One of the reasons the state of smart home TV really disappoints me. Logical conclusion is we'll all end up with Netflix HDMI sticks, Hulu sticks etc etc etc. DRM means we're never going to end up with a fully open TV player.
It was for a long time, the thing that "killed" it was Netflix being very good for a brief moment, while at the same time many pirate sites got shut down and content creators went after people who didn't use a VPN to torrent.
Many VPN services are one click to install and $2-5 a month, and the pirate sites are very resilient at this point, so anti-consumer practices could easily drive a resurgence in this form of mass market consumption.
You can keep a copy of every track of music on spotify on a single 4U server, 20 drives or so. That's ~100TB, assuming 5MB per track.
Every movie or tv show episode is another couple of PB in 720p or so.
Extrapolate the last 20 years of HDD capacity growth (around 300x), and assume that will continue, every single piece of media will fit on a single drive.
I know those assumptions aren't a given, but it sure feels like we're heading towards a world where you can just have a local copy of everything always.
I know that we techies can bypass it fairly easily, regardless of type... but I do understand the argument that 95%+ of people can't bypass DRM even if they tried their hardest, it's just too complicated for them. Which in a sense makes it effective and purposeful?
The thing is, it's so easy to get an HD DRM-free copy of pretty much any movie, tv show, etc that there's no real point - anyone who wants to share a copy of anything can do so very easily without bypassing DRM, because someone else will have already done it.
> it's so easy to get an HD DRM-free copy of pretty much any movie
To a techie. The amount of people who find torrenting too confusing and overwhelming or are afraid of legal consequences or don't even know it exists is, once again, the vast majority (unless we are talking about Eastern Europe and third-world countries).
Even if you could prove that the US had, say, 10 million people that torrented actively (which is, honestly, a big stretch in my opinion), the pitch to movie studios is that they should abandon DRM because 10 million people can bypass it and 320 million people can't; and 320 million people don't even know the DRM is there or something they should care about. Not a winning sales pitch there.
The hard part for people is not obtaining a copy of the media which DRM is "supposed" to prevent. The hard part is setting up the multiple services that makes all this convenient with slick interfaces that people are used to similar to Netflix. That would still require just as much effort with or without DRM.
I know there are people who sell Fire sticks on Facebook marketplace with Kodi pre-configured to use shady streaming sites on it. Or they would charge to "jailbreak" your Fire Stick and set it up for you. Many non-tech people would go this route. Not sure if these still work, but they were popular for a while.
Why can't you just plug a Linux box into your TV and use that?
Like am I taking crazy pills. I got fed up with the madness of all the streaming sticks, and putting in my password with a crappy remote and ended up dropping $300 on an old desktop from a discount computer store. Spent an hour throwing Ubuntu on it, and now bam, works like a charm.
I put the youtube, PBS Kids, and Disney+ (which we later removed) icons on the side so the kids can use it easy.
I can stream Hulu if I had an account, I can watch my Disney+, I can watch youtube, I can watch Netflix if I wanted to. Plus I can play steam games on it, set a fun screensaver. Loads of things.
The best part is I no longer have to try and put in a 12 character password with mixed case, numbers and symbols over a freaking TV remote.
EDIT:
Well this blew up more than expected. Many people are pointing out the issues with the quality. I'll be honest I don't care that much about quality, most of the streaming consumption in our house is Wild Kratts, and Bluey anyway.
Beyond that though is that I have to have a slightly worse quality, (meaning orders of magnitude better than the VHS I grew up on) to be able to own my computing device, to be able to have the freedom I want to use it. It's a price I'll happily pay. If they day comes that the streamers decide it's not worth it, then at that day I'll be turning it off and going to the Uncle Ted route of things.
Most of the major apps have something like scanning a QR code on the display to authorize a device using your mobile, which works well. Others can just cast to a TV, the way YouTube does. But the real problem with just slapping Ubuntu on it is you are losing HD video and often the audio features as well. It's only a good solution if you are indifferent to picture quality.
I could do that, and indeed I used to use a Windows machine as an HTPC until I got sick of dealing with UIs that didn’t play well with remotes (in fairness it’s been years but desktop apps for streaming services were always deeply inferior and web sites were designed for a mouse).
The larger point though is that what you’re describing is not mass market viable. If the streaming services wanted they could shut off HTPC access overnight and they probably wouldn’t even lose a rounding error in terms of users. In a future world where every streaming service has their own stick with its own ads and own DRM I can absolutely imagine them doing that to force everyone over.
> Why can't you just plug a Linux box into your TV and use that?
Because most streaming services don't support 4k HDR on Linux. And if I'm spending thousands of dollars for my TV to play 4k HDR content, I want to be able to watch it.
To be fair, it's not the streaming services fault, because Linux (er, Wayland and Xorg) does not support HDR. We're only just starting, on the bleeding edge, to have HDR with proper color management on Linux.
I'd rather use my TVs flavor of android than Windows, honestly. I just don't see what that would buy me.
I get running a Linux media server, don't get me wrong. But a dedicated windows machine for my TV seems like a waste of time and money when my TV can already do whatever that box would. It buys me very little.
Maybe there's a difference between Google TV and an Android TV, but my partner's dad can't buy/rent stuff on Prime Video through his tv, he has to use another device and then can watch it on his tv. He finds it very irksome, to say the least.
My understanding is that this came around by Google insisting on the 30% cut of purchases made in the Prime Video app on the tv, and Amazon told them to pound sand. I could of course be wrong, though.
I think that is a slightly different issue. Google and Apple charge a percentage for any purchases made on their app stores.
The equivalent here would be Prime offering a free ad-supported channel and Google requiring them to hand over a percentage of their ad revenue for the channel.
I don't think there's any significant difference here between Google TV and Android TV that I'm aware of. I don't think that's a great user experience obviously, but this is different from taking a portion of all the ad revenue which is shown on the device.
I don't love the model, but it's hard to see long term how Roku sustains itself on hardware sales alone. How many new Roku devices does one house need in a 3-5 year period? Investors want recurring revenue streams, and a new Roku device every few years isn't going to do that.
Kind of surprised that Roku hasn't been bought up yet.
I don't believe there's currently any alternatives to ASML's machines for EUV lithography. Unless you're fine using an older process node with lower efficiency. Of course these nodes are fine for a lot of applications still, but I have trouble believing there's any alternatives for cutting edge CPUs, GPUs, etc.
Short-term, yes. Long-term, these apps and services will start looking into offering hardware solutions of their own to become competitors, not providers.
I don't spend any time on shady websites with scams, ads, and viruses, and I surf the high seas for video content with regularity. It's very easy to do safely, and in this day and age, it beggars belief that this comment was made in good faith.
It's not really misinformation though. Most vuln researchers aren't burning browser 0-days targetting pirates, but many piracy sites host malicious content, even if that content isn't looking to deliver malware through browser vulnerabilities.
There is a significant segment of the internet that thrives in the gutters between paid services, straight up piracy sites, and actual "dark web" sites that require TOR or other specialized access. The restreamers that live in those gutters are questionable at best, straight up illegal at worst, and fund themselves through fraudulent ads, or legit ads for sketchy or dangerous services and sites.
It is entirely possible to use those sites safely, just like it's also possible to navigate dark alleys in major urban centres in the late hours, but that doesn't make it a low-risk activity.
I don't navigate any dark alleys in order to perform piracy. I pay a service to host/run torrents, and I browse the available torrents through their associated torrent aggregator.
The only danger involved here is in the actual downloaded content. There have been a few codec/filetype vulns for video files in the past, sure, but one that deploys through the browser through a local Plex instance would be pretty interesting, to say the least.
Well. I am sure you can do some googling (not as an asshole response). The service I use does torrent de-duplication, so if some other user has already downloaded that torrent, you receive it immediately instead of waiting, and you get $x size of cloud storage for the output.
They have an associated aggregator that has no ads on it, it's just a search bar and "What can we hook you up with?".
I pay $20 a month for it. Some may question what the point of paying for a torrenting service is, instead of paying the streaming sites. However, I used to pay for netflix and prime video, and I only went BACK to torrenting after things started happening to enshitify the product (like struggling to get full res videos because I run linux). The answer is simple: Ease of access.
It takes 10 seconds to find high quality content without crawling the underbelly of the internet. Hell if you are so included your torrent client can find it for you without actually opening your browser and drop in in your jellyfin media directory where its indexed by the time it finishes downloading.
I literally end up doing this for things I'm actually paying for when I want to watch the high quality version on a PC. I haven't owned an actual TV in years.
Well this is probably not the best place to link to pirated movies but I was able in 10 seconds to find options both on google and within the integrated search function a popular opensource torrent client. I would suggest it is incredibly easy to find. I'm sure you can do it if you so choose.
If you're talking about doing the playback on Ubuntu, you lose the high-definition. I guess it may not be important for you, but I expect someone who sunk a fair amount of change on a high-end TV to care.
The content providers will refuse to serve the video to you without DRM, attestation, HDCP, whatever new crap some MBA came up with to justify a paycheck to some other MBA…
What is meant is that services explicitly short change Linux users by restricting resolution based on client in a fashion that isn't trivially circumvented by fudging the user agent.
For instance a given content may be available in glorious 4K only via an app on a TV, 1080p via a windows or mac machine, and dogshit 720p that actually manages to look worse than old SD on Linux.
This is basically true of every service with Youtube TV being the least bad and showing at least reasonable quality. In theory showing lesser quality streams to less locked down platforms is supposed to make piracy harder. In reality popular shows are always available same day anyway.
Ultimately if you want creators to get paid and to enjoy the highest quality on Linux you need to both pay for and pirate the content and watch for instance on jellyfin.
Youtube has the video service with cats, puppies, howtos, reviews, and conspiracy theories and YoutubeTV which has live TV, as well as movies, and shows. It is the latter which is artificially limited on Linux but LESS so than for instance hulu or Amazon.
In case any confusion remains these latter are available at tv.youtube.com with a subscription.
It's a cheaper version of a cable package that can be used by up to five google accounts that might not share the same physical household. EG a subscription with multiple premium channels and a good range of channels available in two households could easily be $400-$500 not including internet. YoutubeTV for a similar range of content would be ~$100.
The purpose of youtube for most consumers is to consume video content. Much of the professionally produced video content is TV shows and movies which obviously remains popular. This includes by reference content originating from a range of platforms HBO/Showtime/Starz/Paramount/AMC and so forth
EG you select HBO and Showtime as part of your package and can view the same content as is on MAX or showtime in the singular unified youtubeTV interface. Kind of a mixture of TIVO and netflix with a better interface.
YouTube TV is a cable replacement service and costs around $70/mo last I checked. It has all the network and local tv channels as well as the usual hbo/showtime/espn/etc packages for an added cost. TV guide, DVR, multiple streams, etc.
I don't have (all of) those services but they're not like for like comparable for any services using Widevine, e.g. Amazon, Netflix and Disney. A Linux install will give you access to L3 content using the browser (usually limited to 720p but you can get a 1080p stream out of Netflix using a browser extension). I think the poster was having a bit of a joke though.
I'm really surprised that no one has bothered (or managed) to create an open-source TEE emulator. I mean, there's a ton of different ARM CPUs around there, and it's all ARM under the hood, so it should be possible to create a virtual TEE/TPM and provide it transparently to a VM?
It's not that it can't be done, just that it's an arms race of reverse engineering to try and keep it working against a motivated and financed adversary
What I'm more surprised, is that since most of the decoding and stuff is done on the GPU anyways, and the GPU has to be HDCP compliant, why can't they just directly send the stream to the GPU as is, tell it where to display it, and be done with it.
Well, then you couldn't have a play button, or pause button, or video text over the top of the video; unless there was some way of turning the GPU into a hardware-level compositor... which is generally not recognized as a good idea.
> unless there was some way of turning the GPU into a hardware-level compositor... which is generally not recognized as a good idea
I admit this isn't a domain I'm particularly fluent in. As a matter of fact, I thought that was already the case with all the talk about "GPU acceleration" of desktops. I think there was an HN post about Windows a few days ago, with people commenting on how all this changed between Windows 95 and 8/10.
My guess is that Widevine is pretty universally supported across multiple streaming platforms (i.e. won the DRM format war, even for audio) and 720p is good enough for most users. L1 also requires hardware decryption keys which are unique per device AFAIK (assuming Android - {I know browsers use a shared L3 key but not sure how L1 is implemented on PC formats}) and easily blacklisted.
For Linux users wanting a home theatre experience, I feel they are probably more inclined to go the bluray/piracy route. Personally I use my Android TV to stream in 4K with surround sound but am satisfied that I can still play everything using Linux, albeit at a lower resolution.
Nah, it's HDCP that's cracked. You can grab HDCP strippers (or rather, "splitters"/"signal multiplexers" that happen to strip HDCP) for cheap on alibaba and the likes. From there, all you need is a HDMI framegrabber or if you want the best possible quality, an SDI converter and a BlackMagic Decklink SDI capture card. That's a few hundred bucks.
Yes, given the 4K WEB-DL releases it seems a few groups/individuals possess the knowledge of decrypting L1 content. Occasionally an L1 key will be leaked but is burnt quickly. I think the requirement of "unique" keys stops an interest in a public effort to make L1 content work under Linux, especially as there is already support for L3 content. Even under Windows and macOS end users must be using Microsoft Edge or Safari (platform specific) - given Chrome's huge marketshare I imagine lots of non Linux users are consuming exclusively L3 content on desktop platforms so I'm not sure there's much demand for full/ultra HD content, although many users may simply be unaware that their browser choice affects the quality of content they are streaming.
I can confirm (mostly). I have a FireCube and if my Internet connection goes down then I can't watch TV at all. Even the Plex server I have in my closet. It's super annoying! In fact, I'm ==this== close to ditching it and going with AppleTV. The experience is just so much better.
Not sure if you're joking or not but already content is being filtered based on the client device. In my case of an Xfinity Flex TV box Plex refuses to play self-hosted content, and Amazon's app has restrictions on nested subscriptions.
Well, the article says, Amazon already charges this wherever Amazon Publishing Services is available. The change is to extend this charge to places where Amazon Publishing Services isn't available. Then the article provides some background info about how Amazon Fire works economically. So, basically, not much new here.
I personally think Apple does things correctly, and they do charge a premium, but they sell good products rather than requiring more of your time and energy (ads)
I'm in the Google ecosystem but I agree with the sentiment. Apple has no financial incentive to collect my data. Since they've begun differentiating themselves through their emphasis on privacy I think they have a financial incentive to protect my privacy.
> Apple has no financial incentive to collect my data
They simply understand most of your data isn't worth anything, it's a liability rather than an asset. They know it'd be a waste of energy and customer relations to peek into most of it, so they don't bother. They collect what they can readily use (such as your purchase history - they're pretty open about it), and don't care about the rest (spying on your conversations or photos in hope to build a marketing profile is still a cyberpunk fantasy).
And because they don't do this, there's no reason not to capitalize it by advertising themselves as some privacy guardians. Not doing so would be a waste.
Google and Facebook are failing, because they bought this "big data big brother big money" meme which they rode cheerfully while the hype was high, and now it's time for a realization. When contenders who say "we don't track you" perform no worse (or even better) than all those data hoards that were supposed to predict future, it's a sign that immense worth of personal data was overhyped.
They also make money on hardware not advertising - that data is useless to their core revenue streams (and might actually hurt them) where Facebook and google sell ads
Apple has tried and failed several times to launch advertising services based on user data. Their current lack of motivation is due to those failures, not to the lack of a desire to make more money from exploiting user data.
It's less an issue of the reality distortion field, and more the issue that Apple hasn't been co-opted by the allure of advertising dollars. That's going to change, with projections of revenue growth just from advertising expected to go from $5.3B to ~$20B (industry expectations), and regulations like the Digital Markets Act explicitly going after their walled garden.
If Apple allows sideloading apps in any way that is easily accessible to the average user, then
(a) Meta will insist their apps are sideloaded to enable privacy violations. Right now, they cannot say goodbye to iOS users. They could say goodbye to the small percentage that refuse to sideload (or even just put a worse version in the store to those people with enough new features to push most people to sideload.).
(b) Chrome will be sideloadable. Which means web developers will be convinced "sideload Chrome" is a reasonable fix. Reinforcing spiral and soon Google owns the browser in a way that is the envy of 1990's Microsoft. Keep in mind they managed to turn MS's Edge from a third browser to a Chrome skin. That's bad (see Manifest v3, WEI, etc.).
The list goes on, we could talk about Epic and games and store exclusives.
To say nothing about having to debug malware on my family's devices.
I suppose there's some truth to that as long as you recognise that for Apple, profits come first. This whole new "private & secure" thing on their end is pure marketing/business.
They didn't give two shits about it until they realised that it was a major issue of their competitors, now it's become their core features/marketing. But don't think for one second that the protective wall won't spring a leak or two if it can make Apple a profit.
Apple's dominance also comes from them cornering every possible market they can, they want to do everything themselves and monopolise as much as possible, their recent step was designing their own processors, the debacle with them trying to make their own cellular modems etc. Maybe they'll go for displays next but Samsung et al are so far ahead on that game.
Back in the days when TiVo was a thing, I built a MythTV box including all the troubleshooting of a capture card, X windows settings, getting a remote to work, etc. to the point where my non-tech spouse could use it like a set top box. It even looked like a set top box. This was when Netflix was DVD by mail.
The last Windows laptop I bought bricked itself in a week, the Amazon stick needed constant reboots, I don't care about side-loading apps/widgets/software on my devices - I want them to be like my refrigerator and just work. AppleTV devices are much better than others. Once you're in the Apple walled garden things are much easier on me as an end user. There are seamless transitions from device to device if I want, sharing between them is a breeze. Sure other platforms are "open" or might have more advanced features, but I don't want to waste my time doing tech support having the BeenThereDoneThat™ patch.
Edit to add: "open" usually just means you have countless versions of "standards" to try and get things to interoperate. I deal enough with that at work to be turned off from dealing with that at home when I just want to chill and consume whatever nonsense I'm into.
One started a platform with an upfront communicated commission rate that, at the time, was literally received with applause because before that the rates were significantly worse for developers and has never raised the rate in its entire history (instead lowered it for certain circumstances).
The other is a bait and switch, luring people onto the platform under one set of rules, only to pull the rug from under them years after the status quo was established and change the rules to impose a commission that didn’t apply to them until now.
One is hard to argue as an anti-trust violation and the other is pretty much a textbook example.
Point #1: This bait-and-switch tactic shouldn't be allowed by consumer regulations (Not in the US, but here in Brazil it would be a no-no) as in the end Amazon is tricking it's use base into paying for the Fire TV as a great deal, when in the end they will pay more for streaming as those costs that Amazon is putting on the streaming services will be paid by them in the end.
#2 Wouldn't this movement be (potentially) a great chance for Plex to better position itself in the legal side of streaming? Because by offering a free hub for streaming (even licensing it for hardware sellers like Dlink and others, like Boxee once did) might generate a good revenue stream for them...until somebody buys the whole team (I miss you Boxee!)
It's called the razor-and-blade model, it's not a bait and switch.
RE Plex, that's basically what Android TV does, except it's better than Plex (for streaming services and device manufacturers) and has the same model as FireTV
- Customers bought the devices without the 30% rule in effect
- Amazon introduces the 30% rule
- Customers will now be asked higher prices to make up for the lost revenue
The razor-and-blade model is about selling one product cheap to increase sales on a complementary good. It's not about a vendor changing the situation, as is the case here.
Plex Inc. is not a good company. They are eager to collect and sell your data to advertisers. Jellyfin is a great alternative.
Plex may share Collected Information as expressly set forth in this Privacy Policy, including the following limited situations: [...] With third parties to improve and deliver advertising to you on our behalf.
Plex may also use third-party advertising companies to serve ads, which may, directly or indirectly, collect or use information about user visits to websites and mobile app usage over time and across non-affiliated websites and mobile apps to display advertisements more tailored to users’ interests on this browser or device, and those browsers or devices associated with it.
As lousy as Plex (both the company and the product) have become, there really aren't alternatives with feature-parity available. Jellyfin is starting to get there in terms of basic media center functionality, but still faces stability and platform compatibility issues that have been long-solved by Plex. Jellyfin also lags behind in ecosystem support/integration for those of us operating media servers with heavy amounts of automation and dependencies on workflows executed by 3rd party packages.
Here's my data point: I use Jellyfin and I am satisfied with it.
My use case: movies and TV shows, streaming from mobile, PC, or smart TV with auto-downloaded subtitles and varying stream quality. Heavy use of the "watch together" feature. (Plex watch together is horrible compared to Jellyfin.)
What is particularly lousy about Plex as a product? Overall I'm quite satisfied with it, it's gotten better over the past few years noticeably I felt with the downloads actually working, collections, more suggestions, etc... I will say the genre filter for movies/shows is quite useless though.
where "my data" means a record of the shows i watch.
i'm okay with that. the shows i watch don't need to be a secret. i want advertisers to know what i watch, so more of that sort of TV gets made. If Plex can make money off this information, and give me a good service in exchange for that, it seems like an arrangement that benefits us both. what's the problem?
* notatoad watched show X-Episode 5 on 28-July-2023 at 8pm. We can also correlate that that they used UberEats to order Thai Cuisine at 7 pm on the same day, and that a certain group he belongs to was Y% more likely to buy the product placed within that show.
The second kind of information will be used in the future against you, to extract the maximum amount of money from you for services that "you just can't miss", after being bombarded with ads and social media influencers in sufficient quantity.
I used to order Chinese take out to watch every new episode of Burn Notice. I’m not concerned about companies knowing this and using it “against me” in targeted advertising.
Umm no need to pay for many or any streaming service then that consumer problem is solved just watch the free outlets like YouTube.
Hollywood's biggest competitor is content creators on Youtube, Tiktok, etc ... my bet is they will need to compete and many paid offerings will consolidate and become free / less expensive to compete with all the free content creators on YouTube, Tiktok and etc. If you look at where the eyeballs are the majority are on Tiktok. Personally after using Reels, Tiktok and tons more of YouTube i have a hard time watching long form content. I just want to watch stuff here and there in the background while im working or right before bed any other time Im far away from tv screen outside or with friends/family enjoying life.
Further .. i use to watch documentaries on the history channel and or other places ... there's tons of solid and good content creators doing that same thing on youTube.
I'm not convinced that Hollywood really competes with TikTok. Going out for a movie date sounds a lot more interesting than "let's go flop on the couch and watch TikTok/YouTube all evening."
If it does look at the box office results this year or lack of them compared to the last few years ... many not opening and or close to 100 million seen in many prior years.
Could be a mix things from attention spans changing in various demographics to economics to increased spending in travel to other things.
You really couldn't have picked a worse weekend to make this call. Barbie, alone, is setting record numbers that are showing a pretty good recovery for the past few years.
I'm open to attention spans changing. Or demographics changing. Or both. My money, though, is pandemic hangover. I'm struggling to see how anything else comes even close in explanation power to, "we were in a pandemic."
My thoughts are based on the data above, other similar data Ive seen, my own shortening attention span and these years lackluster box-office compared to 2022 (movies from 2022 that opened above and or well above 100 million https://www.boxofficepro.com/the-top-10-movies-of-2022-at-th...)
To me Hollywood needs to worry even more so the writers, actors and etc ... a younger demographic the future's attention span looks to be elsewhere and they aren't paying to watch their media.
The numbers for movies took an obvious hit during the pandemic. There could be other explanations, of course; but it will be hard to avoid the elephant in the room that is the pandemic.
This will be true for basically all markets. There was an obvious shock during the past few years that is already explanatory for so many problems. No need to hunt for others.
But, even the article you linked is about how the market "continued its recovery in 2022." By the accounting, with the record breaking weekends we just had, this year seems set to be larger than last. Sure, it isn't larger than the past two combined, but that is hardly damning.
Cool I'll stick to my out of the box thinking ...it's never popular on here but in the end future proves to be on the money
in a few years we will see many streamers Consolidate and to compete against the biggest streaming apps YouTube and TikTok more free offerings will be available and or cheaper ones. Hollywood
'S push to go AI is a smart money saving one
I confess I don't know what you are saying here. :(
I should also ack that I do actually subscribe to some twitch channels. I have no problem saying that these things are growing. Most evidence I am seeing shows not that they will supplant the old guard movies, but will grow along side them.
This is not much different to video games as entertainment. I remember concerns that they would somehow replace physical sports. If that is still a concern, it is hard to take seriously. Traditional sports have continued to grow to unheard of sizes.
Does this mean that hollywood and the like have nothing to fear? Not really. But licensing on movies and broadcasts being what they are, they have quite a moat on things.
Im saying attention spans are changing and in the TikTok demographic they are used to short form content. Heck even youTube added stupid short form content videos which now I watch on there. YouTube and TikTok are the two top streaming apps and they are free. They are more used then Netflix and all the others. Thus all the others will start competing with YouTube and Tiktok by merging .. like Disney Plus merging with HBO Max. They will offer more free alternatives to compete with Youtube and Tiktok too. Hollywood will still make money of course, but not as much as they have use to been making when they are competing against the top two streaming apps (YouTube and Tiktok) that are free.
TLDR summary Hollywood's biggest competition isn't between themselves but YouTube and Tiktok and how they are shaping and changing media consumption habits and thus the media landscape. To me the data I pointed out already shows this including 2023 lackluster box office results compared to 2022.
The evidence just isn't there to believe that any of the small streaming offerings are competing with long form videos. "Funniest Home Videos" is, not shockingly, on the drop. But long form entertainment is literally doing better than it ever has.
Yes, YouTube and the like have more viewers than some of the paid services. They aren't, necessarily, making more money with those viewers. And even odds on whether they could keep the viewers as they try to make money. My bet would probably be no, all told. Consider, radio has been free for ages. Even broadcast television was free. This did little or nothing to prevent paid services from growing.
Free and YouTube are not the same. YouTube either has ads or you're paying. Ads are not free. They take your time, which is in limited supply for everyone on the planet. The use of an adblocker does make it free.
I've never used Tiktok so I have no idea if it has ads and what the frequency is.
> i have a hard time watching long form content
I don't know if this is good or bad. I'm older and think this loss of attention is very much a net bad to thinking, but maybe the new way of devouring content turns out to be a plus. I always wonder if 15 second videos turn to 10 seconds, and then 5 seconds, and then 1 second over the next 100 years. Is the future just a video from the A Clockwork Orange rehabilitation scene and everyone is happy about it?
This is why billionaires who could pay to have someone wipe their ass invest in longevity startups.
Okay I watch a lot of YouTube it it’s several leagues of quality below a lot of TV shows.
Some documentary YouTube channels also clearly just read Wikipedia and regurgitate random online sources. They don’t have the budget to go to the actual source or do any interviews.
Ofc there are a lot of bad TV shows on streaming services too but a world with access to both is nice.
I am not sure I understand the Plex example here - their free streaming service that they are pushing so aggressively involves a lot of ads and some ad revenue as well. Eventually since they have to pay FireTV the 30% cut, they might end up raising prices of Plex Pass, or discontinue their "free" streaming service?
Low cost computer, free software updates, backend infrastructure, several years of functional life, for $40 in sales (is there any profit there?). Exactly how is it surprising that they need to make some sort of additional revenue via kickback?
The Pi is sold without peripherals (remote) at that price point, they build little of the software, and given the supply/demand of late, there's a good argument to be made that it's well underpriced.
When I had DirecTV Stream, I bought their streaming device (basically an Android steaming device, but they made it super simple to go into programming, feeling more like traditional cable). They cost $120 each.
The thing I'd point out is that if you're taking 30% of revenue from 4 streaming services, you're getting more revenue than if you operated a streaming service. I agree that these boxes/sticks need some recurring revenue (120% of the revenue of the streaming services). However, should they receive more revenue than the services themselves?
If they're taking 30% from Netflix, 30% from Max, 30% from Disney, and 30% from Paramount, they're getting over $16/mo. Should it be $16/mo per user?
The problem isn't that they need revenue. It's that the revenue demands seem very high compared to the costs of maintaining those boxes. They aren't looking for $10/year to cover their costs and make some profit. They're looking to get more revenue than those actually creating the content.
It's not like amazon is paying for the maintenance of the entire software stack. And the part they're doing they mostly have to do anyway to support new devices.
Cory Doctorow has been writing about this lately. It seems we are heading back to the economic system that preceded capitalism in Europe: feudalism, where almost all of the gains were taken by rentiers: people who made money based on what they own (land, exclusive rights from the king, etc). Want to sell an app? Pay 30% to the landlord, but only if what you want to sell doesn't conflict with their business model.
At what point does a streaming service build an installer that walks you through turning on ADB and push the app over network ADB and just distribute outside Amazon (and Google)?
(Sure, this is a lot of effort, but someone might go for the ol' sideload gag.)
30% is too high, but historically, cable networks gave about 15% of their impressions to the cable or satellite company to sell locally. So, on MTV, you'd see about 15 minutes of ads sold by MTV and 2 minutes of ads from the local car dealership that were sold by the cable co.
FireTV is a roughly a quarter of the OTT market in the US. Content providers could likely boycott the platform and survive if they got together and collectively stood against it.
Every streaming device manufacturer does this. Roku demands a revenue cut if you want your app on Roku devices, last time I paid for something Amazon Video on my Apple TV Apple forced the transaction to go through Apple Pay and presumably took their cut there.
It’s the standard business model in this market: sell a streaming device at or below cost and then turn to the streaming services & tell them that if they want access to the XX million people who own your device they’re going to have to pay up. 30% seems to be the going rate.
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