Ironically, Too Many Video Streaming Choices May Drive Users Back To Piracy

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Ironically, Too Many Video Streaming Choices May Drive Users Back To Piracy

To be very clear the rise in streaming video competitors is a very good thing. It's providing users with more choice, lower prices, and better customer service than consumers traditionally received from entrenched vanilla cable TV companies. It's the perfect example of how disruption and innovation are supposed to work. And given the abysmal customer satisfaction ratings of most big cable TV providers, this was an industry that's been absolutely begging for a disruptive kick in the ass since the 1980s.

But we've also noted that, ironically, the glut of video choices--more specifically the glut of streaming exclusivity silos--risks driving users back to piracy. Studies predict that every broadcaster and their uncle will have launched their own direct-to-consumer streaming platform by 2022. Most of these companies are understandably keen on locking their own content behind exclusivity paywalls, whether that's HBO Now's Game of Thrones, or CBS All Access's Stark Trek: Discovery.

But as consumers are forced to pay for more and more subscriptions to get all of the content they're looking for, they're not only getting frustrated by the growing costs (defeating the whole point of cutting the cord), they're frustrated by the experience of having to hunt and peck through an endlessly shifting sea of exclusivity arrangements and licensing deals that make it difficult to track where your favorite show or film resides this month.

In response, there's some early anecdotal data to suggest this is already happening. But because these companies are fixated on building market share, and this will likely be an industry-wide issue, most aren't seeing the problem yet.

Others are. The 13th edition of Deloitte’s annual Digital Media Trends survey makes it clear that too many options and shifting exclusivity arrangements are increasingly annoying paying customers:

But the plethora of options has a downside: Nearly half (47%) of U.S. consumers say they’re frustrated by the growing number of subscriptions and services required to watch what they want, according to the 13th edition of Deloitte’s annual Digital Media Trends survey. An even bigger pet peeve: 57% said they’re frustrated when content vanishes because rights to their favorite TV shows or movies have expired. “Consumers want choice — but only up to a point,” said Kevin Westcott, Deloitte vice chairman and U.S. telecom and media and entertainment leader, who oversees the study. “We may be entering a time of ‘subscription fatigue.'”

As it turns out, people don't like Comcast, but they do ironically want a little more centralization than they're seeing in the streaming space. What that looks like isn't clear yet, but it's something that will slowly get built as some of the 300 options (and growing) currently available fail to gain traction in the space:

All told, there are more than 300 over-the-top video options in the U.S. With that fragmentation, there’s a clear opportunity for larger platforms to reaggregate these services in a way that can provide access across all sources and make recommendations based on all of someone’s interests, Westcott said. “Consumers are looking for less friction in the consumption process,” he said.

Variety's otherwise excellent report doesn't mention this, but a lot of these customers are going to revert to piracy. It's not clear why this isn't mentioned, but it's kind of standard practice for larger outlets to avoid mentioning piracy in the odd belief that acknowledging it somehow condones it. But if you don't mention it, you don't learn from it. You don't understand that piracy is best seen as just another competitor, and a useful tool to gain insight into what customers (studies repeatedly show pirates buy more content than most anybody else) really want.

It's easy to dismiss this as privileged whining ("poor baby is upset because they have too many choices), and that's certainly what a big segment of the market is going to do.

But it would be a mistake to ignore consumer frustration and the obviously annoying rise of endless exclusivity silos, given the effort it took to migrate users away from piracy and toward legitimate services in the first place. The primary lesson learned during that experience is you need to compete with piracy. It's not really a choice. It's real, it's impossible to stop, and the best way to mitigate it is to listen to your customers. Building more walled gardens, raising rates, and ignoring what subscribers want is the precise opposite of that.

arajay on April 6th, 2019 at 15:14 UTC »

Even for "honest folks" the best case scenario sems to be: wait until the show being held hostage ends its season, subcribe for one month, binge content, unsubscribe. I've heard this over and over inre: Star Trek Discovery for example.

zencanuck on April 6th, 2019 at 13:04 UTC »

Netflix creates a working model, pays production companies to stream content, users pay to watch, win win. Disney gets greedy. Pulls content to create own channel. Other companies follow suit. Now there are 10 Netflix clones with limited content. All for the same subscription price.

Instead of one stop, one price, customers are frustrated. Amazon Prime for one show? HBO for one? It’s corporate greed, not choice.

Screw it, I’m downloading.

jumpshills on April 6th, 2019 at 11:52 UTC »

Nothing ironic about it. This has been discussed for several years. As the industry continues fragmenting the market and making it impossible to pay one subscription fee for all the content a typical user wants, more and more users will revert back to piracy.

It's been happening for a while and the phenomenon has completely invalidated previous industry claims that piracy is driven by greed or theft. No, piracy was at its global minimum when Netflix was dominating the market and had a broad catalogue. Now it's rising again as that same catalogue is chopped up between 5+ different services.

Piracy is driven by people wanting convenient and fairly-priced access to content. People are willing to pay for it. But if you attempt to artificially squeeze them for revenue, they'll fly the black flag again. People aren't stupid, they won't accept artificial geo segmentation or other forms of market fragmentation any longer. The days of cable networks ripping people off are truly over.

We live in a time where a paid subscription to usenet + relevant tooling gets more content more conveniently than streaming subscriptions do. People are paying more per month for convenient piracy than a typical subscription service costs. Elsewhere consumers are paying upwards of 20/mo to support their favourite content creators on patreon. Consumers are evidently willing to pay for their content, but the industry is quite literally saying 'nah we don't want to take your money' because they're that greedy and that unwilling to adapt beyond a 50 year old business model.

The same thing is happening with video games. I have forgotten video game piracy over the last few years of steam, I have spent well over 1000 dollars on my game collection. But when the latest Metro title launched exclusive to 'epic games store' which is a known malware vector, (apparently not quite). I went and got it of tpb like it's 2005 again.

tl;dr: the greedy industry has only itself to blame