fuckin shame that American Broadcasting Companies, Inc. v. Aereo, Inc. was decided the way it was. Otherwise, Netflix could get out of the stranglehold that the movie studios surely have it in by buying DVDs and either mailing them or streaming their contents to subscribers. [0]
[0] The implication here is that the movie studios are threatening to refuse to renew streaming licenses for their movies if Netflix goes back to mailing DVDs at scale. If Netflix could format-shift those DVDs in real time with a one-customer-per-DVD setup, not only would Netflix have some leverage, they wouldn't be beholden to arbitrary and capricious licensing agreements at all.
Maybe not with the existing rules. I expect regions with more consumer friendly legislature might stop exclusive licensing deals (Game of Thrones exclusively on) and vertical integration (of course Disney content is exclusive to the Disney channel). Streaming has been around long enough and successful enough that you can consider it infrastructure and legislate it as such. Especially in countries where any 'lost revenue' was going to be lost overseas in any case.