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
It sucks for consumers…
It sucks for writers…
It sucks for actors…
It sucks for vfx workers…
And the CEOs running the companies and making all the money claims it sucks for them too because after their last couple years of shit decisions, they’re making slightly less money.
So maybe those shareholders should re-evaulte who their CEOs are?
Maybe get rid of the people who killed the Golden Goose because they wanted to eat it?
If they’re not losing money, shareholders do not care. The end goal of a corporation is to maximize profits for the shareholders within the confines of the law. So until they start actually costing shareholders substantial amounts of money they will do nothing.
The end goal of a corporation is to maximize profits for the shareholders within the confines of the law.
And if the fine is greater than the profit, or they don’t get caught, that’s okay too.
Yep. It’s easier to just break the law, pay the fine, and continue making billions over actually stopping the activity that causes the fine. That’s what happens when it’s almost impossible to hold anyone actually personally responsible force actions of a corporation.
In a way it would be really nice if you couldn’t sell short term stocks and there were minimum holding periods of 1 to 3 years based on the company metrics. That alone would flip a lot of these quarterly incentives, heck quarterly earnings calls themselves would probably be less frequent. Even if you had to register the sale 6 months in advance would solve a lot in my opinion. But of course again, that would destroy the entire finance industry as we know it.
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?
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Disney is a bit unique with their streaming, though, because their content helps foster interest in their merchandise, parks, theatre movies, etc. The more engagement with their streaming content, the more likely someone is to engage with some other part of their business. Also, if I’m watching Disney+, I’m not watch any other streaming services (at that moment). They want to be a dominant streaming service because it helps them dominate in the parts of their business.
Netflix, Paramount+, etc. don’t really have that, at least not to the same degree. Prime is more similar, because while you’re not investing in their own merchandise as much, you might be more like to use Prime shipping or music if you have Prime for video streaming (and vice versa).
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I don’t think that producing content by itself is sustainable, but things that aren’t quite profitable enough might be enough to be profitable overall with the reach and market share.
I could totally be wrong, but it feels like they’re fairly invested in D+, and I don’t think it’s because they want everyone to have access. After all, they had a “vault” for many years and only sold movies that were rotated out of the vault at the time.
It wouldn’t be a lie, it would just be accounting. And honestly I don’t know the accounting practices around such large organizations.
Basically Disney+ charges Disney studios for Disney IP. Disney studios gets $3B let’s say over x amount of time for the deal, and Disney+ spends that amount of money. Meaning Disney+ loses money, while the Disney portfolio as a whole breaks even on the trade. That’s not even to mention the value there is bringing people into the Disney ecosystem, making it more likely to visit them parks and buy more merchandise.
I don’t think it’s fair to look at Disney+ in a vacuum to compare to other services.
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The only reason I even have Hulu is because I pay for Spotify. Otherwise, it’s just not worth the price tag for me.
Spotify, though…raised its price recently, but also gave me new features that I use, so I’m not complaining.
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The one I know for sure is new that I use is an AI DJ feature. It plays music in sets it thinks you’ll like, then lets you know when a new set is starting and what it’ll be like; lets you start a new set manually if you don’t like the type of music being played.
As someone who lived alone, when it came out it was nice to have a friendly voice (sounds like a young, 20-something guy), even though fake, to talk to me about my music.
Clearly I need to do research on them, though; I’m out of the loop on their nastiness.
I’m on a Disney/Hulu bundle for $19.99, that isn’t bad. Hopefully that won’t change. But as soon as Ahsoka is over I plan to cancel.
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This is what happened to cable too I think. My grandpa was saying back in the day cable was what you got to avoid ads
thats right. broadcast had tons of ads and also had no cursing/sex etc. cable came along with no ads and tons of cursing and sex etc.
and of course broadcast was a big deal originally because people didnt want to pay 25 cents to watch a movie.
I can’t see any removing the ad free option, they’ll just make it more expensive.
Yeah but sometimes there’s nothing better than a good foie gras
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
Luckily VPNs are cheaper
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.
I still have Netflix, but only because they still haven’t bothered me about account sharing. The moment they do, It’s going away.
Didn’t their subscriber count go up fairly dramatically after the restrictions started?
Hbo will be cancelled the moment they rebrand it to max and add all that bullshit content in my country.
No dance of dragons can prevent that.
Atm there are only 2 streaming services which still hold real value: prime video and Netflix. Disney+ just doesn’t cut it. We get 3 worthwhile serious a year. Hbo doesn’t cut it. We got 3 worthwhile series this last year (last of us, dance of dragons and the white lotus) and they removed Westworld and raised by wolves.
In my country we also have sky/showtime about which I’m on the fence. The star trek catalog is incomplete, some series are nice but there still are technical difficulties. If/when they raise the price I will cancel that in a heartbeat too.
Appletv has quality content just not enough to justify a year long subscription.
D+ is amazing in Canada (and likely most of the world outside of the US). We have most Hulu content.
The difference back then was Netflix launched steaming was that it 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
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.
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.
Everyone thinks they’re better at making business decisions than the financial analysts at major corporations lol
Yeah, these changes suck for the customers (/ex-customers) but do you really think that was a big part of the equation? They do not care about you and the research says they will make more money increasing the cost despite the backlash. And they’re almost definitely right.
Pretty good evidence towards breaking up the production and distribution segments if the industry.
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.
For me it’s back to the pirating era.
I hear sea shanties are making a comeback.
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
