The streaming space desperately needs consolidation right now.
Every rights holder having their own service has killed a lot of the convenience because you'll now need several different services to go through an entire TV show, for instance. And also because all services other than maybe Netflix have garbage software for your various devices. Because every service also has to support 8 different platforms. Video playback and scrubbing is buggy and laggy, the GUI for finding stuff is sluggish. On one service(I don't even remember which, they all blur together in my head), I tried to watch some House MD and half the episodes were missing the English audio track.
Somehow any radio station can play any song they want (or seemingly any), for a standardized set of fees. And there is plenty of competition among radio stations. Couldn't we get the same setup for on-demand streaming of music and video?
That state of affairs was created by compulsory licensing. I'm not sure that really makes sense for TV/movies, since it would also mean a fixed royalty price for everything. But it sure would be nice.
Because there's much more variation in what it costs to make a TV episode or movie than what it costs to make an album of music.
If there was one fixed royalty for every movie, it would presumably be too low to recoup the cost of blockbusters, so we just wouldn't get those anymore (I know some people wouldn't care, but most people would). And low-budget stuff would get "too much" (maybe less of a problem ;) ).
Then again, most successful blockbusters make back their budget and then some from theater ticket sales. But there's a lot of stuff out there that goes direct to streaming, or that doesn't find a following in the theater. Not to mention TV shows never end up in theaters, so they rely a lot more on streaming revenue to pay the bills, since selling television advertising is no longer as lucrative as it once was.
I do agree that compulsory licensing could work, but they'd have to come up with royalty tiers, or some variable pricing that depends on some objective measure that is difficult to game, if such a thing exists.
This is interesting. I'm just coming from the perspective that when I go to the theatre, there's just one general admission price regardless of the picture I'm seeing.
But I understand how TV is very different. You have "prestige" TV and you have your network sitcoms.
Too bad for them. I would assume that getting a royalty off my streaming of something earns them more money than my piracy of something, but I guess they don't want my money.
If Netflix had seen themselves strictly as a distribution service, they might have taken an open-to-all, low-margin, high-volume approach, which had a chance to become ubiquitous and unassailable. Basically, they could have been the Cable-over-IP provider for everyone. But it's a lot harder to get there, from here.
Did they? I thought pretty early they saw the writing on the wall given the low barrier to entry for a juggernaut like Disney to compete with them, and went hard at their "Originals". I remember an interview with Hastings saying as much, that "in the future we won't have all the content, just the best content."
It would have been bold of them to essentially pull back and try and broker a deal where they accepted lower margins as a mere distributor rather than doing what they did and seek safety with their own library of IP.
No, that arguably makes it even worse. You're adding a whole new dimension to the problem of "where can I watch this".
Remember, the UX you're competing against is:
1. Open Kodi,
2. Open a 3rd party add-on that shall not be named,
3. Pick any movie or show that exists,
4. Select any available quality, from 100 GB 4K HDR releases to 1 GB 480p transcodes,
5. Play, anywhere, on any device, at any time
My fear is consolidation will lead to a nightmare scenario where they will push prices up and up until you literally cannot afford the no-ads version and we'll be right back where we all started, paying for access to shows but still seeing ads every 10 minutes.
Every rights holder having their own service has killed a lot of the convenience because you'll now need several different services to go through an entire TV show, for instance. And also because all services other than maybe Netflix have garbage software for your various devices. Because every service also has to support 8 different platforms. Video playback and scrubbing is buggy and laggy, the GUI for finding stuff is sluggish. On one service(I don't even remember which, they all blur together in my head), I tried to watch some House MD and half the episodes were missing the English audio track.