Cloudflare CEO: Football piracy blocks will claim lives

I live in Spain and there is no rising anti-American anything. The average person doesn't care beyond the Trump hate that is spewed by the mass media, but the mass media spews hate about many things, so much that the average person can't really invest much energy into hating every little thing.

I know that people here would love to live in an alternate reality where everybody in the EU is fuming at the US having a right-wing government but that's not here at least yet. The US has done so many terrible things throughout history; they will survive this too.

You don't have multiple choices.

The appeal of Peak Netflix was that it had everything in one place with reasonably working discovery mechanisms. You could pay $10 or so per month and be satisfied. The current streaming era is "if you want to see all your favourite shows, it will cost $60 per month and you'll have to bounce around among 12 apps to find what you want."

If we had a mandatory-licensing regime, I'd expect multiple choices would work great. Services couldn't survive on "Only we have The Office/Game of Thrones/Bluey" alone and would have to differentiate based on other factors like "best discovery tools" or "built to better suit your specific devices"

This goes to Spain government (Nazi-like behavior has long tradition there) and Spain citizens letting laws, which allows this, to pass. Because same law was or will be used to block opposition, etc.

Of course, that similar organizations (paid by huge copyright companies) tried the same in my country. And luckily our government listens to local experts (NIC.cz and others) and not to mention, pirating has big tradition here. So they failed to pass this ridiculous law. (blocking IP addresses)

> Is that really happening at any meaningful scale?

Anecdotally: oh yes. I don’t know anybody who pays, although that may say more about the populations I work with and hang out with.

I hear there’s plenty of headroom for the direct economics to work, if you’re reselling for less than the ~EUR100/month range the commercial providers charge [1]. Gross median income in Spain is on the order of EUR27000 annually, for reference [2]—so I’m not sure how many of the pirate viewers would be able to afford the legit product if the pirate channels dried up.

I also hear [0] there’s a robust side trade in exploiting pirate viewers’ machines though malware-style techniques while they’re there and feeling enticed to click yes to things…

[0] https://www.webroot.com/blog/2021/05/12/we-explored-the-dang...

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/LaLiga/comments/1fksf3i/how_much_do...

[2] https://www.ine.es/dyngs/INEbase/en/operacion.htm?c=Estadist...

> You don't have multiple choices.

The comic depicts "Netflix" -> "Netflix Amazon Apple Disney+ Hulu YouTube", and you later implicitly say there are multiple choices, but, you don't think it works well. "If we had a mandatory-licensing regime, I'd expect multiple choices would work great."

> Services couldn't survive on "Only we have The Office/Game of Thrones/Bluey" alone and would have to differentiate based on other factors like "best discovery tools" or "built to better suit your specific devices"

I'm not sure how either of those are differentiators for people selling content, rather than people coding apps.

Let's avoid that simple argument.

Let us instead assume mandatory licensing exists, which I presume means that as soon as content is released, it is a right to be able to license it, i.e. pay the content creator to have it on your service.

I have a hard time understanding how that would lead to all content being on all services - surely, this adds up to some finite sum, but is that finite sum enough to mean its trivial to license everything, so there's no differentiator anymore?

And that's before we bring in that, presumably, we have some shared understanding that it's more expensive to license, say, Bluey Game of Thrones Edition, than, idk, hmmm...Karate Kid.

Let's set all those little things aside.

A screen is a piece of glass with pixels behind. A video takes up the pixels.

Is there room to "build to better suit your specific devices"?

Can we avoid an example that ends up creating exclusive content in the process?

Let's set that aside: what are discovery tools?

Are they differentiable? Or does it boil down to "a way of presenting N choices I might like"?