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The Disrupter’s Dilemma
What’s the first thing a brash new business does when it reaches a certain level of success and profit? Easy: Frantically protect its position, either through regulation or cracking down on customers.
Netflix, which has blazed a path through my business (television) with the kind of merciless focus you see in truly great companies, nevertheless has a problem. Its business was built on the exponential increase in bandwidth. People everywhere and anywhere can touch a few buttons and connect to a vast library of viewing choices, confident that some combination of wireless data transfers and fiberoptic cable will bring them movies, television shows, whatever they want. At peak traffic hours, Netflix is sending about a third of all the data zooming around the Internet.
But with nearly unlimited bandwidth comes the expectation of nearly unlimited access. Which is a problem, because Netflix is building a business dependent upon geographic zones: i.e, some shows are licensed for the US market, some for Europe, some for wherever.
Data doesn’t like those artificial barriers. Data — especially in its most popular form, movies and television — wants to go where the eyeballs are, wherever they are. So smart folks have figured out a way to circumvent location restrictions by using virtual private networks — VPNs — to get everything on Netflix anywhere they are.
And now Netflix is fighting back. From Wired:
In January, Netflix announced it would begin blocking a popular tech workaround known as a VPN, or virtual private network, that allowed customers beyond the US to access the same shows and films as American audiences. But as Netflix has aggressively pursued an ever-bigger global audience, simmering unhappiness over the ban is reaching a boil. An online petition demanding that Netflix change its policy has more than 36,000 signatures. And a new survey reveals that the crackdown may lead to piracy.
May lead to piracy? Will lead to piracy.
For Netflix, the issue is a fragile one. The company, after all, is dependent on studios and networks for much of the content that it streams on its platform. The crackdown is a way to show Hollywood studios that Netflix respects its regional licensing agreements—in essence, that it will only let people who it’s paid to let see certain shows and movies see them.
But paying Netflix subscribers don’t care what, say, Sony or the CW want: they want (and expect) to see what they want to see. They also want to be able to use a VPN for privacy and practical reasons. Until Netflix can offer the same content everywhere to everyone who pays for it, many users—especially the overseas users the company most covets—won’t be happy.
This is a big issue — to me, especially — because multiple markets for entertainment means, essentially, a lot more money. The television business has collapsed, in part, because the independent local broadcasters no longer have the money (thanks to the expanding cable universe) to buy lots of reruns. Bigger scale and fewer markets means smaller margins (think Walmart) and, for those of us who happen to make our money in those margins, it’s a scary thing to imagine one worldwide market for everything in the entertainment business.
For Netflix, the solution is clear: Make a lot of original content where you can set the terms any way you like while simultaneously making a big show of cracking down on VPNs, despite knowing it’s a doomed game. Data wants to be everywhere all the time. Data doesn’t care that I have a mortgage.
Neither do the customers. And, like all free-market economic principles, that’s as it should be. But like all free-market economic principles, they’re so much easier to like when it’s the other guy getting clobbered.
Published in Culture, Entertainment
I’ve got some other problems with Netflix and the other streaming networks which I hope will be addressed.
We’re catching up with Comedians In Cars, now that the Crackle Roku interface has become slightly less atrocious. Last year’s Bosch on Amazon was good, with new episodes premiering this month. Season 3 of House of Cards on Netflix wasn’t nearly as pointed politically as the superb Brit counterpart To Play the King, but we’ll give Season Four, which also debuts this weekend, a try anyway. For my money (and too much of it!) traditional pay cabler Showtime’s Billions is the most attractive drama on television these days.
what version of Roku do you have? The Roky 3 and 4 Netflix interfaces are much better than the older versions. The Amazon interface is a disgrace.
Roku 3. I prefer the text-centric lists from the old Netflix DVD catalog. There need to be more text fields to sort, date, country, cast, genre etc., and they should let you replace their categories with custom search sorts you create and name. Or they could let you save multiple versions of “your list.” And there should be “exclude” options. Once I’ve consigned “Orange is the New Black” to oblivion, I don’t want to ever see its icon on my screen again, ever.
I agree. I don’t understand why old shows are not on these services. Do the bigwigs really think there is a market for a boxset (DVD? VHS?) of Moonlighting or Knight Rider or other old shows?
How hard can this be? Broadcast the streams in NTSC. Foreign markets can only handle PAL or SECAM.
Yer gonna be asking for 8-tracks next.
So the way Mirror-of-princes writer Mr. Peter Thiel would put the problem is: This is a case where entrepreneurs can create value, but might find it impossible to get anything out of it in the long term. You can see even in a bastion of the right an impatience with property rights except in the sense that individual consumers are benefited & an admirable moral equanimity in face of the losses producers or distributors might incur.
Does anyone have any thoughts on whether competition is going to make shows better or worse?
Both.
Most of my video watching anymore is through Youtube – there are some terrific shows out there, and there is plenty of garbage, and so far the commercials are not unbearable.
Every art form has its day. Traditional TV and movies are changing, and we do not know how that will ultimately play out. Once people went to theaters for live stage shows, now that is a specialized art form that relatively few people attend, done in by motion pictures and newsreels, which in turn were slowly done in by broadcast TV. People will find ways to make content and get paid for it, or else they won’t do it, and the forms will continue to change.
Yeah, change, sure, but it’s always going to be story-telling. So there is a question of better & worse. Isn’t there always with change? There’s no way around, movies have never produced a Shakespeare. TV has never produced a Kurosawa or John Ford or any other number of masters. Of course, partly it’s because popular stories, like Shakespeare & Ford & Kurosawa, are eventually forgotten by almost everyone. Popularity by one measure or another is inescapable, but the content of it is not as it were constant.
Maybe mediocrity improves?
There’s a barrier for the old stuff that can’t be overcome. It’s all 4×3 ratio and some of it is in black and white. People just don’t watch.
I would love it if the types and numbers of TV shows and movies that I could stream to my home were some sort of an issue for me.
But they are not.
My measly 15GB of monthly bandwidth allowance, for which I pay almost $100 per month, from my satellite Internet connection (the only physically possible connection type other than cellular, which is even more expensive), allows Mr She and me to do our usual Internet tasks month by month with scarcely any room left over for Netflix or Hulu (a 30 minute Netflix show is about 1.5GB, and a 2-hour HD movie is about 3.6GB, so you can see how quickly it adds up. Standard definition movies and TV shows are less bandwidth intensive, but still quite unfeasible, and of much less quality.
There are now some satellite providers who claim (speciously in my opinion) “unlimited bandwidth.” What this means is that you pay an amount for a certain amount of ‘premium’ speed bandwidth (say 15-20GB), and after you’ve used it, you are throttled back for the rest of the month to much slower speeds that really won’t work well for anything other than email and the most basic browsing. So, it’s a racket.
I’m sure I can’t be alone in this dilemma, although sometimes I feel as though I am.
When I’ve griped about this in the past, some have suggested creative solutions such as community wireless networks. These don’t really work well in this area (if they did, I might start one) because of the hills and valleys, and because line of sight is a problem.
For decades (since Bill Clinton, anyway) US Presidents have been touting the promise of high-speed Internet to every home and school. We pay fees on various utility bills that are supposed to help pay for access for the ‘underserved.’ There are federal programs which provide money to the carriers to pay for the provision of access for the ‘underserved.’
My area doesn’t count as ‘underserved,’ because we are too close to Pittsburgh. But we can’t get FIOS, cable, or DSL, because the population is too sparse, because the telephone central office is antiquated, and because it would cost too much to provide it.
If, for some mystifying reason, you’re curious as to where I live, just look at any of the orange, or blue, or red, cellular coverage maps. Or at any of the cable TV availability areas.
See? Right there in Southwestern PA? That part of Washington County, just East of West Virginia, and about twenty miles north of Waynesburg? That’s us.
We live in the small town of “Limited Service,” PA.
Do you get digital broadcasts from Pittsburgh over-the-air ? If so, a do-it-yourself solution might help. I’ve been a MythTV user for many years (even back in the analog days), and have no cable or satellite service (by choice). I do have broadband, but my usage is probably under 20g/month. I clearly pick up 7 broadcasters in Atlanta totalling ~ 30 channels. Value varies greatly, but the major broadcast networks plus PBS are 99% of our content.
The Glaswegian
Ball Diamond Ball:
Bless AppleTV, which only asks me how I want to pay.
Apple TV has the same geographical restrictions as Netflix.
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Then I guess I’m not watching these shows I’m watching.
Do you have an app called something like “unblock” on the Apple TV? I have heard of a similar continuation of service from an Apple TV user but when I looked for it afterwords didn’t see it in the app store.
Which is why I was downloading Doctor Who and Downtown Abby when it premiered in the UK until they got smart about two year ago. I did not want to have to wait for months to watch it.
Heck even authors and content providers hate the restrictions. I read a post form the Authors of the book that the new TV series The Expanse was based off. They hate the limitation. Canadian viewers can’t stream the show and even the British production company which made the shows hates it. So it is not just users but content creators who hate the artificial barriers of having to license the content in each nation separate. You can thank Copyright Lawyers for the mess.
It is because copyright law last 100+ years. You would not have this issue if Copyrights expired after 40 years.
No, it just plain works. I don’t know what Netflix does; when I tried to sign up, they said it looked like I was in a different country. Right. Then they said it looked like I was on a VPN. Right again. So they blocked me with or without the VPN. I go to my Apple TV and watch COPS, Breaking Bad, The Hollow Crown, Chinatown, and the UFC.
So I’ve never had trouble with Apple TV, and I have had trouble with everything else. I’m hardly an Apple fanboy — I have no clue what they are trying to do with the OS ever since about 10.2, and frankly, they hit their peak with 7.5.3 or whatever the 3.11 of the day was. I’m not doing anything special, and my Japanese internet comes right through the wall, no VPN, no funny business.
It works.
One early episode of Columbo introduced viewers to both director Steven Spielberg, and writer Steven Bochco.
Television is a writer’s medium. So I would the call your filmmaker pantheon and raise it with the work of TV’s master artists: Bochco, Jim Brooks, Gene Roddenberry, Carl Reiner, David Milch, Larry David & Jerry Seinfeld, David Chase, Chris Lloyd, Matthew Weiner, Joe Keenan, Rod Serling, Larry Gelbart, Anthony Horowitz, etc.
Some of these people I do not know, but the ones I do know do not impress me as anywhere near the top of achievement in story-telling. Then again, neither does Mr. Spielberg–occasionally, he does work worth doing, but there is next to nothing that could be called great.
You do have a point about the unusual importance of the writing, however-that is, relative to the other parts of making a tv show. I wonder what exactly this allows for–what is especially gained in this way.
I haven’t yet watched a show on Amazon Prime despite being a member for several years, because I can’t stand streaming. I only watch stuff I can download and then watch anywhere, any time- whether or not the wifi is in range- then erase. They control my access to satellite/cable programming so they can boost prices, so I cancel my subscriptions. They force streaming-only, so I watch a lot less, and read a lot more.
The video content and TV markets are crashing? Gee, I wonder why.
Blame greedy authors (like conservative Mark Helprin) and the Bern Convention for that.
Creative control. With writer-producers in charge you get character-driven shows like NYPD Blue, Hill St. Blues, L.A. Law, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, The Dick Van Dyke Show, The Simpsons, Star Trek, Seinfeld, The Sopranos, Cheers, Frasier, Mad Men, The Twilight Zone, M*A*S*H, Barbarians at the Gate, and Foyle’s War.
I respect great directors like John Ford, but too many movies today are driven by digital effects. The great storytellers are turning to television, and not just in the U.S. Try Sally Wainwright’s excellent Manchester cop drama Scott & Bailey, for instance, or one of the wonderful Steven Moffat Sherlock adaptations.
Yes, but the creations are not all that impressive, for all the control. Sherlock is not really well done & has recently become abysmal–the feminist show for New Year’s Eve…
The only bad episode they’ve done. Really bad.
Overall Sherlock has been a brilliantly produced, written, and performed series in my opinion, and that of awards panels on both sides of the Atlantic.
The other shows I listed (and you dismiss as “not all that impressive” speak for themselves. Maybe you just don’t like television? I feel sad for people who can’t enjoy a show like Seinfeld, which has brought so much laughter into our lives.
I laugh at Seinfeld episodes, but I also think they’re quite inhuman & have done something to Americans–& later to a worldwide audience–that was better left undone. Most people do not need, I don’t think, to be removed from their ability to tell that other human beings are also human.
This ‘brought up much laughter in our lives’ either implies that laughter is as such good, or that you’re an innocent.
Frasier seems to me funnier & preferable. It is certainly more human.
I also think MASH was an insult to your countrymen & their intelligence. At some point, there’s a difference between laughing at jokes & getting what the jokes are about–& that was all of liberal preening in an age when liberalism in foreign policy was all about betraying the country. I suppose the show, minus the liberal screeds, was comparatively ‘bringing laughter into our lives.’
So I’m not sure if you think of achievement in writing as independent from judging taste or principle.
I tend to watch different things than you do, it would seem. So, if it’s immoral comedy for the middle class, I prefer the straight up to the diluted–have you heard of this show, it only ran for a few seasons, Don’t trust the bitch? It lacked both polish & a sense of its wholeness, but it showed up immorality & moralism better than anything of which I’ve heard. Still made by liberals who’ve got trouble with psychology, but it was close to what it was trying to do, showing up celebrity worship.
As for comic shows, I suppose I find the comedy for the lower classes more reasonable. Cheers was ok, when it was good; even Mr. Long’s more recent show, Sullivan & son, was good at showing up moralism from the vulgar perspective of the lower classes. But I’m not sure I’ve found something really good, although it’s a gold mine…
I think Mrs. Tina Fey’s shows are better than most comedies, although they’re not much appreciated; possibly, someone could have steered her such that she could become popular, but it seems she’s the least silly liberal in her world, so that might be asking the implausible…
I thought the new Mike Judge show, Silicon valley, was really funny & quite smart, but got bored eventually the comic conceit was wanting…
I think the very successful Chuck Lorre sit-coms are soul-sucking, although they show up life at the end of the world quite cleverly.
You can see what I thought about Sherlock, if you go to my website. Well, you don’t have to–I only mean, I saw it, I did some thinking about it by my best lights & in ignorance of ward panels, & while I think there’s thinking to be done, I also think that it misunderstands just about everything it touches, especially in its attempts to talk about the political predicament of England.
Some might say all those episodes involving the press are about the higher classes’ infinite contempt for the tabloid-reading classes & the tabloids–as per the attempt to move from suing tabloids whose owners/managers committed crimes to organizing an aristocratic censorship of the press as such. But the show also deserves to be taken seriously as it presents itself as plot & choice of telling details, not merely as political hackery–hence the stuff I tried to show in my writing.
It is worse than Doyle’s work–who was not a great writer…– & it is systematically deceptious about every human phenomenon it insists upon. & it says nothing important about Sherlock’s to-the-death commitment to justice or the honor & loyalty of the gentlemen. Presumably, because these are unacceptable concerns in a democracy–they imply not a little contempt for democracy. It also therefore fails to confront Moriarty’s injustice properly.
As far as Seinfeld‘s “inhumanity” to man, only the last two seasons after Larry David left. Until then it brilliantly exaggerated human flaws. The job of the comedian is to make us laugh at ourselves. Enlightenment is … optional!
So there’s the perfectionist who sees flaws in everyone he dates; the “loser” who learns to do the opposite of his instincts; the dreamer/layabout with mysterious sexual allure; and the liberal New York innocent so sheltered and superficial that she can’t believe an attractive man might also be pro-life.
Not mention the everyday nuisances so common in our society: the officious bureaucrat who fancies himself the Jack Webb of librarians; menacing activists who maraud ribbon-less charity walkers; and the haughty, humorless cashier who disparages as “just so much fluff” the work of the generation’s finest comedian.
So also the job of the dramatist is to make you cry or at least sigh. You can also laugh & cry at Shakespeare–but if that’s all you get, you do not distinguish Shakespeare from a million other comics or dramatists. I agree TV does mediocrity best. But I was talking about excellence…
Any number of these incidents are innocent & revealing of some human thing worth dwelling on comically. But Seinfeld is not a ‘perfectionist.’ What he sees in seeing ‘the flaws in everyone he dates’ is also something to consider. Worthlessness is, I think, the mot just…
Yeah, Titus, laughter is as such good.
M*A*S*H was about doctors cleaning up after humanity’s most dubious necessity, warfare. To the degree that it occasionally dabbled in equivalency — humanizing North Korean soldiers, and sticking a Bircher stereotype in among ours — I don’t share its politics, and history has had the last say about that war. Communism’s most conspicuous failed state remains, and the free men across the DMZ deluge us with smartphones and the world’s best TV displays. The medium is literally the message: the Samsung has the last word.
M*A*S*H was a masterful mix of comedy and drama. Whenever silliness threatened, the writers knew all they had to do was have Radar hear the choppers approaching. It’s a natural human defense to crack wise in the face of horror, and Larry Gelbart and company did it well. Far from dishonoring our warriors, the program demonstrated the extent of their sacrifices.
But let’s not get too serious about comedy. Making millions laugh is a wonderful end in itself. We don’t want to be like that Romanian hire wire performer in Seinfeld who contemptuously snarls “ah yes, the comedian” at Jerry, then throws his cape over his shoulder en route to his own circus performance.