For movies and series, there's a process called "Minimum Commit" where the media companies have to commit to spend $X for a bundle of content that includes both the content you want to sell and a random selection of crap to pad out the offering. Then it depends on the deal, but often the amount that each item is watched then contributes to the royalties cost. The relative exclusivity you might want will then dictate the overall cost and royalties returned.
For sports it's different, typically you bid for the right to own a geographic market and the games are sometimes split into bundles where you can bid for one or all bundles depending on how deep your pockets are. You'll then get to keep exclusive or non-exclusive rights for a certain number of years. You'll then pay annually/quarterly for that right at the total bid package for the term of the deal (e.g. 5 years). Depending on the contract you might be able to re-sell that right to other companies as well, which dilutes your audience, but may increase the distribution overall.
Then aside from the rights, you end up paying infrastructure costs both fixed and variable. You also generally commit to CDN capacity for distribution based on a forecast of how much you think your customers will watch in any quarter.
A significant part is that there's very poor data about how many people have surround sound systems or systems that can make use of such quality.
Sending it speculatively adds to the cost of delivery, but for a percentage of the audience it pushes their video quality down to the next resolution down. And for a percentage of the audience that'll be a more noticeable impact.
Here's another oddity: there's no great ways to measure audio quality subjectively. It's kind of been done for voice telecommunications but for perceptual codecs and media sound? The tools are terrible. So, quantifying decisions about how much bandwidth to allocate are hard. Most companies still depend on trained individuals ("golden ears") to test audio quality and for independent testing you need A/B testing with a listener panel. For video quality we have accepted tools to measure quality. They're not perfect but comparatively, any time you see an audio quality test tool you'll see a substantial professional audience that will happily dismiss it.
All increases in quality, audio or video, are subject to the law of diminishing returns. In audio the argument in favour of higher quality is far weaker than it is for something like HDR.
I'm a senior person who looks after content protection and anti-piracy at a major streaming company.
The idealism of those who want to see the demise of DRM doesn't actually hold up in the face of reality. Even when we remove restrictions and give global access to content, for free, pirates don't give up. One of the reasons is that many pirate sites get ad revenue, piracy is a business for many folk and they get the benefit of not paying for the most expensive part. They also don't have legal/regulatory compliance, taxes and will often operate their infrastructure using stolen credit cards or accounts (we can see this).
Then you have people who are selling legitimately and trying to provide the best service for customers, but who have to pay for the content, competing with people who don't have any such responsibilities. So, customers take the cheap deal.
Some folk are also under the assumption that streaming services are money grabbing. Except when you actually look, most streaming services are running at a loss, or barely profitable.
I'm just working to protect our company and reduce losses, ultimately I am not preventing people getting access to fresh food or water. I am protecting premium goods from being illegitimately exploited and protecting the jobs of my colleagues when we're already under significant cost pressures.
One reason I post about these things on the internet is in the hope that one day we might have a constructive dialogue about how to balance freedoms AND enable commerce. But at the moment we have extremism, libertarian ideals against company lawyers.
I'm sure you are aware that there are groups (scenes) which break your DRM as a hobby, they sacrifice device keys for 4K HDR content. And they do it for just the reputation.
More money than ever flows into piracy these days.
Even with complete monolithic control (which is an unlikely objective) over the entire chain from distribution to display there will be a way to obtain good quality output from a hijacked LCD controller if nothing else. There is no win condition for you.
Yup, and I have zero issue with people finding exploits, ultimately many of those just serve to help us improve security as they get released.
Ultimately the goal of content protection (not just DRM) is to make it as inconvenient as possible to take content without paying. No security system is going to be perfect, but when you make it secure enough that people concentrate on weaker targets (or give up), then you're content.
The biggest problem with this is that DRM does not work, there will always be mediums such as blu-ray releases, some chinese display controller or l3 data decryption available.
By that measure, locks on our houses don't work, so we shouldn't bother locking the door? To repeat what I said to the other commentor:
Ultimately the goal of content protection (not just DRM) is to make it as inconvenient as possible to take content without paying. No security system is going to be perfect, but when you make it secure enough that people concentrate on weaker targets (or give up), then you're content.
I've already been using HaLow for years to link my in-laws house to our holiday cottage. I get ~14Mbps which is enough for my wife and I to work remotely for a few days.
I purchased a cheap "CCTV wireless bridge" from AliExpress and it works fine. Sure, I could be paranoid about the security, but honestly these devices are dumb and the goats in that village aren't astute at hacking obscure wireless signals.
I'm using it at less than 1km, but that's because we're on a mountain and there's lots of trees that I have to cut through. I've previously tried 5GHz Ubiquiti gear but there's a particularly big tree I can't get through. I swapped out the omni-antenna for some UHF directional antennas to make it more selective.
Looks like this product is just a reference design for their silicon, I can't see anywhere you can actually buy it.
Ultimately the CTO pays the bill but my boss, the head of Tech Ops, effectively pays the bill for cloud, even though almost all the users are not in his reporting line. Our division is a service to the business as Platform Ops.
Our bill is so big that no one engineer can significantly move the needle, but we have people going around and looking at costs (both Arch and FinOps) to identify what appears to be inefficient spend. We're also quite happy to tell AWS we want something zero rated or discounted if we don't like the cost of it. At a certain size the account team from the cloud provider are somewhat on your side when it comes to negotiations.
Generally architecture reviews and engineering peer reviews should avoid designs which cost a lot, but the most common cause of inefficient engineering practices is when time is more important than money. Then 6 months later someone looks at the cost and says "Why the hell are we doing search that way?", "Because you said you didn't have any time to change the API, so we just made it work this stupid way."
Any new engineer can join and find 5 ways of saving more than their annual salary within a week. But corralling all the teams to actually change the code? That takes leverage.
1) Customers want their service to be cheap, distribution costs for streaming companies are significant and every minute watched is a sink for the business. Streaming is not a massively profitable proposition, so it's not greed to want to ensure you're business is minimising delivery cost.
2) Most customers struggle to see the quality improvements, it's a law of diminishing returns to add higher quality encoding if so many people don't care. You might care, but if more customers actually noticed then it would be more of a driving force.
3) The lower the bitrate, the more people can get HD. Giving more people access to relatively good quality images drives a lot of innovation in compression, not just cost.
There were TVs made that you could upgrade the processor on, they were more expensive and never took off.
People want cheap, they'll forgo the better product if they can get one that's on sale cheap. Consumer choice says that an upgradable product sells worse and the company that makes the upgradeable models will get the lowest market share.
You'd have to legislate modularity and then you get people complaining about government over reach.
For sports it's different, typically you bid for the right to own a geographic market and the games are sometimes split into bundles where you can bid for one or all bundles depending on how deep your pockets are. You'll then get to keep exclusive or non-exclusive rights for a certain number of years. You'll then pay annually/quarterly for that right at the total bid package for the term of the deal (e.g. 5 years). Depending on the contract you might be able to re-sell that right to other companies as well, which dilutes your audience, but may increase the distribution overall.
Then aside from the rights, you end up paying infrastructure costs both fixed and variable. You also generally commit to CDN capacity for distribution based on a forecast of how much you think your customers will watch in any quarter.