I like Cory a lot and I often agree with him, but this feels a little half-baked and entitled. We’re talking about an entertainment business that supplies a nice-to-have service that is 1000% optional. If people were willing to unsubscribe rather than screech about Netflix pricing and policies, they’d listen. If they won’t stop paying, it is the nature of corporation to simply keep seeking more and more profit until customers finally walk away.
It is the lowest of low stakes to cancel Netflix.
“the password “sharing” that let you define a household according to your family’s own idiosyncratic contours is unilaterally abolished in a quest to punish feckless Gen Z kids for buying avocado toast instead of their own Netflix subscriptions.”
Uh… huh. Never for a moment does Cory acknowledge that, maybe, perhaps, password sharing has grown beyond any reasonable definition of “family” and extended to larger networks. Other services simply have a cap on the number of users for a “family” plan. I’d be curious to see Netflix’s data and the average number of users / IPs touching the same user/password pairs.
Like, I’m pretty sure that our college student has gifted friends with our Netflix password. I know he used to share it with my wife’s ex. (Who should absolutely have been paying for his own account.)
I’m far, far more pissed at Netflix at platforming anti-trans performers like Dave Chappelle than I am about their billing policies.
Uh… huh. Never for a moment does Cory acknowledge that, maybe, perhaps, password sharing has grown beyond any reasonable definition of “family” and extended to larger networks. Other services simply have a cap on the number of users for a “family” plan. I’d be curious to see Netflix’s data and the average number of users / IPs touching the same user/password pairs.
Netflix already has a limit in number of profiles and number of concurrent active users. You’re already paying twice as much just to get 4 devices.
Netflix already has a limit in number of profiles and number of concurrent active users. You’re already paying twice as much just to get 4 devices.
That’s 4 concurrent devices, rather than a single stream, plus downloads. (Not sure if they have a way to check if there’s already 4 devices streaming if I’m watching Netflix downloaded content on a tablet at 30K feet…) Also UHD vs. HD streaming.
Seems to me that double pricing isn’t unreasonable for 4x as many users consuming the service, perhaps more if you count in offline content.
Especially when you compare that $20 charge to, say, a movie ticket or other things $20 can buy. You can have 4 people watching pretty much unlimited content every day of the month, vs. maybe two movie tickets or a handful of streaming rentals.
Sure, I think the 18€ are reasonable as well, but only if I can actually use them.
If they now require those 4 concurrent streams to also be from the same WiFi (or to regularly return to the same WiFi), that’s ridiculous.
Often I go for months without using the netflix app on my phone, but if I use it, I’m usually somewhere else and trying to log in on e.g., my parents’ TV or watch something on the train. Now I’m not allowed to do that anymore?
Uh… huh. Never for a moment does Cory acknowledge that, maybe, perhaps, password sharing has grown beyond any reasonable definition of “family” and extended to larger networks.
That’s just part of Doctorow’s schtick - warning people about the downsides of tech with polemical opinion articles and novels. I often agree with the thrust of his arguments, but he’s anything but nuanced!
I agree, however it is worthwhile nothing that unlike with many others going that part he seems to be more on the idealistic, maybe naive side and not on the radical. So I wished more people would go more that route instead of denying reality or making up twisted arguments that make them morally right. Thinking of RMS and others here.
But both the naives and the radicals in that field seem to be right about a lot of things, sadly more so than more nuanced people
Of course that’s a gross oversimplification of people and I am only talking about the traits relevant to this discussion of course. What I want to say is that despite those downsides I think they are all in all in the group of people there should be more of in terms of being aware and not totally ignorant of issues. Especially the ones that have pretty long lasting effects or are roads that shouldn’t have been walked in first place.
I’d be more worried if the topic was a different one, but I’d like to think that they might act differently then?
I know a bunch of people that pay for one account and have it in several households. I do have Netflix on multiple devices that I own. But,installing it on my parents house (for example) it is something that feels like a clear abuse if the concept of an account for a household.
The way I see it, they have been reasonable enough to let people have multiple devices and multiple subprofiles without aggressively going after abusive password sharing. Now that people exploited their relaxed approach to a point where it affects their business… They are kind of forced to combat fraud.
We’re talking about an entertainment business that supplies a nice-to-have service that is 1000% optional.
No, it is not.
It is a valuable weapon against dangerous content that some people still ingest in extremely unhealthy quantities until it makes their brains explode and they go on a violent rampage, dismantling democracy along the way.
Giving young people in your extended family access to Netflix makes it less probable that they will spend their time getting groomed into toxic incels, neonazis or social network attention whores. Remember that these kids don’t read and they have virtually zero contact with an adult who would mentor them. Their parents are way too busy going to work and watching Fox news.
I have seen young people flock together just to watch Netflix. It gives them something to talk about. A slightly less shitty culture than their parents partake in. And they feel it’s better and want more once they are hooked. It helps to broaden their horizons and might help them start looking beyond their small town and their parent’s idea of fun.
Tightening screws will make it more expensive to share it with them and will create weird dynamics with their parents once you start paying for something their kids watch. As long as it’s “free anyway, I have accounts to spare”, it’s OK. But now they will start wondering, “are they grooming my kids or something”? Why would they pay for something my kids watch? What’s in it for them? Is it some woke propaganda or something?
[I am not living in the US, but I have similar family situation in Europe and I have borrowed your context for a bit.]
PS: Sorry for the tone, I had a bad day and it shows. I don’t want you - the reader or parent - to feel as if I am yelling at you. It is slightly touchy topic for me, since it affects me and people close to me. Your circumstances might differ and you may have a different ideas about meddling and that’s okay too. So, once again, sorry for the tone. A bad day.
I don’t understand. The people I have in mind have plenty of “outdoor time”, if that’s what you are worried about.
The way I see it, it boils down to what kinds of ideas the young person perceives and integrates. When the parents are not very intellectual and/or are troubled by their circumstances to the point that don’t help their child to grow intellectually, it’s basically up to the child to determine what kind of culture they want to be influenced by.
I argue that having access to a service that can provide rather progressive content that showcases various scenarios with characters the viewer can identify with helps build wider repertoire of behaviors and enriches the viewer while fostering tolerant views towards people in different circumstances.
The fact that the the content is not infested with ads like TV or YouTube without browser extensions and overall visual and aural approach feels contemporary helps to attract young viewer’s attention, which is helpful when the viewer can easily get their “entertainment” elsewhere.
I am not saying an online streaming platform is saving kids by gluing them to a screen, but it sure can help in right circumstances where the bar is even lower and I would be inconvenienced by its loss. And I sure agree with Cory that family is a complex beast.
Pretty good article but I think it glances over one main point, which is mostly irrelevant for the family discussion, but anyway…
Then, once Netflix had users locked in and migrated to the web (and later, apps),
Very typical “US first” reasoning, here in Europe I might have stumbled over the name Netflix but they didn’t really register, as they weren’t available and no one was mailing DVDs around here. Yes, people only switched to them (when they finally became available) because they had some Goliath stance already after having their catalogue after negotiations with the studios, but on the other hand - with all the regional licensing I couldn’t even tell if that international market is now a positive or a negative argument :D
Netflix definitely mailed around DVDs in the UK too before taking over streaming. My (at the time) 12-year old brother made an account and ordered about £50 of DVDs we never returned.
They weren’t even the first. Cinema Paradiso did a DVD by post service before Netflix in the UK. LoveFilm then joined in and also had a lot of reseller brands (e.g. Tesco). Amazon bought LoveFilm and then killed the DVD service to drive people to Prime Video (the response to my complaint to the competition regulator about this purchase showed that they had absolutely no understanding of the markets that they were regulating).
Cinema Paradiso is still around and remains the only rental service with a complete catalogue of recent things. I keep a subscription to them more because I want them to exist than because I use their service.
Say what you will about Doctorow or password sharing, his “enshittification of the internet” series has been on a roll here. More importantly there’s some salient points here about who’s defining a “household” (in general, not necessarily whether it’s a good idea for Netflix to handle anything how they have specifically) and why identity management in general is such a difficult data problem.
I worked on a team a couple years ago doing a mix of automated and manual identity matching (and other management) based on input from multiple systems, and it’s complex even without trying to monetize it. Names and other identity information points are right up there with date/time information and currency for how many assumptions people make that miss swaths of people.
In a functioning market, people would vote with their feet when companies started pulling such crap. But AFAIK Netflix has several exclusive deals with movie studios which would make it hard to get away from them. There’s not a whole lot of competition (yet), and the competitors they do have pull the same kind of shit, so you’ll end up needing as many subscriptions if you want to watch “exclusive” shows and movies.
Remember we’re talking about entertainment here, not insulin or some other vital commodity. Yes, Netflix has content you can’t (today) get (legally) elsewhere. If every company provided the same content there’d be little for them to compete on, making the whole market statement pointless.
Part of a “functioning market” is people being willing to be mildly inconvenienced to hold corporations accountable. If this is really a meaningful issue and people won’t “vote with their feet” for six months or whatever to actually inflict some pain on Netflix management, we’re truly lost as a society.
It’s not like there aren’t billions of hours of content available via other services, not to mention the option of just not watching TV and reading a book, playing a board game, etc.
Remember we’re talking about entertainment here, not insulin or some other vital commodity.
Fair enough, we’re squarely in the domain of “first world problems” here.
If every company provided the same content there’d be little for them to compete on, making the whole market statement pointless.
That doesn’t sound like that should be true - back when there were video/DVD rental stores, there wasn’t just one chain, but many and they all had the same “content”. And even now you can watch the same movies in various cinemas, as well. Netflix and its competitors could compete on time to market of movies, user experience like recommendations and app UI, streaming speed, subscription models and price, availability on set top devices etc etc.
Traditional TV subscriptions have done the same here in Europe at least - sure, there’s probably been some exclusive deals with some networks only being offered by some companies, but for most of them they deliver the same stuff. The infrastructure is already there, so that’s not an issue - especially nowadays with digital TV. Same for ISPs and telcos.
Part of a “functioning market” is people being willing to be mildly inconvenienced to hold corporations accountable.
So that’s why people keep using all these services such as Google and Facebook, or even smartphones which have been shown time and again to violate their privacy? In our day and age, it falls to governments to fine them for doing such. In my experience, people choose convenience over almost anything, every day of the week. Except perhaps cost.
That doesn’t sound like that should be true - back when there were video/DVD rental stores, there wasn’t just one chain, but many and they all had the same “content”
True-ish but IIRC they’d play games with pay-per-view, release dates to HBO or premium cable, etc. Disney is (in)famous for only selling movies on VHS (and DVD? I can’t recall) during limited windows and then putting them “in the vault.”
Videos stores may have had access to the same content, but we also had less content. You also had limited copies. “Sorry fam, I know we all wanted to watch the latest Rambo, but all the copies are gone. I got Over The Top instead, cause it also has Stallone!”
In our day and age, it falls to governments to fine them for doing such. In my experience, people choose convenience over almost anything, every day of the week. Except perhaps cost.
And our governments suck because, again, people choose convenience over almost anything - including the bare minimum oversight & holding accountable the people who are in government. (I’m looking at the U.S. and other democracies here where substantial percentages of the population can but don’t even bother to vote. Or vote very poorly against their own interests…)
I’d have cancelled Netflix when they dropped the last Chappelle special but I’m not the one in my household paying for the subscription, and my wife is still grumpy about losing Spotify and being talked into cancelling her NYT subscription…
Because entertainment is trivial, there is even more reason to regulate it, since there’s not a lot of downside risk. :-) The regulation I would impose would be pretty simple: content distributors cannot also be content owners, and content owners have to license content on listed terms that anyone can pay. That is, if studio X licenses show Y for $Z/stream to one streaming site, they have to make the same terms available to other streaming sites. Pretty low impact, but it would simplify things a lot for consumers and creators.
The regulation you propose was actual American law from 1948-2020 – movie studios could not own movie theatres (the Paramount Decree). So it’s not a particularly unusual idea.
Yes. I want to return to the olden days of antitrust. IP is intrinsically a monopoly on the ability to reproduce some idea. It only works if there are other regulations to balance out the monopoly with competition. If Disney owns all the movies and TV shows and Disney+, consumers are doomed.
In a functioning market, there needs to be a diversity of supply. Copyright intrinsically creates monopolies because entertainment isn’t fungible: no one who wants to watch a film and is going to be happy with whatever the cheapest film available on the market at that point is, they will want a specific genre, often a specific franchise, or specific actors / writers / directors.
If you want the streaming market to behave like a functional market, lobby to make copyright contingent on RAND licensing after a short period of exclusivity. If Disney, Paramount, Netflix, and so on all had to license their own content to all streaming platforms at the same price that they charge their first-party service after, say, 6-12 months of exclusivity then there would be a lot more competition.
Whoa, whoa. The streaming market right now is very competitive. D+, HBO Max, SkyShowtime, all have very broad movie libraries. Moreover, HBO Max has excellent Series selection, surpassing Netflix in quality. And frankly, Prime Video isn’t starved either.
And if you /really/ care about movies, there’s MUBI.
I hadn’t heard of half of the services you mention - maybe because I’m in Europe? I always thought Disney+ had just Disney movies, and HBO just offered series. So that’s competition in the general sense, but they’re not competing against eachother for movies from the big studios. But perhaps times are changing - if they offer the same types of movies, there’s at least a bit of choice for consumers.
Yeah, no. Now it does have the backlog from 20th Fox, Searchlight, Marvel, Lucas. etc
HBO just offered series
HBO Max is offering those yes, but it also has movies from… Warner Bros.
they’re not competing against eachother for movies from the big studios
Nope, they are the big studios. Only in Europe Universal and Paramount decided to spin up a joint streaming venture for their catalogues, and that’s SkyShowtime which is rolling out right now.
perhaps times are changing - if they offer the same types of movies
Right now we’re living through a period that resembles the pre-split up Hollywood of early 20th century. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Studio_system Movies that can be distributed in-house, are.
If you want broad coverage, you either need a lot of those services, or turn back to the black flag operations. I’m doing both.
For an excellent additional reading on how modern bureaucracy have been forcing reality into easy to read shapes, I can but recommend “Seeing like a state” by James C Scott.
This policy comes with an assumption: that there is a commonly understood, universal meaning of “household,” and that software can determine who is and is not a member of your household.
I’m skeptical about the “software can determine who” part, but “household” is actually pretty well defined, and as used by the government and economists (and presumably Netflix) it has a precise definition.
As far as the rest of the article’s ranting (which I only skimmed because it’s too wordy), it was really only a matter of time before they started cracking down on this, and I fully expect Spotify to follow suit at some point.
You don’t have a “right” to use NetFlix, and if you’re not playing by their rules they’re free to cancel your account or ban you. If you don’t like it, cancel and find a better hobby.
I like Cory a lot and I often agree with him, but this feels a little half-baked and entitled. We’re talking about an entertainment business that supplies a nice-to-have service that is 1000% optional. If people were willing to unsubscribe rather than screech about Netflix pricing and policies, they’d listen. If they won’t stop paying, it is the nature of corporation to simply keep seeking more and more profit until customers finally walk away.
It is the lowest of low stakes to cancel Netflix.
“the password “sharing” that let you define a household according to your family’s own idiosyncratic contours is unilaterally abolished in a quest to punish feckless Gen Z kids for buying avocado toast instead of their own Netflix subscriptions.”
Uh… huh. Never for a moment does Cory acknowledge that, maybe, perhaps, password sharing has grown beyond any reasonable definition of “family” and extended to larger networks. Other services simply have a cap on the number of users for a “family” plan. I’d be curious to see Netflix’s data and the average number of users / IPs touching the same user/password pairs.
Like, I’m pretty sure that our college student has gifted friends with our Netflix password. I know he used to share it with my wife’s ex. (Who should absolutely have been paying for his own account.)
I’m far, far more pissed at Netflix at platforming anti-trans performers like Dave Chappelle than I am about their billing policies.
Netflix already has a limit in number of profiles and number of concurrent active users. You’re already paying twice as much just to get 4 devices.
That’s 4 concurrent devices, rather than a single stream, plus downloads. (Not sure if they have a way to check if there’s already 4 devices streaming if I’m watching Netflix downloaded content on a tablet at 30K feet…) Also UHD vs. HD streaming.
Seems to me that double pricing isn’t unreasonable for 4x as many users consuming the service, perhaps more if you count in offline content.
Especially when you compare that $20 charge to, say, a movie ticket or other things $20 can buy. You can have 4 people watching pretty much unlimited content every day of the month, vs. maybe two movie tickets or a handful of streaming rentals.
Sure, I think the 18€ are reasonable as well, but only if I can actually use them.
If they now require those 4 concurrent streams to also be from the same WiFi (or to regularly return to the same WiFi), that’s ridiculous.
Often I go for months without using the netflix app on my phone, but if I use it, I’m usually somewhere else and trying to log in on e.g., my parents’ TV or watch something on the train. Now I’m not allowed to do that anymore?
That’s just part of Doctorow’s schtick - warning people about the downsides of tech with polemical opinion articles and novels. I often agree with the thrust of his arguments, but he’s anything but nuanced!
I agree, however it is worthwhile nothing that unlike with many others going that part he seems to be more on the idealistic, maybe naive side and not on the radical. So I wished more people would go more that route instead of denying reality or making up twisted arguments that make them morally right. Thinking of RMS and others here.
But both the naives and the radicals in that field seem to be right about a lot of things, sadly more so than more nuanced people
Of course that’s a gross oversimplification of people and I am only talking about the traits relevant to this discussion of course. What I want to say is that despite those downsides I think they are all in all in the group of people there should be more of in terms of being aware and not totally ignorant of issues. Especially the ones that have pretty long lasting effects or are roads that shouldn’t have been walked in first place.
I’d be more worried if the topic was a different one, but I’d like to think that they might act differently then?
I know a bunch of people that pay for one account and have it in several households. I do have Netflix on multiple devices that I own. But,installing it on my parents house (for example) it is something that feels like a clear abuse if the concept of an account for a household.
The way I see it, they have been reasonable enough to let people have multiple devices and multiple subprofiles without aggressively going after abusive password sharing. Now that people exploited their relaxed approach to a point where it affects their business… They are kind of forced to combat fraud.
I.e. this is why we can’t have nice things.
No, it is not.
It is a valuable weapon against dangerous content that some people still ingest in extremely unhealthy quantities until it makes their brains explode and they go on a violent rampage, dismantling democracy along the way.
Giving young people in your extended family access to Netflix makes it less probable that they will spend their time getting groomed into toxic incels, neonazis or social network attention whores. Remember that these kids don’t read and they have virtually zero contact with an adult who would mentor them. Their parents are way too busy going to work and watching Fox news.
I have seen young people flock together just to watch Netflix. It gives them something to talk about. A slightly less shitty culture than their parents partake in. And they feel it’s better and want more once they are hooked. It helps to broaden their horizons and might help them start looking beyond their small town and their parent’s idea of fun.
Tightening screws will make it more expensive to share it with them and will create weird dynamics with their parents once you start paying for something their kids watch. As long as it’s “free anyway, I have accounts to spare”, it’s OK. But now they will start wondering, “are they grooming my kids or something”? Why would they pay for something my kids watch? What’s in it for them? Is it some woke propaganda or something?
[I am not living in the US, but I have similar family situation in Europe and I have borrowed your context for a bit.]
PS: Sorry for the tone, I had a bad day and it shows. I don’t want you - the reader or parent - to feel as if I am yelling at you. It is slightly touchy topic for me, since it affects me and people close to me. Your circumstances might differ and you may have a different ideas about meddling and that’s okay too. So, once again, sorry for the tone. A bad day.
what are you even on about ? netflix being a way to prevent people from getting groomed, so is getting locked up in your room by that definition ?!
I don’t understand. The people I have in mind have plenty of “outdoor time”, if that’s what you are worried about.
The way I see it, it boils down to what kinds of ideas the young person perceives and integrates. When the parents are not very intellectual and/or are troubled by their circumstances to the point that don’t help their child to grow intellectually, it’s basically up to the child to determine what kind of culture they want to be influenced by.
I argue that having access to a service that can provide rather progressive content that showcases various scenarios with characters the viewer can identify with helps build wider repertoire of behaviors and enriches the viewer while fostering tolerant views towards people in different circumstances.
The fact that the the content is not infested with ads like TV or YouTube without browser extensions and overall visual and aural approach feels contemporary helps to attract young viewer’s attention, which is helpful when the viewer can easily get their “entertainment” elsewhere.
I am not saying an online streaming platform is saving kids by gluing them to a screen, but it sure can help in right circumstances where the bar is even lower and I would be inconvenienced by its loss. And I sure agree with Cory that family is a complex beast.
Did I explain myself?
Pretty good article but I think it glances over one main point, which is mostly irrelevant for the family discussion, but anyway…
Very typical “US first” reasoning, here in Europe I might have stumbled over the name Netflix but they didn’t really register, as they weren’t available and no one was mailing DVDs around here. Yes, people only switched to them (when they finally became available) because they had some Goliath stance already after having their catalogue after negotiations with the studios, but on the other hand - with all the regional licensing I couldn’t even tell if that international market is now a positive or a negative argument :D
Netflix definitely mailed around DVDs in the UK too before taking over streaming. My (at the time) 12-year old brother made an account and ordered about £50 of DVDs we never returned.
They weren’t even the first. Cinema Paradiso did a DVD by post service before Netflix in the UK. LoveFilm then joined in and also had a lot of reseller brands (e.g. Tesco). Amazon bought LoveFilm and then killed the DVD service to drive people to Prime Video (the response to my complaint to the competition regulator about this purchase showed that they had absolutely no understanding of the markets that they were regulating).
Cinema Paradiso is still around and remains the only rental service with a complete catalogue of recent things. I keep a subscription to them more because I want them to exist than because I use their service.
Say what you will about Doctorow or password sharing, his “enshittification of the internet” series has been on a roll here. More importantly there’s some salient points here about who’s defining a “household” (in general, not necessarily whether it’s a good idea for Netflix to handle anything how they have specifically) and why identity management in general is such a difficult data problem.
I worked on a team a couple years ago doing a mix of automated and manual identity matching (and other management) based on input from multiple systems, and it’s complex even without trying to monetize it. Names and other identity information points are right up there with date/time information and currency for how many assumptions people make that miss swaths of people.
In a functioning market, people would vote with their feet when companies started pulling such crap. But AFAIK Netflix has several exclusive deals with movie studios which would make it hard to get away from them. There’s not a whole lot of competition (yet), and the competitors they do have pull the same kind of shit, so you’ll end up needing as many subscriptions if you want to watch “exclusive” shows and movies.
Remember we’re talking about entertainment here, not insulin or some other vital commodity. Yes, Netflix has content you can’t (today) get (legally) elsewhere. If every company provided the same content there’d be little for them to compete on, making the whole market statement pointless.
Part of a “functioning market” is people being willing to be mildly inconvenienced to hold corporations accountable. If this is really a meaningful issue and people won’t “vote with their feet” for six months or whatever to actually inflict some pain on Netflix management, we’re truly lost as a society.
It’s not like there aren’t billions of hours of content available via other services, not to mention the option of just not watching TV and reading a book, playing a board game, etc.
Fair enough, we’re squarely in the domain of “first world problems” here.
That doesn’t sound like that should be true - back when there were video/DVD rental stores, there wasn’t just one chain, but many and they all had the same “content”. And even now you can watch the same movies in various cinemas, as well. Netflix and its competitors could compete on time to market of movies, user experience like recommendations and app UI, streaming speed, subscription models and price, availability on set top devices etc etc.
Traditional TV subscriptions have done the same here in Europe at least - sure, there’s probably been some exclusive deals with some networks only being offered by some companies, but for most of them they deliver the same stuff. The infrastructure is already there, so that’s not an issue - especially nowadays with digital TV. Same for ISPs and telcos.
So that’s why people keep using all these services such as Google and Facebook, or even smartphones which have been shown time and again to violate their privacy? In our day and age, it falls to governments to fine them for doing such. In my experience, people choose convenience over almost anything, every day of the week. Except perhaps cost.
True-ish but IIRC they’d play games with pay-per-view, release dates to HBO or premium cable, etc. Disney is (in)famous for only selling movies on VHS (and DVD? I can’t recall) during limited windows and then putting them “in the vault.”
Videos stores may have had access to the same content, but we also had less content. You also had limited copies. “Sorry fam, I know we all wanted to watch the latest Rambo, but all the copies are gone. I got Over The Top instead, cause it also has Stallone!”
And our governments suck because, again, people choose convenience over almost anything - including the bare minimum oversight & holding accountable the people who are in government. (I’m looking at the U.S. and other democracies here where substantial percentages of the population can but don’t even bother to vote. Or vote very poorly against their own interests…)
I’d have cancelled Netflix when they dropped the last Chappelle special but I’m not the one in my household paying for the subscription, and my wife is still grumpy about losing Spotify and being talked into cancelling her NYT subscription…
Because entertainment is trivial, there is even more reason to regulate it, since there’s not a lot of downside risk. :-) The regulation I would impose would be pretty simple: content distributors cannot also be content owners, and content owners have to license content on listed terms that anyone can pay. That is, if studio X licenses show Y for $Z/stream to one streaming site, they have to make the same terms available to other streaming sites. Pretty low impact, but it would simplify things a lot for consumers and creators.
The regulation you propose was actual American law from 1948-2020 – movie studios could not own movie theatres (the Paramount Decree). So it’s not a particularly unusual idea.
Yes. I want to return to the olden days of antitrust. IP is intrinsically a monopoly on the ability to reproduce some idea. It only works if there are other regulations to balance out the monopoly with competition. If Disney owns all the movies and TV shows and Disney+, consumers are doomed.
In a functioning market, there needs to be a diversity of supply. Copyright intrinsically creates monopolies because entertainment isn’t fungible: no one who wants to watch a film and is going to be happy with whatever the cheapest film available on the market at that point is, they will want a specific genre, often a specific franchise, or specific actors / writers / directors.
If you want the streaming market to behave like a functional market, lobby to make copyright contingent on RAND licensing after a short period of exclusivity. If Disney, Paramount, Netflix, and so on all had to license their own content to all streaming platforms at the same price that they charge their first-party service after, say, 6-12 months of exclusivity then there would be a lot more competition.
Whoa, whoa. The streaming market right now is very competitive. D+, HBO Max, SkyShowtime, all have very broad movie libraries. Moreover, HBO Max has excellent Series selection, surpassing Netflix in quality. And frankly, Prime Video isn’t starved either.
And if you /really/ care about movies, there’s MUBI.
I hadn’t heard of half of the services you mention - maybe because I’m in Europe? I always thought Disney+ had just Disney movies, and HBO just offered series. So that’s competition in the general sense, but they’re not competing against eachother for movies from the big studios. But perhaps times are changing - if they offer the same types of movies, there’s at least a bit of choice for consumers.
So am I? I live in Poland.
Yeah, no. Now it does have the backlog from 20th Fox, Searchlight, Marvel, Lucas. etc
HBO Max is offering those yes, but it also has movies from… Warner Bros.
Nope, they are the big studios. Only in Europe Universal and Paramount decided to spin up a joint streaming venture for their catalogues, and that’s SkyShowtime which is rolling out right now.
Right now we’re living through a period that resembles the pre-split up Hollywood of early 20th century. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Studio_system Movies that can be distributed in-house, are.
If you want broad coverage, you either need a lot of those services, or turn back to the black flag operations. I’m doing both.
For an excellent additional reading on how modern bureaucracy have been forcing reality into easy to read shapes, I can but recommend “Seeing like a state” by James C Scott.
The ideas from that book keep showing up everywhere I look when I least expect it.
I’m skeptical about the “software can determine who” part, but “household” is actually pretty well defined, and as used by the government and economists (and presumably Netflix) it has a precise definition.
As far as the rest of the article’s ranting (which I only skimmed because it’s too wordy), it was really only a matter of time before they started cracking down on this, and I fully expect Spotify to follow suit at some point.
You don’t have a “right” to use NetFlix, and if you’re not playing by their rules they’re free to cancel your account or ban you. If you don’t like it, cancel and find a better hobby.
Why would you intentionally use a mono-spaced font for prose? Do you hate your readers?