• ShepherdPie@midwest.social
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    9
    ·
    9 hours ago

    It turns out people don’t want to pay the full price for content, so streaming companies are experimenting with ads to fund the difference.

    Who exactly determines what “full price” is? This reads like a statement from music executives in the 1990s when they were charging $25 for a CD with 10 songs on it and claiming piracy was costing them quadrillions of dollars. With inflation, that equates to just under $50 per CD today. Is that full price or is full price whatever people are willing to pay at any given time?

      • ShepherdPie@midwest.social
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        4
        ·
        edit-2
        8 hours ago

        That isn’t really possible to calculate for as you don’t know how many people will buy ‘XYZ’ until after the fact.

        Say two separate movies cost $1M to make and only 5k people watch Movie A while 100 million people watch Movie B. According to this, Movie A would need to cost $200 per copy, while Movie B would cost $0.01. The “full price” would be constantly fluctuating so how could you apply it to the first hundred people who watch the movie? What about the last hundred to watch it?

        Full price is just code for “what we want” not necessarily what it takes to recoup their investment. These companies want profit and they want every release to be as popular as something like End Game so they’re going to claim “full price” is whatever it takes to reach that $10 billion goal.