Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

A golden age of consumer convenience is passing

ft.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 231 posts

Re: A golden age of consumer convenience is passing

#121

Post by hakfoo »

charcircuit wrote: post #109
Lev1a wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wanted to watch the currently in-progress season of a certain anime via the usual legit sites like Crunchyroll, Funimation, etc. All of this anime's seasons are now "not available in my region due to licensing issues". The DVD/Blu-Ray season sets cost 85-90€ each(!!!) for 13 (~20-22 minutes) episodes per season. That price to me is simply unacceptable, since that's more for one season than the entirety of series li…

>and are WAY more popular than any anime. Which is why they can get away with charging less per copy.

But it's a self-perpetuating death loop problem. At those prices, the only buyers are extreme fans buying it almost more like a merchandise item (compare figurines) than people who want to view the content. I know this is a thing in Japan-- the anime releases tend to be a few episodes at a time, at prices that would be considered astronomical most places.

There are potentially many market equilibria-- selling 200 copies at $100, 400 copies at $50, or 1000 copies at $10.

If they switched to a bargain-priced model, you enable tsundoku-style purchasing-- put up a big display of "here's a hundred back-catalog series, 13 episodes on two DVDs in a flimsy cardboard sleeve for 1000 yen each", people would be willing to take much more risk on buying them.

Arguably, there's a lot of information being lost because they only see purchase data of people hardcore enough to pay the current high prices. (I wonder if to an extent this impacts anime's tendency for fanservice choices-- they're chasing an artificially narrow market)

There's still the opportunity for price-discrimination for fanatics with limited editions with better packaging, extra content, and feelies.

It's interesting to contrast that the price of manga was almost impossibly low. In Japan, (at least it used to be) like 1/3 the price as in the US for a 200-page volume, and the omnibus magazines were pretty cheap, which made it more amenable to risk-taking purchases.

Re: A golden age of consumer convenience is passing

#122

Post by scarface74 »

DocTomoe wrote: post #117
scarface74 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is everyone acting so apocalyptic? Netflix is offering a cheaper tier with ads. If you don’t want ads, keep paying for the tier you have been paying.

Because that's how it starts. Eventually, the cheaper tier will be with more ads, the more expensive tier will no longer be ad-free, but have "some" ads. It has happened before. It will happen again.

HBO has been ad free since the 70s. There hasn’t been a cable service or streaming service that started ad free and then didn’t offer an ad free offering

Re: A golden age of consumer convenience is passing

#123

Post by flyaway123 »

dixie_land wrote: post #78
AstralStorm wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Steam is successful because its advertising is rather low key, showing a popup with offers, and providing a search, directory plus suggestions. Their gain is from consumer analytics too. (They also take a cut for using their platform from the game developers or publishers. It also provides some added value like achievements, basic social media in forms of forums and chat, some (somewhat broken at times) controller ha…

For me it’s about context. Steam ads do not bother me that much since it’s easy to turn off/dismiss, but also importantly they're "first party" - I’m already on steam and a gaming mood so I don’t mind checking out offers for other games. Streaming ads are annoying because under no circumstances I'd be thinking of picking up tampons while watching a football game.

What's your thoughts on targeted ads in general?

Setting aside the ease of dismissing - would you be willing to give up some data to allow them to be smarter (having more context)?

Re: A golden age of consumer convenience is passing

#124

Post by jabbany »

skocznymroczny wrote: post #118
TheAceOfHearts wrote: post #13

Media embedded advertising has already been a thing for years, but companies hate leaving money on the table so they cannot resist the temptation of showing more ads. I wonder why it is that Steam hasn't had any issues remaining such a successful video game platform, while other forms of media have struggled to keep up. You're competing with piracy, but you throw ads in my face. I can download any show or movie I wan…

Steam was at the right place at the right time. Also it was more insidious in its behavior. Throughout the late 2000s and 2010s most AAA games were Steam releases only. Even boxed copies were not much more than a Steam code. This allowed them to build a powerful network effect. At some point gamers were demanding that any new big release was a Steam release ("no steam no buy").

This does make some sense. Games are big (file size wise) and prone to updates. Steam helped handle this distribution in a reasonable way.

It's also why people prefer app stores or package managers, because they give a predictable distribution experience over hunting for scattered software.

I'd say the problem with Steam is that it should have a community-run alternative/competitor. There hasn't been much push for one since Steam isn't a walled garden and Valve has historically been pretty ethical, but still...

Re: A golden age of consumer convenience is passing

#125

Post by kroltan »

shakow wrote: post #94
AstralStorm wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Steam is successful because its advertising is rather low key, showing a popup with offers, and providing a search, directory plus suggestions. Their gain is from consumer analytics too. (They also take a cut for using their platform from the game developers or publishers. It also provides some added value like achievements, basic social media in forms of forums and chat, some (somewhat broken at times) controller ha…

> "Steam DRM" - requirement for an online connection to use the downloaded application It's not a requirement. It's to the discretion of the game developer on whether or not they want to require it to play their game.

True, but it's (as far as I know) the only DRM that is not listed in the store page. "Third party" DRMs like Denuvo must be listed there, but Steam's gets a free pass.

Re: A golden age of consumer convenience is passing

#126

Post by P5fRxh5kUvp2th »

pdpi wrote: post #73
AstralStorm wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Steam is successful because its advertising is rather low key, showing a popup with offers, and providing a search, directory plus suggestions. Their gain is from consumer analytics too. (They also take a cut for using their platform from the game developers or publishers. It also provides some added value like achievements, basic social media in forms of forums and chat, some (somewhat broken at times) controller ha…

It’s important to take Steam DRM in context. In a world where DRM was becoming more intrusive by the day, and you had to contend with every game having its own unique way to mess your system up in its fight against piracy, Steam provided one single DRM system that almost everybody agrees to use. For consumers, worse than no DRM, but miles ahead of the status quo it replaced. Also, Steam does have an offline mode. You…

To add to this, the original Witcher is the game that made me decide I was never again going to install a game directly. It was going to be steam or gog, and I've kept to that over the years with few exceptions (rpg maker games, etc).

As a freelance developer I would run vmware with a dedicated partition for the VM. The VM was linux and the partition itself was either ext3 or reiserFS (can't remember).

Since Windows didn't recognize the partition, the DRM for witcher repartitioned that drive so it would have a "secret" partition to track who knows what.

That affected my ability to earn money and was doing things to my PC I would never have accepted if asked.

compared to that, steam is a godsend. I understand people complaining about steam, but to this day I'm still a huge fan of steam for what it forced the gaming industry to accept.

I still prefer GoG due to its policies, but steam is fantastic.

Re: A golden age of consumer convenience is passing

#127

Post by JanisErdmanis »

TheAceOfHearts wrote: post #13

Media embedded advertising has already been a thing for years, but companies hate leaving money on the table so they cannot resist the temptation of showing more ads. I wonder why it is that Steam hasn't had any issues remaining such a successful video game platform, while other forms of media have struggled to keep up. You're competing with piracy, but you throw ads in my face. I can download any show or movie I wan…

> I can download any show or movie I want

The golden age of movie piracy has already passed. It is becoming quite hard to pirate 10y+ movies at a good quality. Also, streaming services do offer remastered film versions rarely available for pirates.

Re: A golden age of consumer convenience is passing

#128

Post by vladvasiliu »

buzer wrote: post #98
vladvasiliu wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the difference is that if you buy the cd, even second hand, and keep it , you're fine because you own it. At least in Europe, there's the whole "personal copy tax" that's levied on all storage media as well as a "private copying exception" to copyright law.

In Finland you are not allowed make a copy if you need to bypass a strong copy protection. According to decision from 2008 from appeals court (supreme court did not grant appeal) DVD's CSS is considered to be such. Given that it's not very strong from technical point of view and that pretty much all CDs do contain some form of copy protection it's hard to say if you are allowed to make personal copies of most of the…

Fair enough. I don't really care for movies, so I wouldn't go through that trouble, but I don't recall having encountered any audio CD with copy protection. Would those work in a regular, old-style cd-player, like, say, in a stereo?

Re: A golden age of consumer convenience is passing

#129

Post by overeater »

beloch wrote: post #86

"The money thrown into the convenience economy has also created a crowded marketplace. Couch potatoes can choose between Netflix, Amazon Prime, Disney Plus and others, and a glut of ultrafast delivery and takeout services; ride-seekers can switch between Uber, Lyft and Bolt. " Home video and taxi-cab service are very different sectors. Uber has engaged in some pretty "creative" (i.e. unethical) business tactics to mu…

> Uber has engaged in some pretty "creative" (i.e. unethical) business tactics to muscle their way into the taxi industry while avoiding both regulations and the payment of decent wages. They moved fast, but it was only a matter of time before government regulators (and their own reputation) caught up to them. Transportation is, indeed, something that's going to go back up in price in the short-term, if only because Uber and the Uber-wannabe's were using a business model that was never sustainable. I'd expect considerable contraction of this market as multiple companies fight each other for dwindling profits.

I want to push back on calling Uber's methods to avoiding regulations to be unethical, separately from discussing the wages. When they were starting, taxis had regulatory capture with their de facto monopoly. Lobbying over many decades prevented fair and healthy competition for out-of-date reasoning (like medallions and landmark tests). To break this corruption required illegal (and gray area) techniques, but I don't think it's unethical to destroy something that is unethical itself. Not all positive change can happen from following all the laws. Had they gotten shut down in the beginning, I think that would have been a major societal negative, and other ride-share companies coming on their coattails would not have happened.

Re: A golden age of consumer convenience is passing

#130

Post by Ekaros »

notsapiensatall wrote: post #116
ChrisLomont wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Steam still has shareholders to answer to, with the same human motives as any shareholder, so I don't think this argument holds water. I suspect they'd try to get whatever growth they can because otherwise eventually someone will overtake them. And empirically they are still growing at rates [1] not common among any class of companies, so someone there is certainty pushing for incredible growth. [1] https://www.stati…

The difference is that their shares are not publicly offered. Their shareholders much more likely to be people with vested interests in the company's long-term health, rather than retail investors and hedge funds who reliably demand short-term returns.

Also I'm pretty sure they are making enough money as they are. And don't need to chase that ever increasing stock valuation. Which might not even mean increased profits.
Post reply on HN