There are a lot of comments in this thread and the first page contains only the first subthread. To read the rest you need to click More at the bottom of the page, or like this:
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.
No it isn't. It's a workaround. This is an 8 billion dollar deal, there would have to be an impossible amount of piracy for it to count as "competition." This is precisely the reason why government regulation here is correct, as consumers, we don't have a lever long enough to have any real impact on the core problem.
And we're just one side of the deal. These types of distribution setups are not just bad for consumers, but for actors, directors, producers and anyone who makes a living on any part of these productions.
The knee jerk responses to avoid meaningful government regulation are always baffling to me.
Our focus of attention on matters of regulation ought to be in those areas where working around the problem is not nearly as dead simple as a torrent client, a NAS, and a Plex server.
I'm a computer geek, and I'm LONG past the point where setting up safe VMs and signing up to half a dozen services like newsgroup server and directories and search engines and what nots, download software with impossible names like sabnzbd (I'm waiting up for somebody to scream how nobody uses sabnzbd anymore, it's been replaced by jidwiaj and iqerqip, which are super easy, and that just proves my point:P), setup my own webservers that talk to themselves internally so my downloader would work with my cataloguer that would work with the sorter that talks to the video player, figuring out a VPN to keep me somewhat safe while introducing a whole 'nother threat vector... gawd I get a headache just thinking about it. And I end up paying the same as I would for 2-4 monthly legit services. And then my wife wants to watch this movie that's just come out and I download eight versions of it but four are fake and two have hieroglyphic subtitles in three languages baked into video stream and take up half the screen. And then it stops half way through. And then I'm on a business trip (remember those? hah!) and my family wants to watch something and now I have to spend 47 minutes on the phone trying to guide her on how to do that before we all quit in frustration.
My few friends who still do that try to get me back on board, and their "quick & easy explanation on how to do it because it's so easy now" is still three pages long, while skipping 70% of crucial steps & detail.
Just, NO. Whoever thinks piracy is "trivially easy" has a very specific mindset (Hey, it's OK, I used to as well...!), and lacks empathy for those with different mindset/circumstances/skills/priorities... who happen to make up the clear majority of public.
1. Go to {insert-seedbox-website-because-there-are-so-many-like-seriously}.com (I'd share my favorite, but you know, don't want to break any rules, suffice to say there's a great search engine named "Google" that will point you in the right direction)
2. Pay $5-$10/month for a seedbox that pre-hosts rTorrent. Zero configuration. It will give you a web address, you visit it, and boom, torrent client.
Wait, should I pay for it in Bitcoin? I mean, you can. But you don't have to. It literally doesn't matter. No one gets caught doing it this way, unless you're a real Whale.
3. Go to {any-number-of-piracy-websites-even-that-one-everyone-knows-about-yeah-it-still-exists-and-its-fine}.com
4. Download torrent -> Upload into your rTorrent
You can, alternatively, skip all of that, pay for NordVPN or whatever, and just use your favorite local torrent client. Same thing.
A whole 3 pages, to be sure. I've got friends who wouldn't know a Mac from a PC, and they still pirate all the latest movies. Its startlingly easy. Experientially, there's near-zero risk of getting caught. It hasn't changed even a millimeter in a decade. Its the same process we all used back in middle school (or, you know, wherever you were ten years ago). Its just gotten cheaper, and also less interesting because of the Golden Days of streaming, but I think it'll come back if streaming continues splintering as it has.
You are blind to the amount of time you spend finding torrents, manage disk space, cleanups, feeding your TV-box, replacing broken/fake media, versus just opening an app and clicking play.
I say this as someone who's setup sonarr, radarr, bazaar, nzbget, usenet priorities, indexers, ombi, etc, which eliminates most maintenance and labor. Stuff can still break, quotas run out, and I want market options.
If I could pay to watch British panel shows, and everything else I want to watch from where I reside, I would do so.
I've read all the comments, and they're helpful, illuminating, insightful, and I've learned a lot (genuinely).
But overall they did not change and rather enforced my perspective:
1. the "Easy, out of the box, set-it-and-forget-it, everybody knows this" method to safely and easily to this seems to still change every 6-12 months, and still doesn't compare to convenience of just pushing a button on Netflix.
2. Paying for VPNs or Seedboxes etc easily equals the cost of a "just works" streaming service, while incurring new and exciting security & privacy threat vectors.
3. Most importantly, they don't take into account on what I will put forward is the actual mainstream public scenario: family that just wants to watch stuff . Between spouse who cannot be bothered with three remotes and two computer keyboards and six devices and 7 steps to watch something they could otherwise just stream on their phone, parent-in-law who wants to watch NBA/NHS/Soccer/Whatever reliably and in real time with no interruptions, kids who want to watch Paw Patrol safely now now now, all of this at the same time and all of them expecting six nines reliability and utter convenience across all their devices all the time always.
I'm off that particular wagon train, and if that makes me less of a computer geek, then so be it :-)
I truly cannot relate. All one needs is a VPN, a torrent client, a browser and an internet connection. Most tv's nowadays are smart enough to either connect to a simple Windows share or at least be able to play movie files. My SO and I watch a new movie almost every single night with a very simple setup and rarely encounter problems. It reads to me like you've over engineered movie night and are now complaining about the complexity.
Three comments so far that highlight the exact point the parent was making, a true lack of empathy. VPN alone is enough complexity for most... it's hard to find one that doesn't have comments calling it potentially insecure, questioning the owner, nevermind keeping tabs on if it sells to another owner.
Maybe. It is still more complex than just using Netflix. OTOH, there’s enough stable software for this out there that’s it can be a “set it up and forget about it” experience if you want it to be. The right client will search N sources for you with the click of a button, instead of you having to search Netflix, then Hulu, then HBO, then Disney+, then Funimation, Crunchyroll, and so on until you find (or don’t find) the thing you’re looking for.
At what point does the daily time savings from having a unified view into all the world’s media outweigh the initial time cost of setting it up? It surely varies by person. Personally, spending one day setting up a media server is a far better experience than spending 5 minutes every #%$!ng night searching for some show on all these platforms and still not finding it.
I don't think VPNs are that complex. At least if the ads on just about every YouTube video I watch are to be believed. I think VPNs are actually pretty mainstream now.
You do need a VPN to mask your IP. Especially if you're going to be using public trackers. Otherwise you'll get copyright notices and you're ISP could terminate your service.
> I'm a computer geek, and I'm LONG past the point where setting up safe VMs and signing up to half a dozen services like newsgroup server and directories and search engines and what nots, download software with impossible names like sabnzbd
Then as a computer geek you don't seem to be aware about the modern tools to do that.
I mean, that reinforces every single one of my points, doesn't it? :)
its unhelpful, dismissive, and shows a complete lack of empathy.
My whole point is that Netflix is fire and forget. Piracy is not only a complex install and a security threat, you also have the cognitive and time load of keeping up, learning about and reinstalling / reconfiguring new stuff all the time... I deal with sysadmin all day at work, at home, sometimes I just want to watch stuff - and certainly my family does.
Some people get pleasure out of mowing the lawn, some people get pleasure of endlessly reconfiguring their home lab - I was one of those for 25 years, but! It's crucial to recognize that's a minority.
He's talking about all the stuff to set up to actually watch the stuff you pirate. Like, on a TV, from your couch, using a remote, without fussing with an HDMI cable to your laptop every time. Or setting up your kids / SO to watch on a tablet, phone, etc. Just getting the files without getting caught is only like a quarter of the battle.
Even then... I run Kodi on a Shield, which pulls data from a NAS. Copy the files to the right folder and let Kodi rescan. Still simple... the hardest part is setting up the network drive
"Honey, it's easy, just go [there] and download a torrent, then wait for it to finish, then copy it to the right folder, oh, you don't see it? you have to mount the NAS on your computer, you can't on your phone, then reopen Kodi so it scans, no I mean you have to force close it: home, home, down, enter, then open it again, wait for it to scan, it takes a couple of minutes, then the kids can watch Paw Patrol after dinner. Also, don't forget dinner."
Even that seems like it's much simpler now. The desktop player I use has Chromecast support. Haven't connected a PC to the TV in ages. I don't have an Apple TV, but I would imagine Airplay support isn't difficult to find either.
And it doesn't even require a desktop / laptop. It's possible to use your seedbox to torrent, then download it to your phone, and then cast it from your phone.
The one thing I do have to futz with are subtitles. It's usually easy, but fails every now and then.
I spend 11 pounds a month on a seedbox where you can just download everything via http or even stream it probably afterwards. It's really not that complicated.
This comment reminds me of the classic
"For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software."
It's extremely important to recognize that piracy is only a workaround for the consumer side. The consolidation of media production undoubtedly also changes what media gets produced. The types & style of content produced in each era of 'Hollywood' is incredibly influenced by who held power in the content creation process.
At several points the studios had the upper hand which meant that actors would only appear in a single studio's films. When more regulation freed actors from those types of contracts then celebrity actors were the major selling point. And for a while individual directors had a lot of power including final cut privileges which is why older in the 80s often had a theatrical release and a directors cut.
It seems that overall we are moving back towards studio control as single companies once again control production and distribution. For the most part this has worked out OK since most of these companies (Netflix, Hulu, etc.) were actually competing with the 'legacy' studios. However, now that major consolidation has taken place including the growth of Disney, etc; we are likely to see the industry and content itself shift to meet their interests. You can already see that, outside of small players and foreign sources, most studios focus on single annual big budget films marketed to an international audience (read: US & China). Just look at the top 20 films from 2015 vs 1995 vs 1985.
Well-crafted regulation is constructive, in that it expresses the social problem and provides guidance on the expected behavior. That can shape investment and allow companies to make long-term decisions.
Piracy can have many reasons behind it, including just not wanting to pay for things in general. And it’s easy for companies to dismiss as just an expense to manage, like shoplifting (“loss”) in the retail channel.
It's a lot easier than that now. There are apps now that package the bittorent client and website with magnet links into a single unified app ecosystem that looks somewhat like the spotify app, but with practically every movie and TV show ever produced. You don't have to wait for downloads, the client will stream the torrent for you after maybe 30 seconds of buffer. It's often much faster for me to use this app to get to a show, than to navigate the website and do the same for a service I might pay for.
Google shouldn't be able to set web and mobile standards, then reap ad monies by forcing everyone to accept their anticompetitive changes.
Apple shouldn't be the sole guardian of iPlatform. You can't have a protection racket on 50% of all commerce (phones >> gaming consoles) and enforce what gets put on the device.
These companies don't have moats the size of an ocean. They have moats the size of a Schwarzschild radius, and they're sucking up everything in their path. Google, in particular, is being lazy as fuck because they don't have to actually do anything anymore.
Microsoft is literally the only tech giant behaving correctly, and it's probably because they got slapped with antitrust in the 2000s.
Competition is supposed to be good for the economy. These companies should have to try harder. The minute they no longer face existential risks, they become destructive.
What's more amazing to me is Google had Chat and Docs/Sheets all ready to go and integrate and take on Office and instead they closed down chat and brought out Hangouts which I've still never understood.
I’m also astounded at how badly Google has squandered the opportunity in business productivity.
Even companies that were all-in on Google for email, calendar, and documents went with (for example) Slack for chat and Zoom for meetings. Google has had multiple products in both categories for years! And yet somehow could not put together a compelling package the way Microsoft did with O365 + Teams seemingly overnight.
It does seem like a big missed opportunity. My only thought is the failure of Wave loomed large and people didn’t want to repeat it. Consumer messengers with huge user bases all had simplified UIs and that seemed like a better market to try (repeatedly) to break into.
Was Skype bundled as a part of Office? I'm not sure if it was included or if it was a license add on.
The companies I worked at that had slack licenses still had teams using what they considered to be the best product. Slack, Hipchat (remember them?), and Zoom.
There's also more to it than 'bundling.' Trusting your chat communications to the same company doing your email is a more compelling story than sending it to Slack, Discord, or Zoom.
There are a lot of companies that still don't trust 'the cloud' and then you've got governments all over the world and all of their regulations that may block the use of something else.
Skype for Business is licensed separately, from what I recall. Back when I was L1 I'd have to install Skype for Business from portal.office.com, because it wasn't installed as part of the standard Office2016/O365 package.
"Bundling" isn't any indication of any wrong doing. The OS "bundles" a word processor, a music player, a photo editor, etc, etc. I don't think I'd choose to install an OS without an internet browser. But a decade or two ago, people thought differently that an OS shouldn't ship with a bundled browser.
I don’t think that really counts for much — they literally just expanded their product suite, and integrated as such. If you’re not supposed to do that, then I’m not sure what a company is supposed to do other than have a single standalone product per domain.
Their monopoly lawsuit behavior was different — the bundling of windows with forced IE was problematic (largely because windows was everything, and also IE being largely unrelated to the rest of the OS) but much more problematic was their OEM strategies, to enforce and maintain windows as the dominant OS.
I’m not sure I can agree about Microsoft. I’ve come to not hate them in the last decade but they definitely have been buying up the developer scene too. They aren’t as brazen as Google I’ll agree (likely because of the antitrust issues) but they are still setting themselves up as a monopoly over the long term.
The other day I was helping my brother setup Python on his Windows 10 computer. So I went to python.org and installed it as usual, then why I typed "python" in the console, it launched the Microsoft Store app and took me to the download page for their distribution of Python.
Apparently, it's some kind of alias "feature" they added to Windows at some point. What legitimate reason is there for that if not to try and trick people into thinking they need to download the Microsoft Store version of Python (which probably includes analytics/telemetry not in a standard Python distribution)?
Google, Apple, etc are all shameless, anti-competitive monopolists. Anyone can see that because they make no attempts to hide what they're doing. Microsoft's intentions are exactly the same, but they're a lot sneakier about it because they've already been burned in the past for their bad behavior.
People who think the new Microsoft is different! because they released a free text editor and other open source projects are naive. Microsoft wants to lock you into their platforms and technologies like Apple, and wants to collect and monetize your personal data like Google.
The Microsoft Store version is managed by the PSF and is a legitimate method of getting it. It went to that because you didn't choose the option to add python to the PATH, so the console didn't have a python executable to run.
That alias really is supposed to go away when you install Python from any install path (Store or classic EXE installer), but it does have more bugs with the EXE installer. (The alias feature is used more generally in Store installs, so it's more of a direct alias swap when installed that way.)
> Apparently, it's some kind of alias "feature" they added to Windows at some point. What legitimate reason is there for that
It's a loophole so they don't have to ship Windows with a version of Python and then have to support it for how long that version of Windows will be supported. So instead the user gets it from the store (and it's upgraded via the store).
Same thing they did for years "Add or Remove features" where, to enable certain things they wouldn't bloat the base OS and made them optional download.
> Why Python though? If a user knows what Python is, they probably know enough about technology to install it themselves.
Yes and no, it's frequently used as an intro language. I could see advanced users being annoyed by this but I'm not certain they are the target demographic.
Yeah and it was a collaboration between Microsoft and the PSF. A lot of tutorials written for macOS and Linux literally do start with "type in python and see what happens next" and both Microsoft and the PSF were seeing complaints that on Windows nothing happened but an error message. Microsoft didn't want the maintenance burden (that macOS and Linux has) of supporting and shipping an officially bundled version (and accidentally stuck on older releases as things start to depend on it or what have you), and meanwhile the PSF realized they were excited to get Python officially into the Store (and take on the maintenance of that) as possibly the easiest way to bring in new users on Windows. (As someone who has used Python on Windows for a very long time, I welcome the Store version as really the easiest install path to date.)
(ETA: The other reason Microsoft is less than willing to include scripting languages out of the box is past bad experiences with WScript. Doing it a shortcut to the Store install actually is a decent compromise from the malware we'd possibly see if Python scripts worked out of the box in fresh Windows installs.)
A big part of this is because people see Nadella as some kind of angel after the reign of terror by Ballmer but that's only on a relative scale. Same shit, different day. The second component is Bill Gates' philantropism, which is used to whitewash a whole pile of despicable behavior (as the CEO of Microsoft, never mind the rest).
Holy shit, you typed "python" in a console window so the OS looked for an existing install, didn't find one, so it tried to help you! How evil and awful! Burn M$$$$ down! unknown command 'python' is the only proper way to respond!
And for every new generation of know-nothings that grows up to replace the veterans of wars long past, all the old battles will need to be re-fought... Sigh. I'm too old for this shit; geroffmylawn.
That’s not what happened. Python was installed and on the PATH, it just refused to use it as long as that alias check box was turned on in system settings.
I love how the term "break up big tech" includes "break" in it. Kind of makes you realize what's really at stake here. Sure, you don't want monopolies, but is breaking US companies going to actually prevent monopolies, or are you just shifting the balance of power from US companies to Chinese companies? Because you sure as hell are not going to break those up - and Tik Tok has demonstrated what should be obvious: we are already neck-deep in the water trying to fend off Chinese companies from taking over the US market, and our competitive margin is only getting slimmer every day. A family member works a lot with Chinese companies and predicted this 13 years ago, and I remember laughing him out of the room. I am no longer laughing today, and I think most of us won't be with each passing day.
> or are you just shifting the balance of power from US companies to Chinese companies?
That's not going to happen. The biggest Chinese companies only exist because of stolen technology. This is a well documented fact. Tencent for example has this business model:
1) Identify trending games from competitors outside of China
2) Clone those games and release them internationally
3) Petition the Chinese government to block the game they cloned in China
Maybe in the short term they'll see some growth, but in the long-term innovation will always prevail.
If anything, breaking up these monopolies will lead to more innovation as the smart people working at Google, Microsoft, Apple, etc. will no longer be tied by the "golden handcuffs" and will be driven to build and experiment with new ideas and technologies, instead of spending their days working on ads or other money printing businesses that provide little value to society.
> The biggest Chinese companies only exist because of stolen technology.
We can debate the origination of their know how just like we can debate the origination of Covid. But at the end of the day what matters are the results, and China demonstrated with Covid how much more successfully they were in execution than we were. That same scenario is being replayed in board rooms across the globe - the Chinese people are hungrier, work harder, and get results more quickly. Granted, there are still gaps in some areas, but the margins are shrinking every day.
> Maybe in the short term they'll see some growth, but in the long-term innovation will always prevail.
You are somehow implying that the Chinese people are fundamentally bad at innovation. That's neighboring on being a racist statement that you should take a moment to reflect on. Just like innovation is not limited to the Bay Area, it's not limited to the US either. The Bay Area did in fact produce a disproportional amount of breakthrough ideas in the past 50 years, but not because their residents are somehow genetically more superior to other parts of the country (and ironically, you might be surprised to find out just how many Chinese workers stand behind so many of those Bay Area companies). It happened because the infrastructure for ideas was there (lack of enforcement of non competes, high risk tolerance of financial backers, previous waves of successful founders sharing their know-how with young founders and pouring money into new startups, etc). The pandemic has removed the need for in-person meetings for fundraising, and suddenly we're seeing an even more pronounced decentralization of the Bay Area, which should prove that innovation is not tied by city, county, or country borders - it's tied by regulatory, educational, and financial constraints, all of which are rapidly improving in China.
Once this current wave of Chinese mega-successful companies cashes out, the next wave will be even stronger. It's only a matter of time until a suitable ecosystem forms in China that will give their people the right ingredients to kick our ass in innovation, on top of all the other things they are already kicking our ass in.
> their residents are somehow genetically more superior to other parts of the country
Those are your words, not mine.
I never said that Chinese people can’t innovate. My point was that Chinese companies don’t innovate, and if you wanted to have an adult discussion about it, I would’ve been happy to clarify for you why I believe that.
But I’m not going to entertain a discussion with someone that tries to support their argument by putting words in my mouth and suggesting I’m racist. A discussion with someone like that will go nowhere productive.
Let me start with an apology: using loaded terms is not a good way to have a good faith conversation, and that wasn't appropriate.
But you have to admit there's something about our folks being a bit too comfortable with the notion that the Chinese people won't catch up with us because we innovate and they don't. I see people justifying their beliefs in one of these two ways:
1. Focusing on barriers that supposedly exist in China today and will continue to exist forever. Something like: "their government will always force them to do things in a certain way", or "the lack of regulatory framework invites bad behavior and doesn't instill the discipline required to be creative," etc.
2. Focusing on the idea of American Exceptionalism - essentially, it doesn't matter what China does now or in the future, we're always going to be a few steps ahead because of the most unusual events that have led to the formation of our country, our political system, our culture and values, and our inherent will to be the global leaders and ambassadors.
I would be curious to hear what your thoughts are. In my mind, as I laid out above, innovation is not a privilege bestowed upon any one location or nationality, but instead a byproduct of regulatory, educational, and financial ingredients all coming together and unblocking barriers to creativity. All of those elements are changing in China very rapidly, and all of them are moving in the "right" direction.
So for your statement "Maybe in the short term they'll see some growth, but in the long-term innovation will always prevail" to ring true to me, I would have to be convinced that we somehow have a defensible advantage in one of those three elements, and that this barrier will stand the test of time. Because I think we're both agreeing on the notion that there's nothing fundamentally special about us and our raw capabilities compared to theirs.
> If anything, breaking up these monopolies will lead to more innovation
Yes, let’s violate a company’s right to exist and conduct business just because we don’t like ads, or have preferences for how the run things. If you’re so concerned that they are not doing the right thing, then you go out and do it.
I am not sure the right for a company to exist, is a real thing. These are artificial entities created by the government that give groups of people liability protection and the ability to act as one entity legally.
It is not really a right, so much as a practical privilege we have set up. As such they should be open to whatever democratic will of the people. If the people arbitrarily decide they can only have so much power or size, then so be it.
The entity sure, but beyond the entity you have a group of people who have created something and want to sell it to you. If the Democratic will of the people said that we should jail them for creating shows we don’t like, I’m sure you’d object. Just because the people will it doesn’t mean it is correct.
People have a right to get together and create things and sell them to you under a contract. You have the right to accept or refuse. That simple.
Right but that’s tangential to the main point which is that if people come together to create something and you don’t like it, don’t buy it. Don’t attempt to strongarm them into making something you like, or punish them legally because you think they have had too much success.
I am all up for first principles thinking, which is what you demonstrated above. The problem with this approach, however, is that you have to think deeply enough to get to the very bottom of each topic. Your analysis didn't touch on the fundamental need of any democratic society to sustain strong economic growth. It's a well-known fact that destabilization of that growth nips away at democratic principles and ultimately leads to totalitarian governance. Just look a the role of economic instability in the Nazi rise to power [1].
So, yes, people may decide that we no longer want a certain type of companies. Heck, let's take it a step further - people may also decide that we want everyone to get a million dollars, no questions asked. But people are smarter than that, which is why we still have democracies.
> Your analysis didn't touch on the fundamental need of any democratic society to sustain strong economic growth
The need of the society is to defend property rights and sustain the rule of law. Economic growth is good, but you can’t make it the top of your list. Besides, we are already awash in too much regulation as it is, we should be heading the other direction towards more liberty. I’m not saying there’s never a time for regulation, just that we are waaaay past the point of reason in many areas.
It feels like we're agreeing on some subjects (eg: too much regulation can kill economic growth), but disagreeing on the importance of economic growth for the defense of property rights and rule of law. My point is that those two items can only be guaranteed in a democratic society (you won't find them in places like Russia, Middle East, most of Africa, etc). In an earlier comment, I referenced a piece that discusses the impact of economic stability on Nazi's rise to power. You will find many other examples of democratic societies turning into totalitarian regimes at the time when people lost faith in elections (which is something they do when they can no longer pay for their food and rent).
Yes I think we do agree on many things. I think in general we both value property rights and that’s a good place to be.
We may disagree on which is the cart and which is the horse. I think that in general you need a moral people who will enforce the rule of law to get economic growth, so the rule of law is the horse. And the horse’s horse is the morality of the people, something Weimar Germany was certainly lacking. Get those in order first and I think prosperity will follow. Try to put prosperity first, then it won’t matter what rule of law you have b/c the most important thing is to make money.
That's a very scary thought. What you're saying is, these big companies already are, or about to become, effectively untouchable, because they're now important strategic assets for United States in its struggle to maintain global economic dominance.
I agree it's a scary thought. Really, it's not much different than what happened with the military industrial complex. We'd be better off without it assuming every other country got rid of theirs, but since that's not happening, it has become effectively untouchable. I am not happy about it, but you won't see me advocating for destroying all of our weapons without other countries following suit. The same applies to my thinking around the tech companies, which are increasingly becoming important drivers of our economic growth.
I don't think I implied that multinational conglomerates are the pinnacle of innovation. I implied that they are important to our economy, and by extension (see my other comment), they are important to our way of life, our way of thinking, and our ability to live in a free and democratic society. That doesn't mean that companies get to operate without any regulatory oversight, but I would be careful to constrain domestic companies in ways that we cannot constrain their international competitors.
Somehow this concept might be easier to explain by looking at the analogies from the military world. Of course the world would be a better place if we all destroyed all of our nuclear weapons. Does that mean that the US should lead by example and destroy all of our weapons first with no assurances that others will do the same? Of course not. We do this step by step, and only as much as we can trust and enforce through bilateral agreements. Well, military power is intrinsically linked to economic power, so it should be clear that we wouldn't want to cap our economic power by implementing rules that others don't have to follow. Of course, two notable exceptions are environmental concerns, and in the future likely also mental health concerns. But you can't just go crazy with imposing unreasonable limitations in those two areas (eg: requesting that every factory is only powered by renewable energy, while allowing Chinese companies to use whatever energy they want). The same thinking should apply to any limitations we want to invoke on protecting our mental health - we have to approach this step by step, rather than killing our domestic companies and handing over the market share to the foreign ones.
I look at it differently (and I admit I could be wrong). I don't view these conglomerates as weapons but rather as baggage holding us back. I think by freeing ourselves from them we'll have a better chance at dominating competing nations. While they do have a lot of resources, it's not often good comes from it. They stifle innovation and lack imagination.
Microsoft is hardly behaving correctly rather behavior is just considered normal at this point.
Compared to Amazon, Google, & Apple, Microsoft's is incredibly litigious when it comes to licensing their products. It can seem baffling that most other tech company grants access to what you are licensed to use but Microsoft, perhaps deliberately, makes their licensing confusing and imprecise. Since not everything that requires a license is enforced via software, you can pretty easily be breaking their licensing rules.
Additionally, Microsoft products are deeply entrenched business best practices and auditor requirements:
Use Windows? Pay for it.
Need centralized antivirus for your organization? Pay for it.
Need to enforce MFA for Windows accounts? Pay extra for it.
Use Linux? Aren't you glad that Windows Defender supports it? And yea pay more for it.
Meanwhile Office 365 is a mess compared to AWS. Maybe Azure is better but it's still obvious that Microsoft uses its dominance in the OS space to pander more products to service its own OS which means they have no incentive to actually make Windows easy to manage.
Microsoft buying up the good will of developers is just an extra twist of the knife.
Conglomerates have never been a good idea (imho), because they have this ugly tendency of cornering one market at a time using profits from all other divisions.
I prefer Apple controlling their platform thank you very much. I remember Verizon controlling what I could use to connect to an old flip phone, not allowing me to use bluetooth but some service they charged for.
I remember Verizon controlling what OS version was installed and what firmware and what updates were even supported by them.
Remember when Cell Service providers charged us PER SMS text?
You're presenting a ridiculous dilemma between phones that are controlled by the network, and phones that are controlled by the manufacturer. Turns out, there's a third option that you are handily ignoring, where phones are controlled by the owner.
Presumably the ripper has some form of contract with whichever entity they sourced the content from, and piracy undoubtedly violates that contract / ToS.
Could or should? If you want to download a bunch of mp3s without paying the author, knowing that the author has not intended for you to do so, do you think that is right?
I really wish we had the bandwidth we have now, back in the Napster-era.
Napster, and others forced, persuaded and cajoled the music industry to consolidate, whether they liked it or not, on Spotify, and iTunes.
If we'd had easy free sharing of movies, it's not hard to envisage something similar to what we see now in the music industry forced on the movie companies. Now it's honey pot torrents all over the place.
No customer wants to spend X on Shudder, Y on Netflix, and Z on Prime, plus Hulu, HBO, and your cable/satellite fee either. Paying 200 GBP/USD a month is utterly absurd.
Frankly, I'm glad I have a waning interest in modern movies as I get older, and I'm actually more interested in watching old black and white movies that are "free to air" in my country.
We have not yet approached the pre-streaming willingness to pay (WTP). People used to pay $150 to $200 plus onDemand for the whole package with their cable provider. Today you can have YouTubeTV, HBO, Netflix, Prime, AppleTV+, Disney+, and Spotify for less than that. So perhaps the average will hover around $100 with many paying closer to $200 a month. We are creeping back up to those numbers because people will pay.
That's a good point, though I think the time/generational factor may cause it to trend downward. My parents unhappily paid cable prices their whole life. I've never once paid for cable TV and never will be willing to pay that much for subscription entertainment, but I'm willing to pay for one streaming service and have considered a second at times. Anecdotally reading places like here, I don't think I'm an uncommon case. Again to your point, even though there's fuss every time a streaming provider raises the cost (especially Netflix being one of the larger players and who has been around long enough to have increased prices more than once), it seems each service is viewed as cheap and well under what people are willing to pay.
Isn't it an issue if "willingness to pay" drops too much? In the end, content costs money to make. If money coming in goes down, then there might not be enough money to make all that content.
Big budget content is usually the worst. There were many pieces of indie media that had heart and shoestring budgets, that have been pushed out the market.
Distribution costs have decreased greatly, while markets have grown remarkably. Looking at inflation adjusted cost of blockbuster movies today, film company revenue or indie scenes across the globe, I find it hard to argue that the last 20 years have been bad for the industry. Disruptive, for sure, but this creates winners and losers.
I have a hard time believing that that was the average monthly cost of a cable subscription. Mine was never more than $30-40 when I needed cable for the internet.
When I had cable the $30 plan was the "just the stuff you can get OTA plus some shopping channels" plan. If you wanted actual cable channels you had the choice of:
1. "Basic" bundle, $60 + $20 in fees + $8-15 per set to rent the box. Got you ESPN, Food Network, SciFi, Cartoon Network, USA
2. "Complete" bundle, $100 + $20 in fees + $8-15 per set to rent the box. Got you BBC, a bunch of foreign language channels, Starz, and a few more.
You could also add HBO to either plan for $15 a month. I think they may have had a few other premium channel options as well, but I never paid that close of attention.
We cut the cable because the price had crept up from about $50/month total to almost $100/month over the course of a few years. It was just unsustainable. Now we pay about $40/month for streaming services, and the streaming services don't have ads.
Yet. IIRC, when cable started, it didn't have ads either. It was its selling point.
Advertising is a cancer on society that infects and poisons every communication medium available. It has already metastasized to streaming platforms, though it's not conspicuous yet. You don't have to watch interstitial ads between episodes of your favorite show on Netflix, but if that show is a modern production, it's likely overflowing with product placement ads. When that and other means of making easy money get used up, you can be sure that overt ads will follow.
"All this has happened before, and all this will happen again." And that's a salient argument in favor of torching the whole advertising industry to the ground.
When cable started, it had ads. Cable was just a bunch of broadcast stations pushed over a coax wire to your house so you could get stations that were pretty much impossible with an antenna from your location in pretty much perfect signal quality for the time. There weren't even "only cable" kind of channels when people started paying for their television to come over wires to their homes.
> You could also add HBO to either plan for $15 a month
Please note that that was only a channel (or two). You still had to tune to watch the movie/show you wanted! For the same price today (not even adjusted for inflation), you can watch any of this content on demand, on any device, but it has waaay more content available.
My current monthly cable subscription is $135 (plus "fees"). And when people say, "cable", they generally mean TV service. For many, that may mean a pricey satellite TV service (very expensive back in the day). Basic cable is likely what you are getting, but many people want to watch sports or movies, which requires premium subscriptions and it adds up quickly.
Half the country can't really shop around they need to buy internet alone from the same cable company and then replace TV with netflix hulu etc but long term there isn't much stopping the cable provider from jacking up the price of just internet to what you are paying for TV and internet and claiming to offer you a deal for just a little bit more if you pay THEM for tv.
Hi we've noticed you used to pay us $200 for internet and tv but now pay $100 to use and $50 for streaming services. How would you instead like to pay us 200 for internet and 220 if you want TV too. our $20 tv addon is cheaper than netflix because its subsidized by the monopoly rent we are charging you on internet access! Also we have noticed that despite bandwidth being cheaper than ever we can also discourage your netflix use by also charging extra for using "too much" data.
There’s one wire going into the house usually that carries media, a coaxial cable. Hence, your options were always Dish or DirecTV satellite or the cable company.
Being able to buy and cancel on demand streaming for $15 or less per month is a massive improvement over the previous situation.
It has never been easier, cheaper, and more convenient to consume basically all content and yet people still find ways to complain.
There may be places that have only one provider with only one option in that provider, but are those places really $135/month with all the TV channels? The issue might be paying for things that are already free over the Internet.
> There may be places that have only one provider with only one option in that provider, but are those places really $135/month with all the TV channels?
Yes, I've lived in places where there is one cable company and they abuse their monopoly position with predatory pricing like this. When you're a new customer, they offer you a deal at maybe ~$60/mo and then over the course of a couple years raise the price to over $120/mo, with price increases every year or two after that, as well.
In the U.S. the vast majority of places have only only provider, there is no shopping around. $135/month sounds about right for the complete package. If you're lucky that includes a "special" on including HBO.
Virtually all places have "specials" on the first year of service, wherein the price will increase 50% or even 100% after the first year, which will almost always put you well into the $100+ range.
I understand. For myself, I chose to solve that by not purchasing any TV, cable phone, or any other package and only getting Internet. Internet is the only useful thing for me from all of that, anyway.
If the prices get too high I call them up and cancel. At that time, they try to keep me as a subscriber by giving me lower rates. If they don't have any available I ask when their new packages are coming out and call back a day after that time.
Comcast hides their real rates as well as they can but in some places they are required to publish them. In my rural area (where they are the only real option):
$139.99 gets you "Select+ Includes Limited Basic, Expanded Basic, Digital Preferred Tier and HD
programming for primary outlet, 20 Hour DVR Service, and Blast! Internet"
You can't buy ALL the channels as s bundle but the top tier bundle is $189.99/mo (plus fees)
The prices don't sum reasonably at all and it's not really feasible to calculate a price for TV without internet (and its very difficult to order such a thing)
I heard Comcast (Xfinity) business model is forget about the threat of Cordcutters, and just keep raising prices, hoping the consumer doesn't notice the costs.
I head this from a Xfinity employee.
My mom showed me her bill and it was $240 month, for basics channels, internet, hbo, and one other lousy feature she doesn't use.
I trying to get it down, but their contracts have early termination fees in the contract.
They offer reasonable packed rates only to new customers. They know most people won't take back their equipment, and go a few days without service, in order to save $100 plus a month. I don't know how they legally get away with their business practices.
She has bern a faithful customer since 1972.
She is in Marin County, USA.
If anyone knows of a different company please give me some advice.
(I looked into AT&T, but they have almost the same business model as Comcast.)
The price for essentially just 120Mbps (sold as 200) down and 6 up is over 100 for internet + 15 for the box if you don't get your own. With TV and a few premium channels it would easily be $200. They are also have only one competitor of note in the downtown of a city of 50K people, a DSL provider offering a service slow enough that its not technically considered broadband anymore by present standards.
Sure maybe some are willing to pay, but finding what you want to watch across 10x different services is obnoxious. Signing up for a particular monthly service just to watch a single show is also not ideal.
>We have not yet approached the pre-streaming willingness to pay
Even if that is true, I am pretty sure it is specific to US only. I dont believe any other place in the world are paying that much for monthly TV content, where Free ( paid by Tax or not ) OTA TV are the norm, and paid are mostly for Live Sports Content.
Fragmentation across streaming services may do more to increase piracy than overly-expensive cable packages. Even if the total monthly cost is lower with six streaming services, there is a higher likelihood to look at each of the $10/mo services and say “not worth it” than a single $100/mo cable subscription. The music streaming industry was smart enough to avoid primarily competing on catalogue exclusives. When all services have near-identical catalogs, they are forced to compete on price & UX.
Amazon did not take over online shopping because it had the lowest prices at any cost. It grew dominant because it was the everything store and any higher prices they charged were not higher enough to make it worth the time to comparison-shop or look for specialty retailers.
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/
> Frankly, I'm glad I have a waning interest in modern movies as I get older, and I'm actually more interested in watching old black and white movies that are "free to air" in my country.
My mother recently gave me a sub-account to Netflix and while I was thrilled to rewatch some shows I liked (like the OA or good old star trek) I was quickly submerged by the sheer amount of YA novels adapted in TV shows or movies that are really mediocre. Now I see there's a lot of content on Netflix but I feel like I am swimming in an ocean of never ending content produced with the same recipe.
TCM was available (alongside all of Warner Bros. Media, Turner Media and DC Comics)... It's getting absorbed by Discovery [1], I imagine that a competitive bidding process must have taken place, presumably Netflix didn't see the benefits.
> I feel like I am swimming in an ocean of never ending content produced with the same recipe.
This is what machine learning, pattern recognition will get us.
I watched one show in Amazon prime. One shocking thing I noted besides repetitive plots every few episodes, is that one character say something and after few minutes or next episode another character spoke exactly same sentence in different situation. And it happened so many times I thought I knew what is about to be said.
I think the machine learning part in that is massively exaggerated, perhaps to avoid personal responsibility. Detecting the patterns in commercially successful movies hardly requires complex pattern recognition algorithms. I would claim that most movies made in the past decades were copying ideas that had turned out to be
successful earlier.
Maybe machine learning can add some tiny extra on top of the recipe, but I think it's still the producers who are to blame for the lack of creativity.
> I think the machine learning part in that is massively exaggerated,
You are right of course. I said that in half-jest. It is like at work where every product/project is working on something next generation. Irritates the hell out of me. So in morning meetings I so often ask "Are we fixing it now or it will be part of our next gen product?"
Not just the producers but the overall strategy. Right now, these media companies are competing on quantity because it's a numbers game and a marketing gimmick to showcase your "vast" collection, however mediocre.
Well Netflix formula is throw a bunch of stones in the ocean and see what sticks and then make more of it. Its a bad strategy because users waste time watching content they would rather not watch. HBO imo is the only platform that focus on quality rather than the number of shows.
Yep, HBO is the only streaming platform with consistent quality. It’s also the only one I pay for. There are approximately 0 Netflix originals that are on par with the ‘good’ HBO series, same for amzn and Hulu.
> Well Netflix formula is throw a bunch of stones in the ocean and see what sticks and then make more of it.
I read it was more than that. Shows have to bring in more customers, keeping them hooked to a show (or the platform) is not enough now. They will more and more invest only in content that bring in more customers, not just keeping the ones they already have. I read that's why the OA got cancelled: it wouldn't bring in more views and the show would have been more expensive.
I would argue Apple is trying to follow the HBO formula. They are not quite there yet, but the Apple shows I have watched have all been good, with Ted Lasso being great.
The ML lays out the broad strokes of what it thinks will perform thematically which coincidentally is what uncreative producers have been doing for years.
(see Avatar is Dances with Wolves with Blue Aliens)
> No customer wants to spend X on Shudder, Y on Netflix, and Z on Prime, plus Hulu, HBO, and your cable/satellite fee either. Paying 200 GBP/USD a month is utterly absurd.
When we’re done talking about the quantity of movies, let’s talk about quality.
If an awesome movie goes to the cinema, like Twilight, you’ll be able to watch Werewolf on Netflix. With abysmal plot and acting. If you type Mission Impossible, you’ll certainly get Suits.
The search is so abysmal, always suggesting the same 40 series on and on, that people exchange numeric codes which allow them to discover new categories (but half the titles will be already seen). A/B testing probably shows that after seeing a title for 6 weeks and dodging it, you end up watching it, because, there’s only that.
It’s not that I don’t want to pay $40 a month for 4 services, it’s that even at that price, I still can’t watch the quality movies.
And let’s not even start with ideology-pushing in movies.
My rule of thumb regarding watching content is: if its only 1 movie or tv show I want to watch just pirate it, if its more than one on a streaming platform subscribe to it. I subscribe to netflix just once a year to watch everything I want to watch and then don't bother subscribing again for a year. I guess eventually I will do the same to other platforms if they have enough content in them.
I can't fathom how someone can pay to streaming sites month after month unless they have quite a lot of stuff they want to watch.
A lot of people just can't be bothered tracking their usage over time of a bunch of services and keeping track of what lives where. I don't have a lot of services so it's not worth optimizing to save $10/month or something like that.
> I'm actually more interested in watching old black and white movies that are "free to air" in my country
My experience has been that old (black and white or otherwise) movies are hard to find now. Especially if you just want to watch it once and don't want to buy an old DVD or VHS.
In the UK, a lot of channels still play these old films. In fact over the pandemic, there's actually a channel that was set up to specifically play these films:
Why do you need cable/satellite if you're playing the a la carte game of streaming? I feel like the world where you have cable and streaming services is ending and you either live in a world with cable and maybe or two streaming services; similar to paying extra for HBO and Cinemax with your cable service in the past, or you cut the cord and manage bundling the "networks" yourself. Netflix+Hulu+HBOMax+Sports/Local News subscriptions all tally to less than cable used to, you get more content, and all that content is on demand and free of commercials. This notion that service has backpedaled is nonsense. It baffles me why people still cling to their cable service and then expect "premium" channels be free and also share their content with one another. Which cable networks did that? When new episodes of Seinfeld were airing which networks could you watch them on? Just one? So unfair! I prefer the commercials on ABC! Perhaps you felt differently because you had no alternative to buying all the "streaming services of the day" under a single bundle. Now you do. You don't like TNT? Don't pay for it. ESPN never get turned on? Now you can drop it from your bill.
For many people in the states it is difficult or impossible to get internet without cable bundled in.
And your argument assumes that the shows you want are clustered into one of the providers. But what if you like one show from Netflix, one from Hulu, one from HBOMax, etc. You still have to pay for all the shows you don't care about from each of those providers. The different streaming services is roughly equivalent to the different channel bundles that cable companies offered before.
Sure, the streaming situation isn't any worse than cable was, but it could still be a lot better. Imagine if streaming services had to compete on the quality of the service itself instead of the content available on the network. If you are ok with ads if you get a lower price, use one service. If you are willing to pay more for 4K content for everything, use a different service, etc.
In the UK at least, it's Sky (satellite) or Virgin (cable), and they both bundle internet access with the service. Often it's more expensive to get the internet service on its own (Virgin) than getting the 'bundle' (tv+internet).
Also, the free-to-air reception in some parts of the UK is still so poor, you need cable or satellite to watch any TV at all.
On the FTA point, Freesat is the satellite equivalent of Freeview and needs no subscription. Many TVs have Freesat tuners built in so you just need the dish.
But that's the thing. You don't have to pay for cable anymore. And if you want to watch a show, you can subscribe for a month, get your fill, and then unsubscribe. You couldn't do that before.
Although very limited in its content, at least in Canada. My understanding is that it's because of old exclusivity contracts with cable providers.
And indeed, our process is: "Can we rent it? No, fine let's fine a pirated copy". Not going to get cable for one night to watch this one movie. Everybody's losing by hanging on those old outdated systems.
Amazon and Apple also have stream rentals. That said, I have Netflix (free with my T-mobile phone service) and HBO (free with my AT&T fiber internet) and Apple+ (free with the recently purchased iPads for the kids) and Hoopla (free from the library) and Kanopy (free from the library) and Disney+ (we actually pay for this one) and I never feel the need to say, I must watch this movie which isn't available on one of the services right now. If anything, I have too many options of what to watch.
I've stumbled across various streaming services that look like they have stuff I might like, but I really have more than I need already. And I always forget that because my wife pays for Prime, we have Amazon Prime streaming too.
This. I don't understand why streaming a movie is so much more expensive than renting a physical DVD or VHS from a brick-and-morter store. If I want to watch a new movie, it is generally much cheaper to rent a DVD from redbox than watching it from any of the streaming services that allow you to rent it online.
It's because of the first sale doctrine. Redbox and family video can buy DVDs and Blu-Rays (at a maximum) at the same price as consumer DVD/Blu-Ray--and rent them out without permission from the copyright holder. That means video rental stores can undercut the VOD prices.
Consumers are willing to pay more for VOD because its easier. Having to return the disc is a pain in the ass.
... There used to be this little startup company and service, where you could queue movie/TV shows, then you would receive the discs in the mail, with a paid envelope to return them as well...
AFAIK - only in the US though, there was much talk at launch of how they got special deals with the US postal service.
It's not possible to lend digital media out without making a copy(remotely streaming it still copying), which isn't protected by the first sale doctrine. Redbox isn't making a copy. That's the big difference.
> My library manages to lend ebooks; they even have wait lists for them.
Those are made available in that format by the publisher. No equivalent for movies is available (as far as I am aware).
Also my understanding is that it was never entirely clear if lending ebooks like that in the US was legal or not. The publishers and lenders both carefully avoided the issue going to court IIUC. (Prior to the Internet Archive's actions, that is.)
You can also still subscribe to the Netflix DVD service, although it's degraded compared to what it used to be. They're obviously not replacing a lot of disks when they wear out.
If you're basically just walking by the box anyway while doing something you'd be doing otherwise, sure it's cheaper to drop $2 for a disc.
If you have to make a deliberate trip, you've transportation & opportunity costs. 2 round trips to the box, just to get/return the disc, is 6 miles total (1.5 miles one-way by road & parking lot) for me; at >$3/gal gas (wear/maintenance not included) that's >$1.50 plus the $2 rental. Then there's the time spent getting the disc, as several people wait around for someone to fetch it; if we're already at cumulative $4 cost, I'll pay the extra $1 (<$0.25 each) just so the group can watch what we want right now with a mere wiggling my thumb and not wait around half an hour.
...which is why Redbox puts its boxes in places where people already have to go anyway. It's funny that you think this all needed to be explained in such excruciating detail. It's not rocket science.
I wish we had the data on this but I suspect a customer only selects a one or two video platforms and _MAYBE_ juggles a third when a hot show like GoT shows up, which is rare. There is a limited number of attention hours, it doesn't make sense to be on 10 platforms.
Regardless, the end game of these streaming services is probably going to be consolidation or partners, if it makes since because the market is too diluted. We're coming off, wha, $60-100 a month cable bills? The streaming providers are still siphoning this value before we start seeing consolidation of the losers with the winners.
It's probably more than one or two. Amazon Prime Video and Netflix are two right there. But, you're right, The reality is that most people don't feel like they have to see a particular show. In any case, for the time being, it's pretty easy to dip in and out. I guess I have four at the moment (though two of them are free for various reasons).
Depending upon how you allocate the cost of Amazon Prime though, I'm saving a lot compared to when I had cable--albeit at the cost of losing live TV.
I have Netflix, Prime Video is basically free (I have Prime for other reasons), HBO comes with my ATT internet, AppleTV is included with a new device, but will then come with Apple One (which is a good deal if you have a family of users), and Hulu.
I pay for Hulu because I'll pay just about anything to never see a commercial. When I do have time to watch something, I don't want to see commercials. If that means paying a bit extra to have another service, so be it.
Yep, Netflix and Amazon Prime are a given for us (Netflix a bit less so lately, actually considering taking a break from it for the first time in years), and then we'll add Disney+/Hulu or HBO Now for a month or two a couple times a year.
By the way, has anyone checked out the free movies on Youtube? There's some good 80s and 90s classics on there lately. Supposedly it's with ads, but I don't see too many when I watch, certainly less than Hulu.
Prime is already enhanced by its delivery services, something the others can't offer. Like I had Prime already just for that and didn't really start watching shows on it much until recently.
But that being said they've definitely stepped up their Originals game lately. Last few shows we've watched on there are all excellent (Invincible, The Boys, Upload).
It's my understanding that Xfinity sends a few warning notices, just a little slap on the wrist, before they end up terminating your account or something (though a quick cursory Google brings up a Reddit thread where someone claiming to have worked for Cumcrust said they never saw any accounts terminated for that). I know I received one letter like 7 years ago for downloading 'Christmas Vacation' and nothing else ever happened. Speaking from experience, if you use a VPN to torrent then they'll leave you alone.
I'd be curious how much - and what - your neighbor was doing to have made it a big deal, and what Xfinity's response/reaction was.
maybe times have changed, but before I got a VPN, I used to get copyright notices all the time. I didn't notice for a few years because they went to an @comcast.com email address that I never checked. when I finally looked, I saw pages and pages of sternly written emails. if freely torrenting movies for years isn't enough to get disconnected, I dunno what is.
That's odd. For a long time the standard response in the US was to severely throttle connection speed for some duration if there were too many notices within a given time period.
This is the obvious outcome from customers wanting to drop the all you can eat cable model and pick and choose.
If any one "stream everything" service popped up with every providers content, it would cost $200+ a month, and essentially a cable tv subscription all over again just without the cable box, and everyone would complain it's too expensive and go back to piracy.
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 Costello and so on. So pleasant to watch.
oh yah, my family totally dropped out of modern media, and man whenever we go to visit extended family and other stuff and they happen to be watching something on TV or a movie or whatever holy smokes it's pretty incredible how resensitized we have become to that violence. I can't stomach it. Probably took several years to happen quietly in the background, not even doing anything particular other than not consuming such media.
Now that I think about it, I've come to realize that a large fraction of entertainment operates at the extrema of human experience, otherwise it would be too mundane and unentertaining. But if most of those so called entertaining things took place in front of you they'd be crazy intense, too intense for daily living. Even something ordinary like a makeup commercial, if you had women staring at you like they do in those shoots that be pretty out of the ordinary. In that regard everything is sort of exaggerated.
Our whole family has been doing that this year. Watching older movies and TV shows is much more pleasant all around.
This was tougher growing up when kids all watched the same shows and talked about them, but with content so all over the place now that common thread seems to be mostly gone at school (outside of internet video stuff).
> Watching older movies and TV shows is much more pleasant all around.
My girlfriend somehow grew up completely unaware of Star Trek, so I introduced her to The Next Generation last year and we've been watching it (rewatching in my case, but for the first time in over two decades) one episode a day.
It's so relaxing, in a way that almost no modern TV is. No end-of-episode cliffhangers or other mechanisms trying to make you binge-watch. We can just watch one episode to unwind, discuss it a bit if it's one of the better thought-provoking ones, and then go to bed.
I feel the same way! My partner also hadn't watched much Star Trek before. During the pandemic, we watched all of Enterprise, Voyager, and now into DS9 (I had watched TNG so much when I was younger I wanted to start with my less-watched series). The episodes are calm, and the competence of the characters is refreshing as well.
I'm saying that cliffhangers are a major element of TNG and constitute a very deliberate part of its "house style". They are a small percentage of episodes, but if you made a list of what made TNG distinctive, "seasonal cliffhangers" would be on that list. As such, it's strange to remark on how the show lacks cliffhangers. It's notable for having them!
Words derive meaning from their context, and you're pulling mine out of theirs. The full sentence is:
> No end-of-episode cliffhangers or other mechanisms trying to make you binge-watch.
I'm talking about mechanisms that modern TV uses to trick people into watching a series many episodes at a time until they're too tired to go on. An end-of-season cliffhanger that was designed to ensure people would come back when the series returned next season after a long break from their weekly Star Trek watching habit is not at all the same thing. Nothing about TNG is attempting to make me, the viewer, binge-watch it.
In the case of me and my GF, since we know exactly when we are about to watch an end-of-season episode we just plan an extra hour for it that evening. That's it.
Well, except for the season finale/openers from Season 3 on; but, yes, TV in general (even before streaming, DS9-VOY-ENT all show this trend within thr Trek franchise) has become less episodic since the TNG era.
I believe you mean more serialized. Episodic, defined as "containing or consisting of a series of loosely connected parts or events", is the opposite of what you mean.
Same here, but we haven't gone as far back as the 50s. Mostly we've been enjoying family movies from the 70s, 80s, and early 90s, back when sets were elaborate and most effects were practical. Many of these older movies have really stood the test of time. Hook, The Goonies, Honey I Shrunk the Kids, Muppets movies, Ernest Scared Stoopid, Willy Wonka, etc are all family favorites.
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.
Forced diversity is one of the big issues with modern media. Instead of making an actually diverse character, yano, with human thoughts and feelings, they just tick some skin and gender boxes and leave it at that. It's just another form of stereotyping.
Not enough is said about this. The amount of TV available for free (with an internet connection) these days is mind-boggling, and the vast majority of people ignore these options altogether.
We've had a regular "bad movie night" throughout the pandemic, and there are a lot of these that are available to pirate up to about the 90s on Youtube (or occasionally dailymotion) simply because their distributors no longer care about them.
Movies from the 30s to the 50s are still mostly captured under copyright now. It's directly movies from the 30s to 50s that are possibly one of the biggest reasons to oppose Amazon buying MGM, because it is one of the larger 30s to 50s back catalogs in general, but especially it was one of the larger 30s to 50s back catalogs not directly associated with a specific VOD streaming service and so open to and optioned by many of them. Amazon consolidating that to Amazon Prime will potentially be a huge blow to the general availability of older films.
I've seen a few myself. They probably don't hit as hard as when they were new, but certainly a few still hold up acceptably. Especially compared to some mass produced content today which is cringey and predictable.
Or just watch whatever one service provides. My queue on any service is always way longer than what I can get thru.
YouTube & others provide a large library for free (with ads). I assume most here are Amazon Prime members anyway, so that vast library is practically free. Apple TV always has some good $5 movies.
As I get older, the less I care about seeing the latest stuff - as there's always more I want to watch than I can get to.
(And if there really isn't enough for you to watch, you really need be doing something else.)
The Naked City by Jules Dassin is a really good police procedural. If you like stuff like Law & Order, this is the progenitor.
The Third Man is classic, classic noir. Between the on location shooting in Vienna, fantastic performances by Joseph Cotten and Orson Welles, and really distinctive cinematography, it's just stunning.
A Man Escaped. To quote Godard, "He is the French cinema, as Dostoevsky is the Russian novel and Mozart is German music". If you like simple, but beautiful films, watch Bresson. A Man Escaped makes all other prison break films, with their endless plot twists and convolutions, seem utterly pointless. Instead Bresson focuses on the character, the drama and the methodical process of breaking out.
The story depicts the machinations of a racist named Adam Cramer (Shatner), who arrives in the fictitious small Southern town of Caxton in order to incite white townspeople to racial violence against black townspeople and court-ordered school integration.
A thousand times this. Best screwball comedy ever.
Also You Can't Take It With You. Now you've seen one Cary Grant and one Jimmy Stewart. To finish up you can get both of them with Catherine Hepburn in The Philadelphia Story.
Word of warning that Day at the Races has a "minstrel show" scene that's pretty offensive even by 30s standards. Other than that, the Marx Brothers are easily the greatest comedy troupe in American history, and their films are still some of the funniest ever made
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?
Yes, because as of today, right now, every human on earth could decide to not visit the cinema again and instead download the content off of the internet.
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.
Sure, but the idea of mass collective action is always a bit of a nuclear option, because it takes a huge bit of motivation to actually make _everyone_ do anything. So, could they? Sure. Will they en masse? No.
Everyone could have stolen cable back in the day and caused a decrease in cable prices and increase in customer experience. They didn't.
I think we're at or approaching a tipping point. For a long while I've not been able to justify the effort it takes to maintain automatic content downloads and a streaming server. But that maintenance cost isn't higher when I want content from an additional platform. If I'm gonna pirate an Amazon/MGM exclusive then I'm gonna cancel Netflix, Hulu, Paramount+ and Apple TV+ too.
Piracy was the Easiest/Only way to get content until ~2008ish. Since then; Netflix and (...x streaming platform) made it easier/better to Pay for the content than pirate it.
It does feel like we're approaching a tipping point now in the other direction with all of these streaming fiefdoms.
My household has Netflix, Hulu, D+, and Prime streaming now - that's already too many and needs pairing IMO.
I'd argue that we've reached the tipping point already. It will accelerate now. netflix just increased their prices again to compensate for slowing growth.
All these stream platforms produce their own exclusive shows and chances are that you're only interested in one or two flag ship series and the occasional movie or so. I believe this will hurt hulu the most then hbo before the rest, because compared to netflix and disney they have less exclusive content.
This leads to a downward spiral, where you need more exclusive content to attract users which leads to more fragmentation and eventually drives costs, which is bad for platforms with less (exclusive) content, because user may ditch first because of unattractive content/cost ratio...
Pirating is great if you're just interested in a particular new show but nothing else, for me that's HBO.
What you're missing out on with pirating is discovering new shows/movies that you actually like just by browser the platform.
Cable providers were charging you $80/mo for commercial laden network aggregation. You cut that cord and complain when paying less for more content, without commercials, and is on demand, because it is unbundled and you need to manage each $5-15 "network" fee individually, instead of a single itemized bill.
This is like complaining you have to pay for NBC to watch Friends when you'd much prefer to watch it on ABC so you can avoid paying for both.
Absolutely. I see a lot of rationalization for piracy here, even though media consumption has never been cheaper or more convenient.
I can't speak for the Android ecosystem, but the iOS ecosystem's Apple TV app (Netflix notwithstanding) aggregates channels into one nice experience, and the App Store makes these channels trivial to subscribe to and cancel, making it easy to decide month-to-month what I want to pay for.
> You cut that cord and complain when paying less for more content.
For a few years there; it felt like I could watch ~anything i wanted on Netflix or Crunchyroll. Now it feels like I need 10 services. Maybe my viewing habits have changed; but I haven't started a torrent in a decade and I've been tempted recently.
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 given show at a given price.
> which happened to be on different channels because physics.
So why do we see wars for who gets to stream Friends/Seinfeld/The Office/etc now? The networks don't own that content, it was just physics?
> Let each channel decide if they want to buy a given show at a given price.
That's not how this works now, nor has it ever worked this way. If Network A is paying for the exclusive broadcast rights, then Network B doesn't also have an equal Right to also purchase the exclusive broadcast rights. This has always worked this way. If Disney produces Disney Mouse Club Cartoon it has no obligation to allow any network purchase the exclusive rights to broadcast that show because it already purchased them in the form of owning the original production, and therefore copyright, from its inception.
You are quite right in that it doesn't work this way, I am advocating a change in the law. Remember copyright is a temporary monopoly granted to promote science and the useful arts.
So let's imagine the streaming services operate like channels--which is to say they have some content they get created and other content that they license. Now imagine there's a common platform or at least common portal that aggregates them all and bills you for access to everything. You've now effectively recreated the cable bundle and your monthly bill is probably going to be $100-$200/month. (Maybe more if it includes something like YouTube TV.) Is that actually what you want?
I wouldn't pay that much, which suggests that I wouldn't have access to everything, but I would probably get best or alternatively everything in a certain niche (ie. a sci-fy channel that has nothing but sci-fy). Why pay for romantic comedy and horror when I don't want to watch it?
Makes no difference to me, I just spend a few seconds searching the title and pay and watch what I want when I want. But I also do not watch much.
If enough people want bundled content and are willing to pay enough to make it happen, then content owners will sell it. If not, then the buyers and sellers do not agree on price.
>> Piracy was the Easiest/Only way to get content until ~2008ish. Since then; Netflix and (...x streaming platform) made it easier/better to Pay for the content than pirate it.
Fragmentation still hurts this to an extreme, and - worse - God-awful region locks. As a fan of obscure, cult and independent cinema in particular it’s a wasteland of titles strewn across 5 different services, and being Canadian, piracy is just a fact of life for us.
Nothing beats the convenience of typing in what you’re looking for and actually finding it right away. That pretty much defines convenience. It’s what I expect.
I don’t want to Google what platform my current obscure interest is on, only to maybe find out because I didn’t bother with Paramount+ I’m going to have to torrent it anyway. :P
It’s literally just one extra search to find what streaming platform it’s on - which is an inconvenience* - when I can just do a quick Torrent search, and have a nice high quality copy of pretty much whatever usually within (on my connection) about 5 minutes.
By the time I make my popcorn, the torrent is done, I stream it through my Plex on my Roku, and Plex even gets the metadata for me. It’s kinda scary how good it is.
And talk about how inconvenient region locking is to the point where VPNs actually advertise* the ability to get around this inconvenience as a point of sale.
Piracy’s convenience and case for existence has only gotten seriously stronger as more and more competing streaming services open.
If there was a way to combine search results for services into one like overall UI that would then just direct you to the content even that would be better, but anecdotally most people I know are tired of the fragmentation issue.
There is a way to combine search results. Use the search from the Roku/Google TV/Apple TV/FireTV OS. Unfortunately results are varied. I found search results missing from a lot of platforms when I used Roku. The Chromecast with Google TV has been better. I don't how the search is integrated, e.g. on the backend or in the OS via the app. I'd guess it depends on platform.
> Nothing beats the convenience of typing in what you’re looking for and actually finding it right away. That pretty much defines convenience. It’s what I expect.
You can do this for most items. For example, go to apple’s TV app or play store and purchase or rent the item.
>> You can do this for most items. For example, go to apple’s TV app or play store and purchase or rent the item.
Okay, so you're telling me if I boot up my Apple TV and type in 'The Simpsons', I'm going to immediately get a list of options to watch the Simpsons?
...
No, that won't work - in fact - this was actually my first overall point - the fragmentation issue.
If I search 'The Simpsons' on TPB, I'll get multiple options of quality vs. size, every episode ever, the movie; fullscreen vs. widescreen; etc.
If I search 'The Simpsons' on Apple TV+, I get...nothing.
If I search 'The Simpsons' on Netflix, I get...nothing.
If I search 'The Simpsons' on Amazon Prime, I get...nothing.
If I search 'The Simpsons' on Paramount+, I get...nothing.
So...unless you're subscribed to this one particular streaming service (Disney+), you can't watch one of the most popular shows on television, which often airs on many a channel up here in Canada.
If we're even lucky enough to get the content at all in Canada due to region restrictions.
That's...not convenient. I'm not sure what you meant by your comment, but the fact that you can't do what your comment says was kinda my overall point.
If I search for "Simpsons" in the TV app on my Apple TV 4K, the first option is "The Simpsons" TV show. I press that, I can then scroll through 32 seasons of the Simpsons and choose which episode I want to watch for $3.
If I search for "Sesame Street" in the TV app, the first option is "Sesame Street" TV show, which then leads to the HBO Max app from where I can watch all of the episodes.
If I search for the "The Office", the first option is the US series, which I can purchase for $3 each episode, and the second option is the UK series, which then leads me to HBO Max.
If I search for "Jaws", the first option is the first Jaws movie from 1975, which then opens up in HBO Max. Note that Apple does not ask me to purchase the Jaws movie, and instead offers to play it in HBO Max, since apparently HBO Max is currently streaming it.
If I search for the top 3, I come up with nothing. The 4th, "Gully Boy" returns with an option to play on Amazon Prime.
Overall, I think as someone who was looking to watch something in the Hollywood/American universe, life is easier than it has ever been. There is probably room for improvement, especially in international titles, but I'm sure that is in the works.
The set of people who know how to set up Plex/Roku is very, very small. My parents can barely figure out how to use Netflix. This is why monthly streaming services exist and will continue to exist
Asking for a friend of course, but what would be the best setup for a Netflix/Prime/...-like experience for own media for a family of not-too-digitally-savvy users?
That friend uses Kodi (and a NAS) now, but it's still a bit arduous to use for his family. She wants profiles, availability on any device over wifi and 4G and movies and series only.
I couldn't speak directly to this of course but some kind of Plex/Sonarr/Radarr/NzbDrone/NzbHydra/Deluge/Jackett running in docker containers with a GPU or Intel QuickSync for transcoding is something... Maybe throw in Tautilli for monitoring and something like Ombi (There is probably something better now) to make requesting easier and you are off the races. I mean, in theory of course.
This. And do yourself a favour and rent a seedbox where you can run all the above and stream from anywhere. Costs less monthly than the electricity costs for running them in your home.
While this can be true the local option can be quite attractive for the 90%+ use-case of watching at home. Not to mention the costs of storage in the cloud. Best deal I found was a Hertzner server for $30/mo with 6TB (2x3TB). I used that for a while but in the long run, local is king. I have gigabit fiber symmetrical so that does have to be factored in (if you have crappy upload and want to provide for remote access then a seed box might be ideal).
I have a basic nas at home which I periodically download content to from the seedbox so I'm getting away with just 1tb capacity online at around 11euro per month. Have plex running on a raspberrypi which just indexes from both seedbox and nas and serves to TVs around the house without transcoding.
Don't get me wrong I have Netflix and prime but Disney plus, hulu and hbo max are not available to me so I need to work around the stupid global restrictions.
I pay for multiple online services but I hate switching UI/UX/etc and remembering which platform has which show this week and where in the show I am. If I could cache files locally (on a server or phone/tablet) and suck all the content into Plex (or some other third-party client) then I'd pay quite a bit for that service.
As it stands today you can build your own version of this but if you want to stay 100% above board you get a crappier experience (don't get me started on the cluster-f around rights). It reminds me of the jokes back when DVDs were still a "thing" and you had to sit through ads and piracy warnings if you bought it legitimately but if you "stole" it you were able to jump right into the movie.
this probably adds complexity for non-savvy users. for instance, my TV can handle a ~20mbps unencrypted stream. turn on encryption in plex, and that drops down to ~8mbps. I'm fine with routing an unencrypted stream through my LAN, but I'd rather not do that with pirated media through my ISP.
I recommend jellyfin (https://jellyfin.org/). It will require some tech skills to setup, but after that accessing it is as simple as going to the website address it is hosted at.
The best thing about Jellyfin is that it is free software: open source, permissive license, and no paid features (which alternatives like Plex have).
You can host Jellyfin on your own VPS, I host mine on a Hetzner VPS for just over 10 eur / month but that is very overkill, you can host one for far less. The only thing to keep in mind is that transcoding (streaming in a different resolution to the stored media) is quite computationally expensive so if lot's of people are transcoding at once you will need a good CPU.
Then any family member can just visit the IP address of the server in their web browser (or you can buy it a domain name).
Jellyfin has a native iOS app they can use from their phones.
For viewing it on TVs, there is an app for AppleTV which has Jellyfin support (cant remember the name right now but I can find it if you need it).
Your friend may want to look into Plex. It has a good web client, as well as mobile and desktop so family can use it without a lot of work. It supports profiles and the server manager can assign collections to profiles to enable hiding some content from some users.
Plex gets you part of the way, but for not-tech-savvy people, what you probably really want is a Plex Share, as that will keep you from needing to manage any of the media. You'll have to figure out how to adjust some settings on any TV streaming in 4k for most Shares, but it's not terrible to set up. There's a subreddit for it: https://www.reddit.com/r/plexshares/
Another meaningful consumer response is just to not watch the movies. No one actually needs them. Take your dog for a walk or read a book or play a video game or whatever. I've never understood why some people feel like they're entitled to watch particular movies.
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.
It actually looks like the Blu-Ray DVD of The Fugitive is $10. Though in general, older content (whether e-book, streaming movies, or purchased music) never seems to be as much cheaper as you'd think it "should" be. I imagine most of the rights holders don't want to get into a race to the bottom for non-blockbuster content so they tend to stay around industry price norms for newer material.
> It actually looks like the Blu-Ray DVD of The Fugitive is $10. Though in general, older content (whether e-book, streaming movies, or purchased music) never seems to be as much cheaper as you'd think it "should" be. I imagine most of the rights holders don't want to get into a race to the bottom for non-blockbuster content so they tend to stay around industry price norms for newer material.
Right, the copyright holders effectively get to dictate the price and prevent redistribution (how does someone resell their digital [non-physical] copy to me without running afoul of DMCA and the like?). It's not a normal market, and the MPAA and similar organizations have lobbied to dictate the market rules to funnel as much money as possible to them.
For example, copyright terms these days are absurdly long--70 years beyond the lifetime of the original author.
I don't think you can prove that piracy is an effective means to incentivize good behavior on the part of the media industries. Also, it seems irresponsible to openly promote theft as a 'good idea'. I understand there are arguments against calling or treating piracy as theft but at the end of the day you are taking something that isn't yours without paying for it. Encouraging people to take part in illegal activity on the internet has real consequences. I'm guilty of wanting to fight fire with fire as well — and in the past I've pirated plenty. Looking back, it wasn't a good idea then and it still isn't today.
meh, it's a problem of their own making. I used to torrent tons of music. now that I can just buy unencumbered flac files (bandcamp) and stream the rest in good quality for a reasonable price, I don't torrent music. I have room in my budget for a $50/month or even $100/month service where I can stream any movie/show I want. I don't have room in my budget for 5-10 $10/month services where I have to keep track of who has what content and use a bunch of different UIs. it's not even about the money. it's that the paid service manages to be less convenient than VPN+NAS+plex.
It's not though. If you have a system with no piracy, it's an indication that the industry could be more greedy. This is what we saw with Netflix's disruption and the drop of piracy, followed by all the other streaming services and the return of piracy. So there's an acceptable amount of piracy that they're shooting for, and that amount is the line where it's cheapest to lobby the govt to prosecute pirates than it is to give customers a better experience. That's not consumer friendly IMO.
If it isn't legal, and normal democratic processes won't make it legal in the short term, then it isn't viable competition.
DMCA/etc vastly favors content owners who also lobby hard to maintain their ownership by extending copyright and similar protections.
Anti-competitive behavior must be countered but unless it's well funded and focused will end up like the IRS and DMCA today, going after small fish due to lack of resources to challenge those that can afford to fight like players as big as Amazon and MGM.
We for the most part have exponentially more and better content in tv and film, and for MUCH cheaper and with more convenience than 10-15 years ago.
But still people insist that they must pirate because the "studios" for some amorphous reason related to preexisting hatred of corporations or whatever.
Some people would just prefer to not pay for shit I guess. I just wish they'd be more honest about it than the mental gymnastics used to defend piracy.
> But still people insist that they must pirate because the "studios" for some amorphous reason related to preexisting hatred of corporations or whatever.
This is not a good faith reading or interpretation. The frustration is in the fragmentation; having to subscribe to multiple services to get the content you want because it's otherwise siloed.
Hitting that point - having to subscribe to 3 or more services to get a small subset of that service's offerings is driving people back to piracy.
You don't have to subscribe to 3 or more services to get a "small subset" of the service's offerings.
You get ALL of their offerings.
The idea that you should pay less than $8 for Disney Plus because you only want to watch Mandalorian when you actually get access to literally dozens of extremely high quality titles is just fucking dumb.
The previous option was pay $14 per person to go to a theater and that's the only thing you get to watch. Or pay $120 a month for cable.
It's all just ludicrously deranged mental gymnastics to justify the fact you don't want to pay for anything.
Which you can do, that's fine, just be honest about it!
> It's all just ludicrously deranged mental gymnastics to justify the fact you don't want to pay for anything.
This is incredibly backwards. I want to pay for what I want. That's how it works with literally every other product on earth, including the movie theater you brought up. I don't have to spend $80 for 4 movies when I only want to watch one. I don't have to spend $20 on bananas, apples, grapes when I only want a mango.
>>Disney creates most of their characters with merchandising in mind. Look at baby Yoda.
They may try for that, but recent star wars is a merchandising disaster. Baby Yoda is the only real success with Cara Dune coming in second before they nuked that.
Came here to say this, I avoid giving money to Amazon like the plague. I will go out of my way and invest my personal time as long as Amazon gets nothing. Don't give them your money.
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?
Yes. A single service, with a single bill, that makes available every movie, TV show, or album ever produced. That's it. If you can provide this you can have my money.
This is not a technical problem anymore. It's a business problem. The company who can make these nebulous "licensing problems" and "distribution rights issues" go away can make a fortune. I don't care that Company A can't distribute the digital version of Company B's product because Company C has the exclusive rights to it and Company D only has a license with Company A to distribute optical discs. That shouldn't be something the end user has to worry about or be limited by. These media execs are so smart, why can't they untangle this problem?
I'm not going to subscribe to a dozen different services each with their own bill, their own account, their own password, their own rules and terms. Easier to hoist the Jolly Roger and move on with my life.
> Yes. A single service, with a single bill, that makes available every movie, TV show, or album ever produced. That's it. If you can provide this you can have my money.
For this, don’t expect to get this kind of service for 10 or 20 bucks a month; be prepared to shell out at least $100 or even more. Would you be willing to do that? How many people would be willing to do that?
Exactly. I don't watch a lot of video and there's very little that I need to watch right now. I'm very happy that my video bill is mostly just Netflix plus the odd purchase vs. the $100 or so I was paying for cable TV.
I suspect that most people aren't actually complaining about fragmentation. They want one $15-20/month site that has everything.
How about we make the platform exclusives illegal instead?
What is and isn't legal is not an unchangeable property of the universe. These things can change. Piracy for personal use was (and still is) legal in many places before the RIAA/MPAA started exerting political pressure. Heck, piracy was the primary selling point of VHS recorders and tape decks. Only recently have we shifted to read-only media that's hard to copy.
In [1] Arthur De Vany showed rather convincingly that the split between distribution and production for movie production made things worse for the consumers. The problem is that the profit of the whole industry is dominated by very few titles and that split lead to a few non-trivial consequences like lack of diversity in Hollywood.
EDIT: one of the Amazon reviews gave a very good summary of the above point:
One of the more interesting conclusions is that the old movie studio system understood implicitly that this business was unpredictable. Until the antitrust laws were used to break them up, the studios contracted stars, script writers, directors, distribution networks and movie theaters in order to own the entire stream of revenues all their movies would generate.
This way the old studio bosses could diversify their risk in what was essentially a portfolio of movies. They knew that they could not predict which of their films would be a hit so they insisted on owning them all and on managing costs so that the hits would pay for the turkeys, while leaving shareholders with a healthy return.
This depends on what you think makes a great movie and a great system and there really is no right answer. I'm not sure the above 'proves' that things were made worse for consumers. Fact is, weird independent 'auteur' filmmakers and foreign films entered the market in the 1960's and were able to distribute without being locked out. The producers taking those risks perhaps didn't feel they were taking a risk at all. Maybe they knew they had a winning hand and had better know-how than the studio bosses and their risk avoidance BS. That's how you get those Easy Riders and Raging Bulls.
At the same time, movie theatres ceased to be these lavish 'palaces'. So what 'going to the movies' meant shifted in consumers' minds. Film productions also shrunk in size and scale so there is that. I would assume the business side actually deteriorated while cultural relevance rose. Probably not everyone on the consumer side was happy with all of that.
If we're talking about that studio era though, these portfolios of movies being managed from the top definitely made films bland and predictable. But then on the other hand they also forced the talent to hone skill through repetition. So you had some specific aspects of the films being executed on a high polished level like the noir cinematography. I'm feeling/seeing something similar going on right now with the VOD offering. Even though it's all really well produced and shot and put together, I just sense everyone is following the same seemingly risque but safe playbook optimized for social media marketing.
Seen in another way, the internet aspect of these distribution systems really can make all of the above completely irrelevant too. I find my satisfaction with MUBI and weird niche shit on YouTube. A piece of my money still goes toward partially paying for the very same infrastructure. As someone else mentioned here already - I'm not physically limited from seeking what I want to find online, and it's all there side by side for me to view. This was not at all the case in the 1950's.
In my mind one thing is certain, and this is just my take - I don't really want to watch a James Bond that has been developed by a goofy logistics e-commerce corporate giant. I just really don't see it.
> Until the antitrust laws were used to break them up, the studios contracted stars, script writers, directors, distribution networks and movie theaters in order to own the entire stream of revenues all their movies would generate.
Interesting. I was entirely unaware of that history. I was always impressed by Michael Ovitz's bundling play at CAA. Seems like he in fact "just" rebundled what he could at the agency level.
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...
That Supreme Court case [1] stopped the vertical integration where the studios signed actors under exclusive multi-year contracts, made the films, and will only release them in their own theaters. It was overturned by new legislation in 2020.
Yes - and this is by far the strangest aspect of it all. My local telecom advertising that Netflix is bundled into the cell service. Netflix licensing shows from BBC or ordering content from other outfits. Netflix being built on top of AWS infrastructure. Streaming brands being available as “apps” on AppleTV. HBO becoming a property of Paramount, and both being owned by ATT. So many examples of complex relationships and weird inter-dependencies.
All this superficial cooperation is a front to hide the anti competitive and price gouging that’s happening. Joe average doesn’t understand that the marginal cost of delivering a 4K stream is a few cents, nor does he think critically about why it costs 9.99 to “buy” a decade old movie that’s liable to be removed his account at any time.
Low marginal costs presents an economic conundrum in general: it's expensive to produce material and yet cheap to distribute it, so how do you fairly divvy up the cost? If each viewer only paid the marginal cost ($0.01), it no longer makes sense to invest in production; and in the success case, once the production money is recouped, one could certainly argue that charging $9.99 for a $0.01 stream is difficult to distinguish from price-gouging (or more formally, "rent-seeking" [0]).
One answer to this is "club goods" [1]: bundle large collections of content together for a fixed price so that per-unit access is zero-cost, but every participant pays their share of the whole; this is the model of both cable packages and streaming services. It's hardly perfect (especially in that it centralizes both data and power), but it's arguably a better win-win than arbitrary unit prices.
I do think it's shady that vendors are allowed to sell content using "buy" and "ownership" metaphors of physical goods, when in fact it's a limited license that can change or disappear at any time. I'd love to see some regulation in this space, to the effect that content can only be labeled "buy"/"own"/etc if the content is DRM-free and carries a permissive license for backups, remixing, transforming, etc.
And of course, there's an excellent case for reforming copyright laws more generally, such that content that has already had plenty of time to recoup its costs enters the public domain. I think the original duration (14 years) struck a reasonable balance; and on a cultural level, there's a great deal of value in each generation having unlimited access to the previous (still-living) generation's culture, in addition to culture of dead antiquity.
Well, this is showbiz. The whole idea has always been to advertise an exciting show that “you absolutely must see today” and place it behind a barrier that you must pay to cross. How much you are willing to pay for it, what “it” is, not to mention if you will be happy with the entertainment is a very old question. “Joe average” has never been in the position to fully comprehend the economics. And those have always been very difficult to understand even for all the people involved in the production. There are always periods in which a select few acquire a superior understanding of how to extract the most value from that transaction for themselves. Today most of these people are software visionaries who realized ahead of time which way the wind is blowing. Is it a “front” is a tricky question because this has always been the way. Twenty years it was cable TV infrastructure and physical media. Decades before that it was a film distribution and theatre network. And then earlier it was having a theatre with troupes of actors and lighting/stenography technicians. And for most of human history, it was traveling with an exciting minstrel show from town to town. And it was always to some extent a rip-off ;)
The market is currently "dictating" that I have to do business with Amazon no matter how odious I think their practices are. They're almost as hard to avoid as Google at this point.
Amazon, and their primary revenue stream (AWS) is *immune* to boycott because it's so diversified. The fact that a company is immune to boycott is alarming.
I’m guessing that you’re young-ish, then? Because that’s not how it was when I was a kid. That changed in the mid-nineties, and it was a fairly controversial decision.
From about 1970 to 93, antitrust regulations were put in place because only three networks could determine over 90% of broadcast media. A judge ended that rule under the rational that upstart networks like Fox and CW were now competitive. https://www.nytimes.com/1993/11/13/business/judge-rules-netw...
Critics said this would be bad because the networks would be incentivized to broadcast lucrative content over quality content, and subjectively I would say that is exactly what happened. But fortunately the Internet came along and made TV kind of moot… but anyway if you are of the opinion that radical centralization and corporate consolidation lead to crummy content, fewer opportunities for creators, and in a macro scale a widening wealth gap, this all just kinda sucks.
Yes, that’s the difference. There used to be a gatekeeper to reaching your audience, but now there is none. A kid can take their 4K phone and make their own TV show with their friends and distribute it worldwide, or a company can get a professional crew and spend a couple billion dollars and distribute it worldwide.
If the contention is that a few companies owning all the content will raise the prices, then that solution would be removing/reducing copyright protections, or compulsory licensing, but in the current environment, who owns what is mostly immaterial to customers.
> Yes, that’s the difference. There used to be a gatekeeper to reaching your audience, but now there is none. A kid can take their 4K phone and make their own TV show with their friends and distribute it worldwide, or a company can get a professional crew and spend a couple billion dollars and distribute it worldwide.
Until Google or Facebook decide that your content is objectionable. Don't worry, punishment is instant and Court of Big Tech appeals process is even slower than actual due process [1].
Would you rather a business such as Google and Facebook not be able to do what they want with their computers and bandwidth?
No one is entitled to someone else’s computing resources. But unless the ISP is blocking access to your computers or from you to the network, then the point is the barrier to distribution is at its lowest in any point in history.
Ideally, we’d have ipv6 and fiber connections to home so Google/Facebook would be irrelevant. But that is a governance issue, not a Google/Facebook issue.
You would be shocked at the amount of shows that were sold to NBC but produced by ABC Studios or whatever. It still happens today but the trend is going back to the closed loops.
How are the incentives any different now? Why would Amazon not want to be paid for a show it does not want but Apple or Netflix does? Swap around any of the company names.
If a different studio was selling to Apple/Amazon/etc then presumably they would have language that lets them sell to someone else if they did not end up distributing it.
NBC is one of the major studios that chose to license their content to broadcast networks around the country. I do not see how that is related, but in the event it is, you can replace NBC with HBO or any other non broadcasted channel.
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 and huge on-demand libraries. It's pretty clear ad-free streaming subscription is a massive improvement for consumers over "free" broadcast TV.
The important implication of broadcast TV being "free" isn't that there's zero cost. It's that there's no subscription.
Subscriptions mean you have to pay a certain minimum amount, even if you want to watch just one episode of something. That's a much bigger burden than changing the channel.
Yes, in theory you can carefully manage things and cancel as soon as you've watched what you wanted, but in practice that effort is a cost too (like watching a commercial is a cost).
The heavy load of advertisements is a point well made, however the cost is a bit more nuanced. By your calculation, it would cost $2,166/month (+price of service) to just watch that amount TV.
This is an opportunity cost but only if you have the stamina to be doing billable work during all that time instead of relaxing.
The biggest opportunity cost was having to schedule a specific time to watch something or not being able to pause and watch later or not being able to watch while waiting for your flight to board.
> 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.
You can’t skip live without a time machine.
You can disable the audio and replace the video.
Alternatively, you start the game 22 minutes / hour late.
It’s all about trade-offs but attention is being under-valued imho.
And if you lived in a location close enough to a city to receive the airwaves. I do not see what that has to do with it, but you can swap out NBC for a non broadcast media owner like Comedy Central.
Point is content is more accessible and cheaper than it has ever been in history, and that is partially due to the elimination of middlemen like cable/satellite TV distributors.
But media is always going to have an owner, who is always going to be able to license it to whoever they want at whatever cost they want.
Advertising is a thing in netflix productions too, you know. Really takes you out of Stranger Things when you see them set down a coke can with the label perfectly aligned to the camera.
HBO wasn't and you needed to pay to watch an HBO show. There's really not much difference between and premium channel cable offering and these services, at least, it's a lot more similar and closer in time than studio-owned movie theatres.
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 drawcard to different video subscriptions is exclusive content, which the giants are funding the production of themselves. Can't see how you could impose a law banning them from producing their own content, if they did and all content is licensed to everyone, there will be nothing distinguishing the different services.
> It will most will likely consolidate to 4 major players so we're looking at 4 subscriptions to watch most new content.
How do you see this playing out when there have been so many big investments by traditional players to put forward new streaming services?
The major players went from Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon and have now added Disney+, HBO Max, Peacock, Apple TV+, and Paramount+, with more on the way.
Untangling all the licensing deals is quite confusing as well and starts to get into the innards of production. I always associate Friends and Seinfeld with NBC, yet they aren't on Peacock, they're on HBO Max and Hulu, respectively. That and content shifting from one platform to another constantly, makes the web even more confusing and it's hard to determine which services you really want.
Hulu is majority owned by Disney who'll likely want to keep it running as a separate subscription service like ESPN in order to charge multiple content subscriptions.
The major players I expect to be around after the streaming wars ends is: Netflix, Amazon, Disney and Apple. I expect most of the other platforms are going to end up as premium channels that you can subscribe to and watch on the other platforms, which you can do already in AppleTV+ and Amazon Prime.
HBO and Hulu will be around as long as they have exclusive content they can't stream on other platforms. I don't expect HBO's content & licensing strategy of limiting it to higher margin cable services will last. In Australia you can only watch HBO through Foxtel which I'll never do, basically anything that's not accessible from Netflix, Prime, Disney+ or AppleTV+ doesn't exist for us.
If the platforms were banned from producing their own content I expect it would dramatically favor platform owners like AppleTV+ where most iOS users would use to watch their content on as they can do now. Owning the UX would make them like Amazon.com storefront for 3rd party sellers, giving them unilateral power over the discovery of content, e.g. over time they could favor their own content, which is behavior I'd expect from Amazon, for Apple I think they'd be happy to just own the streaming platform as another lock-in & drawcard for iOS users.
This kind of confusing experience is certainly advantageous towards extracting more from the viewer. It’s like shopping malls being designed to be difficult to get out of.
It’s a far less confusing experience than it was pre streaming services. You basically paid for an unknown item - you did not even know which content was going to be available or when it would be available.
Now you can search for what you want to watch, follow the prompts, and it shows you the price, and you agree or disagree. And then you cancel if you do not want it anymore. Some of the purchasing flows can surely use more work, but it’s leagues better than it used to be.
Oh yeah definitely. It's all a matter of perspective and possibility enabled by the technology.
But it's definitely still structured to kinda slightly force your hand towards a subscribtion, and then towards maybe forgetting to cancel it in a couple weeks etc.
> if they did and all content is licensed to everyone, there will be nothing distinguishing the different services.
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).
If UX isn’t much of a moat, why do most of the streaming platforms get it wrong? Apple TV+ and Amazon Prime have terrible UX for example. You might argue people don’t care about UX and that’s why it’s not a moat, and maybe they don’t, but personally I wish everyone would just plug their content into netflix and I could use that as the only platform.
Can't really vouch for Netflix's UX. I'd believe other platforms are better based on my experience with Netflix.
Major personal gripes:
1. No watch history. Have to visit the web, dig into account settings to view it, having to click through 5 items at a time!
2. Content added to your list is displayed randomly, not by date added. No option to sort with various standard parameters such as aforementioned date added, popularity, year released, genre, etc.
3. Licensed content disappearing with not so much as a "we know you saved this to watch at some point but it's no longer available". Instead you're left second guessing yourself as to whether you suffer from dementia or not. (I get the business aspect of this, but still!)
4. Suggests content you've already watched and/or rated multiple times. At times recommends said show or movie immediately after watching/rating it.
5. Originals have trailers. Other content sometimes has trailers but most licensed content does not despite said trailers being available elsewhere for free. Most (all?) content used to show trailers but that's recently changed. (My guess is trailers convert better so you're more likely to watch original content)
6. No ratings history. Tangential to #1 I guess.
7. Can't click through to 'Coming Soon' titles to explore synopsis, trailers, cast, etc. Even for shows with prior seasons available; have to first search to access. To exasperate frustration, releasing soon titles are shown in searches where you can't do anything besides stare at a thumbnail.
Pretty sure I have other issues with their UX but these are the most irritating.
Because we indeed have been proven, time and time again, that people will rarely pay a premium for UX.
We will complain about it, mock it, but rare are those willing to pay more for it (or even merely change products), unless the advantage is significant (ie Netflix vs P2P & streaming websites)
Curation, which you may be including in UX. I’d pay $$$ for decent curation. As it stands, I apparently want to watch every low quality period piece known to man because I enjoyed Downton Abbey.
> Better stuff gets made in this kind of ecosystem.
Are we not currently living in a content golden age? Is there any measure of quality and quantity now vs the past? It feels like there's a new amazing mini series and movie and show every week.
This, in my opinion really depends on the content you consume, where you consume it and how you pay for it. Some types of content in competitive ecosystems, are thriving and flourishing. Other types, in large vertically organized systems, are languishing. Only time will tell, but for instance, it has been a really long time since I have seen a memorable film or tv show that truly stands out in my mind as something that will stand the test of time. And the best stuff can be found in obscure distribution channels while the worst stuff gets over financed and over promoted. But that has always been the story hasn’t it, so it’s tricky to make assessments as we only remember the best examples from the past. Certainly, more people than ever can make some thing and then rapidly deliver it to their audience and this is a good thing, even if there are fewer Stanley Kubricks around.
What do you think cable networks were in the 90s? If you weren't paying a middle-man to aggregate them onto a single monopolized access point in your house you'd be paying NBC/ABC/CBS/etc individually. Think about how premium channels worked at the time; you'd pay for HBO or Cinemax on top of your monthly cable bill. It's not as though those premium channels were significantly cheaper than HBOMax or Netflix, and they didn't offer a fraction of the content you could consume at any given time.
I still think DRM should be banned and paying for content should be super cheap - say per movie $1 for HD file download and $2 for a 4k version. For me I'd literally spend hundreds of dollars per year on content that I can own going forward.
The funniest thing of course is I bet the studios would make more money than trying to charge me $4.99 to rent movies and absurd sums to "buy" them...
My wife and I are no strangers to "buying" on-demand movies we enjoy. But our experience with Verizon FIOS is that every couple of months those titles "aren't available." Our "Purchased" area is empty.
Last night was one of those nights. We settled in a bit early for TV (minor celebration) and decided we had time to re-watch a movie, and our kid-still-at-home would join us. But we couldn't get it and ended up watching some junk (background while we talked mainly) and, of course, losing the kid's interest.
The alternative was to try to call CS and spend perhaps an hour troubleshooting.
If, however, we owned our own physical copy we could have watched it.
My evening, crippled by tech failures of the vendor, and no recourse for compensation for loss of use or our time.
Have you tried Movies Anywhere? It syncs your purchased Movies between most major providers. I wonder if this would allow you to watch the movie elsewhere when this issue occurs at one vendor. With this I now have many of my Apple purchases on Google Play and Amazon and vice versa
>I still think DRM should be banned and paying for content should be super cheap - say per movie $1 for HD file download and $2 for a 4k version
Sounds like you need to go and produce some content and distribute it this way to show the world the way to englightenment. Please come back and post a Show HN on how well it worked out for you.
I do have sympathy with this view (that content creators can do as they like, of course!), but I’m just saying I want to be able to buy films (maybe > 5 years old), for very cheap, legally, in a format I own, that I can watch when I like on any device I choose. I think a lot of people would like this possibility too and would spend lots of money that they wouldn’t have otherwise. It’s difficult to prove either way of course without a spare content library. I’ve no interest in starting to charge for content, all the films I make will always be free. :-D
>The funniest thing of course is I bet the studios would make more money than trying to charge me $4.99 to rent movies and absurd sums to "buy" them...
That was actually the situation early on with videotape. The price of the tapes was set at something like $100 to make more money (indirectly) by renting because the rental stores had to pay a much higher price.
Over time, tapes started also being "priced to buy" (often things like Disney animation that kids would want to watch over and over again). Eventually, I think pretty much everything became priced to buy.
Right on. In the times of DVDs, you could get a DVD film for $5 dollars and here in Mexico even cheaper $50 pesos ($2.5 USD). I think the fact that a rental movie (even when you "buy" the digital version it is a rental as it has ben shown over an over) costs around $12 USD today that delivery process has been streamlined so much. That's pure greed.
Exactly. When the movie star system died, it took a lot of material made for adults with it. Even Robert Downey Jr. can't carry a movie that's not a popular IP. Now everything is a $200M sequel to something else or a $1M movie that's financed by 18 different companies. The TV golden age was serving adults for a while but seems to be dying off now.
Isn't that the period considered the "golden age" of Hollywood cinema?
I've no skin in the game, really, except that I do love film and I hope good films are increasingly made.
It's not as if those films or productions are requisite viewing. It's casual entertainment or philosophy. I'm not sure what the pressing concern there is.
Amazon, however, is a different beast and should probably be broken up to some degree for other reasons—not this one.
It's definitely a streaming service arms race, though.
To a degree the “golden age” is as more about a certain style as it is quality. Casablanca is an entirely wonderful movie - but at the time it was just one of a fleet of films pushed through the machine. The ‘Hollywood style’ was intended to be 1) immediately legible/easy to understand for a wide audience and 2) easy to make quickly on a factory line-like studio process.
Worth mentioning that the studios have been screwing theaters more an more for a long time. Theaters used to be run on ticket sales, now your popcorn costs $18 because Disney is taking 60% of all ticket sales. It really seems like at some point in the future the only way you're seeing a new Marvel movie is by going to a Disney theater.
You're right. And yes, we could use those laws, but we're also now at a time in history where the combined power and influence of "big tech" is greater (by far, I fear) than the will and character of Legislators (i.e. low-character politicians) to enact any such law to constrain/regulate them, at all.
> 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.
Forcing this would also have many downsides:
- if you make content that others don't want to distribute, are you not allowed to distribute it yourself? Freedom to publish whatever you want feels very valuable for society, IMHO.
- costs for consumers might rise because you now have two sets of costs priced in, instead of one set of costs.
- It's harder to launch new companies. If content providers don't want to work with you as a distributor when you're small, it's hard to get off the ground. If distributors don't want to work with you because your content is unproven, it's hard to get off the ground. Etc.
I don't see your line of thinking:
- Yeah you um can, like build your own movie theatre and show your own movies. The point of the law in this case is to prevent vertically integrated corporate structures from forming.
- I don't see the sets of costs argument - any price is made up of infinite sub-costs. You buy a carton of milk, it came from a distributor who bought it from a wholesaler, who got it from a carton plant and so on and so forth. At each step of the way someone verified the quality to ensure reputation. In a vertical corp quality control can be difficult.
- The opposite - easier to launch new companies. This is already how it is in places like Europe. No problem to sign 'distribution' deals, and no problem in seeking 'distributors' if you have the content. What's more a ton of other types of incentives make it easier to start new efforts.
I don't think you understand that mostly, this is how it all already works, by itself. That's the whole point of a 'free market'. Until Amazon rolls into town and starts buying everybody up and integrating it all into something else.
Make all content available at a flat rate per minute streamed owed to the content creator. Maybe let the creator set the rate for the first N years (with a cap) if they want to capitalize on a new release etc. I would throw money at a service that had Everything(r) on it.
>Better stuff gets made in this kind of ecosystem.
Really? Have you enjoyed the drek that has been released over the past decade? HBO started the bucking of the system, F/X and A&E followed. But since they were cable ops, I guess they get a pass? When Netflix started producing and pushed everyone's game, content started getting so much more interesting. Obviously, Amazon/Apple followed. I'm waiting for Google to get involved so we can have a full FAANG entertainment.
All of the Paramounts/WBs want to do is take the one franchise and squeeze every drop from it with endless sequels to the point I have completely lost any interest in explosions, cars, and super heroes.
Squeezing all the juice out of a genre or subgenre is what Hollywood is best at. If you didn't like cowboy movies you were avoiding like 60% of all movies and tv shows made from the birth of cinema until the 70's. I think we're seeing the same thing w comic book movies. In other words they'll peter out, but probably after all of us are dead.
Well, the end of the 1930's to 1950's vertical monopoly shouldn't detract from the many ways the entertainment industry is monopolistic today. Indeed, my impression is no one could even summarize all the ways unions, rights, contracts and etc divide profits, limit who can do what, etc.
My impression buying a historical piece of the entertainment industries is a lot like buying a company with large patent portfolio. No one knows whether the buyer is going to use the pieces "offensively" to cut off the rights of others or "defensively", to get leverage for cross licenses and so-forth.
We definitely now know Apple won't be buying the James Bond franchise and making it exclusive. That would have been a huge loss for the other GAFA's entertainment libraries.
Well technically the way I understand it, all the law should be enacted and enforced everywhere.
This is a classic 'culture is not important, doesn't matter' line of thinking. Cultural products influence people a great deal. Especially when they are young.
If monopoly power is influencing culture, the way it can with any industry by incentivizing low-quality or bad pricing, then it should be to some extent over-seen.
>This is a classic 'culture is not important, doesn't matter' line of thinking.
Culture is important and so is entertainment but the later is not always the former, and none is vital. There’s plenty of unmonopolized cultural options and one could even argue that much more benefiting than big blockbusters, it’s like worrying that pizza hut would monopolize the pizza market and losing nutritional values in the community.
Well for one in this context you could say that I’m interested in the pizza and how it’s harder to find a good Neapolitan pizza place and all the mom’n’pop pizza places are being strangled to death.
It’s an interesting phenomenon, not necessarily something to be “worried” about.
If there was some kind of anti-trust to go on with streaming sources it might be more likely to be about something like Amazon only having its content on Fire devices or forcing Roku to only have Amazon content and not Netflix or something.
We need FRAND for Copyright, if you are going to license your copyright in a commercial setting you must license it to all platform in a way fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory method
I see the meaningful difference here being that there is no limitation to distribution across consumers.
With studio owned theaters, if there wasn’t a Paramount theater in your town, you’re outta luck.
Today, you can get Peacock and Paramount+ and Disney+, etc on virtually any device. Even Apple, who has been historically resistant to distribution on other devices has Apple+ on Roku and Amazon devices
Because antitrust favors impact on consumers, I doubt we’ll see any substantial legislation is this space.
I think in the near term a combination of good content and enjoyable user experience with viewing application is going to drive adoption.
I have a Roku and Samsung SmartOS TV. The only independent playback experiences that come close to Netflix, Prime Video, and Paramount+ in my limited experience are Plex, Apple TV, and for legacy stuff, TiVo.
I'll take this weird world of locked-in distribution channels for a few years while innovation progresses, and hope Plex and Apple TV win once innovation stops.
>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.
Or the TV business throughout all of TV history. You know, if you want to see an HBO show, you can only watch it on HBO. If you want to watch _new+ episodes of Seinfeld, you have to watch it on NBC.
On the contrary: stop trying to use the law for everything!
Such strategy works a million times better than the horror of copyright law.
The companies should be free to do it, and it's awful that someone wants to involve the force of the state to stop them from doing so, instead of seeing it as a way to get rid of the burden of copyright law to society.
Isn't this more like cable tv packages, where you add another $10/month to your bill for that package of channels, which were often focused by broadcaster, who had a bunch of exclusive shows, or themes, like sci-fi or 'cartoon network'.
Netflix, Apple TV, etc are broadcasters and crunchyroll is thematic.
One wrinkle of that era was how they even had their own stable of actors working for them exclusively. The new vertical integration doesn't seem to be going that far down. I imagine there's not as much interest in that, and actors have a powerful union now.
First look deals with production companies never went away. The first one coming to mind is The Weinstein company had a first look deal with Disney (yes, Disney turned down lord of the rings).
Tbh, probably completely off topic, but the first thing that came to mind are alcohol regulations at least in CA preventing vineyards and distilleries from opening or operating restaurants...hence the rise in "educational tasting/pairing classes"
> 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.
We have those laws for cars and beer and they are considered ongoing disasters. Why are films different?
I wonder if we’ll see some kind of cable box equivalent where private companies will go ahead and bundle a subset of all the content on the streaming service into a package to sell you. Possibly subsidized with ads…
This is kind of what Roku does, yeah? Each Roku device comes pre-loded with a suite of streaming services installed (but you still have to subscribe to each one...) and the remote even has dedicated buttons for whatever streaming services are paying Roku the most at the moment.
The laws are there, it's our lawmakers that have been failing us the past ~30 years as big tech has run roughshod over the entire fucking planet doing whatever it wants with extremely minimal consequences.
We have the laws and organizations but the FTC and SEC have failed us in the 21st century. There is no consideration of the consumer or marketplace, only shareholder value.
I don’t think you can make the same comparison to iTunes. No record label had the ability to reach millions of paying users like Netflix already has. Netflix has no incentive to license their original content to a different aggregate platform.
A century ago, if Library's hadn't existed, someone trying to create one might have had a chance. Today they'd have no chance at all.
If you think to today's U.S. government would willingly choose to fight the U.S. vs Paramount battle again, you'll probably be disappointed. They're far more likely to close libraries.
Disagree. Government oversight is usually never the correct answer. The simplest solution to this is through consumer choice. Simply pirate the content you want. If corporations don't want to lose money to piracy then they'll learn to stop doing anti-consumer behavior.
This will be my prediction: the usage of piracy to consume this type of content will increase.
And they will blame PLATFORM X (or just the ol'piratebay) for the losses of revenue, when in reality it's just a matter of people not being able to access content because everything has a paywall gate.
It's like they want to bring cable TV back to the internet, and you had massive bills just for channels subscriptions.
I think that what the industry will move into will be into something very similar to cabletvm, so, instead of buying subscriptions from a few services, you'll buy a package from a bundler.
On the bright side it won't be as bad as it was with cable, because it will be on-demand. But also, probably the MBAs are going to come out with infinite combinations of tiered-services that nobody will understand, at first, it will be cheaper to buy a bundle, but as it becomes popular, the consumer value extraction machine will go full throttle.
Yes, and then you get a bundle with Prime, Netflix, Disney whatever. For the first year it will be great, SSO, maybe unified search, whatever.
But then, this will become "basic netflix, basic prime". All the good stuff will be in a "new" premium tier. You'll have to add those to your subscription, and then you'll endup with cable tv over ip.
> It's like they want to bring cable TV back to the internet, and you had massive bills just for channels subscriptions.
Basically, yes. More precisely we have a handful of companies who worked to "disrupt" the cable TV business only to realize that in fact, they could become the new cable TV.
The defining part of cable TV is that you had to deal with the company who owned the wire coming into your house, or the 2 satellite companies available in the US, assuming you could put satellite dishes on your residence. And you could not watch on any of your devices at any time and subscribe and cancel at your whim.
None of that applies anymore. Content was always going to be owned and sold by someone. What other situation should we have expected?
You won't have to deal with the company that owned the wire or the satellite service, but you'll have to deal with one of the few companies that are purchasing IPs left and right (Amazon, Netflix, Apple, Disney).
In the end it's just different people controlling the distribution.
The difference was that the content owners still had the choice to have their content available in other media formats, now it's the distributors that own the content and will (probably) limit it to their distribution channels.
I wonder if the rise of smartphones will dampen this. Back when PCs were the standard piracy was relatively simple, you downloaded bittorrent or edonkey and sailed the high seas.
Nowadays it would be rather difficult to install a piracy app on your phone (not impossible, but definitely harder than simply downloading a binary from sourceforge). So you're left wish shady streaming sites who in my experience have terrible usability.
Torrent clients are readily available in the Android app store (not sure about Apple), and web browsers can still get to any websites. Since the resulting download is DRM free, it can be viewed with standard video players.
You need to be ordering from Amazon weekly to break even on Prime for shipping costs. It’s likely worth it for some people but it really doesn’t fit my habits.
If by "they" you mean big-studio Hollywood, then there've been about 1500 of those movies in the last 15 years. There are another 600-700 or so non-major-studio films that see a wide release per year, which I think includes foreign films with US distribution, but also US productions outside the major studios.
Yes, at least a few of those 1500 major Hollywood studio movies are quite good.
Looking at the last few years of MGM's output, Creed and The Cabin in the Woods were both good. I didn't like Skyfall but mine seems to be a minority opinion, and AFAIK it's considered one of the best Bond movies by many people (for whatever that's worth). Stretching back closer to the 15-year mark... The Mist is pretty good. Casino Royale sneaks in right at the 15 year mark, and it's really well-regarded.
It's important to remember is happening now is not without precedent. There have been large monopolies in living memory. It's also telling that they have all but faded from the memory. It's not just some hopeless, "evil" power - grab. [Edit: so thanks for mentioning that!]
The meaninglessness of $8.45b relative to amazon's scale is mind boggling. It represents 0.5% of their market cap, 20% of their cash-on-hand, nevermind their borrowing capacity @ near 0%.
If a problem is worth the Jeff/Andy's personal attention, it's worth spending $8bn on.
I'm a broken record but, current equity prices and financial climate generally makes massive consolidation very likely. Antitrust, or fear of is the only restraint... and it is not very restraining.
Unless Apple & Google are going to start issuing dividends/buybacks on an epic scale (doesn't seem likely), they have no way to put cash they have to work (besides vanguard/bitcoin). Google would need to do 10 Waymos (in for about $20bn so far) simultaneously, to invest what they need to invest on internal projects, but even their one Waymo is dubious. Acquisition is the only remaining option.
Consider that these companies can currently afford to buy whole industries outright, perhaps without involving a bank. Does Waymo need a friend? Why not buy it Ford & GM? Anything outside the S&P 10 is a snack. They literally have cash enough for both lying around... and these deals are never all cash.
5 more years on the current trajectory, and the VOC/EIC days will look quaint.
True, but I don't think buybacks are likely to be scaled sufficiently to solve the "problem." Apple, maybe. They do have a dividend paying history and they don't like to spread.
The Alphabet & FB buybacks represent about 5% of those companies' cash reserves... not enough to change anything. Apple have $200bn, though I'm not sure if this is net or gross of the buyback.
I think of these buybacks more as supporting evidence to what I said previously. There is a hell of a lot of "what are you going to do with all this cash" pressure on these companies.
That said $77bn (I've seen $90bn reported) is a truly stupendous sum. Has there ever been a buyback at this scale?
At $77B, that buyback program amounts to a $300m bid for Apple stock every trading day....much to the delight of executives whose compensation is tied to share price performance.
They could have used that $77B to fund fusion research, carbon capture research, build private space stations and put man on Mars, but no they wanted to make their already high share price even higher.
Actually a better way to think about it is that they are compensating their shareholders...
That $77B that is now returned to shareholders can be spent on whatever those shareholders want. It isn't really Apple's money to begin with... kind of the issue with being a public company. Unless of course its shareholders would look at that investment as sound, which might be a stretch given Apple's lack of background in any of those fields (maybe carbon capture given they have a great understanding of their supply chain and could already be thinking of ways to reduce their energy impact)
> That $77B that is now returned to shareholders can be spent on whatever those shareholders want. It isn't really Apple's money to begin with... kind of the issue with being a public company.
Apple and its shareholders are the same entity when discussing “whose” money it is. If shareholders want it used to do buybacks, they vote for company leadership to do that. If they want dividends, they vote for company leadership to do that. If they want to invest in travel to Mars, they vote for leadership to do that.
Saying Apple’s money belongs to shareholders is a meaningless statement. It belongs to the collection of shareholders as a whole, who have opted to elect in leaders to decide how to spend it.
Well. With such large firms, shareholders are quite a stretch of distribution. Voting proxies and the complexity of introducing a shareholder vote proposal quite drastically restricts the number of shareholders who can make stuff happen at these firms.
That is how ownership in a public company works. The more you own, the more control you have. Before you purchase, you will know what percentage you will own and you have to predict if it will be enough to enable you to accomplish your goals. Or you have to make friends with other shareholders.
The $77B didn't vanish, it went back to shareholders. Indeed Apple could have used it to fund fusion research, but this seems like a complete stretch of their expertise and capacity to execute on a project like that, the money could just have ended up being wasted on projects that went nowhere. Shareholders can cash out, the government tax the capital gains, and both entities can use the cash in the investments that seems worthy to them
the investors who get the money back through share buybacks can do that with the 77B. There is no reason for Tim Cook to be leading fusion research and everything else you listed.
Apple could have built the most incredible semiconductor mega-hub in the world with the money it spent on dividends and buybacks in the past decade.
In-house R&D is still a thing. Capital expenditure is still a thing. Pay raises for rank-and-file staff are still a thing. Please don't suggest that acquisitions, buybacks, and dividends are the only ways for Apple and Google to put their free cash flow to work.
Waymo is Google's big, speculative in-house R&D project. It's pretty big. They're in for $20-$25bn so far, and it'll require that much again before viability^. That's over a decade, and it is pretty risky.
Meanwhile, besides search, most of their big successes were acquisitions: adwords, youtube, android, docs... all acquisitions at core. All extremely cheap, in retrospect.
Tesla joining the elite "tech company" ranks has made for some good juxtaposition. They are a "textbook" company, because the textbook more or less assumes that firm = manufacturing. The way they were financed (pre-insanity equity markets), the way they consume capital, etc. Apple, Alphabet, FB, etc aren't like this.
Greed is a very human emotion, corporations are like very powerful sociopaths. No-emotion machines that optimize for a single end goal (shareholder money) within the given ruleset: the law.
(Or more realistically whatever they can get away with while still turning profit, ie profit is greater than whatever the repercussions cost).
As parent said, corporations are restricted only by the market and by the legal system, so it’s up to the voters to implement effective taxes and rules as needed
In this vein, $8.45B seems a bargain for the likes of Apple to instantly booster their very limited TV+ offerings. Was this an exclusive, closed door negotiation between owners of MGM and Amazon?
I'm perplexed how the final price isn't a lot higher due to a potential bidding war between all the streaming giants. Even Netflix would benefit - if anything to force competitors to pay more.
What about MGM’s back catalog makes Apple TV+ qualitatively more compelling to your marginal subscriber? Versus say spending that same $8.5B on new content?
There’s not much “forward looking” IP of value tied to MGM except the Bond franchise, and it sounds like the Broccoli’s aren’t giving up control of that in this deal.
Not yet. The key is to keep adding properties and unlock other deals, eventually Amazon/Apple could convince broccoli in ways MGM never can try. Deeper pockets, way better distribution etc.
It took several deals for Disney to line up MCU fully. They spent a lot on Pixar, star wars and MCU , fox acquisitions to become the force they are today.
Without these acquisitions, Disney would also be largely a back catalog like MGM being sold today .
The theory is that sum of the properties are worth more than each individually.
Very easily are a few million people who'd be willing to have access to the Stargate library as part of a subscription + hopefully they start production again of at least Stargate Universe; it's premise would make for an awesome game too.
>The price is about 37 times MGM’s 2021 estimated EBITDA - or almost triple the enterprise value-to-EBITDA multiple that Discovery’s deal implied for AT&T’s content assets - according to Reuters Breakingviews.
Was there another offer for slightly less than $8.45B? What kind of thinking would lead them to that figure, rather than a different one?
Worth noting that based on AAPL's latest 10-Q, the vast majority of their cash is invested in corporate bonds, which have a nominal annualized return of ~6%. I'm sure the financial value of any acquisition is pitted against this alternative.
In real business culture, there is an imputis (especially for tech companies) to "maKe money work." If their best investment is other companies' bonds, they should (again, in theory) just return cash to investors who can buy the bonds themselves.
More importantly, The ability to reinvest profitably is a sign of horizon, at least traditionally.
I stress "in theory," because theory is a long way from practice when it comes to modern tech giants. The theory is financial theory... how companies are financed. In theory, equity investment is a way of financing companies. Google and Facebook did not need to be financed by the time they became publicly traded. They never had debt. Software companies don't require capital investment to expand, like a theoretical "firm" does. In practice, public markets have no role in financing companies per se, they're only there to provide liquidity.
> If their best investment is other companies' bonds, they should (again, in theory) just return cash to investors who can buy the bonds themselves.
This is what they're effectively doing, in practice. AAPL has conducted ~$500B in share buybacks since the commencement of their buyback program in 2013. Their current cash and cash equivalents sits at ~$200B.
So, one could say that of the $700B AAPl could have returned to shareholders, it returned $500B (or most of it).
I'm not sure we should accept "returned to shareholders" at face value.
Nothing is really returned to shareholders. Shareholders own that money (as they own all Apple's assets) before the buyback. After the buyback, they no longer own the money... but share value has (in theory) not changed because it now represents a larger portion of this smaller asset.
In the case of a buyback, cash is literally returned to the shareholders who participate in the tender offer by selling their shares back to the company.
Crypto "market cap" isn't really comparable to the market cap of companies. Nobody would (or could) ever buy Dogecoin for 44b. But companies are usually purchased for more than market cap.
No one can buy Amazon or Tesla at their market cap today either.
Sure companies valuation are backed by revenue and profit numbers unlike crypto.
However the multiples both these companies trade at along with the way Amazon treats "profit" their dividend habits means no buyer can actually recoup the investment by means of profits generated in a reasonable investment window.
The only way to make actual money with these stock is to sell it even higher not that different from crypto.
Look at last 2 years of the stock market even ignoring GME/AMC there seem to very little correlation with the actual numbers for these companies.
Er, yes they would. Thousands of people already have, that's why its 44bn. It's a market cap not a paper valuation. Are you suggesting that if someone wanted to buy Doge outright they could pay less than it's market cap?
There is no mechanism to buy all Doge and the "market cap" of Doge includes lost coins. If you bought all of Doge, its value would be gone since it would be like it didn't exist.
You might as well calculate the market cap of baseball cards.
It's just not the right way to measure the worth of a crypto.
Put another way, if Doge owners decided to collectively sell it would be worth 0.
Hypothetically if some whale wanted to 'buy' Doge say to shut it down or something, they would probably have to spend a lot more than the market cap and as you yourself point out they still wouldn't have bought all the Doge that existed. OP was comparing amounts i.e $8bn seems like peanuts when 'joke' coins are hypothetically worth more than $44bn, and not really comparing market caps (which doesn't really make sense, again as you yourself pointed out).
True, but the flipside is also the case, if someone wanted to sell a significant fraction of a cryptocurrency or high-value stock, they wouldn't necessarily get close to the current market cap either.
Think about the total basis in Dogecoin. Compare that number to the takeout valuation for a public company, which would be the basis of the acquirer. That's the point GP is trying to make, in a roundabout way.
This makes it very likely that the beloved Stargate franchise will return as an Amazon Prime exclusive franchise, which will be great news for those of us like myself with appetite for 60+ more seasons of that show (after the 17 seasons that have already been made).
I watched the sci-fi show "The Expanse" on Amazon Prime Video. Season 4 (the one made by Amazon Prime Video) felt like it had a tenth of the budget compared to season 1 and 2. A completely different show that I found very boring and unwatchable.
Hopefully any future Stargate revival will have the budget and writing it deserves. I would spend $20/month for the rest of my life to get a season of high budget Stargate with decent writing each year. I'm sure there is a million other fans are willing and able to pay a similar amount.
SG-1 is a great show. It holds up surprisingly well for its age. Strikes a great balance between serious and light-hearted, and the self-contained episodes often have interesting ethical or social issues. I'm also fond on how the early episodes emphasize that humans are new to interplanetary travel and are still figuring things out. There are several episodes where SG-1 travels to another planet and actually messes things up, making life worse for the natives. And the show did a great job with having things change in-universe.
There are some cliches and flaws, of course. My least favorite part is probably how non-permanent deaths were, they really overdid the whole thing with characters dying and coming back to life, or being cloned.
I'm surprised that Stargate has had some sort of franchise curse where other media never succeed. They had two more shows in the franchise (I'm in the minority that loved Universe, and I think Atlantis was for the most part bad), but never a movie aside from the one that started the franchise, never a game that succeeded (most attempts failed to even ship).
Honestly, I loved Atlantis and Universe. Atlantis was purely character driven imo. The plot was more or less a rehash of SG-1 missions to the point they directly start referencing the SG-1 mission report lol. But McKay, Sheppard, Weir, Ronan, Teyla, Carson, and Todd were all very fun characters. SG-1 was carried by the strong performances from O'Neil, Carter, Jackson, Teal'c and Hammond + interesting plots. So I was able to forgive the lazy plots in Atlantis since they focused more on the characters.
Universe was really cool. They made some critical mistakes early that made it hard to see where the show could go, but the last season was so good and setup some cool stuff just to never get the opportunity to explain it. Rush getting control of Destiny so early really messed up the pacing of the show imo, but I would have loved to see the show continue.
Atlantis couldn't decide what it was, I think. They got to some great characters, but with difficulty. Ronon replaced Ford in Season 2, with Ford being a very poorly written character, he didn't get a single interesting scene for a season. Weir was remarkably poorly written IMO, every time she made a decision it was wrong. Teyla had great moments but in too many episodes she was a "mystic Amazonian alien" cliche. Early on Atlantis tried to again do the "small band of humans versus powerful alien enemy" thing, abandoned that, transitioned to a cornier version of SG-1, then also abandoned that and went more for character stories, it was a mess. I'm also simply not a fan of its too lighthearted style, it intentionally avoided the more serious bits of SG-1.
Universe was great in my book. Detractors say it's like Stargate trying to be Battlestar Galactica, but BSG is easily my favorite sci-fi show so I actually liked that. Universe did make some mistakes early on, but the second season was great, I enjoyed Dr Rush as a very non-Stargate style main character, and I enjoyed how Universe had a completely different take on aliens, keeping them mysterious.
I haven't finished Atlantis or Universe yet. They're on my to-watch list.
As for franchising into other media... there's a brand new tabletop role-playing game that'll be launching later this year. I wonder how the Amazon deal will affect it.
> I haven't finished Atlantis or Universe yet. They're on my to-watch list.
Ooh, I _really_ enjoyed SGU. Granted, it was the kind of show that I had to try watching once, give up on, then rewatch years later during to really appreciate. It's fairly different from SG1 and SGA, but in my (humble) opinion, it's really good and I'm sad that it ended so quickly. It reminds me a bit of Lost In Space (the movie, not the relatively new tv series- I've only seen half the pilot so I can't make a comparison) but in the Stargate universe.
I started watching SG1 again (I saw it incomplete as a kid). It’s incredibly good. It pushes rationalism and feminism in a sane way that I’m not sure would happen in today’s environment. It’s incredibly rich in historical references and concepts. It’s rarely dumb and often preempts cliches. It’s still worth watching imho (and is much less known that Star Trek in US).
I consider it hands down better than any Star Trek except possibly TNG. And that's giving TNG some grace due to being a bit older; take that away and I'll give SG-1 the prize. I will agree that people can reasonably disagree about Deep Space Nine vs SG-1. But that's the level of quality we're talking about, in my opinion. It's top tier, and much less well known.
Also strongly recommend binging the first season in particular; they did a very good job of conveying the feeling of humans blundering about not really knowing what they are doing in the big new universe, and it really comes across when watched relatively quickly on top of each other. It is reasonable that as the seasons rolled on and they got their bearings this toned down in favor of other plot lines, but I think this is one of the more unusual tones in sci fi that a show managed to successfully convey. Enterprise really whiffed on this, in my opinion. (They should have had a first season more like SG-1's first season and saved the "temporal cold war" plot arc for later. Or perhaps even not at all. That would have been OK too. There are a couple of episodes that convey this sense but not enough to hold the tone IMHO.)
Also, if you are starting out, I kinda recommend the Stargate movie first... it isn't strictly speaking necessary but it will contextualize some things, even though it's only sorta half in the continuity with SG-1. But I will say that if you kinda dislike it, continue on to SG-1 anyhow. In my opinion it's a big step up in a lot of ways.
I had only seen TNG until two years ago. I knew almost every episode past season 2, and really loved it. Still do.
But then I watched Deep Space Nine, and wow. I got hooked. I "only" watched about 80 episodes that are the plot arc + a few outstanding solos, but still. The quality of the acting, the more "on the nose" social messaging, the darker side of the Federation, the racial struggles between the crew - if I hear anyone make fun of DS9, I send them on their way (which doesn't happen much like it did in the 00's).
I have some friends who liked SG-1 as kids, maybe I should take the time to watch it. But it can't be better than Battlestar Galactica :)
I have watched Stargate Atlantis but not SG-1 or SGU. I loved Atlantis and thought it was a very fun show. Looking forward to starting SG-1 when there is time...
I did a full rewatch of SG1 a few years ago, and what surprised me is how instantly the show found its footing. If you watch the first and last season of any Trek show, you can see how the writing and characterization takes a while to settle into place. Character development is part of that, but it goes beyond that.
If you watch the first and last season of SG1, the writing has its footing nailed down immediately. Not many shows find their footing so effortlessly.
That may have been helped by the fact that SG-1 got the green light for 4 full seasons right off the bat, so it gave showrunners the opportunity to write a cohesive and comprehensive story which really laid the foundation for the franchise after the original movie.
I don't have a source handy, but I recall reading about that many years ago.
Wikipedia says they were picked up for 2 seasons, totaling 44 episodes. So while it's not 4 seasons, that's still a lot of stability for a show to start with. That would explain how they felt comfortable enough to plan ahead.
I agree with all of this, but especially the last bit.
It sets up the stories to come, even if some of it borderline contradicts SG-1. The characters that go from the movie to the TV show are much more likable in the TV show.
>Also strongly recommend binging the first season in particular; they did a very good job of conveying the feeling of humans blundering about not really knowing what they are doing in the big new universe, and it really comes across when watched relatively quickly on top of each other.
One thing I've never enjoyed about Star Trek is how the Enterprise/DS9/Voyager and its crew are the ones that always save the day/week/universe.
I've never watched Stargate, but I do know that occasionally the show shows other exploration teams enter/exit the gate. Does the franchise go further than that, and implicitly/explicitly state that the Stargate team that the show focuses on is just one of many doing comparably cool things?
Stargate: SG-1 series takes its name from SG-1 - the first of many teams USAF sends through the gate on a regular basis. The show focuses on that team, and in this way, it's similar to how Star Trek shows tend to focus on its eponymous ship/station. They somehow end up with most of the cool adventures and do most of the world-saving.
Where it feels more believable/acceptable than Star Trek is:
- SG-1 being special is at least somewhat justified. It's the first team Stargate Command sent through the gate (after the events of the original movie), so they got to be the first to make new friends and enemies.
- The show constantly reminds you about existence of increasing amount of other teams, through namedropping, discussing them, showing them, or showing multi-team missions. While SG-1 may be the tip of the spear, you know that SG-2 through SG-whocankeeptrack are following close behind.
- Unlike in Star Trek, in Stargate, humans start having no idea what they're doing. Quite often, it's them who need to be saved by more powerful forces, whether aliens or institutions.
Stargate: Atlantis starts with a focus on wider cast - so the gate missions are more fluid, you don't care much about who's assigned to which gate team on any given day. The whole ensemble of characters work similarly to a Star Trek series crew. But it makes sense for the same reason most of ST:Voyager made sense: Atlantis expedition is very far away from Earth, alone and with (at least initially) no backup.
I'd go with, yes and no, probably mostly no the way you mean it. They are always the elite team. It's clear others are functioning, yeah, but while I haven't watched this in a while I don't recall SG-4 ever saving the galaxy as we know it.
Then I'd also add that while SG-1 does improve in my opinion as it finds its own footing as most shows do, if you don't at least somewhat enjoy the first episode of SG-1 you can walk away with your head held high. I don't think you have to give it half-a-season like many shows (or 2 seasons like TNG...), they came out very strong at the beginning. It's not the best episode by any means, but it's a fair representative.
(Also as mentioned elsewhere in the thread the third episode is pretty weak.)
(Some versions may have a quite literally gratuitous nudity scene in the first episode. Apparently Showtime demanded one, but a bit bizarrely, left them alone after that and that's the last such thing in the series. I suppose in this era of Game of Thrones this will seem less bizarre than it may have at the time, but it is worth pointing out this is a one-off. So if that happens to be the only reason you like SG-1's first episode, you can stop. :) )
Like you I also recently restarted watching SG-1 for the first time since I was a kid. It holds up a lot better than I expected it to. There's the occasional eyerolling cliche (and Carter's dialog about internal vs external gonads is kinda ridiculous) but like you said the cliches are also lampshaded pretty often. I just watched an episode where the Stargate broke and there was an exchange that went something like this—
General Hammond: How long will it take to fix the Stargate?
Technician: It'll be about 24 hours sir
Hammond: You have 12 hours
Technician. Sir, that's not how this works... it'll take about 24 hours
SG-1 was my therapy during my worst years. I don't think I'd have gone through that period as well as I did, if it weren't for the mix of laughter and seriousness every episode of this show offered.
And what I love about it, SG-1 pulls it off. It's a serious show that's also very genre-savvy and full of quality gags. I haven't seen any other media product, sci-fi or otherwise, that managed to get this mix of opposites to work.
(It's all nicely balanced, except that one time in Season 7 where you thought you're watching a joke episode, until the sudden change of tone punches you in the head, and you're left emotionally spinning and wondering what the hell did just happen. The two-parter I'm referring to, "Heroes", is a masterpiece. This kind of thing works only once - and fortunately, the producers were smart enough to not try it again.)
The characters are so good. The plot lines are great. The enemies are actually bad.
While TNG is idealistic and more or less wholesome, SG1 definitely lines up with DS9 in that it's more real/gritty yet still has all the hope, fun, morals, ethics, etc.
With the possible exception of the Ori, the villains in SG-1 weren't usually the "like the last one, but MORE POWERFUL" villain trope we see in most series.
And the evolution of the replicants... that was a complicated adversary.
My parents watched a lot of sci fi TV when I was kid, SG-1 is the only show that I ever actually sat down and watched more than the occasional episode of.
I remember being struck by a scene that was (I believe?) pretty early in the series where Sam's about to fight some guy hand to hand; Jack protests this (but not in a way that makes it clear whether he thinks a woman shouldn't do it or if he's just unsure of her fighting skill), but once getting told what level she had trained to he immediately backs off.
It gave me (who was at most 13 years old I think) the impression of what good respect between the sexes should look like.
I could also be mis-remembering this because it's been a really long time though.
S1E3 Emancipation... one of the most disliked episodes by most fans but I agree that the scene was handled well... but the rest of the episode is not good. The writer of the episode (Katharyn Powers, who only worked on SG1 in season 1) was also the writer of the Star Trek TNG first season episode "Code Of Honor", which is frequently considered in the bottom 3 episodes of any Star Trek series, and many find very racist.
I just started doing the same last week (weird to suddenly see this thread after not much mention of SG1 for a long time...) and agree it is great. It is nice to watch as a series instead of the random odd episode I saw as a kid watching cable TV in the 90s. There is so much more of it than I remembered. I've almost finished season 1, so it's going to tide me over for a good long while!
I envy you, I wish I could forget everything about the show, so that I could experience it fresh again. Having watched it end-to-end 3+ times over the past decade, it's burned hard into my brain.
I recently finished a rewatch of it. It has held up far better than it has any right to. One thing that’s really stood out to me is the insane amount of technology change that happened over SG-1 — the show ran from 1996 to 2004. It went from laughable 3D CG on a Showtime budget, CRTs and landlines to heavy CG on a SciFi Channel budget, flatscreens and tiny cell phones.
It does have its dumb moments though. Basically anything involving real-world weapons or explosives. There were also a few weak seasons in the middle, and it’s pretty obvious the main cast started phoning it in around season 5. But on the whole I agree, it’s one of the best Sci Fi shows ever made and absolutely belongs with the best of Trek.
That one surprised me (positively) when I noticed it. Particularly when I binge-watched it end-to-end and saw how the cellphones evolve across the show.
> Basically anything involving real-world weapons or explosives
You're telling me that P90 is not the weapon to save the galaxy?
> Season 4 (the one made by Amazon Prime Video) felt like it had a tenth of the budget compared to season 1 and 2. A completely different show that I found very boring and unwatchable.
Season 4 follows book 4, whereas previous seasons split the books in a non-typical fashion: e.g., S02E05 ("Home") was the end of book 1. Book 4 is also part of the second kind-of-trilogy and so is a bit slower paced, because it set ups the next two books.
This isn't really Amazon's fault: it's from the original content.
The show was weird from the start -- the first season was the first half of the first book, then they adapted the second half of the first book and the first half of the second book for season two (and likewise for S3 and books 2 & 3). Season 4 largely resolved that by wrapping up book 3 and adapting all of book 4 in one go, since book 4 is kinda slow on its own.
The show is weird because the source material is kind of schlocky and the show improves it significantly. I think season 4 is so hard to watch because book 4 is a self-contained story so they couldn’t blend characters and scenarios like in the previous book. The book characters are all a little too one-dimensional and the show does an excellent job condensing them into well-rounded characters.
I had to stop reading halfway through book 5 because I couldn’t take the heavy use of cliched language and tropes. The books are a great story at the macro level, but the writing is pretty terrible, especially as the series goes on.
This. I’ve read them all but my god is the writing terrible, or at least half of it. It’s written by two guys one who is a big sci-fi fan/writer who writes all the good characters (Bobby, Avasarala to name two of my favorites.) But the other guy, Daniel Abrahams, is a horrible writer imo and his shit writing bleeds through. I’ll also add that they can’t really write women and it seems like it’s written by two male nerds who didn’t engage with many women before meeting their wives (which is why they write women best when there’s no relationships involved.)
Jesus, if the show significantly improves on the books in that regard then I can't imagine what the books are like. I'm mid-way through S2 of the show right now. I like the realistic portrayal of what space travel/interplanetary colonies might look like. All the political stuff. But some of the dialogue and characterization is still embarrassingly cliched.
I don't know. People keep complaining about Cibola Burn (book 4), but I liked it. I genuinely consider it one of the better ones.
That's perhaps because it's the first, and to date the most detailed, exploration of the aliens and their technology, which to me is the most interesting part (after Earth-Mars politics).
But then, I'm the weird guy who thinks character development is overrated, and reads sci-fi for the ideas.
The whole series is like a tease. I like book 4 a lot too because I started reading this series to read about alien monstrosities, etc. Then the next three books turn back into a political theatre and it only gets good again in book 8 when they start looking at different alien systems. The series should have been a lot less books, but it makes sense the writers themselves have said they have the whole story in mind, up to the last sentence, and they’re just adding in pacing. I think it’d be better to have a trilogy with the first two books, the second two and then the last trilogy (no need for books 4&5 since, as I said, I’m wanting to read about an ancient alien civilization.)
I’ve read all the books and S4 was my favorite so far as it didn’t look as cheesy (the first few seasons have that “syfy” tint to them, which is strange considering they have the same budget) but S5 was not good, imo, which sucks because it’s probably my second favorite book. Too much filler it really should have been 8 episodes tops.
If it makes you feel better the fourth book of The Expanse is the most boring in my opinion and the show stuck to the plot for the most part throughout. I still enjoyed both the book and the fourth season but the action and production really picks back up in the fifth season.
The expanse has a lot of problems. Mainly the fact that the creators dislike "disaster porn". Thus making the show completely devoid of any emotional impact.
Like the rocks falling was filmed in such a way as to be the least emotionally impactful to the viewer. I don't think they could have done anything more than they did to make it un-emotional. It is incredibly bizarre.
I agree with that, I think the way the rocks were handled in the books was much more impactful. It all felt a bit analytical and detached in the show which I didn't like. It still had an emotional impact for me but that may be because I was relating it to how I felt while reading it.
Yes, season 4 has the exact same budget per episode and the same production company/crew as the other seasons. Amazon doesn't have anything to do with perceived changes (I thought 4 was still good and 5 was great).
I'm chugging through book 2 at the moment, I hate reading books right after I watched a show since I'm already aware of most of the events and the plot direction, but I want to see where the show diverged in the later seasons and of course get to the books after that.
SG1 is indeed an amazing series, the showrunners did a great job blending action, mythology, and light-hearted sci-fi into a very watchable show.
I was less thrilled with Atlantis, and thought Universe was completely horrible. Let's not even acknowledge the existence of "Origins".
I do hope Amazon will be good stewards of the franchise going forward. I don't want them to make new content only for it to be dark, gritty, drama-heavy, and politicised the way much of modern "entertainment" has become.
Maybe we'll even get a few good Stargate video games out of this! So many lost opportunities on the gaming front - an MMO was in the works, but never got released.
Stargate revival is my main hope about all this. I don't know that they could do a continuation/sequel because the world of Stargate at this point is pretty complex and far from our universe. So they would probably do a reboot which is risky because the actors had such great chemistry together.
Wow I thought it was just me who didn’t like season 4 of the expanse. At some point they made a turn to focusing on the flaws of all the main characters to an obnoxious degree.
> I watched the sci-fi show "The Expanse" on Amazon Prime Video. Season 4 (the one made by Amazon Prime Video) felt like it had a tenth of the budget compared to season 1 and 2. A completely different show that I found very boring and unwatchable.
Ultimately that's one show though. Amazon have spent BIG on some of their series. The Grand Tour had an enormous, enormous budget compared to Top Gear. They are spending Game of Thrones money on Wheel of Time.
You definitely need to read 7 as there’s a big change in that book that sets up 8. I will say that 7 is a lot better than 6 but, again, there’s very little proto-builder stuff. The whole series builds up to 8 in a slow drag (it sucks) but book 8 is pretty good as a high fantasy/sci-fi book. I really think these books should have just been a trilogy
> The deal can be viewed as a doubling down on business strategy that Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s CEO, articulated at a conference in 2016: “When we win a Golden Globe, it helps us sell more shoes,” he had said, referring to Amazon's diverse business divisions.
`I do get the argument that Prime Video is a waste of money for Amazon; Brad Stone notes in his new book Amazon Unbound that “there was little evidence of a connection between viewing and purchasing behavior” and that “any correlation was also obfuscated by the fact that Prime was growing rapidly on its own.”`
Is that nugget actually true or is Bezos just obsessed with the glamor of Hollywood?
>> “When we win a Golden Globe, it helps us sell more shoes,”
> Is that nugget actually true or is Bezos just obsessed with the glamor of Hollywood?
Could it be more an idea of goodwill[0] ("the intangible value attributable solely to the efforts of or reputation of an owner of the business")? What I mean to say is, having Golden Globes or running a valued streaming service, even if it's not directly correlated with increased retail sales, makes customers generally regard Amazon more highly, more chic?
For all of its faults (and I am very critical of the company), I don't know anyone who derides the company in the same manner that Walmart is derided[1], for example.
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.
For years McDonalds and other fast foods in America bundled toys with Happy Meals. Building cheap little toys is way less expensive than big budget media.
yeah i highly doubt it’s true. but maybe over time if prime video gets compelling enough that people buy prime just for access to it, then it could be true. right now it’s just seen as a bonus if you already have prime for other reasons. maybe bezos just believes it anyway
I’m skeptical of the argument that Prime Video attracts Prime subscriptions. The true motivation could be Hollywood glamor, or having the data to link viewing behavior to product recommendations.
Indeed. The acquisition opens up numerous product placement opportunities. I can't wait to watch John Krasinski watching a mission briefing with his mPow 2021 Slim Noise Cancelling Bluetooth USB-C headphones.
I’m not familiar with the video editing field. But it seems like a product that can edit the logos/item to be advertised for various markets could be valuable.
So person wears an unbranded product or no product even, and then post production adds whatever logos or products it needs to for various markets.
That blew my mind. We have so much sci-fi depicting the evil mega-corp that's it has become a trope, yet we're just lumbering along towards that exact future.
There's probably books on that exact topic published by them and only possible to legally consume by purchasing it from them and reading it on their hardware.
Why suppress the revolution when you can just sell the revolution in episodic form as escapism to be consumed from the safety of your own home.
There's an argument that progressive political comedy shows are actually detrimental because they give the viewer the feeling of having "solved" the problems presented by the mere act of watching. Instead of facing the problem directly and trying to do something about it, we consume the problem as entertainment in a small neat (time)box and can then just go on ignoring it.
There have been recent findings that support for BLM and its causes among "white allies" drastically rose throughout the protests but is now as low or even lower than before (and also corporations not following through with their promises of donating money towards relevant causes because it is no longer profitable for them to signal support). This would fit the same model: most white people who supported BLM only developed an awareness for the problems due to the protests and then supported the protests (and hashtag campaigns) but as soon as the protests were over and minimal reforms (including non-reforms that actually did the opposite, e.g. police funding bills) the problem was "solved" in their mind and they abandoned the movement and maybe even felt personally attacked by anyone claiming nothing had changed fundamentally.
Basically we all see ourselves as the main character and don't think boring (i.e. systemic) problems will affect us. I'm not going to die from COVID like the rest because I'm special -- I'll die in an important way when it's narratively convenient, not like an extra killed off in act one to establish the stakes. Evil mega corps won't creep up on me, they'll introduce themselves spectacularly in a way that directly challenges me personally in a way that still allows me to defeat them and complete my hero's journey.
Maybe I'm in the minority but I definitely see the rise of mega corps as directly affecting me. They funnel obscene amount of wealth and resources(and thus political power) to a few individuals, lessening my democratic impact; they aren't beholden to any particular community and thus often are worse for workers and demonstrate worse negative externalities (such as environmentally); and so on...
The thing is I just feel helpless to do much about it. I can shop locally, but that feels pretty insignificant. Lately it's not even useful to vote any particular way (in the US), since it seems bigcorps have essentially captured both major parties.
Oh, it's absolutely affecting everyone. It just does it in a way that feels too trivial and non-dramatic to be a genuine threat to "the main character". Quoth Thanos, "I don't even know who you are" -- except unlike Thanos it's a faceless megacorp and every single person you ever interact with is an underpaid contractor working for a sub-subcontractor you likely never even heard of.
We understand individual problems ("I have cancer", "I lost my job", "My car broke down") intuitively. Systemic problems (pandemics, climate change, capitalism) not so much. Plus we've spent over a century increasingly framing every systemic problem as an individual problem and training us to think only of individual solutions ("boycott Amazon", "buy organic", "take shorter showers" -- note how many of these are explicitly about individual consumption rather than active collaboration).
They're not joking; this acquisition cost more than it cost Disney to buy Marvel and Lucasfilm COMBINED. They're definitely taking the entertainment end of their business very seriously.
I'm sure Bezos knows what he's talking about, but how does this work exactly? Amazon Prime Video and the marketplace have different entry points. Is the idea just general brand awareness?
You can get standalone Amazon Prime Video membership — buuut it's about the same price as complete Amazon Prime membership! So you might as well get the complete membership and get all the perks you might want in the future.
And bam, you're now in the Amazon Prime universe. One day you'll be comparison shopping for a specific pair of shoes you like online, and you'll see that Amazon has the lowest (or one of the lowest) prices plus free one- or two-day shipping, and hey, you've got that Prime membership from back when you wanted to watch Amazon Prime Video. Deal sealed.
It lowers the barriers for every Amazon Prime-connected entry point.
I think it is usually the other way around: people are finding Prime Video through Amazon. I suspect many would subscribe to Prime for deliveries even if Prime Video didn’t exist, and few would subscribe to Prime for Prime Video alone.
I wonder if Amazon will change MGM's stance on "Movies Anywhere"? MGM is one of the few major studios that currently does not participate in that.
OT: how the heck does MA actually work?
Suppose I buy a movie from Apple that came from a studio that supports MA. It almost immediately shows up in my Amazon Prime Video library, my Fandango library, and others. I then stream it using the Fandango app on my TV.
Does it stream from Fandango's servers? If so, who pays for that bandwidth?. Fandango accounts are free, so I've not paid them any money. Do they just eat it, assuming it will balance out due to people who bought from Fandango streaming on other services? Or does MA tell Fandango that I bought the movie from Apple and Fandango periodically bills Apple for Apple store movies played via Fandango?
Or does it stream from some common CDN that keeps track of all this and bills each seller for their share of bandwidth?
Or does some magic happen so that even though I'm playing the movie in the Fandango app, it is actually streaming from Apple servers?
The studios are basically paying the burden of cost for MA. It's one of the big reasons Paramount and MGM haven't joined, it's expensive on the studio side.
Bandwidth is a nearly zero cost for a lot of the companies streaming the video on MA anyways. Apple, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, all don't care meaningfully about bandwidth cost anymore, especially for prerecorded content they can CDN all over the place. The biggest value to a streaming provider participating in MA is user acquisition: People might redeem their existing collection on MA, and then buy new titles on their platform.
> I wonder if Amazon will change MGM's stance on "Movies Anywhere"? MGM is one of the few major studios that currently does not participate in that.
MGM's home ent catalogue isn't that big tbh but maybe.
> Does it stream from Fandango's servers? If so, who pays for that bandwidth?. Fandango accounts are free, so I've not paid them any money. Do they just eat it, assuming it will balance out due to people who bought from Fandango streaming on other services? Or does MA tell Fandango that I bought the movie from Apple and Fandango periodically bills Apple for Apple store movies played via Fandango?
It streams from Fandango and Fandango eat it, in the hope that if you're using their services you're more likely to buy from them.
> Or does it stream from some common CDN that keeps track of all this and bills each seller for their share of bandwidth?
You might be overestimating the costs here: it’s a fraction of a penny per GB to deliver.
> Or does some magic happen so that even though I'm playing the movie in the Fandango app, it is actually streaming from Apple servers?
It’s directly from Fandango - there is a shared revenue model + Fandango treats the MA content just as they would any third party content. They acquire source material and ingest it into their catalog as they would from any other studio.
I wish people didn't watch so much television. It's too good and too easy to watch an unlimited amount of content. Every hour you spend being entertained in front of your screens is an hour less you could be spending building actual social bonds with people in your community.
There is a correlation to increasing tv watching and decreased social club engagement. By social clubs I mean bowling clubs, skating clubs, 4H clubs, knitting clubs, quilting clubs, book clubs, etc. Whatever other clubs people used to do back in the pre modern television era.
Being a part of these clubs connects you with your local city. It encourages real social relationships. If the club membership is diverse, you are exposed to people of different backgrounds, experiences, and races, which decreases racism and xenophobia.
All of this will increase the amount of trust we have for random humans. And that correlates strongly to how well government is working for us.
This could also be fueling why the US has so much hostility in politics now. What if we were in clubs with people of different political viewpoints? You like these people, and you disagree politically. I think that would change things.
So please, do your part and stop watching so much bullshit on television. Sure, a few good movies and shows every once in a while is understandable. But really do you need to watch all these new TV series and every single made-for-netflix movie??
I have some pretty bad internet addiction too. It was so bad I basically stopped playing guitar in my teen years. I restarted last year and had to basically start from scratch, it was so depressing. I used to be able to sight read sheet music, then I threw a budding life skill all away to look at memes I will never remember or play some dumb quest in a game.
I was addicted really to consumption. I stopped creating. Now I'm trying to make more time for it. The other night I fell asleep on the couch before midnight with my guitar in my hand and my fingers forming a chord, rather than being wired and awake on reddit until I look and notice it's 2am again. Still, the sting of knowing I squandered probably 10 years of youth just consuming junk is a lot to bear.
It's depressing knowing some very smart people are out there striving as hard as they can to get me and others away from looking inwardly and creating, or at least investing focus in one's own life and building yourself up, and instead hooked on the teet of endless content. It's like the end game with this endless consumption is The Matrix, where most of humanity is just plugged into the machine sitting there, thoughtless, sucking on the feeding tube and fueling the robots until they eventually die and are replaced by another warm body.
>>"Every hour you spend being entertained in front of your screens is an hour less you could be spending building actual social bonds with people in your community."
I feel it didn't used to be like that; there was a brief period of limited TV choices where it seemed to increase the bonds - it was a shared experience, and unlike most shared experiences which you have with couple of people physically present, it was shared with any number of friends colleagues and strangers. "Did you see the movie last night" or "Did you catch Ed Sullivan" show, do even "Remember the Friends episode where...". It was a common cultural reference point.
Now of course there's so much content we are more divergent and everybody watches their own TV show or Movie or Youtube channel or TikTok etc.
I'm surprised that your insightful comment (questioning the very elephant-in-the-room assumption that we all must have content to consume) has not been voted higher by this community of hackers, tinkerers, and makers.
Indeed, why is this so central to our lives? Why isn't a different kind of shared activity more sought-after?
Your point about the sheer variety is also relevant -- there's just too many echo chambers of consumption for everyone now.
Overall, the creative force has nary a chance to flourish in such environs.
Doesn't TV shows and movies also contain diverse cast and help us relate to people with different backgrounds, race, sexual orientation, etc.?
For example, i think Hollywood movies depicting homosexuality have large impact on people watching them from conservative countries.
Their awful UI is an artifact of trying to be a storefront (where shows are sold by the season) and a streaming service (where you can binge without regard for seasons).
This might depend on the device, I'm using the Fire stick and I think it bundles the seasons under one show.
I'm not praising that app at all btw, that's just why I think the award for worst app goes to CBC gem on the Fire stick. It shows you which episodes you watched. Past tense. To watch the next one you have to search for the show again and navigate to the episode. Why on earth would anyone want that?!
I found myself going to Netflix by default because its UI is so much smoother in every platform. Amazon does have things I want to see, but I don't want to put up with the slowness and jank.
Ugh, so bad. I pay for Prime in the US and UK, but the app gives me no way to switch countries like I can with the store. When I’m in the UK, I expect it to show me the local UK library that I get with my Amazon UK prime account. Instead, the app assumes I’m “traveling” and forces me into a reduced version of the US library. Worse, it renders all the thumbnails in the catalog view, while only telling me content is unavailable after I’ve decided to watch it and click play.
For this reason I only watch Amazon originals on Prime, since I know they’ll be available.
The real question here is where players like SKY in the UK eventually go for content, I pay €40 a month for Skys satellite service and I am on the edge of cancelling it, I have Netflix/Disney/Prime for a combined approx €30 a month, recently when watching live TV I spent 40 minutes channel hopping and watched nothing, most channels are now reality show filler junk, the occasional gem in there is looking less and less worth the cost and its only a matter of time before they get squeezed out of the live sports market as well.
The problem in most countries I've lived is that there is a market capture with the whole 'triple play' trap.
I only really need a fast internet connection but I can only get that if I bundle it with TV + Phone. Regardless of how much of a 'cable-cutter' I am, it is only financially worth getting internet-only, if I go for lower speeds.
Definitely something I thing the EU competition/anti-trust teams should be looking into.
I think SKY is well prepared for this. With their NowTV service you can get the movies/entertainment/sports packages all separately. You can even buy the sports package for a day or a weekend. They also have quite a lot of exclusive content through SKY Atlantic + their sports offerings.
On top of that they are a major Broadband provider. If they started losing full SKY TV subscriptions I think their other business areas will make up for it. I would never get SKY TV...but I've paid for their broadband + pay £30 a month for sports via NowTV.
As others suggest, simply opt-out of these destructive monopolies. I’m in Europe and have been immensely enjoying MUBI[0] for the last few months.
Many classic and new films, updating all the time - and I’ve had none of the streaming problems that some AppStore reviews have mentioned. Also supports new independent film-makers (which piracy sadly does not do).
The problem lies with the fact that the average person isn't smart enough to understand that some of these companies are destructive. Outside of tech, no one is concerned with privacy -> TikTok. Outside of tech, no one is thinking amazon is a monopoly. outside of tech, no one cares.
With that mentality in mind, coordinating effective boycots of services is impossible. Governments need to step up and enforce a certain balance between capitalism and socialism. On one end of the spectrum you get monopolies and on the otherside you mob-rule and staterun monopolies.
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 .
I don't think that people are united about breaking up Amazon and frankly I don't really see the damage to consumer necessary to break it up; products come faster, cheaper.
Could you articulate why Amazon should be broken up? Most of the arguments I've seen boil down to "It's so big" and not really "It's effectively dominated x market and there is no competition there" or even "they are harming competition by pre-installing free software that I can't uninstall"
2. They purport to operate a neutral marketplace where they aren't responsible for the end product while also controlling what products you see and what company you will buy from and choose the ones that give them the best margin. The huge problem of counterfeit and faulty products on Amazon directly harms the consumer and because of (1) there isn't a general market remedy.
3. They leverage their position as market maker to figure out what products to manufacture and undercut innovative companies with their massive scale. In the short term this is a net benefit to consumers who get a cheaper product but it creates a mess of bad incentives down the line.
>They have the size and market control to crush and/or acquire all competitors
I don't think that is true for all competitors, but it definitely is for many competitors. It's a good point if they are using that power, which I think they are, especially in particular industries. Same applies to Facebook, Apple, and many other companies as well.
>2. They purport to operate a neutral marketplace where they aren't responsible for the end product while also controlling what products you see and what company you will buy from and choose the ones that give them the best margin. The huge problem of counterfeit and faulty products on Amazon directly harms the consumer and because of (1) there isn't a general market remedy.
That's two different things, isn't it? Counterfeit products are a problem and a non-neutral market is a different problem. I think the non-neutral market bit is already covered by existing regulations, isn't it? Shouldn't we simply apply the rules we have?
>3. They leverage their position as market maker to figure out what products to manufacture and undercut innovative companies with their massive scale. In the short term this is a net benefit to consumers who get a cheaper product but it creates a mess of bad incentives down the line.
This one I've seen before but not as an argument to break them up - it's an interesting argument to me because I think a lot of companies engage in these practices. Grocery stores classically would release basic cheerios for example and undercut the price of the brand
I don't know how large of a concern this is, but Amazons wide growth allows using revenue from their higher profit sectors (such as aws) to force out competitors in other lower margin sectors they are involved with such as grocery stores. This also may very well be a strategy other large conglomerates utilize.
Amazon's continuous expansion is resulting in powerful monopsonies - if you want to for example create your own book, soon there is going to be no option but to sell it to Amazon so it will be in kindles and on audible. Amazon will have complete power over what cut of the profits to give you.
Why bother making that new product you thought of when the only way to sell it is by listing it on Amazon and eventually having Amazon copy it and sell under "Amazons Choice".
So while Amazon is great for consumers, it is terrible for producers. And you have to remember - if you have a job you are a producer too. For now you are getting cheaper and more convenient service, but soon you will be struggling to find a job if this continues.
> "It's effectively dominated x market and there is no competition there"
Amazon often enough dominates local labor markets - they strategically set up their fulfillment centers in places that have high unemployment, so that employees have no practical (!) alternative than to accept the exploitative working conditions that Amazon offers.
Regarding marketplaces: in accessible online shopping, Amazon and eBay are a de-facto duopoly for the vendors. Get booted off of either and watch your business go dry in a matter of days.
> "they are harming competition by pre-installing free software that I can't uninstall"
That one was literally used as a justification for the IE de-bundling many years ago.
>That one was literally used as a justification for the IE de-bundling many years ago.
Yeah, that's what I was referencing by using it - that said my phone comes bundled with trash that I can't uninstall
>Regarding marketplaces: in accessible online shopping, Amazon and eBay are a de-facto duopoly for the vendors. Get booted off of either and watch your business go dry in a matter of days.
Their marketplace does seem to be pretty powerful, but I've seen a lot of vendors do well with a standalone site + Instagram/Facebook ads and marketplace so I'm not sure it's really a duopoly for all vendors. If you are only in one market and that market bans you your business will go dry immediately either way.
>Amazon often enough dominates local labor markets - they strategically set up their fulfillment centers in places that have high unemployment, so that employees have no practical (!) alternative than to accept the exploitative working conditions that Amazon offers.
This one I don't think works - it can apply to any employer that moves into a high unemployment area and I think that's something we want to encourage companies to do
I don't get this sentiment, what exactly do you think will be the benefits of doing this? It's a drastic action, you don't just break up multi billion companies in an afternoon, so you better come up with some very good concrete points on why this is necessary. Not just vague statements about improving competition.
Also you know what a huge role Silicon Valley companies play for the U.S. internationally? And you want to cripple them?
I don't understand how here on HN, where the majority is in the tech industry, the people are begging for government intervention and regulations. Be careful what you ask for, I'd rather have them stay out of the industry, thanks.
I think as a consumer, if we are talking about breaking businesses, first in line should be the the cable and telecom oligopolies. Big tech can come next. These companies control more critical infrastructure compared to big tech companies.
I think that a lot of the big politics players realize that if the big companies get broken up, some of the businesses might not be as profitable.
In other words, it seems like some businesses have been able to find a diamond//golden goose so much so that they are able to support different businesses. These other businesses will not have had the same success if they didn't have a cashcow behind their back.
They are close to hitting a critical point in terms of political and economic power where they literally will no longer be able to be stopped. We will have no recourse but to replace our government with Amazon. It will be like Buy n Large in Wall-e.
I fear we are already beyond the point of stopping them. Remember those cringey, awkward videos by dozens of mayors begging Amazon to choose their city for their second headquarters? I'm all for gov-biz partnership, but gov literally begging big biz is not a good sign. There is a power imbalance here.
I disagree, there is a lot the government could do. Amazon is nothing with out the US Government. Protection of all of it's property, maintaining infrastructure, both the internet and transportation system. Simply charging business for the wear and tear the place on the roads would be a start.
Amazon builds and operates internet-disconnected datacenters, on-prem in Langley, for the CIA. You're not getting rid of the CIA's drone video cluster sysadmins.
They also operate several internet-connected regions (GovCloud) that have the special racist hiring policies required to fulfill US govt hosting regulations.
MGM itself was formed from a merger: MGM was formed in 1924 when the entertainment entrepreneur Marcus Loew gained control of Metro Pictures, Goldwyn Pictures, and Louis B. Mayer Pictures.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
10-20 years ago it felt like it was all the telecom companies buying out these media/production/conglomerates to serve as their auxiliary arms. Now it's big tech.
20 years after Atlantis lands in San Francisco the camera flys over the now moon-based city. We see puddle jumpers zooming to and fro. A Daedalus class ship exits hyperspace from some mission far away.
The camera fades to the control room. A ragged Dr Jackson with a headset is arguing with someone. The room is abuzz with many others doing the same.
This is the moment the audience first can see the logo on his shirt. "Amazon Galactic"
Atlantis has become the Amazon headquarters for the Milky Way. Daniel Jackson is just one of many customer service representatives. The Jaffa were retrained to do deliveries across the Galaxy.
The Goa'uld are long gone.
OR ARE THEY?
Camera pans to Jeff Bezos. His eyes glow just as the camera fades to black.
The upside here is that MGM has been limping along for ages, and if Amazon ends up paying off their debts and relaunching a bunch of their titles, even if this all collapses in a few years, MGM will probably end up better off for it.
Babylon 5, Stargate: Universe, Colony, Aftermath, Continuum may seem have something in common with these roughly.
My memory also isn't very active. I would immediately recall the show you would name but I can't just list them. I have even forgotten about existence of the Westworld show although I enjoyed it and can probably tell what's next at any given moment of it.
I wonder what Las Vegas would look like if tech companies started buying / building hotels in Vegas
At one point MGM owned almost 1 third - half the strip (ish) - recently they've been selling off properties which is a shame, MGM properties are my preferred resorts.
Maybe Amazon can breath some life into Excalibur or Luxor but it sounds like those are not part of the deal
MGM the studio was spun off from the much more profitable and burgeoning casino segment around the early 80s. Since then, tons of different buyers have gone in and out for the casino. Maybe MGM the studio too.
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios Inc, which is the MGM Amazon bought is not the same company as MGM Resorts International, which is the MGM that owns casinos. The casino people become an independent company year and years ago.
Yeah. I didn’t know whether to delete my comment or not. I also had to re verify the history since I am geekily into tech and media startups, corps, but not casinos or brick and mortar.
I don't know how many mining companies there are, but if there is only one or two companies that take 80%+ of the market, then yeah, that is a monopoly/duopoly. Online - one company (Google) controls most of search, two companies (Google and Apple) control nearly all of mobile OS, one company (Amazon) more than half of cloud market, one company (Facebook) controls much of social, one company (youtube/google) controls most of video market.... etc etc.
95% of your salary will be directly deposited into the account of E Corp (Mr Robot) since they own everything, no need to make x payments to x entities per month. Everyone wins!
As much as I dislike Amazon, I am continually surprised at how hands off their streaming creations seem to be. Expanse is probably biggest anti-corporate rant on TV I saw in a while.
If they continue to treat their streaming arms as another business and not PR, it is a great move.
I guess Amazon hasn't yet been overtaken by a MBAS desperate for synergy deciding their programming should double as advertising for their other products yet.
My thesis is that to justify their P/E and valuation Amazon has no option but to keep expanding into new business lines.
A side effect of this expansion is lack of attention to their existing lines of businesses. For instance, Amazon retail UX and website has largely remained unchanged for like well over a decade and in fact gotten worse as they cram more and more things to sell within a screen.
Same with AWS, quite a lot of highly asked features haven't been implemented for years now, and AWS console is showing its age.
I have a feeling those Alexa* devices will not age well.
Having worked at Amazon, things that are doing fine will definitely get put on the back burner, but I don't see why that's a problem. Why the need for everything to keep changing if it's working fine?
Amazon has plenty of problems, but they're not Google; products stay supported for a long time. My three Echo devices are 5, 4, and 3 years old, and of them all work perfectly fine.
Is it weird that I am excited about this? I want tech to rethink how distribution is done, and if I have to watch them buy shit and then get anti trusted to spin it out so be it :)
I for one am very happy with all of the content consolidating into 4-5 major brands. I can pay $10-15 a month and rotate through individual streaming services. I don't need to be able to watcth James Bond at any particular point in time, I just need to be able to find some content I'm going to enjoy tonight.
Interestingly enough, Prime Video is bundled with my Amazon Prime subscription so it's the one video service that I don't actually rotate.
Does Amazon charge for Video today? I don't think they do. Maybe they plan too.
I know Bezos has stated in the past (can't find it though) that he believe Video will be the next growth engine, much like how AWS has been said engine over the last few years.
Only some movies and shows on Amazon Prime Video are actually "included with Prime". The rest you have to pay for individually.
Their Music service is similar. As a Prime member, you have access to a portion of their music catalog. If you want access to everything, you have to pay for it.
Here's hoping they pick up Stargate along with some of the SG-1 writers and producers. With the Expanse ending next season, there's definitely an opening for an exclusive sci-fi show in Prime's catalog.
I think it would be interesting. But even at the end of SG1 they had already 'jumped the shark' as it were. They tried to make up a new bad guy but it just was not as good. I think reviving it would detract from what is there.
Now more Bob and Doug McKenzie I would be down with that.
A radical idea but please hear me out: A new Stargate series that is not a reboot, not a remake, not set in an alternate timeline, not set far in the past or future, but rather a continuation of the story we know!
Now Bezos has all reels of DJT from filming the Apprentice. I wonder how long it will take until we see those leaked. I predict, it will come out once some big legal hammer falls on the 45th President.
Does anyone else think Amazon will acquire video game producers next? When I look at digital content, this seems the one area they're not already in, as they have TV, movies, books, but no games.
> There are a lot of comments in this thread and the first page contains only the first subthread. To read the rest you need to click More at the bottom of the page, or like this: (Sorry for the interruption. Comments like this will go away eventually.)
dang, since there are a lot of comments in this thread, you tell us about the next page link, thanks a lot... why don't you tell us about the flag link?
It's important to note MGM went bankrupt not too long ago, they also sold a lot of their original releases to Warner Bros and others. To put this in perspective MGM is more and more just a shell company or just a brand that you use (by posting posters of James Bond franchise, which btw they only partially own) to lure in subscribers to your Amazon Prime service.
The article mentions complications with this because of existing deals:
Still, efforts by Amazon to profit off MGM's library won’t be easy, or cheap.
In many cases, MGM’s content is tied up in multi-year deals with television networks, the former Amazon executives said. Amazon cannot air MGM’s reality show “The Voice,” for instance, which contractually is in the hands of NBC.
Bringing a new installment of the James Bond saga to Prime viewers may be a particularly difficult task, the sources said. The terms under which MGM acquired the franchise leave control in the hands of the Broccoli family, the Bond films’ producers.
Upgrade (RelayFM podcast) covered this on this weeks episode and this apparently will come down to what the Broccoli family will agree too since really they own the rights to Bond
I suppose Bezos and co. will use MGM to push their cultural and political narrative much like they have done with WaPo... I'm fully on the boycott Amazon program at this point, having previously been a Prime member and heavy user of Amazon/AWS/WaPo/etc.
All they need now is a house building company and they can sell people everything they need for their entire life (the grocery store, entertainment, health, news, movies, music, goods). Then they can start selling Gatorade for plants to their customers.
I don’t worry too much about the competitive aspects of this but I worry about the mega corps having a monopoly on our culture. Turn on any any radio station and they’re all playing the same ten songs. Yikes.
Now if Prime could only fix their absolutely atrocious audio quality. So many movies have very tinny audio tracks, that sound like low bitrate mp3 from the early 2000s. It's awful to listen to.
Why? I watched a few sporting events recently and I was surprised how often sports gambling was mentioned during the broadcast. Does that annoy you too?
Good book.. there are a class of people worth trillions of dollars and he explores all kinds of weird things that could happen. Like trillie teenagers launching themselves into space on joy riding rockets illegally.
In the US corps don’t usually get brought up on charges unless they are being anti-competitive. I don’t see how anyone can make the case that Amazon buying MGM gives them a monopoly in any sector either.
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 :-)
Corporate towns were bad enough but now we're talking about corporate space colonies where the company can literally charge you for oxygen. I'd be interesting for sure, but not something anyone should want to participate in at table stakes.
You would basically be property of the corporation in that scenario. Musk is not known for treating his dependents or employees or fans well, he’s more popular to outsiders looking in. Market manipulation, Bitcoin pump and dump, a wife who left him, working conditions at Tesla, quality control issues, dishonest marketing for self driving features... nobody should go live on his colonies if he gets that far
Amazon? You mean the company owned by a super-rich guy, who's taking $10 billion of our dollars, to prop us his rocket company, because he lost out on a contract?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27289924&p=2
(Sorry for the interruption. Comments like this will go away eventually.)