Comment by meowface
8 hours ago
Maybe there are licensing restrictions or other things that prevent it, but wouldn't it make more sense to combine HBO Max and Netflix into a single app? Or at least make all HBO Max content also available in Netflix (and then eventually sunset HBO Max). That would make a Netflix subscription a much more compelling purchase for a ton of people.
Not attacking you in particular, but I've always hated how we talk about "licensing restrictions" as if they're some kind of vague law of nature, like gravity. Oh, Studio X can't do Y... Because Licensing. "Licenses" are entirely conjured up by humans, and if there was an actual desire by the people who make decisions to change something, those people would find a way to make the "licensing restrictions" disappear. Reality is, the people making these decisions don't want to change things, at least not enough to go through the effort of changing and renegotiating the licenses. It's not "licensing restrictions" that is stopping them.
Same always comes up when we talk about why doesn't Company X open source their 20 year old video game software? Someone always chimes in to say "Well they don't because of 'licensing issues' with the source code." as if they were being stopped by a law of physics.
Speaking as someone who once worked at a company where these were real issues that came up - it's very often the case that intermediate parties in the contracts have dissolved.
Renegotiating the contracts would require lengthy and expensive processes of discovering the proper parties to actually negotiate with in the first place.
Although the contracts that were already executed can be relied upon, it truly is a can of worms to open, because it's not "Renegotiate with Studio X", it's "Renegotiate with the parent company of the defunct parent company of the company who merged with Y and created a new subsidiary Z" and so on and so forth, and then you have to relicense music, and, if need be, translations.
Then repeat that for each different region you need to relicense in because the licenses can be different for different regions.
The cost of negotiation would be greater than the losses to piracy tbh.
That’s why I strongly believe there needs to be term limits on these kinds of contracts. Copyright is supposed to benefit the consumer, after all.
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> Reality is, the people making these decisions don't want to change things, at least not enough to go through the effort of changing and renegotiating the licenses.
Which is a perfectly sensible reason for a business decision.
> "Well they don't because of 'licensing issues' with the source code." as if they were being stopped by a law of physics.
So laws should just be ignored? Issues created by human social constructs are very real.
We can change the laws. Radio stations don't have "licensing issues" with playing songs.
From another angle, if copyright were more like it was originally in the US, every single show I watched as a kid would be in the public domain, since I haven't been a kid for 28 years.
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Disobeying unjust laws is a moral imperative. Working around laws that hurt society is good for society. Changing laws that aren't benefiting society is the sign of a functioning government.
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I'm with you in spirit, but I think you are underestimating how wide and complex the dependency trees can be in content licensing. And simplifying those licensing structures often mean removing control from individual artists, which we tend to consider a Bad Thing.
Much like local control of zoning, that is an principle that many folks take on faith as being "good" despite all the actual outcomes.
In collaborative productions it is almost never the "individual" artist anyway: it's whatever giant conglomerate bought whatever giant conglomerate that paid everyone involves as little as the union would let them get away with.
The issue is that Netflix doesn't control those restrictions, the content creators (well, rights holders) do, and their incentives don't always align.
Yea, what I mean by "people who make decisions" is everybody involved: studios, distributors, rights holders, and the maze of middlemen who have inserted themselves into the business: If all of them decided that more money could be made, if not for those pesky licenses, the "licensing problems" would immediately disappear.
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The discovery+ app is still operating in some regions because of licensing 3.5 years since all the discovery content got integrated into hbo-max.
Licensing is really complicated and requires lot of paper work. The best example is the music soundtracks of old TV series. They even get substituted if they don't get the proper license to stream them. So some old show get new soundtrack or background music and they don't feel the same.
Noticed that with a lot of intl shows Netflix gets the rights to. They so often have these awful chipper toony music
That would be amazing if we could watch both Netflix and HBO Max content at the price of one subscription. At least for me, these two platforms covers 95% of my video content needs.
"The price of one subscription" being the price of Netflix plus the price of HBO. Streaming is turning back into cable where everything is trapped in one bill, no matter how expensive and uninteresting some part of that bill is.
Having Discovery's awful content push out quality HBO content was already a major blow.
Well, I guess one more significant price jump would be a sign to finally replace streaming with reading
Yeah but there is 0 chance that the cost would remain similar to what it is now
well, you'd get it at price of twice of current subscription
> Netflix and HBO Max content at the price of one subscription
Yes, the price of one subscription. I think some cable packages in the US are $200 per month?
The cable thing in US is something Im struggling to wrap my mind around. I can’t imagine someone deliberately paying so much money for such a bad content.
The only explanation I can think of is that most of the subscribers are elderly folks who signed up long time ago and didn’t bother to look into current bills.
Also maybe some ardent sport fans?
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Easy way to get rid of the few remaining "lifetime 50% discount" HBO Max subscriptions.
I quit my 50% discount after realizing that if I don't watch it anyways.
Funny thing though. When I cancelled my subscription, they offered me 50% off for a month or something like that.
Oh no I am reminded of my dead physical Rolling Stone lifetime subscription!
Hulu and Disney Plus have taken centuries in this endeavor. There's a lot of content licensed to Hulu that is not necessarily licensed to Disney Plus, though Disney Plus seems to be showing more Hulu content, but I assume it has to do with licensing.
> Hulu and Disney Plus have taken centuries in this endeavor.
Only in the US. Everywhere else Hulu has always been integrated into Disney+).
Part of that is because Disney didn’t outright own Hulu until recently. It was a joint ownership.
They might make less money with one super subscription than two separate ones.
Everything about these big moves in the streaming space is basically to re-create the "good old days" of cable subscriptions and pay-per-view.
I think we can expect HBO streaming to continue as a premium subscription for movies and high-production-value shows. That would let everything else to land on Netflix with no conflict.
Pirate everything.
I can imagine an internal analysis that says:
Move show X, Y, and Z from Netflix to HBO Max because those profiles are likely to add the second subscription.
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Piracy seems like the only thing that keeps prices/practices in check.
I wonder how much piracy really impacts their pricing strategy? I honestly don't know.
Yeah, I can easily see something like 2 separate at $20/month vs 1 super at $35/month (make-believe figures).
Assuming all WB and Netflix customers move to the super platform, that's a loss for Netflix (assuming the super platform doesn't significantly reduce their costs).
And the $35 might be more than some set of current Netflix subscribers want to pay, so they drop the service, so an even bigger potential loss.
Certainly, I have no desire to subsidize sports fans via a higher Netflix super package.
We're reinventing cable!
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> wouldn't it make more sense to combine HBO Max and Netflix into a single app
I currently pay $20 something for Netflix every month and $10 for HBO Max a couple of months through the year when I’m binging a show from HBO. I as a consumer would prefer to keep it that way. I absolutely do not have the appetite to pay $30+ a month if the two are combined.
I'd rather not even have to sift through all the stuff on Netflix to get to the stuff from HBO.
And I definitely don't want to pay double for one big catalog.
Maybe we could come up with another ludicrous suite of names for HBO/HBO Go/HBO Max once it's merged with Netflix.
The thing is, HBO _the brand_ is the valuable thing.