What business model would you suggest, that is capable of financing the TV and films we like to watch?

I'm not aware of anything that works in practice, except for legally enforced copyright for at least a handful of years. And enforcing copyright means making torrenting etc. of infringing material illegal.

(Of course, whether it should be 5 or 10 or 20 or 50 or 100 years is a separate matter.)

And copying the music streaming business, where convenience is worth a low monthly subscription, doesn't work for TV/film. Producing a TV show is multiple orders of magnitude more expensive than an album.

To play devil's advocate, if there is no business model capable of supporting something, it should die.

I like tv as much as the next person, but its hardly sacrosanct.

At first sight, this seems to be a common-sense response, but things get more nuanced when you consider it in depth.

Electronic media are a viable business as things stand, so you must be considering whether they would continue to be viable without the sort of laws being discussed here.

Whether any business model is viable is relative to the laws in effect. Without laws governing issues like property and contracts, a great deal of today's commerce would be infeasible. Without labor and fraud laws, all sorts of exploitation would be the norm. Without either, exploitative practices would be the only viable ones, but they would not be particularly productive - that is how things have been through most of human history, and continue to be so in parts of the world. There is a lot more at risk here than TV.

On the other hand, the current law in this case strikes me as excessive, reflecting the anti-democratic influence businesses have over legislation. My point is that there are no simple answers; the sort of economy that has brought a previously-unimaginable standard of living to a subset of the human race is a battleground of competing interests and trade-offs.

> Electronic media are a viable business as things stand, so you must be considering whether they would continue to be viable without the sort of laws being discussed here.

I'm responding to the parent post who is arguing we must have current laws because otherwise tv would not be viable.

The current laws might make sense. They have problems, but i'm also not super sympathetic to people who resell the work of others without adding anything to them, for commercial gain. However i dont think, without law X, industry Y wouldn't exist is ever a sufficient reason in and of itself. If that's the only reason we have for a law, then the industry is not worth it.

I take your point, though there may be cases where the greater good is served by intervention (vaccines for an emerging disease?) I agree that TV and movies do not fall into this category.

Perhapes a crowd funded subscription model. Where television and cinema lovers pay a service to create films and showes based on the interests of their subscribers. while we are at it perhapes we could stream then to those subscribers so they don't have to store them locally where storage is limited. Oh look we recreated modern netflix.

And if people love it enough, they will find a way.

I'm not sure Netflix would agree that a low monthly subscription is not enough to fund TV and movie development, but regardless...

Fairly recently I saw a very interesting proposal for this. The basic idea was to base it off of how artist commissions work, and combine that with crowdfunding. A creator can decide how much they need to make a thing - including both costs and how much profit they need to find it worth doing - can use crowdfunding to get the payment upfront. Then once they make the thing, it gets freely released.

This works out for everybody. The creator has already obtained the amount of profit they desired. The people who paid to have to created have gotten it. The people who didn't pay can enjoy it if they wish. And overall everybody who "engaged" with the content now has a better idea of how trustworthy the creator is. The people who did not pay this time may have gained enough confidence to pay for the creators next project.

Obviously, there are many realities to face here. The degree of departure from the current model is rather large. It's not something you can just flip the switch on tomorrow and expect everything to just magically work out with no pain. But I think it's an interesting idea, and one that meshes better with the realities of the digital medium than the current status quo.

> I'm not sure Netflix would agree that a low monthly subscription is not enough to fund TV and movie development, but regardless..

Okay, and what stops my competing company from running a subscription service, where I take all the shows that Netflix funded, and streaming to my customers for lower monthly price than Netflix’s, which I can do, as I don’t spend a dollar on content creation and acquisition? Oh, that’s right, copyright stops me from doing that.

FWIW, this model (via crowdfunding platforms) has been successful in funding quite a few creative works, including very expensive ones. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_highest-funded_crowdfu... So the general principle is clearly workable.

Funding live action movies in this way is still not very popular, though. Arguably, the cost structure in this industry might just be too challenging to succeed in the first place. The fact that they do get funded by other means looks like a bit of a puzzle! It might even be more of a loss-leading, perhaps marketing-focused activity than anything aimed at directly making a profit.

Without copyright protections, everything on netflix is also going to be just as convenient to watch on youtube, but for free, meaning it's worth much much less to netflix. Extrapolating from netflix today to netflix without IP protections doesn't work.

This doesn't work out for the studio. How are they going to maintain a grip on the creators and consumers then?

They aren't.

Should society be facilitating that for them by allowing the law to punish people for sharing their work? Copyright serves society, not the other way around.

Netflix is funding TV and movies through massive amounts of debt; not subscription revenues. It’s unclear if Netflix will ever make that money back since they can’t stop making content.

Most companies operate on leverage. There's nothing problematic about debt in itself.

The problem is excessively long copyright terms. 10 or even 20 years would be reasonable, such that incentives to pirate would be less and copyright enforcement would make sense.

I have no actual data, but I strongly suspect that recent content accounts for the majority of piracy. Just look at the seeder count for, say, The Mandalorian compared to the original Star Wars.

> I'm not aware of anything that works in practice, except for legally enforced copyright for at least a handful of years.

We have had legally enforced copyright all this time so why would any company take the risk and try out another business model. That we did not see one does not mean one is impossible.

The money spend on copyrighted content would not just disappear without copyright and could be funneled into content by patrons or via grants. Big-budged productions are also already getting funded by product placment and other sponsort-type deals.

Then there is also a cultural aspect: The existence of copyright creates a society where sharing is often not seen as a good thing. Where people are less willing to pay for the creation of something if that would mean that freeloaders could then get it without paying.

And last, I don't agree with your implication that the current big-budget films and TV are something that needs to be protected. Yes, changing funding models might change what kind of content is produced, but never in human history has there been a lack of demand for entertainment or lack of entertainment to fill that demand.