For a moment, it seemed like the streaming apps were the things that could save us from the hegemony of cable TV—a system where you had to pay for a ton of stuff you didn’t want to watch so you could see the handful of things you were actually interested in.
Archived version: https://archive.ph/K4EIh
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I gave them a chance. They collectively became more & more rapacious & greedy.
Back to sailing the high seas.
Arrr
You know after years and years of using it, the name Radarr makes way more sense now.
Arrrrr whatever be i to do? 🦜🏴☠️
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Is Disney+ bleeding money or is that just fancy accounting realizing costs that increase the other parts of Disney’s revenue?
sg
I’ve set sail on the high seas again for the first time in like 15 years.
Fun thing, the captain still knows the major trade routes
I am happy to steal from corporations. Been doing it all my life and I will never stop. Fuck em.
Things you never hear people say: I couldn’t sleep last night worrying about corporate profit margins because I stole some of it. It’s the least culpable crime in history.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Discovery’s David Zaslav have also indicated that their services were initially priced “too low” in an effort to draw a huge and unendingly expanding subscriber base.
In the early-to-mid 2010s, a subscription to Netflix and Hulu and your friend’s borrowed HBO password could get you access to the vast majority of all the TV that was worth watching.
Netflix had a huge archive of older shows plus a slowly growing library of its buzzy releases like Orange Is the New Black, Jessica Jones, and Stranger Things.
Not content to let Netflix have what looked like a lucrative new market all to itself the companies that made and distributed TV decided one by one as the decade wore on that it was time to create their own apps and generate their own subscription revenue.
Tech companies also decided to jump in, with Amazon Prime Video pushing into expensive scripted dramas and Apple TV+ becoming relevant by dint of throwing untold gobs of money at all kinds of projects.
Netflix announced its first subscriber loss in a decade in early 2022, cratering its stock; despite some recovery, it’s still only worth about two-thirds what it was at its peak in late 2021.
I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Good bot
Streaming was great when Netflix launched, convenient and affordable - I remember being excited when Netflix finally launched in my country. Was only a matter of time before all would turn to shit with every tv network/producer launching their own streaming services and fragmenting all that content.
Yeah Netflix worked because you had everything there and no strings attached.
Now Netflix is shit, hbo is meh, Disney plus is more expensive than sky etc etc
Fuck’em
Yeah, well I already got my boat in the water since the account sharing announcement from Netflix. I’m sure many more will do the same in the coming months.
I guess I never stopped. Still have subs though, but might cancel that somewhere in the future.
Didn’t their subscriber count go up fairly dramatically after the restrictions started?
The difference back then was Netflix was free extra money for TV producers. Cable subs were strong and the TV providers were happy to take extra cash from Netflix to let them stream. Netflix income was icing on the cake. As people cut cable out, streaming is the cake. So you need to charge the price of the cake. There was never an end game where streaming would be cheaper than cable. It was a change of pipes to deliver the content, but was not intended to change the value or cost of TV.
Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum
Luckily VPNs are cheaper
For me it’s back to the pirating era.
I will forever wonder how these companies actively choose $0/mo over a cut of $XX/mo and everyone in the decision chain thinks it’s the right decision.
Because your 0$ per month after dropping them doesn’t hurt their bottom line.
Corporations generally weigh the risks and the benefit often wins out and they make more money because there are enough people that either reluctantly cave into the fee increase, forgot about their subscription or just don’t care that it’s going up.
It’s fairly seldom (but seems to be increasing over the years) to see so much backlash that a company walks back on what they were planning to do.
My favorite example of the reverse in recent memory has been Wizards of the Coast essentially going back completely and then some on their unpopular OGL changes after a significant portion of their DnD Beyond members canceled their subscriptions.
They want you to drop your subscription to the ad-supported tier.
Like 22% of Americans never check their credit card statement details.
At this point, the best way to go (besides sailing) is to subscribe to one or two services at a time, cancelling others month-to-month based on what you want to watch.
We need an app that lets you search for content across all platforms and easily cancel and start subscriptions - queueing them up and helping you easily limit the amount you’re paying monthly.
But with these prices, it’s worth doing that manually.
Right now it’s smart to cycle through but I wouldn’t be surprised if that is the next thing to go.
What I could see happening is they keep raising monthly prices until the math doesn’t work out of them. Then they’ll introduce a small discount for locking in multiple months (3,6,12mon). Both will continue to rise in price but month to month will be quicker.
Or straight-up contracts. But I think the next step will be more slow-dripping content.
Netflix just pulled an obvious one by splitting the Witcher season 3 to the release half at the end of June and the other at the end of July. They claim it was for “an effective cliffhanger” but it’s clear they just wanted to squeeze one extra payment out of its viewers who aren’t interested in their other content. Paramount meanwhile stretches all of their Star Trek series out across the entire year.
I imagine platforms will start slow-releasing more of their most popular originals. I wouldn’t put it past them to flood social media with spoilers to punish anyone who’s waiting. I also wouldn’t be surprised if we start seeing one episode per month someday.
Disney+ (at least in Canada) gives a 15% discount if you pay for a year up-front.
Here’s how that will go:
Each streaming service will release their own aggregator app. Each of these will have a fee associated with them. Each of these will have certain services they don’t work with because the lawyers are still fighting over things. Each of these will eventually reduce their search coverage and promote their own content. “You searched for Star Trek, would you like Star Wars instead?”
Even if an open source third party wrote something that did this, companies would change their API pricing or authentication to break it so people don’t leave their walled gardens.
Companies are incapable of making a service that doesn’t eventually enshittify.
A third party app can just scrape catalogues, and then direct you to the platform’s website through an integrated browser to manage each account. They can push notifications when a subscription is about to be renewed just by remembering when you subscribed, and send reminders to cancel and subscribe to the next service in your queue.
The streaming companies won’t hide their catalogues because that’s how many people find what they want to watch through simple web searches, e.g. “Where to stream Barry” or “when does the new season of x come out?” The app could pull metadata from other sites for graphics and info like many already do.
It wouldn’t be as convenient as flipping a switch which would require proper API and probably login info, but seeing everything and managing it from one place would still help a lot.
I think a bigger danger would be platforms countering by requiring phone calls to cancel, or contracts, or slow-dripping content over months to keep you subscribed (some already do the latter.) IOW continuing to become more like cable.
Apple TV and Plex both do this already.
Sounds like a good time to cancel a subscription and finish the ol’ Steam library
I am going to need more gaming PCs to keep the family engaged in the post streaming world. Not sure how I am going to do it. Even finding space for them is going to be a challenge.
Let me introduce you to the wonderful world of steam deck
Capitalism turns everything into shit. Not promises, only profit.
If companies are so adamant in both raising prices to the point of unaffordability, and making alternate routes to enjoy their art illegal, then what we should collectively do is to just go without them, maybe use that free time and money for something more useful than art.
I say we bring back running down the sidewalk with a stick in your neighbor’s fence.
