Comment by npongratz
20 days ago
The progression of the cable TV industry shows many people are more than happy, or apathetic enough, to allow the industry to double-dip.
20 days ago
The progression of the cable TV industry shows many people are more than happy, or apathetic enough, to allow the industry to double-dip.
Cable TV is a bad analogy because it was a natural monopoly. Even the disruption route (satellite TV) was another natural monopoly.
Netflix doesn't have the moat of "built a physical wire connection to every persons home" that cable TV enjoyed.
The moat is the leverage to get licensing deals using the size of the existing user base.
You could bootstrap a movie rental business by buying DVDs from a DVD store (then eventually from a DVD distributor, etc.). You cannot bootstrap a movie streaming business by buying streaming rights because nobody will sell them to you. They hardly even sell them to Netflix anymore.
The Internet Archive tried to get around the same issue for ebooks by scanning physical books and renting the scans (and not being a business), and it nearly cost them everything.
basic people sure, but the early internet showed an extremely strong demand for a better service than cable TV. When that demand is there then people will start seeking other options and building bridges of convenience to help the basic people also port over.