Hollywood studios say they’re quitting Netflix – the truth is more complicated • Hacker News Board

Re: Hollywood studios say they’re quitting Netflix – the truth is more complicated

#61

Post by bscphil » Mon, Jun 03, 2019, 4:50 AM UTC

syrrim wrote: post #49

40acres wrote: post #22

I don't think piracy will come back as streaming becomes more segregated, people generally will go with the legitimate market over illegal means as long as the fiction is under a certain level. Most Americans would rather pay an extra $15 a month for streaming that to pirate content and go through the "hassle" of getting that pirated content on their TV. How many non-tech people do you know who can mirror a PC or lap…

Cable costs ~$60 per month. If the majority of people switch from cable to streaming, we can expect it to reach a similar price (because people have demonstrated that they are willing to pay that much and because existing hierarchies are set up to consume that much money). If a person isn't paying full price, it will be because they cannot access to every show. In either case, it will be more desirable than you are p…

>Cable costs ~$60 per month.

That was once upon a time, when television was the only source of in-home entertainment. If you wanted more you needed to go to your local Blockbuster. Plus in 95% of America you have no choice between different cable providers. Now you have quite a lot of variety - I know literally no one my age who pays for cable. One or two subscriptions seems to be typical and will run you $20-$25 a month. Others share logins to these services with their friends. I don't see people paying $60 a month for entertainment any time soon, but I'm prepared to be proven wrong.

Re: Hollywood studios say they’re quitting Netflix – the truth is more complicated

#62

Post by rhino369 » Mon, Jun 03, 2019, 4:55 AM UTC

mlthoughts2018 wrote: post #34

Godel_unicode wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> used to invest in serious drama, now it’s all lowest common denominator crap Given that it's Netflix we're talking about here, I find this extremely depressing as it likely means the studios were right; people don't want nuanced thoughtful drama, they want mediocre predictable sitcoms and cop dramas.

HBO seems to still be producing very good dramas. Prime has had one or two offbeat gems recently. I think there’s still a strong market for it, but Netflix is clearly pursuing something else.

Netflix is pursuing everything, not just the “prestige tv” niche. The strategy makes sense as it’s trying to be the replacement for cable tv and the movie industry all in one.

Re: Hollywood studios say they’re quitting Netflix – the truth is more complicated

#63

Post by Larrikin » Mon, Jun 03, 2019, 4:57 AM UTC

bscphil wrote: post #57

bitcoinmoney wrote: post #29

Most people dont know but you can get P4S (plex for share) where you pay (or free) someone to get added on their plex library. Some of these servers have CDN and have 90+TB storage with automated requests system. Thousands of shows and movies. You can also get IPTV, which is basivally cable TV through internet for 10$/month. 5000 channels. You ask how its possible? Basically fly by night companies redistributing cabl…

Am I misunderstanding the idea behind the first thing, or is that just piracy that you pay for? If you're going to go to the trouble and / or risk of pirating things and have enough technical knowhow to setup Plex on your local device, I don't know why you wouldn't just go for an old fashioned approach ... which is usually free, better quality, more reliable, etc.

Being able to setup a legal program like Plex and knowing how to pirate high quality versions of all the media you want are two different things. People bought into Hulu and Netflix when you could get nearly everything you wanted to watch on their services.

Re: Hollywood studios say they’re quitting Netflix – the truth is more complicated

#64

Post by bscphil » Mon, Jun 03, 2019, 5:04 AM UTC

Larrikin wrote: post #63

bscphil wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Am I misunderstanding the idea behind the first thing, or is that just piracy that you pay for? If you're going to go to the trouble and / or risk of pirating things and have enough technical knowhow to setup Plex on your local device, I don't know why you wouldn't just go for an old fashioned approach ... which is usually free, better quality, more reliable, etc.

Being able to setup a legal program like Plex and knowing how to pirate high quality versions of all the media you want are two different things. People bought into Hulu and Netflix when you could get nearly everything you wanted to watch on their services.

Plex is legal to use, but not all that easy to set up, at least in my experience. At least, I would expect anyone capable of using Plex longterm on a TV to also be able to pirate stuff.

The point about legality wasn't about Plex, however. It was about paying someone to torrent stuff for you, which is still copyright infringement.

Re: Hollywood studios say they’re quitting Netflix – the truth is more complicated

#65

Post by wolco » Mon, Jun 03, 2019, 5:44 AM UTC

bscphil wrote: post #59

AngryData wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would agree in the past, you needed something like a dedicated media center PC. But these days it is cheap as hell for an old PC, or laptop or smart phone that can handle video just fine. Even a new computer device is pretty damn cheap to have just for your TV. Also, everyone is assuming people are downloading torrents for their media piracy, but everything you can find on a torrent website you can easily find on a…

>The only reason to torrent a show or movie over streaming an illegitimate copy is if you plan on watching it a dozen times over and you have limited bandwidth. Or you don't want to have to weed through half a dozen ad-filled sites that claim to have the film, but don't, and end up with a 200 MB rip for your trouble.

With some services they cycle through the different copies and stream them.

Netflix is easier and quicker. Next comes kodi with an addon. Trying to watch a full series on demand from your cable company. The experience is so much slower to navigate between shows.. this is before we talk about ads.

Re: Hollywood studios say they’re quitting Netflix – the truth is more complicated

#66

Post by sonnyblarney » Mon, Jun 03, 2019, 5:53 AM UTC

40acres wrote: post #22

I don't think piracy will come back as streaming becomes more segregated, people generally will go with the legitimate market over illegal means as long as the fiction is under a certain level. Most Americans would rather pay an extra $15 a month for streaming that to pirate content and go through the "hassle" of getting that pirated content on their TV. How many non-tech people do you know who can mirror a PC or lap…

True, but they won't pay $15/month x 5 different services.

Netflix is already iffy in terms of content/quality, without some blockbusters, then it's really kind of b-films and bad tv, the occasional great show.

Disney et. al. may not produce enough content to warrant $15 themselves.

It'll be interesting to see how this plays out.

They should take note however, that we are 'done' with commercials.

Re: Hollywood studios say they’re quitting Netflix – the truth is more complicated

#67

Post by chx » Mon, Jun 03, 2019, 6:01 AM UTC

voidwtf wrote: post #55

aplummer wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“This is inconvenient and expensive which gives me the unilateral right to steal your intellectual property”. It’s an interesting take, that you get to steal anything you like if it isn’t priced and sold how you want.

This is the same old out of touch attitude that led to the “you wouldn’t steal a car would you” commercials. Nobody has to watch the content but they want to. You have fly-by-nights and unethical operations abounding that make everything only a google search away, sometimes with a single click. I agree that people should not be entitled to the intellectual property of others. However, like the war on drugs and sex ed…

> You have fly-by-nights and unethical operations abounding that make everything only a google search away, sometimes with a single click.

Somebody uploaded the entire The Queen's Corgi on YouTube in pristine 720p quality (they must have had access to a BluRay to get this quality) and it's not even out in the USA yet (I am not even sure it'll even be released at all). No tricks, no visual artefacts to hide it, nothing. It's been up since May 28 and apparently noone cares.

> The “us” of 20 years ago would wonder WTF were arguing about and pay out the nose for these capabilities.

Maybe 20 years ago but not for long. In 2001 we had the xvid codec and boy, did movie piracy take off with xvid compressing DVDs to CDs. A slower burner already was under 100 USD and you needed a CD player anyways http://ixbtlabs.com/articles/news01m08/index.html also some combined DVD - CD-RW units were below 180 USD: https://books.google.ca/books?id=3uyMhR-uNRwC&pg=PA179&lpg=P.... Blank disks were cheap -- 30 cents wholesale. Pirated movies and TV collections were not only on CD-R disks but hard disks as well, in 2002 we had 200GB disks https://www.storagereview.com/articles/200210/20021018WD2000...

Online P2P networking also skyrocketed at this time. In 2001 we had eDonkey2000 with ShareReactor and DC++ for the Direct Connect network. In 2003, Demonoid and Pirate Bay launches.

Re: Hollywood studios say they’re quitting Netflix – the truth is more complicated

#68

Post by vageli » Mon, Jun 03, 2019, 6:03 AM UTC

voidwtf wrote: post #48

dewey wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Didn't people also spent large amounts on one cable provider with different packages? Now it's just a bunch of different providers essentially.

The problem is that now they want us to have a cable subscription to watch all our normal shows and a network specific subscription to watch our favorite shows. Look at what they’ve done with Star Trek as an example. They’re going hard on the content gating and distribution channel diffusion. Literally to the point where Plex+Radarr/Sonarr has become the go to for content I’m already paying for through my cable/Netfl…

> The problem is that now they want us to have a cable subscription to watch all our normal shows and a network specific subscription to watch our favorite shows. Look at what they’ve done with Star Trek as an example.

> They’re going hard on the content gating and distribution channel diffusion. Literally to the point where Plex+Radarr/Sonarr has become the go to for content I’m already paying for through my cable/Netflix/Prime/HBO subscription.

I'm a longtime Plex+couch potato/sonarr user and wonder what you get from radarr?

Re: Hollywood studios say they’re quitting Netflix – the truth is more complicated

#69

Post by wolco » Mon, Jun 03, 2019, 6:04 AM UTC

BLKNSLVR wrote: post #43

aplummer wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“This is inconvenient and expensive which gives me the unilateral right to steal your intellectual property”. It’s an interesting take, that you get to steal anything you like if it isn’t priced and sold how you want.

It's definitely interesting in that this is a great example of the "when elephant's fight it's the grass that gets trampled". Amazon trying to battle Google results in chx's purchased hardware not being supported by Amazon's service despite the fact it's a very standard streaming device. It by no means gives any rights to breaching intellectual property laws, but Amazon are making a commercial decision to leave out C…

It also drives people away and reduces the viewers making it less attractive as a platform without piracy. That increases the cost as stars prefer a larger platform money being equal.

Re: Hollywood studios say they’re quitting Netflix – the truth is more complicated

#70

Post by JamesBarney » Mon, Jun 03, 2019, 6:09 AM UTC

dewey wrote: post #38

JamesBarney wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most people have a friend who's technical enough to follow the plex installation instructions or install utorrent.

These technical friends may exist, but I'd guess most of the people would rather pay 15$ / month to some provider than bothering their friend to set them up with a Plex server, maintaining it, figuring out what file to download ("What is this 1080p, 720p?), waiting for downloads to be done, clear out old torrents so they have disk space again. These are all things that are fun to "us" technical people and I don't min…

I think you're overestimating the difficulty of plex. There's no real maintenance, you don't have to be very technical to download a file(it's two clicks), and if they don't know the difference between 1080p and 720p they don't care, they've waited for downloads before, and hard drives are so large now you rarely have to clear out them out.

My wife uses plex without any problem and she can't stand technology. But besides an issue which comes up every couple of years it's as simple as click and play.

And you're 100% right most people would rather pay someone to take that off their hands. But if things get to the point where you need 15 $10/month subscriptions and can only buy certain shows from one of the 15 mobile apps which have varying levels of compatibility with casters, more people will start looking at other options.