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
I gave them a chance. They collectively became more & more rapacious & greedy.
Back to sailing the high seas.
Arrr
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.
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?”
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.
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.
Arrrrr whatever be i to do? 🦜🏴☠️
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.
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
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!
🎶Yar Har, fiddle-de-dee🎶
Tech products usually follow the same recipe:
- Launch compelling product at compelling price
- Lose lots of money while building market share
- Gut the product in an effort to make it profitable
- Repay investors
Netflix’s plenty profitable, they seem to be enshittifying because they’re the market leader. Hulu also seems to be turning a profit nowadays. Peacock, Disney+, Max and Paramount+ are still bleeding money.
I’ve never threw away my jolly roger, it’s just safely hidden away
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.
Not that it doesn’t suck, but did everyone really think the industry was going to replace a $200/month cable subscription with $30 worth of streaming? Also consider streaming taking over theatre releases too.
Yeah idk what people were thinking. Ads have ALWAYS been around, there were ads on radio, ads on TV and now ads on streaming. Facebook’s entire revenue came from selling digital ad space, well not entirely true, 99.999999% of it was ad revenue, the rest were shareholders. YouTube is the one outlier though for some reason, they don’t seem to care about people using adblockers, no idea where they’re getting their revenue from
Sounds like a good time to cancel a subscription and finish the ol’ Steam library
Since these are turning to shit, are there any good Soap2Day replacements?
Bflicks.something
As someone who watches pretty much no movies or shows, I couldn’t care less, but it’s gonna be fun watching piracy shoot back up.
