That was kind of my thought too. These people were offering a subscription based service that people were paying for. This shows pretty conclusively that people are willing to pay for content when it is conveniently packaged. When it’s broken apart and fragmented, piracy and alternative consumption method become more appealing.

Could you imagine if the music industry operated in the same way? Instead of choosing whether to use Spotify, Apple Music, etc, you needed to have both just to consume a relatively small collection of popular music? That would be madness—and it’s madness for film and television content as well.

My main thought here is that if they were based out of a non-US location, maybe they could have kept on operating. If I were Cuban, I’d be looking to startup something like this and offer global services. Hardware is cheap so the main cost is bandwidth which has been coming down. You would have trouble with CDNs as they would get muscled out of supporting the platform but that could be overcome with geographic partners.