Fire TV: Amazon to block piracy apps in the future

Piracy is just the excuse. What they're saying is that Amazon will allow a collection of corporations (including Amazon) to decide what you're allowed to do with the hardware they pretended to let you buy.

Indeed. I wonder if in these executive conversations anyone ever asks the question, "Music has been purchaseable now without DRM for quite a while. Why has music piracy essentially died but movies/TV shows/etc is still as hot as ever?"

To be fair, I think the fractured rights thing is a big thing a well. I can subscribe to one music service - Spotify, Amazon, Apple, Tidal - and pretty much every new release is available on all of them (or risk a terrible opening week/zero buzz if you go for the 'exclusive' - but ever then, available a week or so later).

The movie/TV companies sell their show to the SVOD platform that offers the most in the territory. Or it's developed by the service themselves. So if you have to subscribe to a handful of services to watch everything your friends recommend.

Most of us can afford one music service. If you're forced into 5 streaming services a lot of people will just pirate. And even for those that do pay - the "we'll show this in the UK a week later than the US" means unless you pirate it, it's spoiled on social media within a few days.

The economics of shoving the entire output of the entertainment industry on a single $15/mo streaming service don't work out. It arguably doesn't even work that well for music. Ask any musician that doesn't rake in platinum records how well Spotify works out for them.

> The economics of shoving the entire output of the entertainment industry on a single $15/mo streaming service don't work out

The economics work out just fine: the net result would be paying the entertainment industry less, which may be what people want.

People can pay less, all they have to do is consume less.

But all the complaints I see are about not wanting to pay more for more content.