Cable is dead. Long live the cable bundle. Curious to see the pricing and if the bundle only includes ad tiered options.
I can’t wait for 10 years from now when this all comes full circle and we start getting commercials to “ditch your streaming bundle for whatever new service.”
Hopefully you’re working on “AdamEatsAss+” although seems like you might just have some niche content if you ever make that happen.
AdamEatsAss Pro and Pro+ are only $5 and $6 a month more for over double the content.
But act now and get AdamEatsAss Basic with 5 min unskippable ads for only $4.25
I’m hoping to be fully self-hosted by then.
Now it’s just cable again. What a stupid timeline.
Well one benefit of everything being available on streaming is that it’s really easy to populate my Plex server with any and all content.
^whispers ^in ^jellyfin
Amen.
Yeah my sp has been doing this in Canada for over a year. They bundle streaming services. It sucks but you do get a deal if you already use the ones offered. The problem is like cable, when they start to bundle bullshit services nobody wants
At least you aren’t locked into a contract and can cancel whenever you want.
For now.
I came to sarcastipost this under the parent comment, but you seem to have unironically beaten me to it.
For now.
Really you pay for convenience and legallity. Not everyone knows how to or feels comfortable pirating. With a service you know you aren’t breaking any laws and you’re not worried about quality, storage, captions, and sketchy files.
You’re definitely paying for legality and safety, but when you have to search through five different streaming apps to find that the movie you’re looking for can only be rented via yet another service, the convenience becomes debatable.
At least I know the streaming service videos will always be in English.
What friend, you’re afraid to learn a little Russian?
I remember getting an early file of avengers endgame in Russia with English subtitles. Not my preferred way to watch.
As someone outside the us: I wish
Amazon had (maybe still has, no idea) the habit of having some movies and shows only available in your local language
Apple and others have tried to fix the discovery issue. And some of the platforms tell them to fuck off. Such as Netflix. And formerly Amazon.
If you’re not aware, AppleTV will list things across many streaming services and take you right to the shows/movies in the respective apps. As long as a platform is participating. So you just browse/search in a central place.
Apple and Amazon worked out their differences a few years ago and their stuff is now part of the index.
I wonder if this bundle will change that. Currently, Netflix does not integrate with these sort of features.
Comcast used to have great voice search across pretty much every streaming service. I believe they were forced to stop.
Use JustWatch.com or their app.
It doesn’t solve the multiple services issue, but it at least helps you find what you’re looking for.
Why use JustWatch.com when you can follow this guide to know where to watch King Kong vs. Godzilla (1962)
That guide is a perfect representation of the current situation. Well done.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
It’s funny how hard it is for providers to get this concept. I feel we’re about to enter the cycle where we see an uptick in mainstream piracy because the price is starting to outweigh the convenience and legality.
I currently get that bundle for $0 and 0 inconvenience. So.
I am interested and have never heard these “hi sees”, could you tell me more, kind stranger?
Stremio + Torrentio has changed my life recently!
Tons of tutorials online and it’s dead simple to set up. Takes ~ 5 mins
I have some family members that have HBO and Hulu that I borrow logins for, but I never visit the apps directly anymore, it’s just not worth it when you can get all the content all in one place with no hoops to jump through
If you’re willing to pay a bit for convenience, there’s put.io
Account also easily shareable between friends. They don’t care
I have my doubts it will be cheaper. It’s Comcast.
I don’t think you understand how pricing works. Someone like Disney demands a high carriage fee agreement and mandates that ESPN must be in the basic cable package for all comcast subscribers, otherwise comcast doesn’t get any Disney owned TV. As a result Comcast has to charge basically 10 bucks a month to all subscribers to have ESPN, not counting the general cost breakout for other disney owned channels. Sure, comcast leases STB’s for X dollars and gets a cut of the subscription fees as well, but the point is the people that make the TV programming are the same. So it’s not magically going to make the cost of TV significantly cheaper by cutting out comcast. Comcast is the person that collects the bills, but Disney, ViacomCBS, etc, are very much involved of setting up the prices consumers pay on cable and streaming.
Edit: Also add in the risk and churn factor. With cable bundling, TV programmers had scale and predictability on their side. Basically all cable subscribers had long term subscriptions and could guarantee a high volume of subscribers to collect from. With DTC (Direct to Consumer) streaming apps, consumers can churn and temporarily subscribe for monthly intervals. That means you have less subscribers at any one time on your app and for shorter durations. Guess what that does to the revenue. So if you no longer have the economics of scale in terms of long term subscription length and volume of subscribers, the cost for individual subscribers will probably have to keep creeping up and get possibly more expensive than cable.
I don’t think you understand how greed works.
It’s gonna take a miracle to pull me back off the high seas again. Netflix was big enough to do it all those years ago, but I can’t even imagine what could do it now.
The only thing that MIGHT take me off piracy is the ability to do legally and for reasonable cost what I do with piracy. If I buy something, I download and store it wherever and it’s mine forever. I have no problem paying for my content, once. The problem is that we’re being driven towards paying for our content over and over. Just like we’re being asked to pay for our everything else over and over.
fool me once…
we know it’ll never happen, but if they…
- have content from most studios available indefinitely in one place - or even better, a federated platform - at no additional cost.
- drop all this drm stupidity and allow the best quality streams on any general computing device.
only then, in my view, it’d equal the convenience I have today and I wouldn’t mind paying a reasonable amount for that.
Yeah Telus in Canada has been doing this recently as well. We’re just back to cable packages except now you have like 4 different apps to worry about.
My solution is to just watch less in general.
Not like there’s a ton of new stuff worth watching at any given time anyway.
That was one of the main factors in my cutting the cord in the first place.
Cable channels inundated with garbage meant it was time to go outside or play video gamez
Try happymaxxing and go play video games outside. We have the technology.
And logins and outages to keep track of.
Boomers still boom in though. My dad has a smart TV and easy access to a whole bunch of streaming services but chooses to pay telus and watch on his cable box mostly because all he knows is his cable remote control. And those steaming “channels” are just like, channel 473. Anything else is too complicated. Enter your password? No way.
Leave it to corporate America to figure out how to make a simple thing difficult in order to sell (rent) you less for more.
Say what you will about streaming, but I think everyone born before 1995 will understand that todays streaming is way way way better than renting and old school cable. In the old days there was no on demand, so you could only watch what was on at the time you wanted to watch it. You literally had to go to to block buster to rent physical media that wasn’t always available for things like new releases. TV shows weren’t easily available by VHS/DVD. So with streaming, it’s basically cheaper than what Cable + Renting movies used to cost, but I can do it without limits of physical media and have access to crazy amounts of back catalog. I purchased Band of Brothers back in the day on DVD box set for like 70 bucks which is 10 1 hour long episodes. For 99 bucks a year I can get all of band of brothers and a lot more content than that. Sure I don’t own it all, but that’s fine for most of my purposes. With streaming, I think we are actually getting a lot more for less in the grand scheme of things. And bundling make it even cheaper.
Netflix DVD by mail was actually peak.
Netflix streaming is also good, but DVD by mail was awesome to queue up movies and work through an intended set of watch items.
I would go hard for a cheap 5 disc physical Netflix again. $10 a month for 5 disc’s at once, awesome.
Yeah. It took a while to work out the kinks of getting TV dvd seasons in the right order, but watching TV was easier when you didn’t have unlimited options and more or less a pres defined playlist.
Counterpoint:
Thanks to streaming we don’t spend quite as much time thinking about the media we consume and the deeper meanings and subtext and generating internal fanfictions about what could possibly be coming up in the next episode a week from now.
Streaming makes media easier to consume but fills it with culturally empty calories.
The grand majority of conversation I see about a show is, “Have you seen _? No? You should totally watch _, it’s really good!” Or alternatively, “Yeah, it’s great isn’t it?”
Since Netflix came out we’ve definitely taken one step down the ladder rung closer to Idiocracy ass movies.
Bundling is only cheaper if I actually want all of the bundled things, but that’s not how companies like Comcast bundle things.
Bundling works at scale if you maximize customer pool. I don’t think ESPN cable would be affordable to most people without bundling it into cable packages; their TV is subsidized by every non sports watching household. I wish there was more transparency into the costs to determine if you are coming ahead or behind in the bundling.
But at the end of the day everyone hates paying for multiple streaming apps. To me that means people just want a bundle that magically has everything they want to watch.
I don’t think ESPN cable would be affordable to most people without bundling it into cable packages
Then it’s not a viable network.
their TV is subsidized by every non sports watching household.
But that’s exactly why people started ditching cable in the first place. They wouldn’t be bundling ESPN with non-sports channels, they would bundle other less popular sports channels with ESPN so they can jack up the price because ESPN. But ESPN doesn’t carry the sports I follow, and I can’t get the network that does without paying double because it’s in a bundle with ESPN.
Just in time for me to get fiber installed tomorrow and ditch Comcast for good…
“StreamSaver” is such a junky name for it.
It’ll start with no adds then they’ll slowly introduce them cause “it’s unsustainable” when it’s really “we want all the moneys” not just some
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Comcast CEO Brian Roberts has unveiled plans for StreamSaver, an upcoming streaming product bundle that packages Peacock, Netflix and Apple TV+ that will be available to all Comcast broadband, TV and mobile subscribers.
“Those three products will come at a vastly reduced price to anything in the market today and will be available to all our customers,” Roberts told the MoffettNathanson Media, Internet & Communications Conference during a session that was webcast on Tuesday.
On Tuesday, Roberts talked up StreamSaver as an affordable streaming bundle that will underpin growth for his company’s broadband business.
And Disney, Fox Corp. and Warner Bros Discovery have combined for a sports streaming joint venture.
Peacock, the streaming service of Comcast’s entertainment unit NBCUniversal, has narrowed its start-up losses and ended the latest financial quarter with 34 million paying subscribers.
Roberts told the investor conference that Peacock will continue with a steady-as-you-go dual ad and subscription model, however much the wider streaming space is facing increased competition and a drive towards profitability.
The original article contains 324 words, the summary contains 164 words. Saved 49%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Hell no, not gunna ever go back.
