Fragmentation is what causing the rise in movie and tv piracy, if I was to guess. For years piracy have been declining in Denmark, this past year is the first time is started to rise again. The same year where Netflix as been losing a ton of content.
Fragmentation is a huge problem, and I don’t understand it. Why do you care about managing your own streaming platform. Just licens everything at a price you believe to be fair and let the platforms fight to provide the best experience. As a music, TV or movie studio you’re the only one that sure to make money.
"Fragmentation is a huge problem, and I don’t understand it. Why do you care about managing your own streaming platform. Just licens everything at a price you believe to be fair and let the platforms fight to provide the best experience. As a music, TV or movie studio you’re the only one that sure to make money."
This would be amazing. Imagine picking your streaming service based on who has the best app / recommendations / social baked in (or whatever you were looking for). But from a friend that works in TV sales - the platforms fight and pay for the exclusives. If it's going to everyone - pass. That money helps film the new stuff. I guess music has an advantage in the respect that it doesn't really work like that - and it's much cheaper to record an album. That's why it's so frustrating when music services fragment.
Have music services really fragmented yet? I seem to remember some larger artists trying that, but I don't recall it being successful.
It's pretty rare that I can find something on Spotify that isn't on Google yet (or vice versa), and even then they usually catch up to each other eventually.
It's common for me to find stuff not on spotify, but I'm into some really niche stuff from the 90's and 00's that just didn't have a big following. I'm also into less mainstream stuff and do get good value out of Spotify, and most small/independent content creators are also putting their stuff on Spotify themselves these days, which means the situation shouldn't happen again.
Distribution of content is a "near-zero" cost relative to content production. However, the value of content distribution value is much higher than content. Furthermore, the value of the distribution of the content rises exponentially based on the collective set of content.
It's basically designed as a winner-take-all environment, so you have a bunch of digital fiefdoms. Or as put by Jim Barksdale on How to Make Money: "you either bundle or unbundle".
The thing about fiefdoms is that it increases the amount of territory that's close to a border (by making lots of borders), and crime flourishes around borders.
I pay for Hulu, HBO Now, and Amazon Prime. I suspect a year or two from now the same (or more) money will get me less content, as even more is segregated into separate streaming platforms. I think I'll end up just trading accounts with people, so they can use mine, and I can use their Disney, Showtime and Youtube TV or something. I'll get more content for the same price. But once I've done that, why not share three ways, and each person can pay for two services instead of three, and I'll get more content than now at less cost?
We've finally gotten to a place where people are happy to pay to stream because content is actually available and it's much more convenient, and the rights holders are so greedy they are going to force people back into the mindset that stealing is okay (but this time it's stealing services, not digital content).
> Why do you care about managing your own streaming platform.
because voluntarily giving up control over your content to a monopole means you loose leverage. If 90% of all video content is on netflix, they can set the terms, not you. "we're paying half of that or we dont host it".
> Just licens everything at a price you believe to be fair
They most likely do. But if noone else is willing to pay enough, its only going to be on their own platform.
I disagree completely. Exclusive content is not to protect against netflix becoming a monopoly. it is for the studio to try to be the monopoly!
if your content has a price in the open, streaming platforms can then compete on price/quality to end user. instead, today, they compete 100% on exclusives.
Music and movies are not substitute goods. Ignoring piracy, if you have an exclusive on some content, the fans of that content will come to you instead of choosing some other work to consume.
Not that long ago, the consensus was that it was the opposite that was causing piracy: bundling.
They are the two sides of the same coin, which is that people don't want to pay what the content providers want to charge. Fragmentation wouldn't be a problem if each service was 99 cents a month, and bundling wouldn't be a problem if one big service that had everything charged $10 a month. Netflix showed that the latter is true - people generally don't complain about having to pay for all the content they don't care about on Netflix because they feel that what they do watch is worth at least $10/month.
I'm not a fan of fragmentation, but you have this reversed. Fragmentation exists because it allows content producers / owners to get every possible benefit out of that content before it is generally available. This happens with books (hardcover vs. paperback), medicines (years before generics are available), video game platforms etc.
The producers are merging with content providers precisely because it allows for this maximization of revenue. It's no accident. Apple ruined it by taking 30% of most digital activity on the planet - that's where the money is at scale and you won't see a reversal until those margins start to approach zero.
If a content producer wants the most amount of profit for a known good, say a famous band, (meaning they don't need to give it away to get discovered) then you'll make sure to fragment your customers and make the people that want it most "pay" the most. It makes all kinds of sense as a producer, and it happens in every industry.
Piracy is consumers saying "this is BS" and stealing the content so they don't have to pay more - because they feel entitled to do so. Sure, "let everything be free" is a wonderful goal culturally and for consumers but the model won't win out for things in extremely high demand.
Yup, we've gone from paying $120/month for an all-in-one cable package, to paying $39/month for a handful of channels, $10/month for this one online streaming service, $15 for the other one, $30 for another set of channels, and eventually we get to the point where we're paying around the same (if not more) than the all-in-one package, but we now have to manage multiple platforms, and we most likely have less content than we had before. Fuck all that noise.
Fragmentation is a huge problem, and I don’t understand it. Why do you care about managing your own streaming platform. Just licens everything at a price you believe to be fair and let the platforms fight to provide the best experience. As a music, TV or movie studio you’re the only one that sure to make money.