Quote:
Originally Posted by RichardCoulter
I don't care for exclusive content because if I don't happen to have the service, I need to pay for another one to access it or not be able to see it.
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While I don't like having to buy another service just to get access to a series or film, it is a fact of life. The streaming services need to compete to survive. They have four things they can compete on.
- Size of their library.
- Cost of subscription
- Quality of their videos
- Exclusive content.
Regarding the Size of their library, that may not be an effective way to compete because most people don't care how many millions of programmes/films they have access to as long as they have access to some they like.
Cost of subscription. If they compete on price, they'll end up driving their own profit margins down, and therefore reduce the amount they have to invest in both their own services and their content. This will mainly become a problem when the market reaches saturation point as they will be unable to attract enough subscribers to reverse the shortfall caused by a price drop.
Quality of videos. In my experience, beyond bragging rights, most people wouldn't notice the difference between a Full HD or 4K video on standard size home TV screen (60 inch or less), and a lot of people have trouble telling the difference between 720p and 1080p (Full HD). Also, a lot of people don't really care how good the video is as long as they enjoy the programme. There's also the problem that any serious increase in video quality may well require a leap in the capabilities of the available technology, and may require people to purchase new equipment. Which, as any company selling 3D TVs will tell you, is not a given.
That just leaves exclusive content. It's a lot easier for Netflix, Lovefilm, Blinkbox, Sky or whoever to merely sign up any one of the thousands of independent film or TV producers to make a new series or film, and has the bonus that it's relatively easy to do, and is only going to cost them a few tens of millions of pounds (if that). Bear in mind that while even a million is a lot of money to us (certainly enough to live on comfortably), it's peanuts to those companies.