Comment by nonethewiser
2 months ago
> Any consolidation like this seems like a negative for consumers
This is a very common narrative to this news. But coming into this news, I think the most common narrative against streaming was essentially "There is not enough consolidation." People were happy when Netflix was the streaming service, but then everyone pulled their content and have their own (Disney, Paramount, etc.)
I want a separation between the streaming platform companies and the content making companies, so that the streaming companies can compete on making a better platform/service and the content companies compete on making better content.
I don't want one company that owns everything, I want several companies that are able to license whatever content they want. And ideally the customer can choose between a subscription that includes everything, and paying for content a la carte, or maybe subscriptions that focus on specific kinds of content (scifi/fantasy, stuff for kids, old movies, international, sports, etc.) regardless of what company made it.
This is how it worked a decade+ ago, when there was still alpha to be had on providing better streaming service. It was great and we got things like the Netflix Prize and all sorts of content ranking improvements, better CDN platforms, lower latency and less buffering, more content upgraded to HD and 4K. Plus some annoying but clearly effective practices like auto-play of trailers and unrelated shows.
Now these are all solved problems, so there is no benefit in trying to compete on making a better platform / service. The only thing left is competing on content.
> I want several companies that are able to license whatever content they want. And ideally the customer can choose between a subscription that includes everything, and paying for content a la carte, or maybe subscriptions that focus on specific kinds of content
This seems like splitting hairs, it's almost exactly what we do have. You can still buy and rent individual shows & movies from Apple and Amazon and other providers. Or you can subscribe to services. The only difference is there is no one big "subscription that includes everything", you need 10 different $15 subscriptions to get everything. Again, kind of splitting hairs though. The one big subscription would probably be the same price as everything combined anyway.
It is worth noting that the Netflix Prize winner's solution was never meaningfully used, because Netflix pivoted from ranking content based on what you tell them you like to ranking content based on clicks and minutes watched.
To say that "we have solved ranking" because Netflix decided to measure shallow metrics and addiction is... specious at best. Instead the tech industry (in all media domains, not just streaming video) replaced improving platforms and services in meaningful ways with surveillance and revenue extraction.
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Exactly. Nothing is really preventing a $200/month aggregator beyond paying a bunch of lawyers and people not wanting to pay that. I know I'll live with some service fragmentation in exchange for not paying for a bunch of stuff I'll maybe watch once in a blue moon. And I'll probably buy some discs for things I really want to see.
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> This is how it worked a decade+ ago, when there was still alpha to be had on providing better streaming service. […] Now […] there is no benefit in trying to compete on making a better platform / service. The only thing left is competing on content.
A large profit margin is not something that a business is owed.
> The only thing left is competing on content.
I don't know. Music streaming services do pretty much follow this separation of content and service. At least unless you really care about exactly which music you can access which I think most people don't.
(That's probably partly why music streaming services don't compete on content; most people don't care exactly which funky music they're listening to as long as it is funky, and had most of the popular stuff. But they definitely care if they want to watch Stranger Things and they can't watch Stranger Things but maybe you're interested in these other crap knock-offs?)
Anyway the point is music streaming services still find ways to compete. I guess they would prefer it if they could compete on content though.
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> there is no one big "subscription that includes everything"
You're right, but the switching cost is super easy, and _most_ of the time, these networks aren't putting out new content that I care that much about, so I've found it easiest to just swap services, keeping one subscription active at a time, and then switching again when I've finished watching everything interesting on the next.
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Look back in history. Studios used to own/control exhibition. That system was broken up and theaters made independent.
What we see now is that old system reforming around streaming.
Ah yes, today where they optimized out the recommendation algo to the point I haven't found something recommended to be watch worthy in years. The only thing worse than the video streaming recommendations is what's become of Amazon/Audible's book recommendations (though Spotify is trying hard to enshitify their algos to catch up).
Sad that we can't have nice things, but capitalism must be fed and I guess good, targeted recommendation algorithms are anti-capital.
> I want a separation between the streaming platform companies and the content making companies, so that the streaming companies can compete on making a better platform/service and the content companies compete on making better content.
Exactly the correct solution.
We did something similar with movie theaters and film studios for decades, up until a couple years ago. Same sort of problem, same solution should work.
Not only movie theaters, but also movie rental and selling of VHS tapes/DVDs etc.
One could go to the favorite department store and get movies from all studios right next to each other, sorted by genre or title or similar.
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We did that because the only way to see movies was in the theaters.
Exactly how do you pass a law in 2025 that no one is allowed to create their own content and publish it on the internet?
This feels very much like "United Stats vs Paramount Pictures: The Sequel"[1].
Vertical integration was the key problem back then. Major studios owned major cinema chains. They made it hard for independent cinemas to show the films people wanted, and they made it very hard for independent filmmakers to get their films shown anywhere. It was highly anti-competitive.
I wouldn't expect the U.S. government to step in this time around though. It's very clear that competition and benefiting consumers are no longer priorities.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Paramount_Pic....
This should really be the end goal. We are worse off than cable right now with all these streaming services and worse , overlapping content.
Strong disagree on being worse off than cable. I now almost never see ads, that is a huge benefit in my book.
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Did people forget that on cable you could only watch what was being broadcast in that moment?
Streaming is infinitely better.
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Why is overlapping content an issue? Isn't that good?
Let's say I like Show A and Show B. Show A is available on Provider 1 and Provider 2, Show B is available at Provider 2 and Provider 3. Thanks to overlapping content, I can subscribe to Provider 2 and I can watch both of my favorite shows.
It depends on what you watch and how much you watch.
Cable in its heyday was expensive, even for a low tier package with CNN, TNT, MTV, Nickelodeon and other non-premium channels. Most people did not have premium channels like HBO, Showtime, Cinemax, Starz, etc. Even Disney was a paid add-on in the early 90s. Adding or removing those channels at the minimum meant calling customer service and in certain eras of cable technology could even mean waiting on a tech visit to provision physical descrambling equipment. And obviously TV was linear, not on-demand.
If you watch a series or movie here and there, and aren't a big TV viewer, the streaming era is much, much cheaper with greater choice. You can often even access what you want to watch through a free trial, a single-month subscription, or a free service like Tubi or Pluto. Movie rental options are much better, more convenient, and cheaper (often even before adjusting for inflation) than Blockbuster, and you have access to much better information before you pull the trigger on renting a movie you haven't heard of before.
Oh my god no. The content is much better and you can watch whenever you want.
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This is how it was with cable, and it was actually better for the content providers. They made shows and got fat checks from the cable companies every year.
Then they all copied Netflix, because the stockmarket was rewarding it, and had to start dealing with billing, customer retention, technology platforms, advertising platforms. And they all lost a ton of money a doing it.
Not quite the same. Cable had regional monopolies due to the high barrier of entry and economies of scale (building cable infrastructure). There is still some economy of scale for streaming platforms, but if you get rid of exclusive content and the difficulty of making license deals (especially for a small player), then it is a lot easier for a new startup to compete in the area then it ever was to compete with a cable company.
>>> I want a separation between the streaming platform companies and the content making companies, so that the streaming companies can compete on making a better platform/service and the content companies compete on making better content. >>> I don't want one company that owns everything, I want several companies that are able to license whatever content they want. And ideally the customer can choose between a subscription that includes everything, and paying for content a la carte, or maybe subscriptions that focus on specific kinds of content (scifi/fantasy, stuff for kids, old movies, international, sports, etc.) regardless of what company made it.
This sounds fine in theory, but how would it work if the content were continuously changing? For example, the final straw that made my cut the cord of cable-tv was getting locked into a 3yr plan for cable TV only to get the Disney channel for the kids -- only to learn that Verizon/Disney had a fight and I lost the channel. https://deadline.com/2018/12/disney-warns-verizon-fios-custo...
Now, i'm still locked into the 3yr plan with Verizon but dont have the content I wanted. I know people complain about paying $10 or $15 for a streaming service, but imagine paying $100 for cable TV and being locked into a 3yr contract. I'd much, much rather have a la carte services I can pick and choose and cancel as desired.
However, if you're talking about the Amazon Prime TV model, then I'd totally agree with you. I think that is the ideal model -- Prime is a nominal cost (for now) and you can add/remove channels as you wish.
You can today no? You can buy or rent a single movie / tv series from apple tv, amazon etc. problem is most people don't want to buy each thing they want to watch.
You mean the "license while they feel like it" kind of purchase?
If I could pay for individual TV shows and actually own them I'd definitely prefer that over the disaster we have today. Buying a blue-ray and ripping it is not very practical and it's by design.
Sometimes you can. But there are also shows where the only (legal) way to watch it is on a particular streaming platform where it is "exclusive".
Netflix (notoriously) does not license most of their content this way. You can't rent/buy Stranger Things on Apple TV, no matter how much you're willing to pay. If Netflix acquires Warner Bros, I expect this restriction to extend to that content too over time.
This would be ideal. The cable model was inherently flawed; it was just a series of local monopolies that poisoned it. Give consumers a choice. But considering everyone operates like Disney anymore and is highly protective of its IP I doubt this world will ever exist without direct government intervention.
Honestly the biggest problem was/is copyright law. Make everything older than 10-14 years public domain and streaming services would have endless amounts of content always available. Independently operated streaming sites would be all over the internet.
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This is how cable worked, no? And how streaming has been working. And it MIGHT be getting things cheaper, maybe? I guess?
But watching specific stuff you want is hell. The cognitive load of searching a bunch of services, or finding a site that tells you where to watch, then it’s not in that same service in your country, you might have to pay extra, or sign up for another streaming service or… Holy cow, it’s a terrible experience.
I’m not saying I have a better idea, or that it couldn’t be worse. But it’s terrible.
I agree with you that modern streaming service are a hassle, BUT - I'm old enough to remember Blockbuster, too. It used to be that if you wanted to watch a movie, you drove to the video store, found a copy, paid $2 to rent it for 24 hours, tried to remember to rewind it and got it back to the store before it was late. Streaming services are _definitely_ more convenient.
Right now, you can pretty much rent any movie you want through Amazon Prime with not late fee or rewind penalty, but you have to pay a couple of (extra!) dollars to do it. This is, undebatably, a massive improvement over the way it used to be in every way, but it still bothers me even though I can't put my finger on exactly why.
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Watching specific stuff you want to see is 1000x easier today than it was in the 1990s, when cable ran this whole industry, and anything you wanted came bundled with 100 things you didn't want.
It still works this way.
I wish that'd happen, but instead what we have is that everybody is making terrible new content, and getting any of the old content is a nightmare too because there are 28 or so subscriptions needed, which are constantly increasing prices (yeah, they are supposed to be competing, but somehow...) and constantly shuffling their lists, so you can just lose access to a series in the middle of a rewatch. I hope eventually it will organize into something resembling normalcy, but it's not happening so far... There's of course other solution (ahoy, matey!) but I'd rather just pay reasonable sum for a subscription. I know Netflix buying everything is not a solution either, but so far it's only getting worse.
I want more than two parties competing to run the democracy, also.
The things you want arn't going to happen under the current operating procedures of the United States of America.
I hope that's clear.
I'm more for requiring licensing to anyone and everyone for the same price, including yourself. No more exclusives. Streaming platforms compete on cost, features and availability of niche content. Even further, choosing to not license content to anyone creates an implicit license for everyone. No more lost content. But I don't think any countries are looking at legislation like this, with entertainment way down on everyone's agenda.
I'm still upset with how quickly shows get cancelled nowadays, like the axed Altered Carbon and The Expanse and the endings of neither felt satisfying and the final seasons - rushed.
Whatever set of circumstances leads to that, it would be nice not to have that. Somehow it feels like a huge org owning both the content creation as well as distribution leads to that.
Mostly agree, but I’d advocate for a carve-out for DropoutTV; maybe; exempt if (1) only hosting your own content and (2) that content can be licensed by other services?
I agree that separation of concerns might bring better content but I can't afford buying multiple services in hopes of catching what I want.
(Actually, I can afford it but I'm ... frugal.)
You can have one middle man platform to stream everything but competition to get good movies to that platform, it's a shame that we have so many platforms now
I want all the movies for free without pirating
How do movies get made under that system?
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We could deliver to consumers over some sort of "cable". But what would we call it?
Let the market figure it out. There has never been an easier time to make content and there has never been an easier time to distribute content.
I think you're right, but I've always been a bit skeptical of that vision -- it implicitly relies on the assumption that "THE streaming service" will choose to make as much content available as technically and legally possible; they're imagining something like "Spotify but for movies and TV shows". But I was always worried about "Apple's App Store but for movies and TV shows": one company with ultimate gatekeeper status over what you can and can't legally watch. (The movie and television business is not like the music business; the financial incentives don't, as far as I can tell, support the same kind of distribution models.)
I'm not particularly thrilled about this kind of consolidation, but given that Warner was going to be bought by somebody, Netflix may be one of the least worst outcomes.
HBO owns Westworld and stopped streaming it to avoid paying residuals.
If they don't make their content available legally, then it should go into the public domain.
Don't want this to happen to your content? Then don't release it to the public.
We need to bring back explicit copyright registration and renewals.
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Wow. That is dysfunctional.
I would be curious how the financial wires got crossed.
I would have assumed residuals were proportional to views, and views valued proportionally as contributing to subscription demand. And it would be a rare viewer to watch one show like that, over & over. I.e. only upside. Something went sideways.
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I think ideally you'd have 2-3 streaming services that all have all the content without exclusives? (So the spotify of movies and tv, the tidal of movies and tv, the bandcamp of movies and tv...)
That would be ideal. It's my (very limited) understanding that the costs of making television and movies makes that kind of scenario unlikely, though.
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The problem is content exclusivity. It would be great if all the content or at least most would be available on all platforms. At least eventually. That would be great for consumers. Mergers like this typically not.
Like we had for music on the radio, compulsory licensing
We could do that by limiting copyright to just 10-14 years. All platforms could have all that content forever without paying a dime. New stuff and exclusives would still be a draw to attract people to one platform or another.
Give 10 years of copyright for free, then a $1000 fee for the next decade, and make every subsequent decade 100x more expensive.
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It would be great for consumers if it was just free
Netflix was also still in the “grow users at all cost” phase. They have since moved to “grow revenue at all costs.”
Everyone likes a service when it’s subsidized by VC dollars. Until they inevitably start turning the screws.
>Everyone likes a service when it’s subsidized by VC dollars.
Netflix went public in 2002. It was +8 years later that the streaming-only service was launched in 2010. The digital streaming wasn't "subsidized by VC".
Netflix had more content from everybody back then because the other studios licensed their content for cheap prices to Netflix. But those studios then realized that Netflix was growing rapidly on the backs of their content. Once those multi-year contracts expired, studios like Disney didn't renew with Netflix and instead, started their own platform (e.g. Disney+).
You're not wrong, but that doesn't mean they weren't still in "growth" phase.
Their pricing, and their doubling down on account sharing policies over the last few years have shown that they are no longer in a growth phase.
I cancelled my Netflix account a few months ago because I had gotten the "You're not accessing this from your typical location" blocker. Even though I was trying to watch from my permanent residence and I was the account owner / payee.
The reason that happened was that my wife and I own two properties. We are happily married, not separated, but we just like our space... especially with two adult daughters who still live at home with one of their significant others also living in the house.
We are a single family "unit" but have two locations. Furthermore, my wife has sleeping issues and was using Netflix at night in order to fall asleep. To have to get me to check my email for an access code, was a total deal breaker since I would be fast asleep. So that cut her off from her typical usage of Netflix.
And the reason Netflix thought that I was accessing the service from a different location was that I hardly ever watched it. Every time I'd pull it up, I would spend more time scrolling for something to watch than actually watching anything.. and typically I'd just give up and go watch a 30m YouTube video instead.
So I was paying more, receiving less ... mostly had the account purely for my wife and daughters who watched it the most ... and then the final deal breaker was logistical barriers preventing me from being able to use what I'm paying for.
Fuck Netflix.
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These content library contracts are only for a couple of years, and each time one lapses, some terms get negotiated. Nobody in the streaming industry is successful because they have a long term lock on someone else’s content. It’s all about eyeballs and margins.
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With a lot of competition you might have 20 great shows spread across 10 streamers. People will complain because they’d have to subscribe to 10 streamers to get everything.
Consolidation reduces the number of streamers, but reduces the competition too. The number of great shows will go down faster than than the number of streamers too.
The endpoint would be one streamer, with maybe 0-1 great shows. The vast majority of content will be low risk and cheap to produce.
With one big streamer it will be easy to manage your subscription, but the price will still be at least as high as subscribing to half a dozen small streamers, and the shows will be worse.
(Hope you like repetitive, formulaic shows, which, at best, are a rehash last year’s mildly entertaining show. That’s what you can look forward to.)
> There is not enough consolidation
This is an absolutely wild (and incorrect) thing to assume. The problem of content lock-in is anti-competitive and it would be better solved without mergers
As a consumer, I feel that consolidation is wonderful because it is one less account and password and charge on my credit card that I have to think about.
As a consumer, you want the streaming service to be decoupled from the studios so your single streaming service can access all the content
> People were happy when Netflix was the streaming service
That was also before they started aggressively pushing their own content. For a while, it looked like Netflix was going to be the place you go to stream any movie that ever existed (which was pretty much what they were with mail-in DVDs before the streaming service came along). Now it seems like they don't really want to be in that business either.
We just need to end all exclusives.
Make it like music streaming, where all services have the same catalog so you can choose on price, features, etc.
That only happened because the content libraries decided to exit the music streaming game.
It also helped that the largest player in the music content library game (Sony) was not really as adept at software as Comcast, Disney, and NBCU were.
So does that mean if I ever create a video I just allow anyone to have it?
Netflix was still competing with blu-ray/DVD/cable at that point.
"why should I watch TV on the fiddly computer when I can just pop a disc in?" or "why should I turn on Netflix when there's clearly stuff on cable TV?" -- that was Netflix's competition in those days. Because there was competition, they had to lower prices and improve service to win consumers.
Now, that competition is being destroyed. Rest assured, Netflix will use this market power to extract more from the consumer.
Netflix is still "competing" with discs at this point, although I would accept that discs aren't exactly winning. Most of the content I watch comes from blu-rays, and with a few exceptions (The Americans, grr), most of the things I want to watch have been released on disc. In fact, there is a small community of film enthusiasts who continue to purchase media outright, e.g., https://www.blu-ray.com.
I started using Netflix in 2001 as a DVD subscriber. It was wonderful for nearly 20 years. I ended up canceling before the service officially ended because it was clear that the writing was on the wall and the service was going downhill fast. You used to be able to get nearly any movie or TV series, domestic or foreign. It's a lot more work to find good stuff now, even with streaming in the mix.
I think the main reason they aren't competing as much now is that blu ray players / computers with disc drives / consoles with disc drives are getting more scarce?
I don't even know where I would get a good blu ray drive. The videophile subreddits keep suggesting very specific models with flashed firmware, which is not exactly accomodating to the public.
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I'd say Netflix is competing with piracy now.
The *arrs (once configured) offer a better service in every single way that I've got multiple friends who have all cancelled their Netflix subs for a combination of piracy and physical media.
> Netflix is still "competing" with discs at this point
An increasing number of shows are never getting released on physical media to prevent this. The only thing streaming services are competing with in any meaningful way is piracy and I'm guessing piracy is going to get more and more popular the more greed/enshittification keeps making streaming platforms worse
People were happy when Netflix was the streaming service and it cost $7.99. People will be unhappy if Netflix is the streaming service and it costs $159.99. The glory days were only possible because the streaming market didn’t matter.
I think it would be more accurate to say there was not enough cross-licensing. The generally preferable model seems to be service platforms that compete with each other, but with access to all the same production companies that also compete with each other. Vertical integration is an obvious win for the owners, but this fight has been going on since the earliest days of mass media with radio and motion picture studios.
Netflix was the early beneficiary of broad licensing because the draw bridges hadn't been pulled up yet.
People want consolidation in the sense that they want to just have a service that has everything instead of having to juggle multiple competing channels around. The problem is that this service would have to be very expensive. The glory days of streaming had 10 services all selling more or less the same product.
The kind of consolidation on offer here just means having to pay for two streaming services at once. That is, at some point HBO Max will get rolled up into Netflix, and Netflix will increase their prices to make sure you don't save any money from it. Because let's be honest here: the only reason why the glory days of streaming were so glorious is that nobody knew what anything was worth and everything was being subsidized by the suckers still paying for cable.
The problem is once you run out of suckers, you have to start charging what the show actually costs to make (or license). Once you account for that plus margin you have a cable bill again[0]. Except since there's like five major services they can split the content and bill five ways. They have to charge about the same as the others to maintain this equilibrium, but with fewer services there's less alternatives and they can raise prices higher.
What people really want out of their streaming service is a free ride, no more and no less. Either that, or they're going back to physical media because one time payments are the only fair and consumer-friendly way of paying for creative works.
[0] Yes, I know most of that was actually sports. For everything else, there was a second layer of subsidy involved: ads. Most of the stuff that didn't charge carriage fees were getting shittons of ad revenue, and that subsidy has also largely vanished.
The assumption back then was that other companies would be making shows. Consolidating even more show production in one company is not something we should want.
People were happy when Netflix was cheaper that total sum of what they were paying on cable.
Lower prices is the last thing we'd expect from that deal.
This idea doesn’t mean those people are correct.
Netflix was great when it was the only streaming service because all the legacy media companies licensed shows for cheap. They basically considered it bonus income like syndicated television.
Most of Netflix’s content at that time was very popular but was basically just reruns. The Office, etc. It was a time when you’d be hard pressed to find any movie resembling a blockbuster, just bargain DVD bin type of stuff.
If all the streaming services consolidate there will be less reason than ever to put effort into content. As long as most people stay subscribed the less they spend on content the better.
With an à la carte landscape that we have now, streaming services all have to fight it out in open competition to keep their service on your monthly bill.
It might be less convenient but it is better for content than having a market with just one, two, or three players.
We could get back to that world with anti-trust enforcement and mandatory licensing, while still keeping whatever positive effects competition has had on content production (which I think are debatable at best: it seems like no one outside of low-budget stuff like Dropout is making anything interesting in the US right now.)
I think a great copyright compromise to the insanely long copyright periods would be if certain types of content had standardized licensing costs that kicked in after a certain amount of time.
It would be a very interesting concept if after 10/20 years, anyone could grab any copyrighted content and redistribute it as long as they paid the copyright owner a license fee determined by copyright law.
So should Disney be forced to license Avengers at the same price I license my cat videos? Should every content creator be forced to license everything? Why stop at video? What about books? Software?
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That's caused by consolidation. Compare with music: a bunch of different companies make music, a bunch of different companies stream music, but they're not the same companies, so approximately everybody's music is available on every platform.
With video, many platforms are also creators, which leads to exclusivity, and fragmentation.
Combining everything into a monopoly would also fix this problem, but would have downsides.
Consumers don't care so much about consolidation as they care about not getting ripped off. When Netflix and Hulu were the only streaming platforms you paid a pretty low price to get virtually everything you wanted. Now you pay more for a worse experience.
Netflix at least has technical chops. Other studios (looking at you, Paramount-) put out barely functional apps because they know consumers ultimately will pay for their content.
Netflix may have the technical ability, but they don't deliver. Their UI just gets worse and worse in terms of usability and they keep cutting features on top of steadfastly refusing to provide features people have been asking for since they started steaming movies.
Basically every streaming app is minimally functional and obnoxious in their own ways. netflix isn't the worst of them, but it's no exception and getting worse all the time.
>you paid a pretty low price to get virtually everything you wanted
Depends what you wanted.
Both a deep back catalog of TV and film more generally were always pretty lacking on all-you-could-eat streaming services. Frankly, my biggest complaint with Netflix is that they basically drove local video rental out of business and then shut their own rental down.
This. I loved the DVD service and I don't think I was alone. Younger folks didn't perhaps use it as much as some, but for those who don't have the best internet speed or service, they were great.
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The availability of exclusive content should not be the point over which streaming services compete. The same content should be available on all streaming services, and they should compete on the quality of their delivery and discoverability technology.
Content producers must not be vertically integrated with content distributors.
People want a single service to pay for that serves all content, not a single corporate entity creating the content the service provides access to. Like how people want a single payment method that works everywhere globally, not a single company that produces all products globally. Bizarre that you don't see a distinction between the two.
Our family loved Disney+ from the outset and then to see consolidation into the service was amazing. I can watch Aliens and Avengers in the same place? Now I’m just waiting for somebody to fold Paramount into either Netflix or Disney+ so I’ll have Star Trek as well.
>People were happy when Netflix was the streaming service, but then everyone pulled their content and have their own (Disney, Paramount, etc.)
This, it's been horrible ever since all of the content owners have pulled their content from netflix.
Isn’t that mixing up library size with market power?
Consumers are going to pay for this consolidation through higher subscription prices because the cost always goes somewhere.
What you’re seeing now is the same consolidation and ad loading that drove the old piracy waves.
That crazy thing is that a knee jerk reaction can still be right
This IS bad for consumers - we are slowly inching towards the pre streaming world of only a handful of studios who run Hollywood, except now it’s pretentious tech companies
Netflix was the STREAMING platform - it was not really making content until the House of Cards went supernova.
This is true consolidation and monopolization - regardless of the "narrative" in whichever news you happen to consume.
As a rule of thumb, consolidation is never good. There are exceptions where consolidated services can improve (eg arguably physical infrastructure, healthcare), but in general this will not benefit the consumer.
As a rule of thumb maybe, but in this case it might well.
How? This only means prices will go up.
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I dont mind disconsolidation. The main downside is price as you have to pay for multiple services. Having all the services is "the one service".
Consolidation is only needed in the context of people not allowing other platforms to sell or rent everything.
Eg movies need their iTunes moment.
I am happy to stream surf. Spend a month on amc+, the next month on paramount+, the next in Hulu. It keeps them wanting me back. Competition is good
for me it is pirating everything since since the video stores closed down and never giving any money to any of these companies
This isn't just two streaming services being merged, it's two giant media companies now becoming one media company.
the POV really is: for every 19 people who will pay $14/mo for their preferred, unbundled service, there's 1 person who would happily pay $300/mo for a bundled service.
premium subs are for people who BUY subs not for people who WANT subs.
People were happy because they only needed one subscription and one app. Buying Warner Bros won't bring that back. If anything, it makes it less likely.
>People were happy because they only needed one subscription and one app. Buying Warner Bros won't bring that back. If anything, it makes it less likely.
Plus a cable TV subscription in many/most cases.
Watch Netflix keep HBO Max as a separate service
I was happy when Netflix was a DVD service. Streaming turned everything to shit. Netflix in 2003-2008 was its golden era: any movie you could think of from the past century was available.
I will not lament the loss of visual mass media. I’ve already reduced my viewing to just Kanopy, but even they are reducing tickets.
Fortunately there are plenty of other fun and entertaining things to do than sit in front of a screen and drool at slop.
Unfortunately people will “suffer” with their first-world problems of not getting new Marvel movies every 8 months or Spider-Man reboots every 2 years, or having to pay $100+/month for drivel. Oh the humanity.
I mean... did we really expect the content owners to roll over and let the streaming platforms capture the potential profits?