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

Paying Netflix $0.53/H, etc.

taylor.town

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 138 posts

Re: Paying Netflix $0.53/H, etc.

#101

Post by occamsrazorwit »

I find it interesting to consider other forms of entertainment that aren't commonly thought of as such. Case in point, food is a form of "entertainment"; you need the basic nutrients, but those can be supplied very cheaply. If people consciously thought about how much a dinner costs per hour, it might lead more people to change their dietary habits.

Another example would be makeup and fashion. It's a more subtle type of entertainment (more akin to "being on a cruise"), but the cost per hour is relatively low. That said, the benefit per hour is also low, and it's something missing from this sort of equalized comparison. One hour being at a theme park versus scrolling on Twitter versus watching a movie are very different values.

Re: Paying Netflix $0.53/H, etc.

#102

Post by Night_Thastus »

c2h5oh wrote: post #67

Video games take an average of 18h to beat now: https://howlongtobeat.com/stats and on average players will play less than half of that https://deathisawhale.com/2021/01/20/how-many-players-actual... Excluding multiplayer games with huge replayability AAA titles cost closer to $8-10/h of entertainment. A LOT of AAA titles can be completed in about 10 hours and still cost $60

To me, that's well worth it if the experience is unique, interesting, emotionally moving, etc.

I think that measuring something like that in terms of dollars per hour is a bit reductionist. I'd rather have a short but impactful game over something that sprawls for 40+ hours but doesn't do much with that time. Cocoon was around 5 hours for $25, but I don't regret that purchase for a second.

But when there are so many games out there vying for attention - and I don't know if the game will 'click' with me in advance, I myself often wait for sales. Most of what I buy ends up being in the $10-$30 range, and I frequently play games many years after their release. By then, computers have advanced so the game runs better, bugs have been patched, expansions released, etc.

Re: Paying Netflix $0.53/H, etc.

#104

Post by tripdout »

Spotify average usage is 5 hours a month? No way, that's just 10 minutes / 3 songs a day. My yearly Spotify total was 57,000 minutes, which comes out to just over 2.5 hours a day - and that seems low when I think about it.

Re: Paying Netflix $0.53/H, etc.

#105

Post by sphars »

occamsrazorwit wrote: post #101

I find it interesting to consider other forms of entertainment that aren't commonly thought of as such. Case in point, food is a form of "entertainment"; you need the basic nutrients, but those can be supplied very cheaply. If people consciously thought about how much a dinner costs per hour, it might lead more people to change their dietary habits. Another example would be makeup and fashion. It's a more subtle type…

> If people consciously thought about how much a dinner costs per hour, it might lead more people to change their dietary habits.

This is how I think about my food when I want to eat out. Most meals are now $10+, give or take, and I start to think, "that's one month of YouTube Premium, is it really worth it to eat this?". A "subscription" of eating out often starts adding up real quick compared to my own cooking.

Re: Paying Netflix $0.53/H, etc.

#106

Post by c2h5oh »

sp332 wrote: post #99
c2h5oh wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends on the type of the games you are looking obviously: - 2023 shooters average just over 12h to complete - 2023 RPGs 37.5h - Battle Arena (all time) 433h All in all average for 2023 releases is just under 20h _to complete_, which doesn't necessarily mean people actually played that much - the other article I've linked suggests that on average people got to less than half of the main story..

Shooters are focusing more on the multiplayer right? So the story modes are de-emphasized and also many players don't bother with it.

That's possible, but in general action games are shorter (unless padded with "open world") - e.g. all recent Tomb Raider games are around 12h mark, horror games average around 9h etc.

Since I can't filter data by "AAA titles only" I'm assuming that on average they are no different in length than all games in general - under 20h to complete. Add average completion percentage of less than 50% it gives you average play time per title of less than 10h.

Re: Paying Netflix $0.53/H, etc.

#107

Post by littlecranky67 »

IMHO there is too much arbitrary averaging (or selective non-averaging) going on without details on the methodology. Is the avg. number of minutes watched/listened on youtube/spotify the average of paying subscribers? Plus, video games priced at 60$ are the release price, where is the average retail price for this? Do people that pay $60 on a video game tend to play the game longer, or rather shorter? Etc...

To be fair, author acknowledges the numbers are probably incorrect, but there is too much going on without necessary details to do proper comparrison.

Re: Paying Netflix $0.53/H, etc.

#108

Post by amluto »

As an entertaining, mildly silly calculation:

Netflix, at “best” settings, streams 1-7 GB/hour [0]. At the highest public tier for AWS EC2 egress, that’s 5-35 cents/hour, which would not be amazing for Netflix’s bottom line. CloudFront is a bit better at 2-14 cents/hr.

Of course, Netflix surely doesn’t pay AWS retail prices, and Netflix doesn’t use AWS for streaming data anyway. But this does mean that any aspiring creator or startup that wants to try to collect its 50 cents/hr or so should either not deploy its streaming source in a big name cloud or should design it so it can be migrated off the big clouds quickly if the service takes off.

(Cloudflare R2 appears to be quite good for this purpose. So is a small fleet of collocated machines. A single low-end modern server streaming out 10Gbps accounts for several hundred dollars per hour of revenue, and you need to be truly successful indeed before anything resembling AWS’s internal infrastructure is needed to keep the pipes fed. Keep in mind that Netflix blogs about how their servers pump out streams at 40x that rate.)

[0] https://help.netflix.com/en/node/87

Re: Paying Netflix $0.53/H, etc.

#109

Post by WorldMaker »

danpalmer wrote: post #42
josh-sematic wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can support one for a few months, switch to another, etc.. Or just roll a dice and pick one of your favorites to support and leave it to others to support the others you like. Something is better than nothing if you want to keep independent creators around.

Yeah all of this is just a lot of work and decisions, and rolling a dice just feels weird and unfair. I do pay for YT premium which distributes money across my views which is therefore somewhat fair, and I'm considering a Nebula subscription (if Curiosity Stream's sign up flow doesn't persuade me not to again). I wish that Patreon had a support format where I could pay, say, $20 a month to Patreon and have that sprea…

> I'm considering a Nebula subscription (if Curiosity Stream's sign up flow doesn't persuade me not to again)

Nebula and Curiosity Stream are in a bit of a "breakup period". Curiosity Stream will no longer bundle Nebula at all starting next month (next year).

If you want Nebula, sign up directly with Nebula at this point. Or find a referral code from a channel that you like because they still get paid slightly more for direct referrals. I believe for a few more weeks they are still selling lifetime memberships, as an interesting way to amortize your spread for the next few years (and basically get a long term $/hr deal for a bigger short term investment), if that is something that interests you.

Re: Paying Netflix $0.53/H, etc.

#110

Post by sebastiansm »

tripdout wrote: post #104

Spotify average usage is 5 hours a month? No way, that's just 10 minutes / 3 songs a day. My yearly Spotify total was 57,000 minutes, which comes out to just over 2.5 hours a day - and that seems low when I think about it.

I mostly use spotify on weekends when driving to the supermarket. So I’m on the opposite side of use than you.
Post reply on HN