I doubt there will be enough users who feel the same way to make this a reason why theaters remain. The same argument has been made about sound quality, and overwhelmingly now the sound quality in streaming services has improved, but is no where near perfect.
4k streaming will be more of a norm, and that will likely be enough for most users.
The issue here is not is the theater still relevant, but can the economics continue to support theaters.
If the trends in ticket sales continue, it seems like theaters by and large could be a thing of the past. It really is not about whether a large group see it as still relevant, its can the theater business maintain a profitable industry if it loses x% of its patrons.
If ticket sales decline, profits shrink or losses grow. Changing the model another way might increase revenues for theaters (say a all-you-care-to-watch pass, which would likely increase food sales), but only if Holywood changes its revenue model as well. If they continue to charge theaters the same rates, that model likely wouldn't work well. Further, if Holywood had to lose revenue, would it be more interested to work with other streaming services first, or create a competing service, versus go to the theaters?
To me the MoviePass subscription company is almost a Trojan Horse. While they continue to burn and lose money, and grow subscribers, they are making their subscribers see their experience as the new norm. If they go out of business, these subscribers now have to chose if they want to pay for each pass again individually (very expensive in comparison). Likewise, if theaters and Hollywood make a deal, it cuts their own revenue significantly. Its almost a lose/lose situation.
All this is just some of whats hurting Hollywood and the theaters. You also have personal politics growing sharper, a Millennial generation that doesn't value these experiences as highly, a fundamental change in how reviews are looked at, no longer being as easily controlled (RottenTomatoes), 3D movies not holding peoples interest, etc..
Its a bumpy road that doesn't seem to be getting much smoother.
This seems like a short-term problem. It would be like saying Netflix doesn't have content worth streaming, besides documentaries. A lot of people originally had this opinion of Netflix streaming services, and over time they fixed it.
Fixing movies is a bit more difficult. It requires in some cases larger and maintained budgets, and possibly even eventual increased subscriptions costs, or new revenue models to sustain it. However, all indications seem to indicate this is a path they are willing to go down.
In terms of quality material though, or gaining knowledge in how to improve it, or updating the interface to highlight bigger must watch films vs smaller films, I don't think this is an unsolvable problem for them.
The simple answer is realize your more nervous than the person or group interviewing you. You may not be completely yourself as your nervous, but they are being themselves.
If they act aggitated, aggressive, nervous, rushed, etc... Thats most likely either their true personality or a real problem of their workplace.
When you ask to meet your coworkers are they nervous or friendly. Does their boss say anything nice about them... Etc...
I hope this doesn't happen. With Google weakly policing illegal content, labels really do have a bad situation here.
They either take the deal Google has given them which is bad, or say no, and risk getting removed from YouTube and having their music uploaded by fans as lower quality streams. In other words, they take less money, or possibly lose everything while paying huge fees to send YouTube take down notices.
This is bad for the consumer in my opinion. I want indie musicians and labels to be able to make more money, not less. This further incentives musicians to look for another path of work.
Its disappointing that while technology is making it easier than ever to record and produce music, its becoming tougher and tougher to make a living off it.
I don't see how that follows, except for the terrible logic of less profit for the musician is automatically bad for the consumer because people will just stop making music if they can't get rich off it.
It looks like they're fighting back against exclusives and bullshit restrictions like "you can stream the first 5 songs, but if you want more you have to buy the album for $14.99", just the sort of thing everybody was complaining about two weeks ago when amazon launched their streaming service.
I understand that musicians like money. I can empathize with that, i like money too. But trying to frame it as good for the consumer is silly.
> except for the terrible logic of less profit for the musician is automatically bad for the consumer because people will just stop making music if they can't get rich off it.
It's not terrible logic, it's fundamentally sound. It's just not absolute.
That is, people won't "just stop" across the board. But the harder we make it to make money from making music itself, the more time would-be music makers will have to spend finding some other way to make money to finance their life.
So you lose music at the margins, particularly music that requires a higher level of investment to produce, particularly from those who have less disposable time/money.
I don't agree with that. I like artists, not businessmen. Turning artists into businessmen, or simply making businessmen don the apparel of an artist is not "good for the consumer", it's not "fundamentally sound" either.
but plenty of musicians manage to become rich (often becoming not-indie musicians in the process). There's lots of musicians, they can't all be successful. A musicians failure to become rich should not be taken as a sign that youtube should give them more money, it should be taken as a sign that their music don't have a broad enough appeal to make them rich.
Are people expected to feel sympathy for these companies? Have we forgotten that people turned to big centralized services for their music as a direct result of the recording industry's aggressive effort to kill P2P? This situation was created by the labels' own actions, their failure to embrace the Internet early on before these kinds services existed.
"Its disappointing that while technology is making it easier than ever to record and produce music, its becoming tougher and tougher to make a living off it."
It did not have to be that way. We could have set things up so that when a song was downloaded, the artist and recording studio that produced it received a small payment automatically. It could have been a truly innovative revenue stream.
> Have we forgotten that people turned to big centralized services for their music as a direct result of the recording industry's aggressive effort to kill P2P?
We are talking about small independent labels.
> This situation was created by the labels' own actions
> Its disappointing that while technology is making it easier than ever to record and produce music, its becoming tougher and tougher to make a living off it.
That's normal. Market commoditization. The problem is musician and labels don't want to change and they are learning the hard way.
I'd be interesting to see how many people live off music in the last century.
I don't really know what "change" they are supposed to be dealing with. Sure digital makes it easy to copy and distribute, but musicians keep making less and less and it is harder for them to actually use music as a career. Is the change you are referring to, that they basically should just deal with being broke, because it is easy to pirate? That sounds like a bad thing to me, not good.
> Sure digital makes it easy to copy and distribute, but musicians keep making less and less and it is harder for them to actually use music as a career.
This is true of every single profession that involves creating digital media. Writing, journalism, video, film, game dev, photography, you name it. The money is falling out.
I think a large part of the problem is that in all of those fields, people love what they do. Of course, they work very hard at it too, but what that means is that there are a large number of people producing media for the sheer joy of it.
As the cost of production goes down, an increasing number of "amateurs" can create media, and as distribution costs drop, that media is more easily disseminated. The end result is that people willing to do stuff for free are crowding out the paid players.
There are some exceptions, of course, creative people who make a ton of money, but they're the narrow end of the power curve. For an increasing number of people, being creative isn't a lucrative gig.
I don't believe that's a good or bad thing, just a thing. What I do think is bad is when people who make great creative works don't have the time or opportunity to do that. It's a waste if a talented musician has to spend 40 hours a week at some lame job to pay their bills and only has a few hours for music on the side.
But that's not a problem with the music not paying the bills as much as it is with the bills themselves. If we lived in some sort of utopia where we all the essentials we needed to get by for free, then there'd be no reason to whine about artists not getting paid. They wouldn't need to.
> I think a large part of the problem is that in all of those fields, people love what they do.
Also, the absolute amount of good content keeps going up. Those old Louis Armstrong albums aren't going away. People still listen to the Beatles and the Stones. And this is true of nearly all varieties of content.
The only timely content (sports, news, contest shows) is partially immune to this, but even then, attention is scarce and more quality entertainment enters the public domain every year. Right now it's mostly (classic!) books, but decades in the future, HD content will be 100% free to use and distribute and the bottom will really fall out of everything.
This is really insightful and not something I'd realized even though, for example, my own reading and music tastes encompass an increasingly long timespan.
> they basically should just deal with being broke
If they aren't willing to compete in new ways and change their business models, yes.
Even television shows have this problem. Commercial revenues are down, so production costs go down (more reality TV) and the format of advertising has adapted (more GM cars featured prominently).
And then half the Internet complains when their favourite actually good show gets cancelled because the TV execs saw its viewing figures tumble below acceptable ad revenue levels in some graveyard slot while this month's major sporting event was on.
We are inevitably reaping the consequences of what freeloaders have been sowing for some years now. It still costs a lot up front to make good quality content, more than ever as we push the envelope in some media like the big name games and movies. If too many people just take it for free with whatever excuse instead of doing something that ultimately supports all the artists and other creative professionals who make these works, then those people are going to have to find other jobs to do to pay the rent, and our culture is left poorer for it.
This is exactly why HBO keeps their Game of Thrones content which costs $6 million / episode exclusive.
If they started selling episodes for $1.99/each in HD the day after they air they'd see their upfront capital they get from their recurring subscriptions evaporate, and the show would also go away.
The irony is that Game of Thrones is big and successful enough that it probably could make a tidy profit even in the alternative model you mentioned and despite being one of the most pirated shows in the world.
The difficulty with the "adapt or die" reasoning isn't GoT, it's shows 2-10 on the popularity chart, where show 2 has only a fraction of the audience and brings in only a fraction of the revenue but its fans still want the same production values.
In the same way business does it - offer different services. There are two extra problem with this business though. Labels were stubborn to change, but I think finally they accept the fact that content is commodity. Secondly, musicians are artists not business people. There is an ethos of a poor artists that devotes live to sacrum.
Absolutely! I gave us a real warm and fuzzy feeling inside making more money with cheap, mediocre quality tshirts made in Thailand with unknown working conditions, than the actual music …
Ironically, in the time of the sacred internet, cutting a limited edition on Vinyl is still more profitable than any other digital form for a lot of small artists :)
I'm not complaining though, because I refuse to look at art as plain business and rather earn nothing at all than compromise doing what i love for a better ROI.
I think people should value money less. The artists/label on one hand, and the people who are too greedy to spend a few bucks on something every once in a while, because they can get it for free on the other.
Update: And i do believe that the current time is probably the best ever to make music, from a purely artistic viewpoint.
Kind of sucks, when someone is telling you: Offer different and additional services, and spend more of your time doing it to make up for the fact that your content is now easily able to be pirated.
LOL what world do you live in where music is a commodity? A market treats commodities as equal with no regard to who produced them. This has 0 to do with music, because it's all about skill, star power and charisma, so...
Hi Yegg. Very interesting update. Two suggestions for places..
1) If I search "self storage columbia mo" I get place results but if I "search self storage 65203" I do not get place results. I noticed this does work for food using a more familiar zipcode like 90210.. but maybe still a little zip code work to be done.
2) What about when I search "thai" or "self storage" in general. DuckDuckGo is known for not tracking the user, but if I search something that with location information would most likely provide place results, shouldn't I be given some type of indicator that with just a zipcode or city name I could be given better results? That way you are educating new users while still providing them the results they need and the privacy DuckDuckGo is known for.
This seems like a difficult business to execute on.
1) You need capital to buy the machines to give out and slowly collect $60 on. Once the capital runs out, more is needed, but without getting capital quick enough, new customers have to be turned down, growth slows, and capital becomes even more difficult to acquire.
2) Since the tech and product can be easily purchased by anyone, there is room for other businesses to enter the space quickly and drive a pricing war. If large chains got involved they could offer a lower price and push local same day service.
3) Machines break. Without a hassle-free return / warranty, customers will likely get frustrated, refuse to pay, and make collections very difficult.
Not to say it can't be done, the leasing industry is fairly large, but I'd thought I'd share my thoughts on the problems that might arise. Reminds me of when they did PCs for 19.95 a month plus internet for a contract term.
There are much bigger, fundamental problems with the computer rental business. Key amongst them is the selection bias involved with "renting" anything with a relatively low purchase value.
While consumers frequently make poor financial decisions, most are able to identify that renting is going to be more expensive over the long run, thus consumers prefer to buy outright, or to use credit financing that results in ownership, even if the terms of said financing are poor (e.g., using a credit card to buy a laptop). In a given population of consumers, the ones that are going to choose the rent option either do not have the credit available to use the finance-to-buy option, or simply don't have the means to make the payment that would be required with traditional financing.
I worked for a rent-to-own company (Curtis Mathes) in the 90's, so I have some experience in the space. Overwhelmingly, Curtis Mathes' customers were people who could not get credit otherwise. They couldn't get credit otherwise because they made devastatingly bad financial decisions. When you rent low-dollar items like $1,000 living room sets, this is the customer you get. Renting MacBooks is frighteningly familiar.
If I were Technichi, this is the ball I'd keep my eye on. Curtis Mathes faced tremendous challenges that non-rent-to-own companies only see as a small blip. For example, one of the biggest problems at our location was first-payment-default. A customer would take home a full set of furniture on a promotion such as "$1 pays your first week's rent", then never make another payment. Delivery staff would pick up the furniture, which would often go straight in to the dumpster because the delinquent customer had trashed it.
When you cater to the "Oh, I can afford $XX a month!" crowd, these are the problems you have to solve.
In regards to (1), they can lease/finance them. As long as the $60 includes enough gross margin, and as long as they have enough borrowing capacity, they don't need $2000 * X laptops to start up.
Seems like a good relationship with their financing partner would be key.
A brand new kia or scion is gonna be faster out the gate and cheaper than a 4 year old cadillac.
But the cadillac wins on looks, power, durability, safety, fuel, utility, terrain/environmental performance, can hold more people and those new cars won't have interiors half as nice on their new models 4 years from now as today's 4 year old cadillac model does.
Oh and if the race is longer than 30-40 yards that caddie will catch up and smoke those cars with it's V8.
But the real improvement is battery life. Intel Haswell machines are lasting 10 to 16 hours now, and this number will only improve as Intel moves to 14nm and 10nm designs.
Computers aren't getting faster because no one cares about that. The majority of the design effort is now into battery life. A Dell Venue 8 Pro lasts 8+ hours on a single charge, on a tiny 20Whr battery (while being faster than the 4-year-old Macbook Pro). The 4-year-old Core2Duo Macbook Pros lasted only a couple of hours on behemoth 60Whr batteries.
Battery efficiency will matter when it comes down to lightness and style. Better battery efficiency will lead to thinner, sleeker, lighter designs. Generally speaking, the "progress" of modern computers is battery efficiency, leading to smaller batteries, leading to lighter and smaller computers.
Then get the $300 Asus Vivotab Note, instead of spending $60/month on a lease on a new laptop. Within 6 months, you'll have made your money back and then some (Especially since the $300 tablet can do everything a 4-year-old computer can do, while having superior battery life, significantly less weight, support of a Wacom Active Stylus and a touchscreen)
Yes, I have run Photoshop and Gimp on a $300 Baytrail Tablet. Yes, they work. I can personally verify that fact. On the other hand, I do notice significant performance increases when comparing these cheap, tiny computers against my beefy Desktop. Regardless, I speak from experience.
Benchmarks do not lie however, these $300 Baytrail tablets are faster than Macbook Pros from 4 years ago.
Regardless of how you slice it, computers depreciate significantly faster than cars. For those where "just enough" performance is good enough, you might as well buy these modern $300 netbooks / tablets than lease a top-of-the-line laptop for $60/month... unless you really throw away your laptops after less than 5 months of usage.
A brand new cheap computer is better than a top-of-the-line computer from 4 years ago. And for those who are chasing the top end, modern premium computers are released too often for this lease business model to make sense IMO.
I'm thinking of the typical car vs the typical computer.
>> New cars typically lose about 20% of their value the moment they’re driven off the lot, and about 65% after five years.
MBPs are one of the few computers that hold their value the best. But after 5 years, you're looking at a depreciation rate of 75%+ (going from $2000+ in 2009 to only $500 in 2014).
But we're looking at the _best_ computer that holds its value the best. No one gives a damn about a refurbished Dell Inspiron from 2010.
You're looking at ~90% depreciation for the more typical laptop, and maybe 70% if you focus only on Macbooks. With Cars, you're looking at 65% typical depreciation, with only ~45% if you focus on Camrys or Corolas.
A 2009 Camry will run you ~12k today, only 45% depreciation.
You were downvoted for saying exactly what I was about to say: for most consumer use, my 2009 MBP does everything I need. It beats me at chess. A/V transcoding could be faster, but that's really an edge use case for me, and probably most people, even on HN.
What I do care about is ergonomics, specifically the keyboard, and I have yet to find a $300 (or $600) Windows or Android machine with a keyboard comparable to a Mac. If it exists, I hope someone will let me know in the comments.
This is a thread about how computers get better over the years. A modern Macbook Pro is leagues better than one 2 years ago (SSD, PCIe, Retina Screen, smaller), and the one 2-years-ago is leagues better than a 4-year-old Macbook Pro (Sandy Bridge vs C2D, GPU upgrades, etc. etc.).
I chose the Dell Venue 8 Pro because it is a cheap $300 machine to emphasize a point. Computers continue to make progress exponentially... to the point where a 4-year-old "premium computer" is specs-for-specs comparable to one of the trashiest, slowest modern computers of this time.
I'm a little pissed that I have to change my argument structure to cater to your fanboy mindset. I'm not taking a dig at Mac, I'm trying to make a point about technology and the rate at which it improves.
Long story short: the computer industry has always been about forward progress at an exponential rate. This will make it difficult for any "leasing" structure to work with computers. Depreciation of laptops happens too quickly.
I'm trying to make a point about technology and the rate at which it improves.
Make whatever point you want, but TFA is about an MBP subscription service. People buy MBPs for usability and reliability, not for hardware specs. Always have.
When you claim that one computer is "leagues better" than some other computer, I say "prove it - according to MY criteria as the purchaser and consumer - not your criteria as a chip overclocker."
I don't have to drive if I don't have to. If I want to drive I can lease a car for a few hours or a few weeks. I don't have to change the car's interior. I don't need to install new software to match my taste. I pick up the key, unlock the car and I am ready to go on the road. I put all my personal accessories under a bucket so when I return I know I have everything in the bucket and ready to go home.
I may need a spare laptop for a day or two. But I have to download the software over again and again. I use Firefox, but I also need Chrome. I need to download Adium as IRC client. I need thunderbird to be my email client. I need iterm2 to be my terminal. I need to set up a bunch of things. When I return I need to make sure I have the laptop restored to factory state. But I am paranoid some data maybe kept secret? What if the computer comes with malware already?
If I need a Mac computer to do testing, this business is great. When I am done testing I can return the machines.
One business model has worked for a long time and the other has failed a lot. Haha, maybe that statement itself is not very correct though considering the car industries recent history.
I think you've started a very interesting discussion here with you're comment. The 10x cost reference was a good point, but computers not dropping value over time also seems more feasible.
One of the big drivers for car leasing is tax policy. From my cursory understanding, you can generate bigger short-term, tax-deductible business expenses with a lease than a purchase.
Since computers presumably depreciate faster than cars, the benefit is probably smaller for computers.
My startup is probably going to use Google storage at this point. We are hosting video that only gets accessed a couple times, but needs to be available for 1 year, so the reduced storage cost is going to be big for us.
4k streaming will be more of a norm, and that will likely be enough for most users.