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Message: <blockquote data-quote="shutyertrap" data-source="post: 285204" data-attributes="member: 134">You are looking at this purely as a consumer. As a consumer, of course you want as many options available to you as possible. You are projecting your satisfaction into success for all companies involved. That simply doesn't happen.So let's look at something real world, purely digital, and happening right now.Netflix is responsible for subscription streaming as we know it today. They more or less created the model that all other paid streaming sites follow today. For a while there, they had this market almost exclusively to themselves. A few years back, Netflix entered a contract to license Disney distributed theatrical films up the end of  2019. Netflix would have exclusive streaming rights, would also have a first showing window of ____ amount of time before those movies could make there way to paid cable, basic cable, etc. Amazon and Hulu would not be able to stream those movies at all though. The contract renewal came up, and Disney chose not to renew it, mainly because they are starting there own streaming service and want all their film library under one roof for now. All those films Netfilx had during that agreed contract will be pulled from the service at a specific date.Now under the thread originator's logic, Netflix should be able to show these films that were under this contract license in perpetuity. When they signed the contract, they did not know what films specifically would be made, nor how successful they would be, and neither did Disney. Yes they knew there'd be a Star Wars movie or two, a Marvel movie or three, and some Disney animated stuff. All of that could have failed spectacularly by the way, but an agreed upon license fee was set with a date to review those terms in order to renew or end said contract. The question is, why would Disney grant them the licensing rights for digital streaming in perpetuity? They didn't need Netflix, those films are assets to Disney's overall worth. As a matter of fact, no major studio would have given them those rights. In which case Netflix would have never become what it is today, and instead would have failed as many predicted when they started streaming in the first place.You speak of competition, well look what has spawned; Amazon Prime Video, Hulu, CBS All Access, YouTube Red, and soon the Disney service and one from Warner Bros.There are certain titles shared among the platforms. Each platform probably paid the same licensing fee, and none were exclusive. Once those contracts are up, those titles may or may not continue being available to the service. Again with Netflix, the number one streaming show they have is Friends, which is a Warner Bros owned show. Although it is available to watch in syndication, the only place to stream it is Netflix. With Warners about to launch their own steaming service, it was assumed the contract with Netflix would expire and the show removed from the service. Instead Netflix backed up a truckload of money to keep it on the service for a little while longer. See Netflix actually underpaid when they secured the streaming licensing rights, Warners never suspecting that it would be a huge hit for Netflix when it has long been off of first run television, and can be seen daily in syndication. If Netflix had it in perpetuity, this would be seen as the steel of the century. But what if it had played out like Warners thought, and Netflix overpaid? Well they likely would cut all their future bids, to which no studio would agree.During all this, Netflix started building a content library of their own. It started with House of Cards, expanded to Orange Is The New Black, and they saw subscription rates go up. This further encouraged them to invest in yet even more shows, and eventually they made their first feature film. Now they have a new film coming out every other week. Hulu started out only carrying old TV shows and the ability to stream network television shows the day after they air. They started making shows of their own, creating a library that was exclusively theirs, because otherwise you are at the mercy of the people you license with. These services need these early license agreements to build up the customer base and the financial assets to create for themselves. Netflix isn't sweating the soon to be loss of all those Disney titles from their service, they are sweating another streaming company competing for consumer dollars. So that competition you are worried about? It drove Netflix to make their own content, it drove Disney and Warners into creating their own services, and the only reason they can even do that is because they have a vast library of content that is the very worth of their companies.I put in bold the word contract repeatedly for a reason. That's what these are. Have you ever signed one for yourself? I do every single time I work on a new television show or movie. I have to sign a new contract at the start of each season of a televsion show regardless of if I worked on it in the past. Why? Because we are agreeing upon my rate of pay and what conditions I am being hired under. I don't have an exclusive contract with any show, I am free to work wherever. If I were a writer, I would be locked into one show because they view any story ideas as their intellectual property and don't wish to share those with the competition. Essentially these shows I work on are licensing my skills. If this license was in perpetuity, then I'd be earning the same rate of pay that I was 20 years ago. Same goes for any work contract anyone signs. You want a pay raise, you're signing a new contract. Company doesn't like how you work? Contract isn't renewed (ever heard of a yearly review?) and you are let go. Doing so well that other companies are head hunting you? Well now you have negotiating power and can secure the best deal for yourself, thanks to competition from companies that didn't have your service.The Pinball Arcade is a pinball platform. Zen is a pinball platform. Zen has created enough unlicensed content that even if all the licenses got pulled, the platform would still exist with content. TPA has created one table, Masters of Time, and even that is license dependent. In other words Zen is very much just like Netflix, while TPA is Hulu at launch. The key difference in all of this though is that we the consumers, so long as we made our purchase prior to content being removed, will have access to it as long as the platform exists. The same cannot be said for these streaming services.</blockquote>

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