The only way the Steam model would work for media is if content owners would agree that if someone on the platform purchased a digital copy of something that the ownership couldn't be rescinded.

Nobody will purchase, for instance, all the seasons of M.A.S.H. if they know that there is a risk that the rights owners will pull their content off of the platform in a few years and the person loses the ability to watch what they paid for.

The platform should also have the ability to "import" previously purchased rights. If someone buys a TV show on iTunes, they should be able to import that purchase into the platform so they can consolidate all of their purchases into a single platform.

Lastly, the other thing that made Steam a huge success is the sales. Daily sales of some content, quarterly sales of large swaths of content, etc. That would have to occur for a media platform to have the same kind of success.

I'm an unabashed pirate because it's easy... but if I could use a platform like this that didn't have a recurring monthly cost I would use it.

If Pixar put their upcoming movie available for pre-purchase (like Steam Greenlight) at 40% off, I would likely pre-purchase it. If Disney wanted to drum up interest in their new Duck Tales reboot by putting the original series up for sale for $20, I would be all over that. A TV series in its 4th season with struggling ratings could put up a flash sale of previous seasons in order to get new viewers to binge watch before the new season starts. A TV series could also sell a season pass BEFORE the new season starts for an infusion of cash and release the episodes on the regular schedule.

A steam-like platform could work wonders for media consumption, but it'll be hard to get companies to do it.

Steam took off because it was required for an awesome video game that Valve released. Eventually Steam was more valuable than the game.

That's the only way something like this happen for media. A small studio with a hot property could build the platform for their own offerings but invite other media owners to participate. Adult Swim or SyFy or FX could probably pull it off.

Stream uses DRM, has famously bad customer service, geofilters content and uses differential pricing, keeps content it produces itself exclusively to the platform and withholds it from others, bars some content based on arbitrary criteria, maintains a singular store that doesn't play especially nice with third party indexing tools etc etc etc.

Even Valve doesn't believe in Gabe's statement, and never did. Dozens of media companies have much larger market caps than Valve's estimated value.

The statement conforms to the prejudices of a lot of Hacker News, but there is significant evidence that it's not empirically true.

So DRM, geofiltering, and differential pricing are all requested by publishers and distributors. If you want something more equitable then try GoG, but as you'll notice that not all new or big games are on that platform.

As for third party indexing tools, I read that to mean scraping the site for various reasons. Which I can understand they might not want due to the extra load it generates.

I said make it easy, steam did make it easy. It is easy to use steam to buy and play games. Maybe it's not easy to use steam to buy a game, and then play it without steam... but then that wouldn't fit into my argument.

It's hard to convince someone of something when their income depends on them believing the opposite.

Steam was successful because it combined advantages for producers and consumers with minimal changes to the business model. The old business model is people buy games that come on a CD or DVD in a small cardboard box for $30-50; the new business model is people buy games that finish downloading in a few hours for $30-50. Not really much of a change in revenue stream.

Cable TV, however, relies on splitting up the channels people want into different packages, that each come with lots of channels they don't want. They also need to overcharge you so they can afford to cut the prices for the "package deal" (TV/Phone/Internet bundles). What people want instead is more à la carte options, with a discount from package deals because they're asking for fewer channels.

So moving to a service that would cut piracy would still hurt financially. Another advantage of piracy is that they can blame their financial troubles on "filthy criminals" and use that to extract some benefits from compliant government allies. Offering a less profitable service that reduces piracy robs them of that as well.

Steam does more than that. It combines social elements (What are my friends playing now? Do they want to join me? What games do they recommend?) and lower price points as well (Summer Sale etc). I know lots of people that stopped pirating games because Steam was reliable (pirated games rarely are), took away the pain (mostly) of patching games and because if you are willing to wait, games are actually pretty cheap.

And you're forgetting download speeds. When steam started being successful it would take me a full day to download a game, while in steam I could get it in a couple hours maximum.

Maybe that's not true anymore. But I'm sure contributed to steam's success.

I think there's another point that is very important: Steam was the original cloud.

Back in the day where GMail was heralded as being amazing, and offering 1GB of storage for your mails, Steam came out and said "don't worry about how to install Half-Life/CS, or which patch to apply, I'm automating all of it."

"You don't need to worry about your CDs any more. I'll give you the content, for free, anytime you change PCs."

"Just log in with your Steam account on the cybercafé computer. All the games you own are already installed."

Steam was made mandatory to install the new version of CS (was it the 1.6 release?). That was Valve's best move ever (even though I hated it back in the day).

Save files and settings were sucked into the cloud as well (sometimes). Great for little games I like to play on multiple computers.

For me, it's not about the price (within reason). If it's reliable, easy, and centralised, along with an (albeit weak) guarantee that I will have content access if steam goes belly up, I'm in.

That's only partly true. There are countries where average wage is $300/month. They are NOT going to buy legal software and media for $40/thing no matter how easy it is.

Brazil checking in. People still pay for steam games despite the cost. It is often cheaper than the currency-converted USD price, and otherwise you don't have multiplayer. Piracy is down by orders of magnitude from 10 years ago.

There are always exceptions, I don't think this invalidates the parent comment in any way.

In general, this is usually solved by pricing things differently in different markets.