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
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Sounds like a good time to cancel a subscription and finish the ol’ Steam library
I am going to need more gaming PCs to keep the family engaged in the post streaming world. Not sure how I am going to do it. Even finding space for them is going to be a challenge.
Let me introduce you to the wonderful world of steam deck
Cable companies: You could not live with your own failure. Where did that bring you? Back to me.
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.
Right now it’s smart to cycle through but I wouldn’t be surprised if that is the next thing to go.
What I could see happening is they keep raising monthly prices until the math doesn’t work out of them. Then they’ll introduce a small discount for locking in multiple months (3,6,12mon). Both will continue to rise in price but month to month will be quicker.
Disney+ (at least in Canada) gives a 15% discount if you pay for a year up-front.
Or straight-up contracts. But I think the next step will be more slow-dripping content.
Netflix just pulled an obvious one by splitting the Witcher season 3 to the release half at the end of June and the other at the end of July. They claim it was for “an effective cliffhanger” but it’s clear they just wanted to squeeze one extra payment out of its viewers who aren’t interested in their other content. Paramount meanwhile stretches all of their Star Trek series out across the entire year.
I imagine platforms will start slow-releasing more of their most popular originals. I wouldn’t put it past them to flood social media with spoilers to punish anyone who’s waiting. I also wouldn’t be surprised if we start seeing one episode per month someday.
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.
Apple TV and Plex both do this already.
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.
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!
Good bot
Do what i did and stop watching TV completely. I have watched maybe 10 hours of TV in the past 12 years.
Some of the greatest television ever made is coming out these days. Fuck that. Just build a piracy machine. Yar.
Yeah, i dont find tv to be worth my time. I always heard people talking about the hottest new thing and was like “meh” i dont care.
Do you watch movies, or are those also a waste of time in your opinion?
Very few. I can count the movies i have seen in the past decade on 1 hand.
Cool story bro.
But…Ted Lasso…?!
Who’s Ted Lasso? Some sort of cowboy?
Hm…Kind of… 🤔
I didn’t quite completely quit, but there’s lot of other things to do than watch TV.
So piracy is a check on the abuses of the media market?
Interesting!
For me it’s back to the pirating era.
I hear sea shanties are making a comeback.
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.
Capitalism turns everything into shit. Not promises, only profit.
Since these are turning to shit, are there any good Soap2Day replacements?
Bflicks.something
Over the past few months, I’ve canceled my subscriptions to Audible, Disney+, Netflix, and appleTV. I still have Amazon Prime since it’s an annual subscription, but that’s it. It’s been a surprise to realize how much pressure I was feeling to consume all this content and how freeing it felt to just get rid of it all. I have a lot of audiobooks I haven’t gotten around to listening, and books I haven’t read yet. I can still watch stuff on Amazon and ahem other places if I want. But really, there has to be more to life than just endlessly binging tv shows.
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
The only reason I have Netflix is because I get it through T-Mobile as a last resort. Fuck the state of streaming content. Raise the pirate flag boys!
I’ll plunder yer coffer, ye mutinous, squiffy gob! … Hoist the Jolly Roger!
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Is Disney+ bleeding money or is that just fancy accounting realizing costs that increase the other parts of Disney’s revenue?
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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).
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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.
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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.
