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

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

#211

Post by Benji_San »

MisterTea wrote: post #3

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 would be OK with occasionally paying for other streaming services than Netflix if they actually worked, I.e. better than torrents and preferably on Netflix's level.

The other services available in the Nordics are not even close with some "not working at all" and some have shitty/exclusive device support. Subtitle/language options tend to be abysmal and Netflix, which isn't very good on this front, seems to be the winner there too.

I'm more or less still waiting for Steam for films and TV series where I could just download the video file with whatever audio/language track I want. Providing a Netflix quality streaming service seems to be ridiculously non-trivial so it would be great if less complex and better working solutions were offered until the streaming platforms are figured out. Until that happens torrents offer a vastly superior way to watch content that is not on Netflix.

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

#212

Post by ascagnel_ »

mi100hael wrote: post #151
darethas wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah the MLB media team really knows what they are doing. The MLB has long had the best tech out of the big 5 sports leagues in the US

They also have a contract to provide streaming for the NHL. Probably other leagues as well.

Just the NHL (for now) -- and MLB also handles production for the NHL TV network at this point as well.

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

#213

Post by ascagnel_ »

digi_owl wrote: post #14

A large part of the initial appeal of Netflix, in particular for foreigners, was that they seemed to house digitized versions of straight-to-VHS movies that never left USA. But after the initial raving success, the big studios have been clamping down on giving blanket access to their back catalog of obscurities. Looking for those extra percentages of leaving out the middle man.

Netflix got the rights to stream the entirety of Starz's cable library for peanuts back in 2007 or 2008 -- that deal put them on the map since they got some high-quality content for basically nothing. The movie and TV distributors learned from the record labels -- they're deathly afraid of how iTunes basically took over the market, and will go out of their way to make sure the system stays as decentralized as possible.

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

#214

Post by teamk »

IAmGraydon wrote: post #126
falcor84 wrote: post #120

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.

If I told you a short story and then informed you it was copyrighted by me and you were morally forbidden from repeating said story, but you still repeated it, are you now a sociopath?

What a ridiculous stretch of logic.

On the contrary the idea that people's lives/property should be threatened (e.g. Kim Dotcom, ThePirateBay, etc.) for interfering, vaguely, in multinational conglomerates attempts to prevent the copying of 1s and 0s is entirely sociopathic. Something that most corporations end up behaving as.

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

#215

Post by sharcerer »

developer2 wrote: post #155
JimmyAustin wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Can you elaborate? Does Apple TV let you purchase à la carte (on-demand) from any service, or do you still have to buy into a monthly subscription for a service just to watch one movie or TV series from its catalog? The "one hub nexus" we are clamoring for requires either a) preferably, a single monthly fee to access everything ; or b) less ideally, assuming reasonable prices, on-demand pay-per-view pricing. A nexus…

I think this will take some time. Right now, for a few years Prime, Netflix ,Apple etc are already putting in money for their own Originals. I don't exactly know the solution, but these players won't bundle right now for sure, nobody wants to lose leverage. I think Google might be playing smart or maybe they've lost already. They have already conceded that Netflix is far ahead. And, now they're bundling their premium shows with Youtube Music for additional 2-3 bucks a month. Their content strategy has been really poor. Frankly, Video is a sort of leverage tool for Apple, Amazon. But for Netflix, it's bread and butter. Also, read this article: https://www.ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2017/7/13/content-is...

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

#216

Post by vlozko »

paulie_a wrote: post #122
macspoofing wrote: post #111

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…

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…

> The greed of the entertainment industry has made me not give a shit.

> I will pay for some cheap streaming services and pirate the rest.

I'm still trying to wrap my head around the hypocrisy here.

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

#217

Post by fenwick67 »

The rhetoric by these gaint media companies about how "we're merging so we can compete with Netflix" is a con.

They say "we have to get more vertically integrated like Netflix to survive", but Time Warner Cable is already as vertical as Netflix! They have their own production and distribution already, and Netflix isn't an ISP.

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

#218

Post by phobosdeimos »

always_good wrote: post #74
MisterTea wrote: post #3

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. Ah right, the utopia of extreme centralization I keep hearing HNers rave about.

Technically pirates figured that one out a long time ago.

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

#220

Post by mywittyname »

p2t2p wrote: post #107

I'm a simple man: if I the music isn't on Spotify or Bandcamp I'm gonna torrent it. If the movie/show isn't on Netflix, I'm gonna torrent it. I'm not buying any dodgy channel subscriptions full of crap.

This is my view (except I don't pirate the content). In my eyes, content creators know that these services exist, and how many people use them. So if they make a decision to cut out a large portion of the market, then I guess it's not important for them to be enjoyed by everyone.

I don't want to manage and pay for dozens of services. I use iTunes/Spotify, Netflix/Prime, and Steam/GoG. Any new service is going to need to displace one of those. This probably means being 10x better at 1/10th of the price.

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