171–180 of 844 posts
Any good guesses as to what name will the final world corporation take?
And what would be their subscription model?
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The difference is simple: NBC was (and still is) free to watch if you have a television and an antenna.
Broadcast NBC was only "free" in the strictest sense. Every hour of content requires the viewer to sit through 22 minutes of mind-numbing commercials. At a labor value of $50/hour, watching ten hours of content a week imposes an economic cost on the viewer of $825/month. By comparison subscribing to all the major streaming platforms would cost about $100/month. Let's not even get into issues of higher quality content…
This is an opportunity cost but only if you have the stamina to be doing billable work during all that time instead of relaxing.
So what we're seeing is a repeat of the film industry from 1930's-1950's. You want to see a Paramount movie, you must go to a Paramount theater. Today you want to watch an Apple show you must go to Apple's VOD. We could really use laws that force, once again, some sort of separation between production and distribution. Better stuff gets made in this kind of ecosystem.
Except watching online is nowhere near as inconvenient as only watching movies from theaters in your area. It will most will likely consolidate to 4 major players so we're looking at 4 subscriptions to watch most new content. There's nothing stopping production companies from producing content, if it's compelling enough they'll still be able to license it out to the big players. When everything's online the primary d…
Pricing and UX?
But even though some companies are incapable of making good UIs, UX isn’t much of a moat.
At the same time, differentiation through pricing leads to races to the bottom and unsustainable / worthless markets (and, in our case, probably diminishing content quality).
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How about something legal instead?
piracy and the subsequent success of platforms like steam and spotify prove time and again that it boils down to a delivery issue, not a human desire for illegal sourcing. Same issue with sports streaming. Why pay six different services to watch a 720p legal stream when i can watch a stream from Russia in 1080p with questionable ads?
If they want to be consumer hostile, we should be hostile as well.
> It was overturned by new legislation in 2020. Interestingly, there are some guys powerful enough to push that kind of legislation... I don't like Musk but sometimes I'd really love to leave for Mars :-)
What makes you think Mars will have better laws?
If I had to pick a single politically uniting issue, breaking up Amazon and big tech would be it. Why has this not happened yet? Is the out of power party afraid the in power party will get credit? (This has been discussed when both parties were in power) If the government can't get something with this kind of support done, I fear the road we are headed down .
> It was overturned by new legislation in 2020. Interestingly, there are some guys powerful enough to push that kind of legislation... I don't like Musk but sometimes I'd really love to leave for Mars :-)
What makes you think Mars will have better laws?
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Or we could fall back to watching movies made from the ‘30s to the ‘50s, that’s what I have been doing for more than half a year now and it has been wonderful for my mental well-being (they really knew how to make comedies back then, even after the Hayes code).
Any recommendations?
So what we're seeing is a repeat of the film industry from 1930's-1950's. You want to see a Paramount movie, you must go to a Paramount theater. Today you want to watch an Apple show you must go to Apple's VOD. We could really use laws that force, once again, some sort of separation between production and distribution. Better stuff gets made in this kind of ecosystem.
What's interesting is that the government had to step in and break the movie theaters from the movie studio in a famous anti-trust case. I wonder how it'll play out in this case. Presumably Amazon may still license Bond movies (for example) to Netflix. In fact Netflix is included in my Prime bundle I believe...