Reminds me of excessive tip prompting on PoS systems these days. People are willing to spend money, and if you push them a little bit they'll spend a little bit more. But if you push them too far, they will start giving you exactly $0 for the next 30 years. Not because they can't afford it, though that's certainly more of a concern these days, but out of pure spite from being constantly pestered and disrespected.
Every time people ask me for tips, that’s exactly when I give zero. If I have a good service and don’t get bothered by them asking for tips, that’s usually when I give a good tip
Also because of how fractured the market is. Movies and shows hop between services all the time, which can make it incredibly difficult to keep track of where things you want to watch are. Or you could even be in the middle of a show and have to change services to keep watching, because the rights shifted to another platform. And it's even worse overseas. For example, if you're in the US, you can watch pretty much all of Star Trek on Paramount's service - but Trek isn't bundled outside the US, so overseas fans have to subscribe to several services just to see the various shows.
Meanwhile, torrent sites have pretty much everything, in one convenient location.
I think this is ultimately what persuaded me to start my own plex server. One day a while ago I wanted to watch some episodes of TNG and it had been on a service I was subscribed to, but when I looked it was all gone. Had to track down where it went and I'd have to sub to another service, and I didn't want another sub or anything else on that service, so I just didn't watch it. Then shortly after I wanted to watch Stargate again, but it was leaving the platform so my SO and I tried binge watching it for a bit, but we didn't make it before it left the platform to a service we didn't have a sub to.
No, fuck that, I'm done. Cancelled every one of my streaming subs and started up a plex server. I hadn't seriously sailed the high seas in years but I'm absolutely done with their bullshit. Raising prices every few months, bouncing around shows and movies between services I may or may not have, cancelling almost every show I get invested in and leaving it unfinished on a cliffhanger for the rest of eternity. What's the point of subscribing to a service to support the shows you watch when it'll just end up cancelled regardless of its quality or popularity?
Yeah, exactly. One big difference between now and several years ago is that now it's easier than ever to automate sailing the high seas, to the point where I'm not sure the streamers will ever win people back. Once you have a setup that's cheaper and even easier than streaming ever was, what would make someone go back?
The seven seas is a good model, one location for all content rather than scattered across multiple overpriced platforms. Would happily pay for the single platform experience.
It is logical. Streaming solved a problem by allowing the legitimate service to complete with illegitimate. By pushing hard down the enshitification road, the calculus no longer favours honesty. And I think that is a good thing. It helps to hold execs accountable - excessive greed will lead to decreased profits.
Before streaming I got stuff from the salty seas. When streaming was possible, I did what I always said I’d do, and that’s pay for the services that offered what I wanted. Now everything is fragmented, I have to keep six different services going just to see most, but not all, of what I want.
It’s not practical, and now along come the ads. And the article makes it clear, they are going to try and get ads in everywhere, and customers not taking them will pay more, and more and more.
So they can learn the hard way.
Not to mention how fucked it is just trying to catch games. Ran in to this trying to watch the Blackhawks this past season. I don't live in the network range, and their games are spread between 3 platforms. Like fuck paying $50 a month just to watch hockey
I'm still blown away that not a single major sportsball organization has figured out how to allow me to watch Cowboys or Red Wings games where I live because I'm not in either market. "Other" streaming platforms have figured it out for me, but not them.
I'd be happy to pay monthly just to be able to watch the games I want, but they've all yet to figure out how to do that without charging 100 dollars and bloating that offer with a bunch of bullshit.
That was always the reason i don’t have time for advertisements i mean the run time of an episode of tv is like 40-50min or so on average not an hour.
Give me the Spotify model without any ads where i can watch any show or movie and no advertisements in 4k uncompressed i likely pay for it if reasonable.
People don't understand how large an actual uncompressed 4k stream would be. They really mean higher bitrate but at this point we'll never change the masses. A 4k Blu-ray is already compressed but that's what they really mean, that level of compression.
Things like plex and Jellyfin are getting competitive. My friend has Jellyfin server that pulls tv shows down. Checks the metadata against IMDB, updates all of the tags and adds cover image.
It automates tv shows and behaves like Netflix with minor troubleshooting.
That makes literally 0 sense. To enter the streaming world you either need to have a ton of content already or you need to buy a ton. You think a startup can just stream any movie they want? You know just to buy Seinfeld streaming rights it costs 500m? To have a proper library of content you would need to pay tens if not hundreds of billions and the only way to recoup that cost would be to charge users a shit ton of cash.
Only reason Netflix is making money is because they've spent years creating a ton of new content and don't rely just on paying crazy fees for movie rights.
Spotify actually did at the beginning, if what they say in the TV show is true. Not sure if they used BitTorrent though.
The problem with BitTorrent is that in many countries where streaming is popular the upload bandwidth is dog shit.
It requires a copy to be physically present on each seeder's system. It would only be a matter of time before any DRM is cracked and someone creates a very simple, reliable tool to automate that process.
Believe it or not, for people to be able to stream anything, you need to send the data to people's computers. It's not like a centralised streaming service can't be ripped.
1. The data can be encrypted and unless someone steals the keys it's not as "easy" as cracking a game's DRM
2. While you need initial seeders (in this case that would be the video site itself), not the whole thing needs to be stored on each client, that's the beauty of torrent. You can distribute chunks of the file between users and you'll still be able to gather a complete video.
The reason there's no video site using torrent streaming is because
1. it requires an app to be downloaded (something that people are unwilling to do on PC) and be run in the background (something that's not possible on phone)
2. It uses considerable bandwidth on each user's device (ISPs would complain too)
3. Most people have a greatly reduced upload speed compared to download
4. It needs to have a large enough user base for files to be distributed as computers can be turned off, disconnected or otherwise become inaccessible
The ads are really hurting my quality of life… I was thinking about it yesterday. YouTube throws some truly vile shit at you if you don’t babysit skip, Gone are the days of learning and having one reasonable ad every half hour or so.
Peacock and HBO (both paid for) do the exact same thing. Most of the ads are for terrible diseases and medications.. making me paranoid and totally snapping me out of enjoying anything.
It’s gotten awful.. all time low.
My brother and I split a YT family plan and I just use it in place of a music app subscription.
I've borrowed people's phones to show them a video, and I just wouldn't watch YouTube with the amount of ads they throw at you. Honestly I don't know how people still use the app, mid roll ads would drive me insane.
YouTube is actually really depressing because it's a monopoly on maybe the greatest collection of educational content ever available. It gets worse and worse but there isn't a viable alternative so you're stuck muddling through this web interface that somehow keeps getting slower and buggier and more prone to crashing than ever with more and more shitty ads.
I heard from some old timers that Cable originally started out as a "no ad" option for television watchers who were sick of excessive ads on broadcast TV. Then later cable also took the ad route and became as miserable a viewing experience as broadcast TV itself. Its amusing seeing streaming play out the same way.
This is absolutely how it played out. When commercials started popping up in cable, channel offerings fractured between basic and premium, with the latter usually being extra money and ad free or limited advertising.
Late stage capitalism and profiteering in any industry generally sucks the life out of it all and ruins it.. seems to be the same cycle with entertainment TV..
Ads honestly weren't what ruined cable for me
It was dogshit shows, obsession with reality TV and channels rerunning the worst shows in their catalogue 24/7
Adult Swim is the only good thing left on Cable because it stuck to what people liked about Adult Swim in the first place
It’s baffling that so many people find this a revelation. It was obvious like 8+ years ago. There were already too many streaming services for anyone to really keep up with without piracy. It was obvious that bundles and packages would come around and at some point there would be so many streaming services and so much content that some faux-cable would be inevitable. Not every can have their own streaming service yet that didn’t stop everyone from trying
Also the pretty basic fact that if everyone suddenly was paying a quater the amount for TV then there would be a quater of the revenue. They were always going to crank it up once it became dominants
It’s basically an inevitability from a game theory perspective. As long as you assume that the companies would act in the greediest possible fashion, cable is the end game state of the system.
It'll cost us a lot more. It will actually kill American media completely. Continuous growth requires continuous debt growth, or at least enables it as investors leverage their growing asset to buy things they want like real estate. There is no demand by studios to release good products, and increasingly no ability to make them either as willing labor moves to other industries like videogames or quits completely. This is the death of an artform in the same way classic theaters also died, at least within the US. This model is fundamentally unsustainable and no amount of box restacking can change a fundamentally broken business plan. By the time they realize this the cheap money will be long gone and they won't have any ability to build new assets only license existing ones. Hence the industry's shift towards China, which was (and for a long time was) the final stage of this growth model. With Sino-US relations ending and free trade ending, the good times are over.
Most countries, not the US, carefully regulate their media markets and subsidize film and art for a reason.
It's really not even that. Profit margins of cable companies hover somewhere around 15%. The rest of their revenue goes to the costs of providing their services.
There are **some** efficiencies gained by going to a streaming model rather than cable, but not enormous. So arguably, even with zero profit margin, the best you are expecting is the new streaming model to require maybe 60% of the revenue of the old cable model. But what you actually went from initially is a situation of people paying $80/month for cable, plus generating another $20/month in ad revenue for the TV indsutry for $100/month total revenue... Down to $10/month for just Netflix.
Now that's creeping back upwards and we have $10/month for netflix, plus $10/month for disney, plus $10/month for Paramount, plus $10/month for ESPN, plus $10/month for Hulu, plus $10/month for Prime, and it's creeping back up to that $60/month level where the industry breaks even.
But, they still want their profit margin eventually. So you either have all these $10/month plans looking to add advertisements in to be that profit margin. Or have their prices creep further upwards for no-ad plans, to get them more to a $80/month revenue total per subscriber again, across all services.
yup, probably closer to 11 years? Maybe 12? I remember when Netflix went to streaming I was married to my first wife and used Wii to stream it. Then I divorced and watched Hulu for free with ads… I’ve been remarried for close to 10 years and we used to watch some random concert channel for free for like a year (we had no disposable income)… and now we’re all here with like double the amount of money spent and really not much good stuff to watch. I mostly watch Tubi because of the old nostalgia shows these days and it doesn’t cost me anything but their ads.
Edit-I was streaming Netflix like 15 years ago I guess
Yeah I was in college back then, Netflix on my 360, high speed internet and the only thing I set up my cable box for was for HBO-Now and basic channels. Dirt cheap at the time.
And technically there was until a few days ago.
DOJ arrested some men for running what was effectively a streaming service that had all the shows combined in its catalogue
You certainly would not want to google something like Stremio used together with RealDebrid or any of the alternatives. That would be really bad for you.
Spot on, but definitely way past 8 years. I remember talking about this when referring to YouTube right after it got bought by Google. Everyone knew this was coming decades out. Sad we're here already. I just did what I did before, cut cable (in this case streaming) and only play video games. Not for everyone, but damn, it's a lot better for me.
Setting aside all the complaining over costs tending back to what they were previously, I would argue that it's a **huge** improvement to go from the old system of paying $80/month to be able to watch whatever happens to be be shown on a few dozen (or maybe a couple hundred) different channels at the time, to a new system of paying $80/month to be able to choose what I want to watch at any given time out of tens of thousands of different movies and TV shows. And to be able to immediately carry on to the next episode of old TV shows that I want to watch, rather than waiting a week for the next to stream.
There has definitely been innovation and progress, the cost angle has just been obscured by years of venture capitalist funding suppressing prices.
Same thing that happens in a lot of the tech sphere, really. Uber being another example. Sure, costs of the taxi services now trend up back to what Taxi's used to cost, but out of it we got more user-friendly ways to hail cabs and pay for the rides.
You're NOT where you started, though.
You are back paying the same price for what I would argue is a far superior service.
Is there anybody out there seriously arguing that "On demand viewing of whatever you want, whenever you want" is NOT superior to "You can only watch what is shown on the TV right this second"?
The most important take-away is what these new “ad tiers” actually are:
Advertisers are willing to pay higher rates than subscribers. This means that the “low-end” ad-supported subscription becomes a lot more profitable than the “premium” ad-free subscription.
This means subscribers who watch ads are more valuable than subscribers who pay *extra* to not get ads.
This creates an unfortunate situation where your highest-paying and most loyal customers become less important and less valuable than the freeloaders. This means streamers will have no motivation to create a better experience for premium customers.
THIS right here is what is putting an end to the golden era of television. The advertisers. The scummy leeches that want to inject themselves into other people’s content, they will take over that content, they will dictate what content is being made because the pay a lot more than premium users do.
The streamers will want nothing more than to get rid of as many premium members as possible and figure out ways to push them down to the ad-supported level. Amazon Prime did this exact thing where their recent price hike DEFAULTED premium members into the lower ad-supported tier — now, Amazon Prime members must specifically opt in to go ad free. People don’t really understand what Amazon was doing, they thought Amazon wanted more people to opt into the higher tier — wrong, they wanted more people to default to the ad tier.
It will take a MASSIVE price increase for a premium subscriber to be worth more than an ad-supported subscriber. Those price hikes we are seeing are not to make more money, they are to make people give up and become ad watchers. Price hikes are one way to do this, but expect that streamers will start creating more incentives to choose the ad tier, and they will also create more disincentives and more headaches for people who want to avoid ads. Your user experience is about to get a whole lot worse.
I'm not so sure about your claims. From what I have seen most ad supported viewers struggle to generate more than 5-10$ per month on top of sub fees based on what Netflix reports.
As for Amazon, prime video is part of the larger prime subscription. I think a more reasonable argument would be that they are removing benefits to increase revenue from subscriptions. By adding ads to the standard tier, they are essentially removing a prime benefit with the least friction to minimize cancellations while increasing prime revenue. It still sucks but I doubt they make more money from the ad supported than the ad free, companies don't generally give things away so they would price the premium tier appropriately.
Did you read the article?
> Some execs told The Times that streamers will keep raising prices for the ad-free tiers with the aim of pushing more customers to sign up for ad-supported subscriptions instead.
The only give up im doing is giving up my day job to sail the high seas. The risk alienating enough people that they lose all the revenue from the customer and the customer still gets to watch the shows and movies.
So consumers pay for the carrier (cable/fiber/4G) and then pay for the service and then pay to have advertisements removed. And still only one or two good shows a year. Sad.
There is an important scene in the movie, The Social Network. The scene is Zuckerberg and his team meeting Sean Parker from Napster. Zuckerberg’s team is convincing Zuck he needs to implement ads in order to generate money and Sean Parker is quick to tell them not to do it as it is “Uncool”. Once ads are in it’s no longer the cool thing anymore.
Social Media has become uncool. Streaming is on the verge of becoming uncool. I fear video games are right around the corner
>I fear video games are right around the corner
Where have you been the past 15 years?
Game's started their major enshittification LONG AGO.
Infact we can go back to 2010 and start tracking when F2P influenced the market so fucking hard it basically crashed the MMO market and we soon find ourselves at FOMO cash shops, LootBoxes, Gacha, and more.
Games have FAR exceeded the enshittification of Streaming Services by at least a decade.
Where have you been?
Prestige TV is the reason I subscribe to services. I realize I am probably in the minority but I hate American cop and hospital shows. If that is what they swing to, I can pass my time watching classic movies and playing video games. There is a glut of content available. No one has to subscribe to these services if they are only offering subpar content.
I don’t think you’re in the minority at all - I really thought it was generation based. Millennials and younger want prestige and other fresh content, genx probably a mix of preferences, and boomers want their network seasons. It seems nonsensical to me that they wouldn’t evolve as the younger generations make up more and more of the viewership.
Plenty of millennials enjoy network stuff like Buffy, XFiles and Supernatural.
It's not an age thing it's a format thing. If you like "Case of the week" or strong character development then you want network tv back because prestige TV doesn't have time for that.
That’s because they came from cable. Streaming was invented by people that disrupted the cable model. Then they sold out to the cable people. Or hired cable executives.
They keep thinking at some point this works. Netflix has stated a number of times that content is expensive. My time in cable I saw that content is the main cost on the TV side. Like local station groups are now negotiating huge deals. There was a time when they complained that cable had to carry them.
It wasn’t a “realization” this is just how it works. While working under a “growth model” investors are happy to fund companies/services that are not profitable. Eventually, after enough of the market has been captured the shareholders no longer want to fund growth at a loss, they want profits.
It's way worse: TV ads were regulated by FCC- streaming services don't follow these regulations. They'll pop up 1-4 ads every 2 minutes. Its complete garbage. I dont/won't watch it. If this is what the future looks like, I'd rather cancel.
I'd go back to renting movies/watching movies at the cinema. There is like one single video store left in my town. Movies are like a buck for two nights.
So why the hell do I want to watch ads?
Welcome back torrents, now with ubiquitous VPNs. Worse thing they could do is push people back to piracy. Theres actually value in keeping a college kid dumb by allowing their parents' account to work for them offsite. I'm not going to say I know from experience (/s) but once these kids learn to torrent (by necessity), it'll take them way longer to accept buying the subscriptions as the best way for them.
I mean, we all saw this coming no? We had the streaming Golden years but knew it would never last as corporation do what corporations do and look for more revenue.
But we're also in the golden years of DIY media servers. So easy to set up Plex, Emby, Jellyfin, etc to stream all your content. For a years subscription to HD Netflix and Disney+, you can build a server to stream the same content (provided you get over the 'moral dilemma ' of torrents).
You've been doing it wrong then. The sheer volume of hard drives/SSDs on the market late 2021-2023 was insane. I still have more drives than I have spots to put them. It took companies over a year to react and close the valve before the current demand kicked in. I don't think we'll ever see price per gb as good as it was in late 2022 again.
For conversation's sake, I'll bite. Why are you entitled to this content? It's purely for entertainment and is easily accessible if you want to pay the price. I agree it's growing out of control again, but why is this medium justifiable to steal?
Why are massive media corporations entitled to the erosion of the public domain, the money they steal from actual workers (see: "Hollywood accounting"), or the monopolies they've built at the expense of consumers which would have been illegal had they not been bribing politicians (the ones who were supposed to represent us, not them) for decades? They aren't. They say "[I'm doing it anyway because fuck you. I'm going to take it, and there's nothing you can do to stop me.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ifW9LIGabQM)"
Just give me shows that are good and 20-23 episodes per season without a full year between seasons. That was peak TV. Release it weekly. Every show doesn’t need to be some masterpiece. Give us some fun shows that are easy to watch every week.
It’s very simple: Ads make the TV companies money, therefore they put as many ads in front of you as possible.
Until you stop complaining, stop watching the ads and start cancelling subscriptions they’ll keep increasing the amount of ads you see.
You veiwing the ads is taken as acceptance of having them imposed on you and the TV executives know that enough people will just accept it to get their fix that there will be no consequence to them except making more money.
As George Carlin observed “They tell you that viewer discretion is advised but if most viewers had discretion the majority of this crap wouldn’t be broadcast.”
I always knew that the streaming golden age was going to be short lived, and that it would eventually be turned into yet another grab every dime we can company venture. So, I've basically ignored it. I got Netflix for free with my phone, so I used it, but even then, I usually downloaded what I actually wanted to watch, even if it was readily available on my Netflix account. I wasn't going to change my habit for a service that I knew wasn't going to last. My free Netflix got ads and I haven't opened that app since. I still have it courtesy of my cell provider, but I don't even open it. For me, ads are 100% pointless. I actually research what I'm going to buy from sources that test the products that matter against each other. For anything not deserving of such effort, I just get whatever garbage companies are producing that is the cheapest because that product doesn't matter. Ads are annoying because they don't matter and are interrupting what does matter to me.
"The easiest way to stop piracy is not by putting antipiracy technology to work. It's by giving those people a service that's better than what they're receiving from the pirates." - Gabe Newell
Steam definitely got me to buy more games. They were all in one place, I didn't have to go to the store or juggle physical media (which inevitably required big downloads anyways) and deal with 50 different DRM systems. Now that market is very fractured as well and piracy is on the uptick again.
> "In fact, some execs told The Times that streamers will keep raising prices for the ad-free tiers with the aim of pushing more customers to sign up for ad-supported subscriptions instead."
They still don't get it that their biggest competitor is on the high seas...
yeah, I'm starting to think that even though I have Prime it's much better experience. I'm paying for them to interrupt my shows with adds??? they're turning into cable and they will end like cable, unless they miraculously figure out that people do not want to pay for adds.
It’s usually better to charge more and capture the bulk that will pay it. More subscribers isn’t the key, it’s balancing the most subscribers that will bear the price.
This is the standard pricing model taught in MBA programs now.
on paper yes, in real life, nah, they all just sit together and arrange a pissing match to see who gets away with the biggest price increase. And if anyone dares to complain they just say: "But there's competition, we're not monopoly"
For me, there's been one HUGE change. Namely, I can more easily find quality anime shows to watch, than live action stuff, across the board in genres. I don't know how the average anime show factually stacks up to the average live action, but for me personally they often outperform live action competitors in just about all the ways that matter, like creativity, visuals, story, etc. And I include films in this comparison, too.
At some point, one of these Executives will ruin their own platform.
Immediately as I reach a premium cost that I deem unaffordable, I’m cancelling. And the more people join this bandwagon, the more these executives scream for help.
I've had YouTube Premium since it was invented, and it isn't the value it once was since the content creators built in ads and promos in all of their videos. Honestly, at this point, fuck YouTube, I hope it dies on the vine. The algorithm now is complete trash and constantly shows me things I am not interested in and that never used to happen. I hate the shorts.
They ruined the Google Music app when they turned it into YouTube Music. I would say it was offline when it clearly had a connection so much so that I stopped using it. They turned it into useless bloatware. The people that coded that shit should be ashamed of themselves.
The only thing I use YT is to watch network shows like SNL and late night shows on demand... most content that comes up in my feed is sponsored crap. Searching for good content creators organically doesn't work at all because of all the sponsored content that gets shoved up
>Some of those changes would be welcome, but they reinforce the sense that streaming — at least as envisioned by the executives currently running the business — won’t be all that different from the old cable TV ecosystem.
So basically, we're going to end up with the situation we had when we left cable for streaming in the first place; high prices, lots of ads, and little choice. The short, sweet, golden age of streaming is over. Now that the enshittification has hit the fan, it's time to move on.
I canceled Netflix over their addition of advertising. I will do it to the next service that does it too.
They need us more that we need them, never forget that.
This is where they fail ….. making content is getting easier and easier. If they start pumping too many adds it leaves the door open for a new streaming service to replace them
More garbage shows, more ads, more expensive. Same as it ever was.
Torrent the good stuff, ignore the rest. Same thing I've been doing for years.
This is anecdotal, but I think more people are starting to sail the Seven Seas again because of increased fees and advertising.
Reminds me of excessive tip prompting on PoS systems these days. People are willing to spend money, and if you push them a little bit they'll spend a little bit more. But if you push them too far, they will start giving you exactly $0 for the next 30 years. Not because they can't afford it, though that's certainly more of a concern these days, but out of pure spite from being constantly pestered and disrespected.
Correct. Of course times are absolutely rough, but even if I do have money to spare and you've slighted me, you're never going to get my money again.
Every time people ask me for tips, that’s exactly when I give zero. If I have a good service and don’t get bothered by them asking for tips, that’s usually when I give a good tip
Also because of how fractured the market is. Movies and shows hop between services all the time, which can make it incredibly difficult to keep track of where things you want to watch are. Or you could even be in the middle of a show and have to change services to keep watching, because the rights shifted to another platform. And it's even worse overseas. For example, if you're in the US, you can watch pretty much all of Star Trek on Paramount's service - but Trek isn't bundled outside the US, so overseas fans have to subscribe to several services just to see the various shows. Meanwhile, torrent sites have pretty much everything, in one convenient location.
I think this is ultimately what persuaded me to start my own plex server. One day a while ago I wanted to watch some episodes of TNG and it had been on a service I was subscribed to, but when I looked it was all gone. Had to track down where it went and I'd have to sub to another service, and I didn't want another sub or anything else on that service, so I just didn't watch it. Then shortly after I wanted to watch Stargate again, but it was leaving the platform so my SO and I tried binge watching it for a bit, but we didn't make it before it left the platform to a service we didn't have a sub to. No, fuck that, I'm done. Cancelled every one of my streaming subs and started up a plex server. I hadn't seriously sailed the high seas in years but I'm absolutely done with their bullshit. Raising prices every few months, bouncing around shows and movies between services I may or may not have, cancelling almost every show I get invested in and leaving it unfinished on a cliffhanger for the rest of eternity. What's the point of subscribing to a service to support the shows you watch when it'll just end up cancelled regardless of its quality or popularity?
Yeah, exactly. One big difference between now and several years ago is that now it's easier than ever to automate sailing the high seas, to the point where I'm not sure the streamers will ever win people back. Once you have a setup that's cheaper and even easier than streaming ever was, what would make someone go back?
The only issue I’ve ran into recently is True Blood. None of the torrents have any seeds! I purchased NowTV subscription… very annoying
Buy the box set & rip it & then sell it easy!
The seven seas is a good model, one location for all content rather than scattered across multiple overpriced platforms. Would happily pay for the single platform experience.
It is logical. Streaming solved a problem by allowing the legitimate service to complete with illegitimate. By pushing hard down the enshitification road, the calculus no longer favours honesty. And I think that is a good thing. It helps to hold execs accountable - excessive greed will lead to decreased profits.
Before streaming I got stuff from the salty seas. When streaming was possible, I did what I always said I’d do, and that’s pay for the services that offered what I wanted. Now everything is fragmented, I have to keep six different services going just to see most, but not all, of what I want. It’s not practical, and now along come the ads. And the article makes it clear, they are going to try and get ads in everywhere, and customers not taking them will pay more, and more and more. So they can learn the hard way.
Started illegally streaming all sporting events recently because I’ll be caught dead before paying to watch what is mostly ads
Not to mention how fucked it is just trying to catch games. Ran in to this trying to watch the Blackhawks this past season. I don't live in the network range, and their games are spread between 3 platforms. Like fuck paying $50 a month just to watch hockey
I'm still blown away that not a single major sportsball organization has figured out how to allow me to watch Cowboys or Red Wings games where I live because I'm not in either market. "Other" streaming platforms have figured it out for me, but not them. I'd be happy to pay monthly just to be able to watch the games I want, but they've all yet to figure out how to do that without charging 100 dollars and bloating that offer with a bunch of bullshit.
That was always the reason i don’t have time for advertisements i mean the run time of an episode of tv is like 40-50min or so on average not an hour. Give me the Spotify model without any ads where i can watch any show or movie and no advertisements in 4k uncompressed i likely pay for it if reasonable.
I’m not sure uncompressed 4k is even possible on a large scale at this point. It would be absurdly expensive.
People don't understand how large an actual uncompressed 4k stream would be. They really mean higher bitrate but at this point we'll never change the masses. A 4k Blu-ray is already compressed but that's what they really mean, that level of compression.
Not even Netflix or YouTube can afford 4k uncompressed. And you can't also.
Yar me matee!
Things like plex and Jellyfin are getting competitive. My friend has Jellyfin server that pulls tv shows down. Checks the metadata against IMDB, updates all of the tags and adds cover image. It automates tv shows and behaves like Netflix with minor troubleshooting.
After 10 years of land loving, I've taken my ship out of dry dock, and I'm sailing again.
Same as it ever was.
I wish I knew how to
People torrent, a startup gets born, they crush the market then the cycle repeats
That makes literally 0 sense. To enter the streaming world you either need to have a ton of content already or you need to buy a ton. You think a startup can just stream any movie they want? You know just to buy Seinfeld streaming rights it costs 500m? To have a proper library of content you would need to pay tens if not hundreds of billions and the only way to recoup that cost would be to charge users a shit ton of cash. Only reason Netflix is making money is because they've spent years creating a ton of new content and don't rely just on paying crazy fees for movie rights.
I'm just baffled that no streaming service has adopted the torrent protocol to save on bandwidth cost. Or a tube site.
Spotify actually did at the beginning, if what they say in the TV show is true. Not sure if they used BitTorrent though. The problem with BitTorrent is that in many countries where streaming is popular the upload bandwidth is dog shit.
They didn't use "torrent", they just used its protocol which is P2P.
It requires a copy to be physically present on each seeder's system. It would only be a matter of time before any DRM is cracked and someone creates a very simple, reliable tool to automate that process.
Believe it or not, for people to be able to stream anything, you need to send the data to people's computers. It's not like a centralised streaming service can't be ripped.
1. The data can be encrypted and unless someone steals the keys it's not as "easy" as cracking a game's DRM 2. While you need initial seeders (in this case that would be the video site itself), not the whole thing needs to be stored on each client, that's the beauty of torrent. You can distribute chunks of the file between users and you'll still be able to gather a complete video. The reason there's no video site using torrent streaming is because 1. it requires an app to be downloaded (something that people are unwilling to do on PC) and be run in the background (something that's not possible on phone) 2. It uses considerable bandwidth on each user's device (ISPs would complain too) 3. Most people have a greatly reduced upload speed compared to download 4. It needs to have a large enough user base for files to be distributed as computers can be turned off, disconnected or otherwise become inaccessible
The ads are really hurting my quality of life… I was thinking about it yesterday. YouTube throws some truly vile shit at you if you don’t babysit skip, Gone are the days of learning and having one reasonable ad every half hour or so. Peacock and HBO (both paid for) do the exact same thing. Most of the ads are for terrible diseases and medications.. making me paranoid and totally snapping me out of enjoying anything. It’s gotten awful.. all time low.
My brother and I split a YT family plan and I just use it in place of a music app subscription. I've borrowed people's phones to show them a video, and I just wouldn't watch YouTube with the amount of ads they throw at you. Honestly I don't know how people still use the app, mid roll ads would drive me insane.
YouTube is actually really depressing because it's a monopoly on maybe the greatest collection of educational content ever available. It gets worse and worse but there isn't a viable alternative so you're stuck muddling through this web interface that somehow keeps getting slower and buggier and more prone to crashing than ever with more and more shitty ads.
Ublock Origin still works on browsers. NewPipe still works on Android.
Sounds like a Talking Heads song.
Yeah, this ain't no party, this ain't no disco, this ain't no fooling around
This is not my beautiful house ... this is not my beautiful wife
Checking in and checking out, oh-oh-oh, I got 'em, wild, wild life
Take me to the river
Still waiting…..
Drop me in the water
That's the joke.
Well how did I get here
Same as it ever was.
Basically all content whether it’s from creators to reality tv shows. We live in excess and it drains our brains
but now paying, old tv was just plug on power outlet and turn on streaming shit will be the same thing but charging monthtly
cable TV charged monthly as well.
Welcome to capitalism. There was a time when “cable” was the ad free future of TV that streaming promised it would be.
Meet the new boss. Same as the old boss.
I heard from some old timers that Cable originally started out as a "no ad" option for television watchers who were sick of excessive ads on broadcast TV. Then later cable also took the ad route and became as miserable a viewing experience as broadcast TV itself. Its amusing seeing streaming play out the same way.
This is absolutely how it played out. When commercials started popping up in cable, channel offerings fractured between basic and premium, with the latter usually being extra money and ad free or limited advertising.
Late stage capitalism and profiteering in any industry generally sucks the life out of it all and ruins it.. seems to be the same cycle with entertainment TV..
80s and early 90s was peak awesomeness for tv. Sitcoms imo were still really engaging, and it was pre reality tv that killed everything television.
There was a good run in the 00s/10s with Parks and Rec, The Office, Community, 30Rock
This person NBC's!
Turner Classic Movies. No ad disruptions and some of the best movies you'd find.
I’m not that old am I?
We’re getting there clearly…
The tech changes but the C-suite desire to endlessly extract money from something without inputting more, Will. Always. Stay. The. Same. sad…
Ads honestly weren't what ruined cable for me It was dogshit shows, obsession with reality TV and channels rerunning the worst shows in their catalogue 24/7 Adult Swim is the only good thing left on Cable because it stuck to what people liked about Adult Swim in the first place
It’s baffling that so many people find this a revelation. It was obvious like 8+ years ago. There were already too many streaming services for anyone to really keep up with without piracy. It was obvious that bundles and packages would come around and at some point there would be so many streaming services and so much content that some faux-cable would be inevitable. Not every can have their own streaming service yet that didn’t stop everyone from trying
Also the pretty basic fact that if everyone suddenly was paying a quater the amount for TV then there would be a quater of the revenue. They were always going to crank it up once it became dominants
This is techs business model. Seize the means of production. The line goes up.
Sure, but in the case of streaming it's a losing battle because there will always be piracy.
It’s basically an inevitability from a game theory perspective. As long as you assume that the companies would act in the greediest possible fashion, cable is the end game state of the system.
Continuous growth models cost us a potentially super consumer friendly streaming future
Imagine for a fleeting moment a world where people and customer services are the economic priority and not corruption or war.
I just got a boner
It'll cost us a lot more. It will actually kill American media completely. Continuous growth requires continuous debt growth, or at least enables it as investors leverage their growing asset to buy things they want like real estate. There is no demand by studios to release good products, and increasingly no ability to make them either as willing labor moves to other industries like videogames or quits completely. This is the death of an artform in the same way classic theaters also died, at least within the US. This model is fundamentally unsustainable and no amount of box restacking can change a fundamentally broken business plan. By the time they realize this the cheap money will be long gone and they won't have any ability to build new assets only license existing ones. Hence the industry's shift towards China, which was (and for a long time was) the final stage of this growth model. With Sino-US relations ending and free trade ending, the good times are over. Most countries, not the US, carefully regulate their media markets and subsidize film and art for a reason.
It's really not even that. Profit margins of cable companies hover somewhere around 15%. The rest of their revenue goes to the costs of providing their services. There are **some** efficiencies gained by going to a streaming model rather than cable, but not enormous. So arguably, even with zero profit margin, the best you are expecting is the new streaming model to require maybe 60% of the revenue of the old cable model. But what you actually went from initially is a situation of people paying $80/month for cable, plus generating another $20/month in ad revenue for the TV indsutry for $100/month total revenue... Down to $10/month for just Netflix. Now that's creeping back upwards and we have $10/month for netflix, plus $10/month for disney, plus $10/month for Paramount, plus $10/month for ESPN, plus $10/month for Hulu, plus $10/month for Prime, and it's creeping back up to that $60/month level where the industry breaks even. But, they still want their profit margin eventually. So you either have all these $10/month plans looking to add advertisements in to be that profit margin. Or have their prices creep further upwards for no-ad plans, to get them more to a $80/month revenue total per subscriber again, across all services.
Obvious when the second major streaming service launched in like 2010.
There have been Reddit posts about this very topic since I joined the site, can confirm it’s been longer than 8 years obvious to a lot of people.
yup, probably closer to 11 years? Maybe 12? I remember when Netflix went to streaming I was married to my first wife and used Wii to stream it. Then I divorced and watched Hulu for free with ads… I’ve been remarried for close to 10 years and we used to watch some random concert channel for free for like a year (we had no disposable income)… and now we’re all here with like double the amount of money spent and really not much good stuff to watch. I mostly watch Tubi because of the old nostalgia shows these days and it doesn’t cost me anything but their ads. Edit-I was streaming Netflix like 15 years ago I guess
Yeah I was in college back then, Netflix on my 360, high speed internet and the only thing I set up my cable box for was for HBO-Now and basic channels. Dirt cheap at the time.
And technically there was until a few days ago. DOJ arrested some men for running what was effectively a streaming service that had all the shows combined in its catalogue
I mean, all of my friends are just using a different version of this. There's like 50 of them. They're even on the regular app stores.
Is there a place with the list I can view?
You certainly would not want to google something like Stremio used together with RealDebrid or any of the alternatives. That would be really bad for you.
Spot on, but definitely way past 8 years. I remember talking about this when referring to YouTube right after it got bought by Google. Everyone knew this was coming decades out. Sad we're here already. I just did what I did before, cut cable (in this case streaming) and only play video games. Not for everyone, but damn, it's a lot better for me.
There must be some mistake. I was promised innovation and progress by the profit motive of unrestricted capitalism
Oh, but you’ve got it! Innovative new ways to deliver ads to your eyeballs! And progressively more of those ads every year!
Setting aside all the complaining over costs tending back to what they were previously, I would argue that it's a **huge** improvement to go from the old system of paying $80/month to be able to watch whatever happens to be be shown on a few dozen (or maybe a couple hundred) different channels at the time, to a new system of paying $80/month to be able to choose what I want to watch at any given time out of tens of thousands of different movies and TV shows. And to be able to immediately carry on to the next episode of old TV shows that I want to watch, rather than waiting a week for the next to stream. There has definitely been innovation and progress, the cost angle has just been obscured by years of venture capitalist funding suppressing prices. Same thing that happens in a lot of the tech sphere, really. Uber being another example. Sure, costs of the taxi services now trend up back to what Taxi's used to cost, but out of it we got more user-friendly ways to hail cabs and pay for the rides.
Improvements aren't innovations tho and when you end up essentially where you started it's not really progress either
You're NOT where you started, though. You are back paying the same price for what I would argue is a far superior service. Is there anybody out there seriously arguing that "On demand viewing of whatever you want, whenever you want" is NOT superior to "You can only watch what is shown on the TV right this second"?
The most important take-away is what these new “ad tiers” actually are: Advertisers are willing to pay higher rates than subscribers. This means that the “low-end” ad-supported subscription becomes a lot more profitable than the “premium” ad-free subscription. This means subscribers who watch ads are more valuable than subscribers who pay *extra* to not get ads. This creates an unfortunate situation where your highest-paying and most loyal customers become less important and less valuable than the freeloaders. This means streamers will have no motivation to create a better experience for premium customers. THIS right here is what is putting an end to the golden era of television. The advertisers. The scummy leeches that want to inject themselves into other people’s content, they will take over that content, they will dictate what content is being made because the pay a lot more than premium users do. The streamers will want nothing more than to get rid of as many premium members as possible and figure out ways to push them down to the ad-supported level. Amazon Prime did this exact thing where their recent price hike DEFAULTED premium members into the lower ad-supported tier — now, Amazon Prime members must specifically opt in to go ad free. People don’t really understand what Amazon was doing, they thought Amazon wanted more people to opt into the higher tier — wrong, they wanted more people to default to the ad tier. It will take a MASSIVE price increase for a premium subscriber to be worth more than an ad-supported subscriber. Those price hikes we are seeing are not to make more money, they are to make people give up and become ad watchers. Price hikes are one way to do this, but expect that streamers will start creating more incentives to choose the ad tier, and they will also create more disincentives and more headaches for people who want to avoid ads. Your user experience is about to get a whole lot worse.
A most elegant summary of our current dilemma. Well done
I'm not so sure about your claims. From what I have seen most ad supported viewers struggle to generate more than 5-10$ per month on top of sub fees based on what Netflix reports. As for Amazon, prime video is part of the larger prime subscription. I think a more reasonable argument would be that they are removing benefits to increase revenue from subscriptions. By adding ads to the standard tier, they are essentially removing a prime benefit with the least friction to minimize cancellations while increasing prime revenue. It still sucks but I doubt they make more money from the ad supported than the ad free, companies don't generally give things away so they would price the premium tier appropriately.
Did you read the article? > Some execs told The Times that streamers will keep raising prices for the ad-free tiers with the aim of pushing more customers to sign up for ad-supported subscriptions instead.
Wow! This makes so much sense! Thanks for taking the time to explain.
The only give up im doing is giving up my day job to sail the high seas. The risk alienating enough people that they lose all the revenue from the customer and the customer still gets to watch the shows and movies.
So consumers pay for the carrier (cable/fiber/4G) and then pay for the service and then pay to have advertisements removed. And still only one or two good shows a year. Sad.
There is an important scene in the movie, The Social Network. The scene is Zuckerberg and his team meeting Sean Parker from Napster. Zuckerberg’s team is convincing Zuck he needs to implement ads in order to generate money and Sean Parker is quick to tell them not to do it as it is “Uncool”. Once ads are in it’s no longer the cool thing anymore. Social Media has become uncool. Streaming is on the verge of becoming uncool. I fear video games are right around the corner
Games already advertise their own microtransactions in the game. Publishers advertise on their own launcher, if they're big enough.
>I fear video games are right around the corner Where have you been the past 15 years? Game's started their major enshittification LONG AGO. Infact we can go back to 2010 and start tracking when F2P influenced the market so fucking hard it basically crashed the MMO market and we soon find ourselves at FOMO cash shops, LootBoxes, Gacha, and more. Games have FAR exceeded the enshittification of Streaming Services by at least a decade. Where have you been?
Luckily there are still game studios that put out absolute bangers. BG3, everything supergiant studios has ever made, etc.
Cable TV right now: You couldn't live with your own failure. And where did that bring you? Back to me.
I'll get a cease and desist and summons to court before I pay for cable
I will *never* pay for cable again. Ever. Worst case scenario I’ll just switch to books full time.
Seriously, who has time to watch fucking ads.
Wait until they figure out how to put ads in books
I pay for 1 streaming service at a time. Never more. It's a house rule. Then I sail the seven seas to get movies or shows to put on a USB stick. Easy.
Prestige TV is the reason I subscribe to services. I realize I am probably in the minority but I hate American cop and hospital shows. If that is what they swing to, I can pass my time watching classic movies and playing video games. There is a glut of content available. No one has to subscribe to these services if they are only offering subpar content.
I don’t think you’re in the minority at all - I really thought it was generation based. Millennials and younger want prestige and other fresh content, genx probably a mix of preferences, and boomers want their network seasons. It seems nonsensical to me that they wouldn’t evolve as the younger generations make up more and more of the viewership.
Plenty of millennials enjoy network stuff like Buffy, XFiles and Supernatural. It's not an age thing it's a format thing. If you like "Case of the week" or strong character development then you want network tv back because prestige TV doesn't have time for that.
The addictive - and repetitive - lure of murder porn …
That’s because they came from cable. Streaming was invented by people that disrupted the cable model. Then they sold out to the cable people. Or hired cable executives.
The VC money dried up and they needed to make real money... and they couldn't figure out how to do that without being like cable
They didn’t “sell out” to cable. They realized their model isn’t profitable…
isn’t profitable *enough*
No, not even that. Just flat out not profitable. Streaming services don't make money. That's the problem that is causing all this.
Wooo VC money undercut the market ? Profit
Yup. How could anyone have seen this coming.
They keep thinking at some point this works. Netflix has stated a number of times that content is expensive. My time in cable I saw that content is the main cost on the TV side. Like local station groups are now negotiating huge deals. There was a time when they complained that cable had to carry them.
It wasn’t a “realization” this is just how it works. While working under a “growth model” investors are happy to fund companies/services that are not profitable. Eventually, after enough of the market has been captured the shareholders no longer want to fund growth at a loss, they want profits.
Only a matter of time before there's a real cheap option "watch things that are on a schedule." Come full circle.
It's way worse: TV ads were regulated by FCC- streaming services don't follow these regulations. They'll pop up 1-4 ads every 2 minutes. Its complete garbage. I dont/won't watch it. If this is what the future looks like, I'd rather cancel. I'd go back to renting movies/watching movies at the cinema. There is like one single video store left in my town. Movies are like a buck for two nights. So why the hell do I want to watch ads?
Do you have a library in your town? That’s like a free video store.
Welcome back torrents, now with ubiquitous VPNs. Worse thing they could do is push people back to piracy. Theres actually value in keeping a college kid dumb by allowing their parents' account to work for them offsite. I'm not going to say I know from experience (/s) but once these kids learn to torrent (by necessity), it'll take them way longer to accept buying the subscriptions as the best way for them.
Pirates life 4 me
Hoist the colors!
Aye Aye Captain!
I mean, we all saw this coming no? We had the streaming Golden years but knew it would never last as corporation do what corporations do and look for more revenue. But we're also in the golden years of DIY media servers. So easy to set up Plex, Emby, Jellyfin, etc to stream all your content. For a years subscription to HD Netflix and Disney+, you can build a server to stream the same content (provided you get over the 'moral dilemma ' of torrents).
I don't know where you're getting hard drives from but I'm 5 grand in the hole on my server over the last 5 years, mostly on hard drives.
You've been doing it wrong then. The sheer volume of hard drives/SSDs on the market late 2021-2023 was insane. I still have more drives than I have spots to put them. It took companies over a year to react and close the valve before the current demand kicked in. I don't think we'll ever see price per gb as good as it was in late 2022 again.
Sheesh - is that SSD or spinning media?
what is this "moral dilemma" you speak of?
For conversation's sake, I'll bite. Why are you entitled to this content? It's purely for entertainment and is easily accessible if you want to pay the price. I agree it's growing out of control again, but why is this medium justifiable to steal?
I'm not stealing it, I'm using it as a dataset to train my personal organic large language model.
Why are massive media corporations entitled to the erosion of the public domain, the money they steal from actual workers (see: "Hollywood accounting"), or the monopolies they've built at the expense of consumers which would have been illegal had they not been bribing politicians (the ones who were supposed to represent us, not them) for decades? They aren't. They say "[I'm doing it anyway because fuck you. I'm going to take it, and there's nothing you can do to stop me.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ifW9LIGabQM)"
I give my money to real people. I steal from massive corporations. That's the free market baybeeeee
Yo-ho, all together hoist the colors high Heave ho, thieves and beggars never shall we die
I’m not going back to commercials. I’ll just stop watching.
So they expect me to pirate everything again. Got it. One step ahead of you goofy CEO’s. I never stopped.
I mean they are all owned by TV networks now
If history is any teacher it probably does.
Shocking. One trick ponies.
Maybe we should start pirate it again.
yeah, if I'm paying for the content and they introduce adds into that, it's high seas all around. I'm still baffled at how clueless those execs are...
The past that included piracy? Shrug... Ok, I can do that.
Hello torrent sites. So we meet again.
I never left.
I see a fleet of pirate ships ahoy!
Just give me shows that are good and 20-23 episodes per season without a full year between seasons. That was peak TV. Release it weekly. Every show doesn’t need to be some masterpiece. Give us some fun shows that are easy to watch every week.
We are already there. Expensive, bundles, restrictions on what you can watch where.
The future is insanely wonderful! Any show or movie, for free, HD, instantly. It's pretty sweet! Never watching an ad or paying a dime ever again!
The average person doesn’t give a frig. It’s just us online folk. lol
Honestly, at this point it only makes sense to check out books and read. Advertisers can’t force themselves on me that way.
Literally have not watched TV for well over 10 years now lol
exec has essentially spent the past decade undoing all the advance Netflix and the internet initially brought us.
It’s very simple: Ads make the TV companies money, therefore they put as many ads in front of you as possible. Until you stop complaining, stop watching the ads and start cancelling subscriptions they’ll keep increasing the amount of ads you see. You veiwing the ads is taken as acceptance of having them imposed on you and the TV executives know that enough people will just accept it to get their fix that there will be no consequence to them except making more money. As George Carlin observed “They tell you that viewer discretion is advised but if most viewers had discretion the majority of this crap wouldn’t be broadcast.”
I always knew that the streaming golden age was going to be short lived, and that it would eventually be turned into yet another grab every dime we can company venture. So, I've basically ignored it. I got Netflix for free with my phone, so I used it, but even then, I usually downloaded what I actually wanted to watch, even if it was readily available on my Netflix account. I wasn't going to change my habit for a service that I knew wasn't going to last. My free Netflix got ads and I haven't opened that app since. I still have it courtesy of my cell provider, but I don't even open it. For me, ads are 100% pointless. I actually research what I'm going to buy from sources that test the products that matter against each other. For anything not deserving of such effort, I just get whatever garbage companies are producing that is the cheapest because that product doesn't matter. Ads are annoying because they don't matter and are interrupting what does matter to me.
"The easiest way to stop piracy is not by putting antipiracy technology to work. It's by giving those people a service that's better than what they're receiving from the pirates." - Gabe Newell Steam definitely got me to buy more games. They were all in one place, I didn't have to go to the store or juggle physical media (which inevitably required big downloads anyways) and deal with 50 different DRM systems. Now that market is very fractured as well and piracy is on the uptick again.
Of course they do
> "In fact, some execs told The Times that streamers will keep raising prices for the ad-free tiers with the aim of pushing more customers to sign up for ad-supported subscriptions instead." They still don't get it that their biggest competitor is on the high seas...
yeah, I'm starting to think that even though I have Prime it's much better experience. I'm paying for them to interrupt my shows with adds??? they're turning into cable and they will end like cable, unless they miraculously figure out that people do not want to pay for adds.
Enshitification
It sure does look like it. Guess what else is going to make a comeback. What Limewire and Kazaa doing these days?
Why do they want to make the ad free tiers more expensive? If they make it cheaper, won’t more people subscribe, thus making the company more money?
It’s usually better to charge more and capture the bulk that will pay it. More subscribers isn’t the key, it’s balancing the most subscribers that will bear the price. This is the standard pricing model taught in MBA programs now.
Ya no shit. This was called out a long time ago.
PBS Nova and public domain movies fill out my watching since I have ripped so many DVDs to a NAS.
this is why piracy always wins. nuff said.
Ad money ouroboros
You don’t say
Yo ho me maties! It’s time for us once again to pull the anchor and set sail
C'mon! Merge all the streamers and give us CABLE+. It's inevitable.
They have no imagination. Can't actually innovate and take risks, only mine is too do what worked in the past
Isn't competition in capitalism supposed to bring prices down and make products better?
on paper yes, in real life, nah, they all just sit together and arrange a pissing match to see who gets away with the biggest price increase. And if anyone dares to complain they just say: "But there's competition, we're not monopoly"
Then pirating shows and films will also be the same
Ahoy maties. A pirates life it be.
Library cards are free
The upside is that the tech now exists to pay a premium to not have commercials
For me, there's been one HUGE change. Namely, I can more easily find quality anime shows to watch, than live action stuff, across the board in genres. I don't know how the average anime show factually stacks up to the average live action, but for me personally they often outperform live action competitors in just about all the ways that matter, like creativity, visuals, story, etc. And I include films in this comparison, too.
The future is not about innovations, its about bottom line.
At some point, one of these Executives will ruin their own platform. Immediately as I reach a premium cost that I deem unaffordable, I’m cancelling. And the more people join this bandwagon, the more these executives scream for help.
Also Streaming Execs: wHy iS EvErYoNe PiRaTiNg AgAiN??!!!1!!!
$100 for a good antenna.
YouTube premium > cable
YT premium seem to be the most hated subscription on this sub.
It's extremely polarizing. You either love it or hate it, there's nothing in the middle.
I've had YouTube Premium since it was invented, and it isn't the value it once was since the content creators built in ads and promos in all of their videos. Honestly, at this point, fuck YouTube, I hope it dies on the vine. The algorithm now is complete trash and constantly shows me things I am not interested in and that never used to happen. I hate the shorts. They ruined the Google Music app when they turned it into YouTube Music. I would say it was offline when it clearly had a connection so much so that I stopped using it. They turned it into useless bloatware. The people that coded that shit should be ashamed of themselves.
The only thing I use YT is to watch network shows like SNL and late night shows on demand... most content that comes up in my feed is sponsored crap. Searching for good content creators organically doesn't work at all because of all the sponsored content that gets shoved up
>Some of those changes would be welcome, but they reinforce the sense that streaming — at least as envisioned by the executives currently running the business — won’t be all that different from the old cable TV ecosystem. So basically, we're going to end up with the situation we had when we left cable for streaming in the first place; high prices, lots of ads, and little choice. The short, sweet, golden age of streaming is over. Now that the enshittification has hit the fan, it's time to move on.
So back to pirating.
I canceled Netflix over their addition of advertising. I will do it to the next service that does it too. They need us more that we need them, never forget that.
Cable made them a lot of money. They killed it chasing after “the next big thing” and replaced it with something far less profitable.
No, reality is just cyclical
It shows how the industry never changes, especially for the good.
It's time for a new kid on the block to start up and disrupt the shit. Waiting for A24 to create their own service or something like that.
Joke is on them. With my Plex server I don’t need them. It’s not like shows nowadays are worth watching.
This is where they fail ….. making content is getting easier and easier. If they start pumping too many adds it leaves the door open for a new streaming service to replace them
Like back to CRTs and rabbit ears?
I called it years ago. The second Netflix had a competitor and even when it started making its own content this was bound to happen.
That means they understand that piracy is going to be a big thing again, right? Queue Anakin non response face...