This is how it worked a decade+ ago, when there was still alpha to be had on providing better streaming service. It was great and we got things like the Netflix Prize and all sorts of content ranking improvements, better CDN platforms, lower latency and less buffering, more content upgraded to HD and 4K. Plus some annoying but clearly effective practices like auto-play of trailers and unrelated shows.
Now these are all solved problems, so there is no benefit in trying to compete on making a better platform / service. The only thing left is competing on content.
> I want several companies that are able to license whatever content they want. And ideally the customer can choose between a subscription that includes everything, and paying for content a la carte, or maybe subscriptions that focus on specific kinds of content
This seems like splitting hairs, it's almost exactly what we do have. You can still buy and rent individual shows & movies from Apple and Amazon and other providers. Or you can subscribe to services. The only difference is there is no one big "subscription that includes everything", you need 10 different $15 subscriptions to get everything. Again, kind of splitting hairs though. The one big subscription would probably be the same price as everything combined anyway.
It is worth noting that the Netflix Prize winner's solution was never meaningfully used, because Netflix pivoted from ranking content based on what you tell them you like to ranking content based on clicks and minutes watched.
To say that "we have solved ranking" because Netflix decided to measure shallow metrics and addiction is... specious at best. Instead the tech industry (in all media domains, not just streaming video) replaced improving platforms and services in meaningful ways with surveillance and revenue extraction.
> ranking content based on clicks and minutes watched.
I suspect they just push what they want you to watch, like their own content. Seems that way to me at least, based on their quite shitty "recommendations"
I noticed that for the last few years, my recommendations are almost the same for every category. 'Top picks' is 60% the same as 'We think you'll love this' which is almost the same as 'Your Next Watch' which is similar to 'Award-winning movies', 'Chilly thrillers', repeat ad-infinitum. If there is a new Netflix-owned movie it will definitely be in there.
Then on top of that, similar to YouTube, half of that content are things I have already watched. HBO and Amazon are even worse in this aspect but it just drives me crazy, feels like seeing the same 100 movie options over and over for months. Has the catalog shrinked that much over the years?
I started keeping a separate list of films to watch on IMDB, but 6/10 times they are not available on any service except for rent in AppleTV.
I have a difficult time trusting their recommendations when those come along with more and more difficult to even know what exists in the rest of the catalog. It seems pretty obvious they want de facto scroll feeds instead of the streaming style they started with.
Why do they care what you watch? I expect they pay a flat fee to license content (if not, how is that policed?) so the marginal cost to them is the same no matter what you watch.
I'd guess they push you to their content for the same reason they make that content in the first place: they believe you'll like it and keep watching it.
Ad placement is one wrinkle that would incentivize promoting their own content, but I don't get the impression that's big enough to make the difference at the margins.
I wouldn't tbh, though I'll admit I'm speculating solely on public information. During the 2023 strikes, SAG-AFTRA and the WGA negotiated additional residuals based upon whether 20% of the streaming services subscriber base viewed the content within 90 days of release.[1] So, streaming platforms are evidently willing to share subscriber viewership data with 3rd parties if it's a contractual requirement.
I would be surprised if content licensors haven't negotiated an as good or better deal for themselves.
The story I heard about most Netflix content going for very long is that after two seasons a show's cast unionizes and they didn't want to pay up and they'd rather cancel shows, which seems awful penny-wise pound foolish of them.
> which seems awful penny-wise pound foolish of them.
On one of the podcasts that I listen to, which has given me many great recommends, one of the hosts has given up watching content until it hits three or four seasons because of exactly this.
If people are watching their content, they can rely less on licensed content and drive those costs down. It's a similar value prop to any vertical integration.
I think they also used their metrics to figure out people liked kevin spacey (whoops) - and created house of cards - which catapulted netflix's production side.
> This is how it worked a decade+ ago, when there was still alpha to be had on providing better streaming service. […] Now […] there is no benefit in trying to compete on making a better platform / service. The only thing left is competing on content.
A large profit margin is not something that a business is owed.
Exactly. Nothing is really preventing a $200/month aggregator beyond paying a bunch of lawyers and people not wanting to pay that. I know I'll live with some service fragmentation in exchange for not paying for a bunch of stuff I'll maybe watch once in a blue moon. And I'll probably buy some discs for things I really want to see.
My solution with manufactured content is to just rotate services. I maintain netflix year round because they have enough, but I'll buy the special rate and cancel in the same day, giving me a month at a time of each of the different ones. It also gives them time to release the whole season, instead of dribbling them out over the course of months.
It's sports that really have driven me away. I like collegiate wrestling. This is by no means a mainstream sport. But to watch what I want, I need to subscribe to flowrestling, ESPN, B1G, and BTN. The last two are really mind blowing, because the big 10 seems to think I need two subscriptions to watch a single season for a niche sport.
It's just too much for me to bear -- not financially, but morally. I won't reward such behavior, so I just don't watch.
Then there are all the games that are on broadcast and could normally watch them for free, but unless you have an antenna, you need to subscribe to get your local channel.
Now these leagues need to contend with my family and all the others like it where the kids won't have the nostalgia for that game that was on every Sunday. We don't watch the games, so we don't go to the games, so they'll never grow into being fans themselves.
The NHL does seem to try putting their games in front of their fans as the lone exception.
Exclusive deals are preventing it. Media content is resistant to commodification, making it a durable value proposition, and this makes exclusive licensing deals highly desirable - lawyers hired by an upstart aren't going to make a dent in this.
Don't disagree. Just paying lawyers was sort of a facile dismissal on my part. In video content, there's a lot of history that makes it hard to get closer to the way things are in music. Though there are also monetary incentives and practicalities as well.
Doesn't the ease and low risk of individual copyright violation place an upper bound of sorts. Sharing sites are still everywhere, and they were never very successful in making people confuse civil for criminal.
You can actually mostly do that through Amazon Video (although...eww). Missing HBO and Netflix but you can get a lot of the others including Apple TV, AMC+, Paramount+, etc.
I don't know. Music streaming services do pretty much follow this separation of content and service. At least unless you really care about exactly which music you can access which I think most people don't.
(That's probably partly why music streaming services don't compete on content; most people don't care exactly which funky music they're listening to as long as it is funky, and had most of the popular stuff. But they definitely care if they want to watch Stranger Things and they can't watch Stranger Things but maybe you're interested in these other crap knock-offs?)
Anyway the point is music streaming services still find ways to compete. I guess they would prefer it if they could compete on content though.
> (That's probably partly why music streaming services don't compete on content; most people don't care exactly which funky music they're listening to as long as it is funky, and had most of the popular stuff. But they definitely care if they want to watch Stranger Things and they can't watch Stranger Things but maybe you're interested in these other crap knock-offs?)
Idk. I can imagine an alternate universe where Taylor Swift's new album was exclusive to Spotify. All the Swifties using Apple Music probably aren't interested in "Taylor Swift knockoffs".
It's not entirely obvious to me why this hasn't happened.
They do compete on content. How many billions did Spotify spend on Joe Rogan? And it happens with music too, some bands moved away from Spotify in rage recently and at least one person switched to Tidal to keep listening to KGLW https://www.theguardian.com/music/2025/jul/26/king-gizzard-a...
That said, my interpretation is that bands don’t really make a lot of money from streaming, it’s more of a promotional platform for them so it makes sense to just be everywhere to be seen. This is not true for tv/films.
I think steaming just represents such a small share of revenue for professional musicians that negotiating over it isn't worth the headache for the most part. For Swift in particular, touring definitely represents the overwhelming majority of her income.
>Anyway the point is music streaming services still find ways to compete.
Some recommendations and playlists I guess. Most of us (outside of Spotify) get them because of a bundle with other offerings from a vendor. Spotify definitely has a following but I don't really care much and have an Apple bundle anyway.
And Spotify is barely profitable and its major competitors treat music streaming as just a slightly above break even feature to combine with other services.
> there is no one big "subscription that includes everything"
You're right, but the switching cost is super easy, and _most_ of the time, these networks aren't putting out new content that I care that much about, so I've found it easiest to just swap services, keeping one subscription active at a time, and then switching again when I've finished watching everything interesting on the next.
Ah yes, today where they optimized out the recommendation algo to the point I haven't found something recommended to be watch worthy in years. The only thing worse than the video streaming recommendations is what's become of Amazon/Audible's book recommendations (though Spotify is trying hard to enshitify their algos to catch up).
Sad that we can't have nice things, but capitalism must be fed and I guess good, targeted recommendation algorithms are anti-capital.
I've always kind of expected it to work this way, with people being cutthroat and stealing credit for other people's work.
What I have seen in reality is a lot more nuanced. There are a lot of good ideas that will simply die if nobody pitches them the right way, i.e. if no one gets the rest of the team/org/company to understand and agree that it solves an important problem.
There are also very few novel ideas in a mature business or technology space. Every time I think I've come up with one, I search the internal company docs and often someone had mentioned the same thing 5 years ago in some long-forgotten design doc or something.
I've come to realize that the hard thing and the bottleneck for a good idea to have real impact is not the idea itself or the execution, it's pulling the right strings to make space for the idea and get it accepted. At a small scale, in your own team or ownership domain, this isn't necessary and you can just build things and let the results speak for themselves. But the amount of impact that thing has on the broader company will be limited if you don't pull the strings the right way.
Some people despise this idea and in that case, a big company is probably not the right place for you. But most of the cases I've seen of "brilliant engineers passed over for credit" were people not realizing and not doing this necessary part of the job. If someone else steps in and gets the idea more widely recognized after you had let it stall and moved onto the next thing, then 1. usually you do still some partial recognition for it so it's a win/win and 2. the other person is not really stealing credit, because if they had done nothing the idea would have just died and you wouldn't have gotten credit anyway.
> His $750-million company got that way entirely by exploiting people’s misery for views and profit
Uh, what? The guy runs big elaborate game shows. The contestants are thrilled for the chance to compete to win money. How could you spin that as exploiting people's misery?
You're conflating different categories of his videos. Competition videos like Squid Game have volunteers who are participating willingly, with a few winners. And charity videos like "cure 1000 cataracts" also have willing participants, who all get surgery for free, no competition involved.
There are no Mr Beast videos where "miserable" people compete to get charity prizes.
> Who wouldn't want to live and work in that world?
Who would want to? There are a lot of jobs in the real world that do work this way, and they are generally not the most desirable jobs. E.g. data entry or picking fruit or customer support or working on an assembly line.
The ability to improve, scale your work, and over time make a bigger impact with less effort is one of the key things that makes any kind of work interesting.
Not to mention a lot of the the most desirable jobs, like, say, professional athlete or movie star, tend to work very differently than what you're describing. Many people work very hard in those fields and never succeed, it's the combination of hard work and skill and a little bit of luck/randomness that makes it interesting.
In the real world, there's no amount of work that someone employed in data entry or fruit picking etc. can do that will give them the wealth, lifestyle or prestige of the CEO that runs their company. There are no idle rich in Animal Crossing. Even Tom Nook is always working, and it doesn't seem like he generates excess profits from his businesses.
> Before, mods could run subreddits as they saw fit, users could choose the subreddits they participated in, and a user can always create a new subreddit if they don't think any existing ones suit their needs.
As a frequent Reddit user I don't agree with that. The network effects of subreddits plus the fact that they usually own the default name for a topic grant a lot of subs effective monopolies.
As a user if I don't like something about a certain subreddit including how it's moderated, the more realistic option is just to not participate in that subject matter on Reddit. I can still use Reddit for other topics but I feel like there's very rarely an alternative subreddit on the same topic which is anywhere near as active as the main one.
So, no offense to Reddit mods, but I really don't think these are all highly skilled, irreplaceable individuals. There's no competition that incentivizes the best people to rise to the top, these are just average folks that volunteered at the right time and now they're mods. There is apparently even a lot of cronyism among the mod community and I have heard that it can be hard to break into for first time mods.
If Reddit forces some of them out, there will be many people willing to step in who can do just as good of a job. It might even be a net positive thing to get new people involved.
> The network effects of subreddits plus the fact that they usually own the default name for a topic grant a lot of subs effective monopolies.
That's often the case, but not always. A bad mod can drive people to an alternate subs. And having the default name doesn't mean that a sub with an alternate name can't thrive. I enjoy r/marijuanaenthusiasts despite the fact that I've never smoked.
I agree with all of that, but honestly the more important factor is this is just not a very good cause to get all worked up about. Reddit is trying to grow into a profitable company, their business model is showing ads to users, they obviously can't just let millions of people use 3rd party apps for free.
I think even casual users understand this perfectly well. They don't use 3rd party apps for browsing Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, or Tiktok (because those services also don't offer APIs). Why should Reddit be different?
Reddit is different because it has been different. Not everything needs to conform prior social media models.
I think the cause is totally fine. I think framing it as some social justice cause is incorrect though. People really liked a thing and now reddit is taking it away in the name of money. The most downvoted post of all time on reddit is an EA post responding to monetization concerns in a star wars game. Seems right in line to me.
Interesting, at what viewing distance is a 4k monitor 70 PPD?
From what I've seen the common advice for monitors is that 5k is the ideal resolution for a 27" screen and 4k is a little bit less sharp if you're looking closely.
That's why I'm curious just how good the resolution can be on the Vision Pro. If it takes a 5k monitor at, say, 2ft away which covers maybe 30 degrees of your field of view vertically to be truly "retina", then surely a 4k display 3 inches away from your eye that covers ~120 degrees of your field of view is not quite there.
But you also have lenses that are stretching out the screen to cover your periphery where it can be much less sharp so it's not exactly comparable.
I have a really hard time believing this is being actively driven by collusion among rich families who know they could game non-SAT metrics. It would require a huge organizational effort, and for what? It's still not going to be a sure thing to get their kids in, there's gonna be even more randomness in the process after this change than there is now. And sending your kids to elite an school doesn't even buy them that much anyway if you're already rich & influential, you can pull strings to get them a job after they graduate from a mediocre school.
It's much easier to believe that this is being driven by college administrators who know that the way to advance their careers in the current climate is by passing radical social justice changes, and this particular idea is simply an organically popular fad among social justice influencers so it's the one they've latched onto.
I just can't take any discussion of "skills" seriously that equates skill to some formal certification or degree.
As a software engineer, basically all the skills I use to do my job on a day to day basis are things I've learned from experience, or informal mentorship from other engineers, or reading blog posts on programming practices and then applying those things and seeing what works and what doesn't.
But to an economist none of this counts. A 24 year old that just started their first job after getting a masters degree in CS is considered objectively more skilled than someone with an undergrad degree and 10 years of experience.
To be fair, technical skills training in the UK is currently mostly delivered through apprenticeships. The model is 80% "on the job", 20% "off the job" training. So, in theory at least, they should deliver the kind of experience and informal mentorship you're talking about, alongside classroom based training (which is supposed to cover fundamentals, theory, etc.).
In practice, how well this works depends on how effectively employer and training provider coordinate, and how committed the employer is to delivering on the mentorship part.
Economists have a habit of abusing data. It's seen as preferable to simplify the system enough to test a hypothesis than to acknowledge that the system is too complex to analyze. A little too much physics influence and not enough engineering.
I would think that software engineering is the exception that proves the rule: people with domain knowledge are highly motivated to share what they know, ask questions, consolidate knowledge, and refine processes using the Internet.
Working in another field (public services might be a good example) it’s often not possible to test out hypothetical solutions, or find relevant expertise, or to even discover that whole areas of knowledge actually exist. In that context, relevant qualifications have a little more weight.
You can go onto youtube and find dozens if not hundreds of people wanting to share their expertise with the world on every subject you could possibly imagine. "Qualifications" are just the result of a lobbying effort from those already in the industry to restrict supply in order to increase the rates they can charge.
> I would think that software engineering is the exception that proves the rule: people with domain knowledge are highly motivated to share what they know, ask questions, consolidate knowledge, and refine processes using the Internet.
Not my experience they don't want these people on the Netherlands not with my skin colour I guess.
For me it's about being given dedicated time and space to actually upskill - sure in house training is (the most?) important, but what about developing new skills that no one in your company already has? Reading blog posts is all well and good as a software engineer but for many roles this is not an option as there might not be high quality content publicly available online.
very much this. i am applying for a workvisa, and they ask me for my degree (which i don't have) because it counts more than the decade+ of work experience running my own business.
This isn't really true. The article talks about apprenticeships. While traditionally apprenticeships in the UK were mostly for blue collar work, these days you can do apprenticeships in almost anything: software engineering, law, medicine, management, etc.
Now these are all solved problems, so there is no benefit in trying to compete on making a better platform / service. The only thing left is competing on content.
> I want several companies that are able to license whatever content they want. And ideally the customer can choose between a subscription that includes everything, and paying for content a la carte, or maybe subscriptions that focus on specific kinds of content
This seems like splitting hairs, it's almost exactly what we do have. You can still buy and rent individual shows & movies from Apple and Amazon and other providers. Or you can subscribe to services. The only difference is there is no one big "subscription that includes everything", you need 10 different $15 subscriptions to get everything. Again, kind of splitting hairs though. The one big subscription would probably be the same price as everything combined anyway.
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