Live data from Hacker News

Netflix Is Why AT&T bought Time Warner, and Comcast and Disney want Fox

cnbc.com

121–130 of 256 posts

Re: Netflix Is Why AT&T bought Time Warner, and Comcast and Disney want Fox

#121

These companies are obsessed with fragmenting the market for the sake of owning content from production to delivery. I have bad news for them: you're going to lose. People don't want to go back to paying $100/month for a dozen streaming "channels" with one or two good shows and a the same crap the rest of the other "channels" have. We want an on-demand nexus. A single hub. Just the other day I had the urge to watch g…

Rent it. Usually $4 on Amazon or Google or Vudu.

Re: Netflix Is Why AT&T bought Time Warner, and Comcast and Disney want Fox

#122

These companies are obsessed with fragmenting the market for the sake of owning content from production to delivery. I have bad news for them: you're going to lose. People don't want to go back to paying $100/month for a dozen streaming "channels" with one or two good shows and a the same crap the rest of the other "channels" have. We want an on-demand nexus. A single hub. Just the other day I had the urge to watch g…

>I have bad news for them: you're going to lose. People don't want to go back to paying $100/month for a dozen streaming "channels" with one or two good shows and a the same crap the rest of the other "channels" have. No. That's not the correct way to think about this. You are dreaming if you think media and production companies are going to leave $90/mo on the table. You will see prices rise. You will see multiple s…

Then fuck it, I will pay for some cheap streaming services and pirate the rest.. And pirating content is not going to end ever. If anything it has become easier to do. And lately easier to do than use the legitimate streaming service. I've actually was trying to watch a movie through a paid service this weekend and basically said "fuck it" watched it on a copyright infringing service within 45 seconds.

I honestly no longer care about copyright or piracy. I simply will do whatever is easiest. The greed of the entertainment industry has made me not give a shit.

Re: Netflix Is Why AT&T bought Time Warner, and Comcast and Disney want Fox

#124
post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Steam, iTunes, and Spotify have almost completely killed off pirating for games and music. It's still possible but people would rather pay for those services because the services actually add a value over the actual data which is post scarcity. TV and the film industry have decided they'll make more money by making a worse product and doing everything they can to prevent users from finding alternatives

I'm not quite sure about this, but aren't the products you have mentioned also have the same problem as Netflix. Spotify is able to provide lots of music options, but for how long? They are being effectively strangled by music labels and competitors, which will eventually lead to a content fragmentation between music streaming services. Then people will turn back to pirating music just as fast and they have for video…

Yes, if their products value F(steam) If this was a natural state of affairs there might be considerations about morals, but the current rules and laws came about through direct intervention by these same companies

Re: Netflix Is Why AT&T bought Time Warner, and Comcast and Disney want Fox

#125
post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I have bad news for them: you're going to lose. People don't want to go back to paying $100/month for a dozen streaming "channels" with one or two good shows and a the same crap the rest of the other "channels" have. No. That's not the correct way to think about this. You are dreaming if you think media and production companies are going to leave $90/mo on the table. You will see prices rise. You will see multiple s…

some poeple will just go back to p2p and there is nothing they can do.

I think you'll find avenues for piracy are going to be limited. Even now piracy isn't quite the same as it used to be.

Re: Netflix Is Why AT&T bought Time Warner, and Comcast and Disney want Fox

#126
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The down voting you’re getting is emblematic of the entitlement mentality among tech folks when it comes to content. There is no right to consume entertainment someone else produced for free. If you don’t like the terms on which they’re selling the fruits of their labor, don’t buy it.

Human rights are a very politically controversial topic, so let's instead reverse our focus and address this via Dawkins's concept of memetics. Looking at a piece of well-designed popular consumer entertainment content, we can see that its main reason of being is to spread out as if it were an epidemic, infecting people's minds and getting them to pass it around. Continuing with the epidemiological metaphor, there ar…

I think most of us are aware of why people steal content without lengthy, pretentious explanations. The point is that the OP acts as if he couldn’t possibly consider not watching. He believes that someone should provide it to him on the terms he deems fair or he has no choice but to steal it. OP is the textbook definition of a sociopath.

Re: Netflix Is Why AT&T bought Time Warner, and Comcast and Disney want Fox

#127
post #92

These companies are obsessed with fragmenting the market for the sake of owning content from production to delivery. I have bad news for them: you're going to lose. People don't want to go back to paying $100/month for a dozen streaming "channels" with one or two good shows and a the same crap the rest of the other "channels" have. We want an on-demand nexus. A single hub. Just the other day I had the urge to watch g…

> We want an on-demand nexus. A single hub. That is close to existing, it'd be nice if the top players agreed to open their APIs so you could integrate it into a unified TV external like Chromecast or Firestick. Or, to go further, a unified platform that can process subscriptions and PPV across each library. > $100/month for a dozen streaming "channels" with one or two good shows and a the same crap the rest of the o…

The on-demand nexus already works on Apple TV. Say "I want to watch Billions" into the remote and it shows you all the services you can watch it on, then tap through to actually watching it.

Now if only it existed on other platforms.

Re: Netflix Is Why AT&T bought Time Warner, and Comcast and Disney want Fox

#128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Human rights are a very politically controversial topic, so let's instead reverse our focus and address this via Dawkins's concept of memetics. Looking at a piece of well-designed popular consumer entertainment content, we can see that its main reason of being is to spread out as if it were an epidemic, infecting people's minds and getting them to pass it around. Continuing with the epidemiological metaphor, there ar…

I think most of us are aware of why people steal content without lengthy, pretentious explanations. The point is that the OP acts as if he couldn’t possibly consider not watching. He believes that someone should provide it to him on the terms he deems fair or he has no choice but to steal it. OP is the textbook definition of a sociopath.

I would argue that by using the term "steal" in regarding to content, you demonstrate why we do need to continue this dialog.

There is no single truth here and I think that you are being overly offensive in saying that, by advocating for a different set of social rights, the OP is a sociopath. By the same token, any civil disobedience should be treated as sociopathy, no?

Re: Netflix Is Why AT&T bought Time Warner, and Comcast and Disney want Fox

#129
I teach a startup course at a public university. We had a class on disruption, where we specifically talked about Netflix. I polled my students and asked how many have cable or satellite. A single hand went up, out of over 30 students. I then asked how many had Netflix. Every hand went up. AT&T can buy Time Warner and Comcast can buy NBC and Fox. It's not going to matter. Millennials and Gen Z aren't going to pay for bundled linear content via cable and satellite with heavy amounts of advertising. The model is in process of being disrupted. Within a decade or so, I bet traditional cable and satellite goes the way of AOL and landlines.

Re: Netflix Is Why AT&T bought Time Warner, and Comcast and Disney want Fox

#130
post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Does that mean every single software as a service company business model is invalid? I'm OK with someone offering digital renting, if there is an option to buy the same thing (though I wouldn't use it if it has DRM). I'm not OK with it, if renting only is mandated. Software as a service isn't exactly the same case as buying books, films, music, games and etc. For instance Web search is software as a service and I'm…

How is Netflix, Hulu, etc. not the same? You pay $10.99 a month and get unlimited access to an entire library of content. What device that you own can’t play Spotify music?

As I explained above, their problem is offering renting only video which you can't buy.

> What device that you own can’t play Spotify music?

Anything they didn't think about? DRM-free formats can be accessed anywhere, you can re-encode them in any codec and etc. For example I can take my audio files and play them in RockBox on my portable Sansa player. How would Spotify help for that? Benefits of DRM-free are quite self explanatory.

Post reply on HN