When I wrote about the funny TV show Ted Lasso, some readers expressed regret that they do not subscribe to Apple TV+, the only. place where you can see it. This raises a problem that I think is going to get more acute with time, and that is that we may be entering a world where certain films and TV shows will be inaccessible to some segment of the population.
It used to be simpler, at least when it came to films. Films were released in theaters and if you missed it on its first run, you waited until it was released in some video form that you could rent it fairly cheaply from your neighborhood video store or borrow from your public library. You were guaranteed some form of easy access to all films. But now film makers and distributors have another option and that is to create their own subscription streaming service to show their own shows. So now in addition to Apple TV+, we have Disney+, Amazon Prime, HBO Max, Paramount+ and many more. This website tells you where you can find a particular film or TV show to stream.
So where does that leave the viewer? Will there come a time when we will not be able to see a particular film or show unless we either subscribe to a particular streaming service or buy it online, even if we are not sure if we will like it and just want to see it once? If so, there may be some films and shows we never get to see, which would be a pity.
The problem for most streaming services is that Netflix, being the first out of the gate, has got a lot of subscribers and all these other services are competing to be the add-on second or third option for viewers. So their market share is going to be necessarily small, where the ones with a big catalog of content have an advantage. I, for one, do not watch enough films or TV to justify more than one subscription and I got Netflix a long time ago and see no reason to change. The only reason I got to see Ted Lasso is because Apple threw is a free one year subscription to Apple TV+ to anyone who purchased an Apple device like a computer or iPhone. When Apple TV+ was launched, their big promotional show that was meant to lure subscribers was The Morning Show starring Jennifer Aniston, Reese Witherspoon, and Steve Carrell. After I got my complimentary subscription, I watched a couple of episodes and did not care much for it and stopped watching, showing how risky it is to subscribe to an exclusive streaming service based on its marquee offerings.
I see the next few years as being in great flux before we arrive at some kind of equilibrium.
What’s going to happen is that people are going to piracy. When people can no longer get something for a fair price, they won’t pay for it at all. They’re shooting themselves in the foot.
Typo in the above -- meant to say “going to RETURN TO piracy”.
I was very sad when the last, independent movie-rental place in our town closed its doors last year. By any objective measure, we were all better off back in the 90s when we could rent any movie we wanted from the local Blockbuster than we are today. Back then, if you’d told me over the next few decades a) everyone would be able to download movies from a central depository any time they wanted, and b) most of the movies that came out a few years ago would be completely inaccessible to most people, it would have seemed unfathomable. Yet here we are.
The problem, it seems to me, is that there is no way to “rent” a one-time stream of a movie from someplace like Amazon. I can go to Amazon and buy any movie I want for download, pretty much, but it’ll cost me around $20, which is more than I want to pay to watch a movie that I only want to see once. It ought to be in the $2-$5 range, like it was in the Blockbuster days. I’d pay that gladly.
So now in addition to Apple TV+, we have Disney+, Amazon Prime, HBO Max, Paramount+ and many more.
Competition makes markets more efficient!
The market is very efficient… at teaching people to use bittorrent.
Kulgur:
An improvement, but really, it never went away.
Also, generally, it’s just a mistake to talk as if we’re speculating about some possible time in the future. (Also in Mano’s “we may be entering a world where certain films and TV shows will be inaccessible to some segment of the population.”) For the most part, we should be using present or past tense, because it’s the world we’re in now.
Unfortunately, the artists are the ones being (figuratively) shot … maybe in the back rather than in the foot.
I’m sure that executives at Apple, Amazon, and our handful of large film studios and record labels are not losing any sleep over it. Or if they are, they’re resting their anxious little heads on a giant pile of stolen cash, because they make an enormous amount of it while many others do the actual work yet get little or nothing.
Even though it’s been like this for years, I’m still a bit baffled at how some of them ever got involved. Take Apple, for example. It used to be that they made overpriced computers, in their own weird little ecosystem that more or less had nothing to do with me, if I didn’t want to be a part of it. Although they are rather monopolistic, I could at least avoid doing business with them and still do computing.
That’s just not how it is now. Leave computers aside for a moment. How is it that they’ve become major players in the music industry (and TV, books, etc.), so that they’ve inserted themselves between basically every type of artist out there and a large portion of their audiences? Seriously … what the fuck does Apple have to do with it? Or Microsoft? Or Google/Alphabet? Or any of these giant fucking corporations that seem to do nothing but take “their cut” from practically everyone else just because they can?
What exactly would they need to do, before we can’t tell any difference between them and the mafia? And how sure are we that this didn’t already happen a long time ago, while very few people were paying attention?
There’s a business opportunity there — a service to watch individual shows from various streaming platforms for payment and distribute the money to whatever platform after taking its cut.
The segmentation affects everything. Take Cricket:
There used to be a time when you subscribed to Willow TV and you used to get almost all international cricket and a huge amount of domestic cricket from big 4 (India, England, Australia, Pakistan) and a few other countries.
Now, a US subscriber needs US Hotstar for India matches, ESPN+ (or something) for New Zealand matches, another option for Caribbean matches and Willow for everything else. England matches are disappearing from Willow too. The number of domestic matches on Willow has trickled down to a few percent of what it used to be.
I don’t follow the music industry very closely, and I haven’t bought any songs for a while, but hasn’t that mostly settled itself out now? My understanding was that there were now several platforms where you could buy most songs at a reasonable price (a dollar per song, maybe?) And that once that reasonable price was well established, piracy took a nosedive because it was usually easier to just buy the songs legally.
Movies need to reach that point too — but I’m not sure if they will. Maybe the big music labels lost some of their power when everything went digital, but the movie and tv studios have still kept most of theirs? I don’t know — someone enlighten me.
“a problem that I think is going to get more acute with time …..”
I’d love to live in a world where this is the biggest problem.
“Will there come a time when we will not be able to see a particular film or show unless …..”
That has been applying to me since 2000, when I moved to the interior of Suriname.
“If so, there may be some films and shows we never get to see, which would be a pity.”
When in the USA did you get to see this brilliant Dutch movie?
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0051600/?ref_=fn_al_tt_2
This is just one example of course.
So to some extent you describe a non-problem and to the other extent a problem you always have had. Now let’s add the fact that more movies and shows have been made than we can watch during our short lifespan and I don’t see why we should bother. But I immediately admit that none of the companies you mention have the movies I want to see! With your Netflix subscription you won’t get to see the funniest movie ever made: Preparez vos Mouchoirs (Get out you handkerchiefs). Then again, your sense of humour being totally different from mine, you might not regret this at all.
Bottom line: enjoy what you can see, don’t bother too much with what you miss.
@1 Kulgur: “What’s going to happen is that people are going to piracy.”
How do you mean, “going to happen”? It has been happening for years.
@2 Kulgur:: “going to RETURN TO piracy”
How do you mean, “going to return to”? Piracy never disappeared. Me living in Suriname have bought dozens of illegal copies made in East-Asia. I suspect Surinamese broadcasting companies did too, or I can’t explain how I could see the impressive drama
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1068649/?ref_=nm_flmg_act_37
on television?
@3 BruceGee: ” when we could rent any movie we wanted from the local Blockbuster”
No, you couldn’t. You could not rent any movie your local Blockbuster didn’t offer. I bet many titles from my personal top-20 weren’t there. Like Preparez vos Mouchoirs. And Fassbinder’s Lola. Especially La Dentelliere. Perhaps Paul Verhoeven’s The Fourth Man though (superior to anything he made in the USA).
mnb0:
I have no idea of what tt0051600 or tt1068649 are.
You do you could (a) wrap the URL into an anchor tag, or (b) write the name of whatever work you might be linking, and thus avoid forcing readers to either click to find out or ignore the link, right?
Because I live under Verizon’s metered rural broadband, I buy DVDs on Ebay (never underestimate the bandwidth of a box of DVDs) and rip them. It costs less than half the cost of cloud rental and I am mostly buying used discs that the media empires make no money from. It’s a win/win/lose situation and I like it.
There’s a business opportunity there
It is bizarre when you think about it, the perfect platform already exists and is in use to implement this, namely the various torrent aggregators out there, it is distributed, immune to various denial of service, ransomware, and other attacks, needs very little capital outlay, dedicated bandwidth and ongoing maintenance.
Only the blind greed that drives the current system prevents this from being used to access any and all content available in a legal manner. Far better to lobby various governments in a futile attempt to make this platform illegal.
buy DVDs on Ebay (never underestimate the bandwidth of a box of DVDs) and rip them
I’ve done this for my music CD collection (2,500 and counting, regular trips to the thrift shops always net some interesting CD at a dollar per CD), ditto for DVDs.
Toss the ripped images on a network or attached drive and add a KODI box (Raspberry PI 4 does a fine job at around $100 and delivers 4K video at 60 Hz) and you are good to go.
Wouldn’t that time be called “advent of cable TV”? Not everyone had the premium channels (or even cable at all), if the channels were even available in a region. I really don’t see how this is any different.