Op-ed: Apps promised to free us from ad-supported subscription bundles. Oops!

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

  • phillaholic@lemm.eeEnglish
    62·
    1 year ago

    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.

    • Arobanyan@lemmynsfw.comEnglish
      3·
      1 year ago

      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

    • Corkyskog@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      3·
      1 year ago

      It’s also still only like less than 60 for five different services. And more then that is a little crazy. The average cable bill is like $83 and people who didn’t have basic were paying like $200 as you said. If you wanted to buy all paid streaming services it would be ~$102 with ads, ~140 with ads. It’s still cheaper and better than cable, that’s why people haven’t stopped paying.