I think that you are upset about the subscription model not serving your use case. Pay-per-view is probably more appropriate for those who only want to watch a couple movies every month, put ppv isn't available. Customers instead share their accounts with family members. It is dirty rotten piracy and anyone doing it is stealing bread from the mouths of babes, but that's what happens when the legitimate system fails to offer the delivery model that the customer wants.
My story: I have amazon prime, but no proper screens that can watch it (linux) and there isn't much on prime that I care to watch anyway. So my parents in another state use the account. Should amazon care? They are still only streaming to one IP but the reality is that we are all pirates.
> Pay-per-view is probably more appropriate for those who only want to watch a couple movies every month, put ppv isn't available. Customers instead share their accounts with family members
PPV is available for most movies, you can rent them from iTunes or amazon for $3-5 for a single watch in my experience.
Ultimately the best delivery model for the customer would be $0 for unlimited free streaming of movies and music, of course that would tank the industry and stop new production so a balance must be found in terms of what customers will tolerate vs what is needed to fund new content production.
> Should my grandma pay $240 per year, to watch two movies I recommend to her (and are ONLY watchable on Netflix)?
So that's $10. Or sign up for just a month and then cancel. I know people who have Netflix for a few months, and then another service for a few months and so on.
I still remember having to rent movies/TV or buying on DVD as my main way of watching... at 4-6 movies a month and ~$20-30 per season of TV, you'd have to have quite a few streaming services to match that. It's all about convenience vs cost.
> Pay-per-view is probably more appropriate for those who only want to watch a couple movies every month, put ppv isn't available.
and
> PPV is available for most movies, you can rent them from iTunes or amazon for $3-5 for a single watch in my experience.
Yes, PPV is available, but it costs the same to watch a couple movies every month as to subscribe to a whole streaming service. That makes it effectively unavailable (at a reasonable price) for many consumers.
Why isn't a la carte video available at a reasonable markup (say, 200% the cost of 2 hours of a streaming service given the average monthly viewing time)?
Costs like those of the Netflix hardware deployed to the edge, including maintenance (and business relation maintenance) don't scale down anywhere near linearly with hours of content watched, neither does the cost of content licensing (especially, I would assume, exclusives).
So, expecting prices to scale that way for limited-quantity purchases is unreasonable.
I think customers end up achieving similar costs by sharing accounts, or by signing up for one month per year, or by skipping Netflix altogether because there isn't enough content they want to watch to justify the monthly fee.
I think this reflects the reality that for a product with low marginal costs, bundling provides better value for the consumer. If a company is going make the investment to build and operate a video streaming service and acquire you as a customer, it only costs them a few dollars more to let you watch the whole catalogue on demand (the effort to amass this catalog is largely amortized across the customer base). Competing for each individual pay per view purchase is a much worse business to be in, and that’s reflected in the poorer value proposition offered to customers. There’s also some price discrimination occurring (selling to people who really want to watch this specific movie that isn’t offered in their favorite streaming service, or who don’t watch enough movies to subscribe).
The same can be observed in some other industries: museum membership, ski pass.
you have (or your distro has) installed the widevine drm plugins for firefox (or whatever browser) that are included by default on windows and mac os. these are proprietary plugins, but some convenience-oriented distros distros include them because many users expect them.
some linux users are on linux because they want to eliminate proprietary software from their computer altogether. which means no access to un-broken drm media.
Everything and anything it possible on linux. The question is whether I want to bother. I could probably disable my browser's security features and get it working, install some proprietary whatever, but it isn't worth than hassle imho. I've got better stuff to watch than netflix/amazon junk. Whenever I have a hour to kill my first choice tends to be the BBC.
I think it depends on how mainstream your distro is, or maybe on what browser you use. When I used Linux, every streaming platform ever told me that my browser wasn't compatible to stream.
My story: I have amazon prime, but no proper screens that can watch it (linux) and there isn't much on prime that I care to watch anyway. So my parents in another state use the account. Should amazon care? They are still only streaming to one IP but the reality is that we are all pirates.