They didn’t need the army of lawyers to get license deals, so that’s not a fair comparison.
Its almost like its unecessary shit made up in order to keep profits away from working people artificially
Yeah its almost like if we didn’t keep extending copyright protections a bunch of stuff would be in the public domain and any streaming service could offer it without having to deal with licensing.
I mean that’s all well and good, but then how would the very deserving shareholders get dividends?
Won’t somebody think of the shareholders!?
It’s true that Hollywood is corrupt and csuite pay is absurd, but those deals are the only mechanism by which ANY money makes it to the writers, actors and staff who deserve it
It’s the exclusivity bullshit that gets me.
It could be: New movie is released! Anyone who pays the price tag gets to stream it!
But no, we must bidding war gouge.
On top of that, X Y and Z services exist in America, but not in other countries, so in this other country, everything is on Netflix, while I had to jump between three different services at one point just to watch Stargate
Their scale was also an insignificant fraction of what Netflix has, making the point even more irrelevant.
The best figure I could find on Jetflicks user count was 37k, where as Netflix has 269 million users.
Prices should go down with scale not up though.
There’s initial investment on the initial servers (and the software), and afterwards it should be a linear increase of server costs per user, with some bumps along the way to interconnect those servers.
The cost also scales per content. Because that means more caching servers per user and bigger databases, and licenses.
So this service has less users and more content, it should be way more expensive. The only reason they are cheaper is because they don’t pay those licenses.
The cost of storage in this case is more or less irrelevant - traffic is what matters here. You’re also not getting any mentionable bulk discount on the servers for that matter.
The key is that you can engineer things in completely different way when you have trivial amounts of traffic hitting your systems - you can do things that will not scale in any way, shape or form.
Certain types of content. But YouTube’s own existence started because people made content without licensing rights.
Nope. People will still make content. It’ll be on far less of a budget, but that didn’t stop the Film School generation of independent films in the 1970s (before which you had to sell your life and soul and beating heart to a studio). In between all the schlock were the occasional arty films we consider classics today.
And then there’s government subsidization of art projects, as per the National Endowment of the Arts.
I think the MCU movies, the DC movies, the many studio iterations of Spiderman have shown us what capitalism eventually churns out. Sony actually chose this path content as product the same resort to formula that plagued the music industry in the 1980s (and drove the Hip Hop Independent movement of the next half-century).
We just need to empower artists. Make sure they don’t have to moonlight as restaurant wait staff in order to eat and pay rent while they create, and make sure they have access to half-decent (not necessarily high end) hardware with which to do their thing. And yes, as Sturgeon observes, most of it will be schlock, but through sheer quantity of content we’ll get more gems than Hollywood is putting out.
