Comment by ghaff
4 hours ago
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.
My solution with manufactured content is to just rotate services. I maintain netflix year round because they have enough, but I'll buy the special rate and cancel in the same day, giving me a month at a time of each of the different ones. It also gives them time to release the whole season, instead of dribbling them out over the course of months.
It's sports that really have driven me away. I like collegiate wrestling. This is by no means a mainstream sport. But to watch what I want, I need to subscribe to flowrestling, ESPN, B1G, and BTN. The last two are really mind blowing, because the big 10 seems to think I need two subscriptions to watch a single season for a niche sport.
It's just too much for me to bear -- not financially, but morally. I won't reward such behavior, so I just don't watch.
Then there are all the games that are on broadcast and could normally watch them for free, but unless you have an antenna, you need to subscribe to get your local channel.
Now these leagues need to contend with my family and all the others like it where the kids won't have the nostalgia for that game that was on every Sunday. We don't watch the games, so we don't go to the games, so they'll never grow into being fans themselves.
The NHL does seem to try putting their games in front of their fans as the lone exception.
Exclusive deals are preventing it. Media content is resistant to commodification, making it a durable value proposition, and this makes exclusive licensing deals highly desirable - lawyers hired by an upstart aren't going to make a dent in this.
Doesn't the ease and low risk of individual copyright violation place an upper bound of sorts. Sharing sites are still everywhere, and they were never very successful in making people confuse civil for criminal.
Don't disagree. Just paying lawyers was sort of a facile dismissal on my part. In video content, there's a lot of history that makes it hard to get closer to the way things are in music. Though there are also monetary incentives and practicalities as well.
Yes, that's the lawyers part. They are stopping you from just skipping the impossible licensing step.
They can charge that, but I won't pay it. I give myself like 20/month and rotate between services. Still barely worth it