In discretionary entertainment goods, there is no “should be” price, other than the price a seller is willing to sell at and a buyer is willing to buy at.
If the media owner determine there is insufficient revenue and more can be had by lowering price, they can do that.
What is relevant is that it used to cost much more to get the same product, and it’s up to the buyer to determine what they want to spend to entertain themselves. There’s so many options nowadays, if GoT $/hour is too much, then choose something else.
> there is no “should be” price, other than the price a seller is willing to sell at and a buyer is willing to buy at.
That's true in most markets, but also totally irrelevant to the point. If a seller has no idea what the market will pay for something, and so just slaps on an absurdly high price because they don't actually care about this secondary (a la carte) market at all, that's almost the same as not offering the service at all. If an a la carte service is prohibitively expensive, it might as well not exist for the purposes of this discussion.
The sellers in this discussion are multinational organizations with very well educated people working with access to tons of data. I'm sure that for their own compensation's sake, they are busy figuring out how to extract as much value from their content as possible, which means figuring out how to get as many people to pay as much as they can for it.
They've offered the very show we're talking about, GoT, for $15 per month, when you want to watch, on pretty much any device you want to watch it on. Included in the $15 is pretty much the rest of their award winning content. If buyers think they can get a better deal elsewhere for their entertainment, they are welcome to patronize other businesses.
> The sellers in this discussion are multinational organizations with very well educated people working with access to tons of data.
And also likely with layers of bureaucracy, internal and external politics, complex business relationships, and other avenues for dysfunction.
> They've offered the very show we're talking about, GoT, for $15 per month
Sorry I'm not trying to be offensive here but you are losing track of the discussion. My entire argument is that many distribution companies evidently do not care enough about offering a la carte consumption alternative to make the effort to price it reasonably, although the situation is improving as companies get their act together and actually decide to act on the market data they have. (Game of Thrones for example is now $25-$30 per season on Amazon Streaming).
As such, the fact that anything might be available for a subscription at a reasonable market price is not relevant.
If the media owner determine there is insufficient revenue and more can be had by lowering price, they can do that.
What is relevant is that it used to cost much more to get the same product, and it’s up to the buyer to determine what they want to spend to entertain themselves. There’s so many options nowadays, if GoT $/hour is too much, then choose something else.