There was a famous case in which “DVD Jon” was acquitted of all charges. So maybe it depends on the jurisdiction?
Well, all laws are national. I was talking about U.S. law since 1998 and you cited a Norwegian case from 2003. I have no idea what Norwegian copyright law was in 2003 and what it might be now.
Not Amazon. Universal (et al). Studios that make is over expensive for streamers to carry their stuff.
And seriously,
That’s what the spyglass icon is for. Amazon, etc all have subcategories in their pages for “new” or “hot” or “comedies” etc. The old TV shows don’t have to be on the main page, as long as they are there.
Once Amazon would put a title in the server, who cares if three people a year watch it. If they’d come to a good agreement with the studios, it doesn’t cost them anything until someone watches it. then they send $2 or whatever to the studio.
Well good for you. Other people do. Including songwriters and actors that like their residual checks.
The thing is, in this ever computerized future in which we live in, once the system is set up, it costs nothing to collect individual payments and forward them on, It can be automated.
Yes, and what would Amazon get out of that $2 that they sent to the studio?
Ok, sure. But you’re asking why people AREN’T doing it and the answer could be as obvious as “Not worth it to them”. Hell, if the income is small enough, it might take a long while just to recover the set up costs.
We know people aren’t doing this and I doubt the reason is “No one’s considered that they could be getting a quarter penny”
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The current state of VHS rental is… not great.
Seriously, people, I was in my local FAMILY FLlCKS Rent-A-Film last night, and it looked full of the movies I wanted. But those were empty boxes!
I was picking up box after box, shelf after shelf, of Risky Business and Flashdance. All empty! On a Tuesday night!
Okay, then I tried 48 Hours … darn it, even Mr. Mom and Tootsie were all out! I’ve heard people will do that: rent a movie early in the week and pay late fees just to make sure they have the movie for their Friday Night Movie Party.
I swear, my VCR can join the BetaMax machine in the trash. Another week of this and I’m going back to just watching TV. Hmm, Dukes of Hazzard and Miami Vice are on Friday nights…
Geeze you people. Are you all just being contrarians, or do you really not see it?
They get the money I pay them to be a member of prime. Or they charge 2.99 to “rent” it. Same thing they do now. Except they have …wait for it…more choices. Choices that they used to have, since I was watching them, and using my Prime membership to watch until they stopped making them available.
They’re probably not doing it because they way things were done is “you pay us a flat fee to make it available, whether anyone watches it or not”.
My proposal is that the studios adopt a “pay to watch” model, not unlike music publishing rights.
I don’t know why this seems such a contentious point. People have posted here many times complaining about material no longer being available. I’m proposing a solution.
It seems like you are under the impression that there’s little or no cost to Amazon for offering little-watched programming, because the “only cost” they’d have would be to pay the rights-holder each time someone actually watches that programming. What people are saying is that that may not actually be the case – there may well be some fixed or system costs that aren’t immediately visible to you (or, to be fair, to us, too).
If Amazon is no longer offering – at all – certain programming that they used to offer, then it’s likely either (a) not enough people watched it to make it worth the cost of carrying it, or (b) someone else now has the streaming rights. I kinda doubt that it’s (c) Amazon has decided that fewer choices is better.
I think the core discomfort is the entire “…as a service” model, which unfortunately is the way everything has either already gone or is going very soon.
Another example would be how you used to buy and install Microsoft Office on your computer (analogous to buying DVDs), but now they are very strongly encouraging you to switch over to the Office 365 service instead, similar to subscribing to streaming services.
The next big threat / inevitability is when windows itself switches to the service model. Pay $10 a month so that your computer’s operating system continues to run. Gee, I can’t wait for that.
As far as I can tell, the major drawback of the Roku search screen is that it can’t see subchannels that you don’t subscribe to. For example, if you add the PBS Masterpiece channel to Amazon Prime, Roku search will now see the shows available on Masterpiece. But until you add Masterpiece to Amazon, the Roku search screen won’t find those shows or indicate that they are available via Amazon.
Funny, I was gonna ask you the same thing. 
They’re already getting that, and they’re still getting it even though they’ve removed that movie.
When a streaming service is deciding whether to keep a title, it has to decide:
Will we lose current customers if we remove this title?
Will we lose future customers if we remove this title?
That’s really it. I have no doubt that certain titles (Friends and The Office come to mind) are loss leaders in terms of strict revenue*, but they do drive membership. When Netflix lost Futurama - my digital equivalent of comfort food - my subscription status downgraded from “permanent part of my budget” to “let’s wait and see how I feel at the end of any given month.”
What I think you’re failing to consider is just how granular their data is. They know how many people watched your unpopular show, yes. But they also know how many people watched the first season but not the second. They know how many people stopped after one episode. They know how many people binged it in one or two sittings. They know how many people watched the opening scene of Episode 1 and immediately turned it off.
And, perhaps most importantly, they have a good idea how many people joined just for it, because those are the people who watched it immediately after signing up.
So low viewership is one metric, but low engagement is another one. If a title doesn’t have any capacity whatsoever to drive membership, then even a “pay to watch” model loses them money.
Example: amazon pays Zotti Studios a buck every time somebody streams the critically panned Johnny Bravo - His Dinners with Cecil.** If ten people a year watch it, then Amazon is spending ten bucks a year. Ignore hosting and streaming costs, which are certainly very low.
Amazon knows that nobody is joining Prime to watch the film. Amazon strongly suspects that nobody will particularly care when it leaves. So Amazon axes the program. It’s a gamble, sure, because if even a single user leaves as a result they’ve lost revenue. But it’s not like they’re throwing darts here. They’ve got plenty of data suggesting that the title is unprofitable, and plenty more data showing how many overall titles they need to give users an appropriate sense of scale and choices when they’re scrolling through the catalogue.
*NBC paid a half-billion to get The Office from Netflix, for example
**it’s not my fault - the script was good but production went completely off the rails
I suspect that will mutate a bit into maybe a pay-as-you-go model for some people, combined with a full subscription model for others. I think the streaming plans will go there sooner than software actually, but I do think that software will end up there for things like Office eventually. I don’t use Word or Excel that often at home, so paying $70 a year for a Office 365 seems absurdly expensive. But I’d be down with some sort of pay-as-I-go scheme. (once my current installation of Office 2013 is obsolete, of course).
I actually think the OS as a subscription model makes a lot of sense, as long as it’s coupled with better customer service/updates/etc… I mean, it is one of the critical components of a working computer - perhaps THE critical component on the software side of things. It should be priced commensurately- along the lines of a CPU, GPU or motherboard, I’d say. $100 or whatever is essentially a loss leader for Microsoft.
But yeah, there’s a segment of old-timers who haven’t really adjusted to the idea that we don’t own what’s on a DVD or that we’ve installed on our PC. They think of it in terms of the old-school pre-computer media, where the media and the information were essentially one and the same, like a book, or a record or whatever. They never really owned that music or that book either- they owned the paper and ink, or the pressed vinyl, but not the actual information. But since there wasn’t any way to divorce the two, it never mattered, and people got to thinking they literally owned it because they owned the media.
They’re the ones who get cranky about what amounts to essentially renting something every time you want to buy it, because now the media and the information can be divorced, and there’s no good business point in distributing it on permanent media like they used to. It’s a quirk of how the media worked, not some sort of conceptual difference or legal difference.
I disagree with pretty much all of this. First, Windows is absolutely not a loss leader for Microsoft, though it’s not their top earner, certainly. (I assume Office is.) Second, you’re arguing the case for ‘OS as a service’ by comparing it to physical hardware that is itself a one time purchase, not ‘as a service.’
Also, isn’t Linux free? It’s hard to argue that an OS by definition should cost money (based on it being a core requirement) when there are actual free ones. Extending that to say that it’s justified to have to pay an ongoing subscription fee for the OS to work is even more tenuous.
What I think you are missing is that royalties and residuals are a) not usually individually negotiated and b) to the extent they are negotiated, they are negotiated before the payments are pennies.
For example, each individual bar that hosts live bands does not have to negotiate with each individual songwriter - they get a license from one or more performing rights organizations like BMI, ASCAP which distributes payments to the songwriters.
Actor residuals might be negotiated individually by the stars - but for most actors, their residual payment will be determined by the SAG-AFTRA contract - which means each individual station that shows Law and Order reruns is not individually negotiating with each actor.
But that’s kind of what you propose - that streaming services negotiate individually with whoever has the rights to a particular show on a per use basis so that they pay a fraction of a cent per viewer. Except you don’t take into account the cost of negotiating those contracts. And you also don’t take into account the difference between licensing music and licensing TV shows and movies - which is that exclusive licenses don’t really matter for music. Nobody chooses a restaurant/bar based on the location playing music that is not available elsewhere - but that is how streaming services compete.
That’s not how my Roku works. I just searched for a title and it showed it being on several services that I don’t have. They all have a “requires subscription” note next to them.
All I was saying is that an OS is one of the most critical components of a PC- every bit as much as a CPU, for example.
As such, Microsoft has LONG been underpricing them. There was no reason that they shouldn’t have priced them similarly to CPUs all along. Pricing them at about $100 was leaving a LOT of money on the table that they could have gained. I suspect it was in an attempt to avoid monopoly litigation, but that isn’t entirely clear.
Linux is free, but the vast, vast majority of home and corporate users don’t want to deal with Linux. Which leaves Windows. And with a subscription model, Microsoft can likely regain some of that revenue that they’ve been leaving on the table all along.
That seems unlikely. Underpricing a product is the textbook method for cornering a market. It would be a terrible way to avoid antitrust legislation.
For the main channel like Prime, yes. I’m talking about subchannels inside other channels, like adding PBS Masterpiece to your Prime. That subchannel content isn’t visible to the Roku search unless even if you actually subscribe to the subchannel.
As an example right now try searching for Sandition, which is a PBS show available with the PBS Masterpiece subchannel inside Amazon Prime. When I search for Sandition, it comes up and says it’s available for $1.99 per episode on Amazon. It doesn’t mention at all that you could subscribe to PBS Masterpiece inside Prime and not have to pay on a per-episode basis.
In other words, it’s not showing you subchannel streaming services at all in the search results.
Contrarians again.
I never proposed Amazon et al make individual contracts with the individual shows. I am not thinking they need a contract with the estate of Jerry Orbach to show L&O. They go to the owner - Universal, you know, that big planet logo before every episode. The same Universal that has half the television shows from the 70s. The company that’s in the business of making money off their properties. One stop shopping.
What no one seems to get is that I’m proposing things change to more of a music model. I don’t see why this generates such an argument. “We can’t do that because we never have done that.” Well, change that.
Universal et al wouldn’t make an exclusive contract with Amazon or Roku or whatever. They make their entire catalog available to everyone, on a per-use basis. Hell, they can actually hold it on their own servers, and just stream through the providers’ networks. Someone streams My Mother the Car on Hulu, Hulu sends a payment. Someone watched it on Amazon Prime, they send a payment. If no one watches, these programs sit on a server collecting digital dust. Everybody wins: the consumer, the streaming services, the studios.
If streaming services can’t compete on selection, maybe they can compete on quality or accessibility or who has the prettiest VJ. If they can’t, well, maybe we don’t need so many streaming services. Capitalism. Survival of the corporate fittest.
Or we can just keep doing what we’ve always been doing, and we’ll continue to get threads about how bad streaming is, in perpetuity.