I’ve been unmotivated in the past but i think it’s time to sort out an alternative.
Streaming services have a catastrophic problem they didn’t see coming.
As they massively expanded the viewing market, they also gave very accurate viewing metrics compared to broadcast TV.
Also, the many, MANY offerings cut the viewing pie into smaller pieces.
And this is the expectation, mostly because while you might stay with a super hit like GoT, they’re super expensive, and huge risks if they don’t take off (see acolyte). Cost sensitive people are likely to subscribe for the season then cancel, or just subscribe the month the season finishes.
The alternative is to try to hook you on a bunch of shows, which means having a ton of them and hoping they nail your niche. People are less willing to do this, but it works if you have more disposable income, or value streaming more.
In any case, they can’t afford all the shows they have to put on, it’s all or nothing now, before they might watch lost on ABC one night, then CBS walker Texas ranger might let the kid fall on the ground the next, but now you have to keep them entertained most days, that’s a shit-ton of content. HBO has it worse, they’re losing their old cable revenue, and their productions are stupid expensive, and they’re one of the winners. Disney has it even worse because disney+ cannibalizes both their cinema sales and they have to put up their crown jewels, star wars and the mcu, all on the same service, devaluing both. Fortunately focusing on kids programming helps because parents basically have to have Disney+ just as a matter of course.
This barely worked on broadcast because the different channels could share the load and cut the ad pie into larger pieces,
If they could count on must-watch blockbusters (ie GoT, which really hurt them when they screwed the landing and killed rewatchability), they could pull it off, but that’s so risky, it’s betting everything on one spin of the roulette wheel.
I liked reading your response. Wish I had a meaningful response other than there is no way I’m going to feel bad for media companies. If they’ve painted themselves in a corner I’m sure it was greed that got them there.
Don’t feel bad at all for them.
They celebrated like crazy when things were good, now the economics is hitting them like it should.
They, like everyone else in life, will have to figure out how to manage, or not.
Eh, the cycle of collapse and consolidation will hit the streaming system exactly the same as it would any other industry. I feel like the system will stabilize around 3-5 big services - maybe amazon, hbo, and disney, with youtube premium and apple TV as the “also rans” - which will all have premium price points and ads, and the average person who subscribes to them will be paying about as much (after inflation) as they used to pay for cable.
That’s exactly what will happen.
There will just be a lot more fuckery involved, a super-premium tier that doesn’t cycle out content but costs 3x as much and such.
If a million porn sites can make streaming video work, then YouTube is replaceable.
I wonder if they police copyright videos, or if we’ll all just be watching the office on xxx.com soon
It’s easier to ignore ads on porn sites because they’re usually also porn, and that’s why you’re there in the first place.
You’re one person
Because they think you’ll be too addicted to their content and offerings to quit
If you even started using streaming services, I’ve got bad news for you.
Cos you haven’t already. You’re a par boiled frog and didn’t even notice.
But they haven’t added unskippable unavoidable ads yet.
When/if they do, that’ll tell a story.
The issue is by the time they do, they control the market and not much alternatives.
Thank god old mates kept sailing for rest of us were funding our future enemies because it was convenient
Amazon prime video has iirc
Because for every one person like you and me with zero ad tolerance, there’s hundreds, thousands of plebs who can’t be bothered to drop the service. It’s the inverse of the whale (re. microtransactions) problem.
I know a few people that actually claim to like watching ads. They have made consumerism part of their identity and they are proud of it.
Not having commercials has really only been a thing for, at best, like 15 years. Broadcast and cable TV has always had commercials with the exception of specialty channels like HBO and Showtime and a few others.
Streaming only overtook cable TV in viewership in 2020. Even in 2022, cable and broadcast TV still made up 56% of viewership.
A: they’re betting most people will accept it, and they’re right. The same thing happened in the early 80s when cable television advertised themselves as the pay-for-ad-free service, then started sneaking ads in. People complained, sure, but we all saw the outcome. They got away with it.
B: Greed, capitalism, and fuck you.
A: they’re betting most people will accept it, and they’re right.
Yes. Remember when Netflix put a stop to password sharing and the internet went aflame with people declaring that Netflix had shot itself in the foot? Netflix subscriber counts went up.
The average person will put up with so much more of this nonsense than techie people will.
Exactly. These companies are governed by profits. To expect anything other than greed from them is foolish.
It’s why I highly recommend Fmovies, sudo-lol, and others. The barrier to entry is literally a browser and ublock origin and you can watch just about anything.
You can send someone a link to an episode and they can watch it. No sign ups, no ads (with ad block), and pretty decent service. No explaining what a torrent is. No VPN (though I recommend it of course).
Just pure content.
How important is a vpn - in your opinion?
Subscriber counts went down in the affected areas.
But total revenue increased.
I’m saying that it’s false to insinuate subscribers going up due to this change. That’s false. Anything about total revenue is a completely different sentence. And it likely decreased or stayed about the same as the United States is more or less the most expensive reigon.
Perhaps they hid it among a period of growth to fool investors.
Subscribers went down while monthly fees went up.
Ohh right I didn’t account for that.
I’ll upvote dissenting opinions for the sake of argument.
Wait till they drop you as a customer by cancelling your payment tier,then send you countless begging letters over the next month begging you to return. If you wanted my money that badly, why did you cancel me NETFLIX???
This is just my opinion, but when Google(and… I don’t know, “them?”) started cracking down on the “letswatch” and 123movie sites, streaming was in a good place, so people happily jumped over. Now, in the time between that and the state of things now, some people lost their patience and skill with looking up a movie. Both my mom and grandma were fine with the 123movies and what not. The sites started to go down when Netflix was still alright, so it wasn’t a big deal. Spend a couple dollars, get all the stuff you want and be sure it’s the best quality, and no malware? Fantastic.
By the time it became this state of affairs, my mom just couldn’t wrap her head around it. I tried to explain some sites are still there, you just may need to search duckduckgo (which she hates for some reason). She never understood torrenting even though we’ve gone over it multiple times. I’ve always liked anime or some shit that was not going to be on Netflix, so I kept using those “skills” and kept up with the changes. Moving to torrenting, a VPN, file converters, learning how to apply subtitles, one by one, over years, it’s not a big deal. You just learn as you do. Having to come back to that after how much has changed ostracized a lot of people.
The people who aren’t affected by them were never their main focus. They wanted the people who weren’t tech savvy, lazy even. They can’t figure out a torrent, or how to even find it in the first place. They won’t know what to search for to protect themselves and will likely get scared by the first copyright notice. They’re hoping that the majority of their customer base will be like that and feel “trapped.”
Because the “you wouldn’t steal a car” nonsense scares a lot of people off
Because some people want to support the creators of content but digital downloads from iTunes or whatever are more expensive than getting a month of a streaming service
Because there is a level of convenience of having thousands of hours of content at your fingertips without having to store content locally or finding it on a “dodgy” website. Setting up torrents / usenet is more work than giving someone your credit card number
Because a lot of people don’t know where to find content and if they did they don’t know the difference between a 480p avi vs a 2160p HDR DV MKV and get confused with torrents and file formats and how to get them on their TV.
Because - at the moment - the ads aren’t that bad, I got one ad at the start and one episode in the middle of an episode of Gen V - obviously they’ll add more until it’s as bad as cable but they’re not there yet.
Remember Netflix’s password sharing ban outrage? It didn’t work, they gained more subscribers. People stay because they don’t know how to sail the high seas or are too lazy to do it.
Hulu is treating me with impunity when I reported errors with their apps. Hulu, an eminently cancelable service that a lot of people never paid for in the first place.
Sail the seven seas, friends. These people deserve despondency.
Everyone here forgets cable was under threat of piracy until streaming came along. They think the US has cracked down but pirates have gotten more advanced. I just can’t get over these streaming services not realizing if you take away the only safe port then all that is left is piracy.
Wife and I started watching the boys on prime. That’s when I realized Amazon is putting ads in the stream.
I just ended up downloading all the seasons in an hour and it’s been no ads on Kodi since.
Bcs they act as a monopoly in regards to alternatives.
They only slightly intend to compete against each other but pretend nothing else exist (pirates, or people just shifting towards other forms of entertainment).
And they are ofc in cahoots in the sense that their common goal is to normalise paying several hundred moneys per month for streaming services and have the streaming service full of ads regardless.
So in that sense they will not compete but back each other up.Like land owners/landlords, their main goals are completely aligned.
And that is how ‘market disruptions’ actually work - its not to offer a new service to the end user (like Uber-ish services are the same as taxi services from the perspective of users), it’s to undercut the existing regime with lower prices whilst living on capital given because of the promise that once the old regime is gone they can crank up the prices & actually profitable (we are actually just at this stage right now - watch how much monthly fees are gonna go up in just a few years).
Goal/end stage:
Users are gonna be glued to their ad-ridden TVs just the same as boomers but far better monetised (watching TV is gonna be expensive).watching TV is gonna be expensive
Saw some videos pop up on spytube shilling this thesis but vis-a-vis tiktok/social media. Apparently it is already a thing. People just buying shit because they see it on tiktok
Folks… Consumerism is cancer but we all got to buy shit to exist. Get educated, buy good quality shot you actually and use it until it breaks.
