by Tdarcos » Wed Mar 09, 2022 1:46 pm
I have a suspicion a number of these so-called streaming services are going to merge together, or restore their content where it used to be. It's one thing to provide videos to a streaming service and collect royalties, or to put up all the overhead and expense into designing your own. Once it's discovered that, after expenses, they're making less money, they'll go back to the old arrangements, or some of them are going to merge with each other.
There is a condition, called "subscription burnout," in which you get nickeled and dimed - or rather, 4.99d and 9.99d - for yet another streaming service that its owners think carries the greatest content there is, that the public is screaming for. But people are not going to take every streaming service around, people get sick of everybody holding out their hand for a tip. Sooner-or-later, people will get to maybe two, or possibly three services, then decide that when they can buy Netflix or Amazon Prime for $12 a month, why should I pay $5 or $10 for something that has a small fraction of the content as one of the larger services?
My guess is, some content provider looks at Netflix, sees how well they're doing, and think they can make that kind of money. Well, they won't. Your shit isn't worth a larger amount per available item, than a major full-service streaming platform. People did not cut the cord and drop $200 a month cable or satellite TV bills to have to pay $300 a month to get things à la carte, they did it because the price is way too high, and because cable and satellite companies are run by morons.
There's another reason, and for that you have to be tuned into the industry. I watched a presentation on YouTube, given at a technical conference, where the former lead developer at Netflix described the architecture and operation of a streaming service that serves millions of requests. You have to build a robust network, and make sure it's fault-tolerant. This means you need good people to design and code your systems. Next is deployment, how do you get your video to the customer? Well, you have two choices: (1) rent cloud service provisioning from Amazon, Microsoft, IBM or someone else, or (2) build out your own network. The first gives you flexibility for quick and easy options to spin up more servers as demand rises, but after a while the costs become astronomical, Building your own server farm is crucial if you get above a certain size because there is a point where your costs for renting cloud support will become much more than if you built it yourself. But any way you look at it, either you have a huge cost for cloud leasing, or a large capital expenditure to install equipment.
These hidden costs are going to rear their ugly head when they find out how much it is costing either in cloud fees, or in hardware and communications charges. This will become very clear once someone does P&L calculations, and determines how long before the break-even point, if there ever will be one.
I have a suspicion a number of these so-called streaming services are going to merge together, or restore their content where it used to be. It's one thing to provide videos to a streaming service and collect royalties, or to put up all the overhead and expense into designing your own. Once it's discovered that, after expenses, they're making less money, they'll go back to the old arrangements, or some of them are going to merge with each other.
There is a condition, called "subscription burnout," in which you get nickeled and dimed - or rather, 4.99d and 9.99d - for yet another streaming service that its owners think carries the greatest content there is, that the public is screaming for. But people are not going to take every streaming service around, people get sick of everybody holding out their hand for a tip. Sooner-or-later, people will get to maybe two, or possibly three services, then decide that when they can buy Netflix or Amazon Prime for $12 a month, why should I pay $5 or $10 for something that has a small fraction of the content as one of the larger services?
My guess is, some content provider looks at Netflix, sees how well they're doing, and think they can make that kind of money. Well, they won't. Your shit isn't worth a larger amount per available item, than a major full-service streaming platform. People did not cut the cord and drop $200 a month cable or satellite TV bills to have to pay $300 a month to get things à la carte, they did it because the price is way too high, and because cable and satellite companies are run by morons.
There's another reason, and for that you have to be tuned into the industry. I watched a presentation on YouTube, given at a technical conference, where the former lead developer at Netflix described the architecture and operation of a streaming service that serves millions of requests. You have to build a robust network, and make sure it's fault-tolerant. This means you need good people to design and code your systems. Next is deployment, how do you get your video to the customer? Well, you have two choices: (1) rent cloud service provisioning from Amazon, Microsoft, IBM or someone else, or (2) build out your own network. The first gives you flexibility for quick and easy options to spin up more servers as demand rises, but after a while the costs become astronomical, Building your own server farm is crucial if you get above a certain size because there is a point where your costs for renting cloud support will become much more than if you built it yourself. But any way you look at it, either you have a huge cost for cloud leasing, or a large capital expenditure to install equipment.
These hidden costs are going to rear their ugly head when they find out how much it is costing either in cloud fees, or in hardware and communications charges. This will become very clear once someone does P&L calculations, and determines how long before the break-even point, if there ever will be one.