This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
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.
I gave them a chance. They collectively became more & more rapacious & greedy.
Back to sailing the high seas.
Arrrrr whatever be i to do? 🦜🏴☠️
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
I’ve set sail on the high seas again for the first time in like 15 years.
Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum
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
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.
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.
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.
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
Capitalism turns everything into shit. Not promises, only profit.
I've never threw away my jolly roger, it's just safely hidden away
🎶Yar Har, fiddle-de-dee🎶
Yar har har matey.
https://www.togetherprice.com/ - great site to share subscription prices, I've been using it for years.
The only reason I have Netflix is because I get it through T-Mobile as a last resort. Fuck the state of streaming content. Raise the pirate flag boys!
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.
According to CNN article, in a recent earnings call Bob Iger indicated that ad-supported streaming is a better revenue stream for them than ad-free subscriptions. So they're apparently raising prices on ad-free subscriptions to get people to drop down to ad-supported.
Some people can't stand advertising and will turn off rather than sit through it. I have been ad blocking and ad skipping for 20 years. I am not going to change my habits. The alternative is piracy. I don't want to go back to piracy. It is a superior product in many ways but it isn't sustainable and I want a fair share of my subscriptions to fund creative jobs (not that that is happening). There are a lot of shows I can't stream or buy digitally here that are only available via the black market which is crazy in 2023 when streaming was supposed to fix this. We have companies taking shows off their services to claim tax writeoffs now at a time when the market is fragmented and overpriced.
The super rich and powerful think we are livestock to lead to slaughter and often they aren't wrong. The sensible thing is for consumers is to walk away (same for X, Facebook, Reddit and all the other time wasters) and let the whole thing burn down and hope that whatever replaces it learns from the mistakes and greed. Unfortunately I don't think enough will to make a difference.
just ordered a nice OTA antenna so I can watch my local channels, anything else needed will be purchased for exactly 1 month and then cancelled
I've also started looking at smaller streaming services like CuriosityStream and MagellanTV cause I'm more interested in documentaries and such instead of the latest weekly tv dramas
So piracy is a check on the abuses of the media market?
Interesting!
Over the past few months, I’ve canceled my subscriptions to Audible, Disney+, Netflix, and appleTV. I still have Amazon Prime since it’s an annual subscription, but that’s it. It’s been a surprise to realize how much pressure I was feeling to consume all this content and how freeing it felt to just get rid of it all. I have a lot of audiobooks I haven’t gotten around to listening, and books I haven’t read yet. I can still watch stuff on Amazon and ahem other places if I want. But really, there has to be more to life than just endlessly binging tv shows.
Since these are turning to shit, are there any good Soap2Day replacements?
