The Angry Drunk reminds up who is really to blame with the Netflix/Qwikster clusterfuck, as well as iTunes’s DRM, the terrible movie selection in non-US (and, let’s face it, US) iTunes Stores, and more.
Apple and Netflix are happy to sell whatever they can, however you want it. Apple is a store, for God’s sake. Netflix is a service; they want people to use it. They get it. The content providers don’t.
A counterpoint from Outside the Beltway points the fingers through the content providers, at our copyright laws:
For DVDs, Netflix’s rights are unlimited and its costs are constrained. For digital, its rights are constrained and its costs are unlimited. …Netflix must negotiate each and every title, and the price of the right to stream that digital title is up to the whim of the content owner.
(both links via Daring Fireball)
Yeah, but if service providers (like netflix, amazon streaming, cable companies, or whatever else) go bankrupt or make drastically reduced money because everyone is sick of dealing with them, the content providers have no one to sell their content to for ridiculous prices.
They have a supply of movies, and we have a demand to get them. Â If there is no longer a demand, they just sit on all their movie rights. Â I think most people are aware to some extent that service providers are being jerked around by content providers. Â But refusing to buy will ultimately hurt BOTH bottom lines.
Who are the “content providers” really though?  The Writer’s Guild.  The Director’s Guild.  The Screen Actor’s Guild.  And any number of support functions that go along with it.  Content producers have worked long and hard to wring what royalties they can from the media empires, and they’re scared to death of all you can eat content buffets and what it will do to their revenue streams.  They *want* their checks to keep coming in when they’re 95 years old and can’t work.  People complaining that they can’t derive content from 70 year old works are no match for the starving retired artists still collecting royalties from said work when it comes to Congressional pity parties.
They’re only scared to death of streaming because they get no royalties from them, unlike DVDs. Do they deserve them? Absolutely. Why don’t they have them? Because of the content providers (a.k.a. the distributors who own the copyrights to most of these films and movies, not the people who actually create them).