2y ago

The TV streaming apps broke their promises, and now they’re jacking up prices

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

11 comments

Time to hoist the old Jolly Roger! The great pirate era is upon us!
- Yarr, some of us never stopped flying it, matey
I’m still really happy with my Netflix subscription , but it’s clear for me that I’ll never subscribe to 2 streaming services at the same time.
Well yea bait and switch is literally capitalism. We have lived with this shit cunt economic model for 40+ years. Now we won’t buy their bloated garbage because let’s face it, there is literally NOTHING good to watch so they bloat their services with D movies and hide good movies or you still have to pay for them (Amazon Prime).
Fuck Bob Iger and every Hollywood CEO. Your legacy is trash and I feel bad for the people who are elated by it.
People will for sure look back and say wow there was some good stuff created but it was because of writers and actors not because of shit cunt CEOs and vulture capitalist bankers.
So fuck off streaming services while the kids go pirating again.
- If there's nothing good to watch, whatcha pirating then?
- You realize that the people who pay for content are subsidizing your ability to pirate, right? I personally don't hold it against you, but the idea that you'd look down on the people paying to produce the content you enjoy for free is kind of idiotic.
  
  I mean even ignoring the philanthropic take, it's just straight up worth my time to pay for the services. It'd be stupid not to.
  An hour of my work time in a month pays for Max, Spotify, Hulu (with ads), Netflix, and YouTube. I'd be spending more time than an hour to go through other methods.
  And to put it in perspective I'm only in the top 20% of US households. Tens of millions of Americans are making this call even easier than I am. There's definitely a wage gap forming and it's interesting to see streaming be at the forefront of it.
- I like to help support the production of new stuff to watch. This was great with Netflix for awhile, but I didn't really like their shows lately, so I canceled them and got an HBO account. It will take me awhile to get through the shows there I want to watch. Then I will cancel and do another, either hulu or paramount or Disney, depending on shows.
  I feel like paying for one service is a fair amount still.
- With what? Most torrent I've seen sites have ratios. You can use a VPN to hide your origin but even Mullvad has dropped the ability to set incoming ports to seed so....
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!

11 comments