411–420 of 844 posts
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Instead of having cable, I used to rent or buy movies. It’s no fun to rent now and the terms and duration suck and it’s hard to get a physical copy now so you’re tied to some service for life if you “buy”
Netflix still offers their original service that got them started and helped them wipe out Blockbuster and other competition: DVD's in the mail. https://dvd.netflix.com/
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> We could really use laws that force, once again, some sort of separation between production and distribution. Piracy is competition to bad content behavior. It's a meaningful consumer response to monopoly, balkanization and other anti-consumer practices.
So wait, your solution is to encourage all consumers to break the law and put themselves at legal risk, rather than have reasonable legislation focused on consumer welfare and encouraging competition?
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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).
I've just made this comment myself. It's amazing how much casual violence there is in modern films that you just don't notice because it's everywhere. I've watched more black and white classics in the last 15 months than I have in the last 20 years. Particularly the old sci-fi, horror, and slapstick films. Harold Lloyd, The Three Stooges, and Chaplin. Plus all the old St Trinians, and Sherlock Holmes. Abbot and Coste…
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We never paid for networks, we paid for a handful of shows that were worth watching, which happened to be on different channels because physics. Now they are on different platforms, because no good reason at all. A copyright holder of a creative work should be able to set the price, but should not be able to use their monopolistic powers to control who pays the price. Let each channel decide if they want to buy a giv…
Why is a channel needed? You can go straight from copyright holder to viewer.
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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…
> sit through 22 minutes of mind-numbing commercials Commercial detection and skipping has worked well for me via MythTV for nearly twenty years at this point. Seems like there’s a free startup idea in there somewhere. $100 worth of equipment and a webapp and now your parents can watch network TV, local news, sports, and weather without ads.
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I love old movies, especially around the 50's-70's, but I'll admit that you're not gonna see a whole lot of diversity in that era. I'm not meaning to moralize. It's just hard to find movies that say, have an Asian character that isn't a horrible racist caricature.
Awe yes diversity. Can't go a day with out reading this ever lasting buzzword. Is that really your determining factor while deciding to watch a movie? It isn't mine. I watch a movie because its a good movie, I don't go searching for diversity, I like watching a movie because of its entertainment value. You should try it.
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> We could really use laws that force, once again, some sort of separation between production and distribution. Piracy is competition to bad content behavior. It's a meaningful consumer response to monopoly, balkanization and other anti-consumer practices.
So wait, your solution is to encourage all consumers to break the law and put themselves at legal risk, rather than have reasonable legislation focused on consumer welfare and encouraging competition?
The laws take time, need to be tested in courts and are generally not as effective.
If you're constantly under threat of losing your entire income stream and there's nothing you can do to prevent that (because the only way to prevent piracy of digital content is to ban the internet) it's a pretty decent motivator to do the right thing.
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I find it hard to believe as well, although of course if you subscribe to prime for movies and TV you're probably more likely to use it for free deliveries as well. But if the plan is to make Prime more popular there seem to be many, many simpler and probably cheaper ways to do that. It's as if McDonalds started a movie studio in order to sell Movie + Big Mac bundles.
In France McDonalds partnered with a book publisher to create a whole new collection to bundle books with Happy Meals. Small steps yet, but they could be getting there.
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> We could really use laws that force, once again, some sort of separation between production and distribution. Piracy is competition to bad content behavior. It's a meaningful consumer response to monopoly, balkanization and other anti-consumer practices.
My biggest gripe is that the prices are totally artificial. I rented The Fugitive (1993 irrc) for $5 for 2 days and it costs $20 to buy it—as much as a brand new blockbuster in HD on physical media. This doesn’t seem like a particularly free market.