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
It sucks for consumers…
It sucks for writers…
It sucks for actors…
It sucks for vfx workers…
And the CEOs running the companies and making all the money claims it sucks for them too because after their last couple years of shit decisions, they’re making slightly less money.
So maybe those shareholders should re-evaulte who their CEOs are?
Maybe get rid of the people who killed the Golden Goose because they wanted to eat it?
If they’re not losing money, shareholders do not care. The end goal of a corporation is to maximize profits for the shareholders within the confines of the law. So until they start actually costing shareholders substantial amounts of money they will do nothing.
The end goal of a corporation is to maximize profits for the shareholders within the confines of the law.
And if the fine is greater than the profit, or they don’t get caught, that’s okay too.
Yep. It’s easier to just break the law, pay the fine, and continue making billions over actually stopping the activity that causes the fine. That’s what happens when it’s almost impossible to hold anyone actually personally responsible force actions of a corporation.
In a way it would be really nice if you couldn’t sell short term stocks and there were minimum holding periods of 1 to 3 years based on the company metrics. That alone would flip a lot of these quarterly incentives, heck quarterly earnings calls themselves would probably be less frequent.
I gave them a chance. They collectively became more & more rapacious & greedy.
Back to sailing the high seas.
Arrr
You know after years and years of using it, the name Radarr makes way more sense now.
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The only reason I even have Hulu is because I pay for Spotify. Otherwise, it’s just not worth the price tag for me.
Spotify, though…raised its price recently, but also gave me new features that I use, so I’m not complaining.
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The one I know for sure is new that I use is an AI DJ feature. It plays music in sets it thinks you’ll like, then lets you know when a new set is starting and what it’ll be like; lets you start a new set manually if you don’t like the type of music being played.
As someone who lived alone, when it came out it was nice to have a friendly voice (sounds like a young, 20-something guy), even though fake, to talk to me about my music.
Clearly I need to do research on them, though; I’m out of the loop on their nastiness.
I’m on a Disney/Hulu bundle for $19.99, that isn’t bad. Hopefully that won’t change. But as soon as Ahsoka is over I plan to cancel.
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This is what happened to cable too I think. My grandpa was saying back in the day cable was what you got to avoid ads
I can’t see any removing the ad free option, they’ll just make it more expensive.
Arrrrr whatever be i to do? 🦜🏴☠️
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.
Is Disney+ bleeding money or is that just fancy accounting realizing costs that increase the other parts of Disney’s revenue?
I only have this NYTimes quote:
Disney’s streaming operation lost $512 million in the most-recent quarter, the company said, bringing total streaming losses since 2019, when Disney+ was introduced, to more than $11 billion. Disney+ lost roughly 11.7 million subscribers worldwide in the three months that ended July 1, for a new total of 146.1 million.
I don’t think it’s in Disney’s interest to make things look worse than they are for investors. They’re a publicly traded company and rich investors don’t like being lied to, so I’d assume the SEC would step in if they did.
Disney is a bit unique with their streaming, though, because their content helps foster interest in their merchandise, parks, theatre movies, etc. The more engagement with their streaming content, the more likely someone is to engage with some other part of their business. Also, if I’m watching Disney+, I’m not watch any other streaming services (at that moment). They want to be a dominant streaming service because it helps them dominate in the parts of their business.
Netflix, Paramount+, etc. don’t really have that, at least not to the same degree. Prime is more similar, because while you’re not investing in their own merchandise as much, you might be more like to use Prime shipping or music if you have Prime for video streaming (and vice versa).
That’s an interesting take. Producing expensive movies to get people to buy merch or a park ticket doesn’t seem like a sustainable business model though. But if anyone has the massive global scale for it, it’d indeed be Disney.
I don’t think that producing content by itself is sustainable, but things that aren’t quite profitable enough might be enough to be profitable overall with the reach and market share.
I could totally be wrong, but it feels like they’re fairly invested in D+, and I don’t think it’s because they want everyone to have access. After all, they had a “vault” for many years and only sold movies that were rotated out of the vault at the time.
It wouldn’t be a lie, it would just be accounting. And honestly I don’t know the accounting practices around such large organizations.
Basically Disney+ charges Disney studios for Disney IP. Disney studios gets $3B let’s say over x amount of time for the deal, and Disney+ spends that amount of money. Meaning Disney+ loses money, while the Disney portfolio as a whole breaks even on the trade. That’s not even to mention the value there is bringing people into the Disney ecosystem, making it more likely to visit them parks and buy more merchandise.
I don’t think it’s fair to look at Disney+ in a vacuum to compare to other services.
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I’ve set sail on the high seas again for the first time in like 15 years.
Fun thing, the captain still knows the major trade routes
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 fragmented 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.
I guess I never stopped. Still have subs though, but might cancel that somewhere in the future.
I still have Netflix, but only because they still haven’t bothered me about account sharing. The moment they do, It’s going away.
Didn’t their subscriber count go up fairly dramatically after the restrictions started?
The difference back then was Netflix 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.
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!
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?”
Even if an open source third party wrote something that did this, companies would change their API pricing or authentication to break it so people don’t leave their walled gardens.
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.
For me it’s back to the pirating era.
Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum
Capitalism turns everything into shit. Not promises, only profit.
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.
Luckily VPNs are cheaper
Yar har har matey.
