It's amusing to watch various media companies horsetrading the rights to stream a particular show or movie on a given month, worrying about getting one week ahead or one month behind or whatever.
Meanwhile, millions of consumers look at the confusing availability of media and unpredictable technical quality of streaming, shrug their shoulders, and just download high-quality versions of whatever they want to watch at their leisure, thanks to torrents.
iTunes succeeds with a pay model in a world of piracy because it delivers predictable quality, widespread availability, and downloadable content instead of streaming.
That's how they beat the subscription music services, how they beat piracy, and what the movie studios need to learn from.
I regularly see a movie I would be interested in seeing in the theaters and it to my netflix que. Just a few months later it appears at my door (or removed from my que when reviews turn out it was bad). At least for me they overestimate the value of seeing most everything 'right now'. While I could go see the hot new movie, I just got in the mail the movie that came out 3-6 months ago to keep me busy this evening.
As for piracy, just like iTunes between always having a plenty of items from my que for streaming and getting a new disk every few days it is easier for me to use netflix than pirate. That is when I knew they had a model that was going to be very successful.
That's the way I see it. I don't want movies littering my hard drive. I just want to be able to watch movies. Netflix lets me do that without pissing off my ISP or forcing me to buy external drives or wait hours for the torrent to finish.
There's a big difference between torrenting an HD movie and watching a relatively low resolution streaming movie. I don't have the numbers at my fingertips, but I'd be surprised if the HD movie doesn't use 10x the bandwidth.
This is only marginally relevant (it doesn't directly address the specific codecs in use for std vs high def streaming), but torrenting a full movie in standard def versus high def is usually only a factor of 2-3x, at most.
While that is more data, it's a far cry from an order of magnitude of difference.
Netflix streams HD when possible, and most people I know prefer to download non-HD versions to reduce the wait time. I don't know how Netflix's compression is, though, so it might work out not to be that much more even when it's HD.
Netflix's compression looks (unscientifically) pretty close to standard-def DVDs to me.
Sure, it'd be nice to stream 1080p content, but I know my pipe can't handle it, and I'd much rather watch standard-def content right now than wait 2 days to watch the movie I want in glorious high-def.
It's also why IMHO the PS3's movie rental capability is laughably unusable. When someone goes onto an on-demand system, odds are they want their content right the hell now. The PS3 only supports downloading your rentals.
Now, what would be interesting is a standard for storing streamed video. This way I can rewatch, rewind, fast forward, etc, without hitting my connection again, but also have the perks of beginning right now.
Netflix only streams HD for certain movies and only if your bandwidth is good enough. If your pipe can't handle it, you will indeed be getting DVD-quality video.
Meanwhile, millions of consumers look at the confusing availability of media and unpredictable technical quality of streaming, shrug their shoulders, and just download high-quality versions of whatever they want to watch at their leisure, thanks to torrents.
iTunes succeeds with a pay model in a world of piracy because it delivers predictable quality, widespread availability, and downloadable content instead of streaming.
That's how they beat the subscription music services, how they beat piracy, and what the movie studios need to learn from.