The email arrived late last year, a harbinger of a new era. Disney+ was jacking up their annual plan to a whopping $140. It wasn't an isolated incident. Netflix announced their cheapest tier would now come bundled with ads, Amazon Prime would be $3, TV went from $66.99 to $999 a month there are so many great things to watch and they're all spread across so many different Services. I want to watch them all but man does it hurt to Fork up so much money every month to do it it kind of makes you won
Streaming went to shit when everyone made their own. It was good and worth the money when it was one portal with everything available.
Now i am back navigating the stormy high seas, to avoid the treacherous shores of bankruptcy
And the funny thing is, rather than competition driving down prices, they only seem to be competing for who can charge the most while showing more ads.
They’re not truly competing because they make every show they can exclusive to their platform
Fair point, honestly. It’s more like a group of mini-monopolies than any kind of actual competitive space.
Yep, there can be no competition with exclusive access
Streaming infrastructure is expensive, and all these smaller networks that decided to spin up their own didn’t seem to realise that. Prices go up, ad tiers get added because none of them are actually making any money. It’s just quarter after quarter of loss even with substantial revenue due to the fact that producing content, hosting and then scaling globally to make it available to a wide variety of geographic locations just isn’t cost effective. Even Amazon, the lord of cloud compute itself, hasn’t been able to maintain this.
So in this case, competition limits the only way they make money: people subscribing. Greedy bastards.
The fucked thing is that it wouldn’t be such a huge deal but they all want to make money on the current number of customers instead of their potential. People are poorer and poorer and have to choose maybe one or two services at a time at the prices they are.
They would rather get one customer for $15/mo than 4 or 5 customers for $5/mo. And they together created an environment where it’s hard for any one of them to make the first move. Healthy competition only really works when people act in good faith and none of these people are capable of that even when it benefits them.
Business people are truly dumbest creatures on this planet. “What if we make them poor and then charge them a bunch of money? That makes sense, right? And if they get upset we tell them it’s their fault.”
A lot of the infrastructure is provided to ISP’s free for local caching/deployment. Netflix has the Open Connect program to greatly relieve stress on interconnects and backbones.
If memory serves, ISP didn’t like this and would rather profit from fees for the internet traffic. I feel like those fees and licensing fees account for a significant increase in subscription costs.
Yeah, this definitely was not a case of “competition makes everything better.” More a case of every greedy motherfucker wanting to have their own private walled fiefdom making everything worse. Who’s going to be the first to bring up the GabeN quote?
I’m with you, I am proud to say I subscribe to precisely zero streaming services. There’s very little on any of them I actually want anyway, and anything I might actually want to see is readily available… elsewhere.
Studios shouldn’t be allowed to own the channels. It’s a problem similar to when studios owned the movie theaters.
If only https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Paramount_Pictures,_Inc. was expanded to streaming services instead of repealed.
Yep, and everyone having their own exclusives. I’m neither paying hundreds of bucks for a gazillion streaming services per month, nor am I juggling subscriptions between them like some sort of puzzle game.
Not only that, but all of their interfaces are trash. These services should model there UI off of Plex.
Hold on. The fact that it became worse doesn’t mean that the monopoly was a good thing. Remember that those companies start new businesses usually at loss amd giving a lot to the users, just to grow their market share, but then will slowly take everything back, and more, with time.
Well, yeah, that’s why we’re here. Streaming went to shit
While I agree that the monopoly netflix once had doesn’t belong in private hands, a public funded central media archive where all studios release their content would be preferable.
But still, for the user those were golden times. Whatever you wanted to watch, chances were Netflix had it in good quality and any language you wanted on any device with internet.
Multiple streaming services existing isn’t the issue - content exclusivity to certain platforms makes it so. If content was on all platforms then it would just be a choice based on price and service features.
And all the different interfaces that lack basic functionality… and proper filters.
2015 - 2018 was great. I barely pirated anything. Netlifx, Hulu, HBO. Those three covered virtually all my viewing desires.
When was it ever just one portal with everything available?
Early Netflix was pretty close.
I live in the Uk. We used to have a DNS workaround to give us access to the US Netflix. It had everything we wanted. I stopped torrenting and was happy to just stream box sets & movies.
Roll on 10 years I now have a server with Hetzner that is my own personal Netflix of the high seas. Now rather than giving Netflix / Disney / discovery / Amazon etc a piece of my £35 a month I can curate exactly the shows and movies I want.
They brought this on themselves and I have zero regret.
Bluray!