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
this post was submitted on 04 May 2024
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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.”
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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.
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.
Not only that, but all of their interfaces are trash. These services should model there UI off of Plex.
And all the different interfaces that lack basic functionality.. and proper filters.
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Getting out of hand? They've been out of hand for a while.
Yeah, but they still were below what the market would bear price wise. Until the very last price increases, if you counted up all of the biggest service fees, it was still lower than the average cable bill like almost a decade before.
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I have nothing to contribute to this conversation. Just wanted to say that was a horribly written article.
It's llm regurgitated garbage. Welcome to the new and worse internet.
All that I see being "new" with LLM regurgitated garbage is that they call the system doing it an AI and not just a spam bot. Even back in the day, randomly entering words and adding ".com" to the end would result in either: a legitimate website, a porn site, a 404 error, or a page filled with random text like an AI generated article that wasn't hard to determine was made by a computer and not a real human either there to popup when searching literally any words and trying to generate traffic for ads, or as a placeholder for the domain name.
Now that it's harder to tell it's randomly generated vs human generated, even the "legitimate" websites are using it.
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You're not kidding. 2nd paragraph in I stopped. 3rd graders can write better than this.
I switched away from piracy to streaming because they offered a legitimately good value proposition that benefited both the consumer and the producer.
Currently switching back to piracy because these greedy fucks just don't know when to stop.
My NAS and the *arr apps aren't getting out of hand.
The quality also went downhill. In my region Disney+ removed HDR support from all titles and dropped the bitrate to very low on top of that there are so many ads. Video quality is shit now. Even with subscription I'm watching PSA encodes.
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Only just now? Really?
"Now" Not when the license rights to shows get chopped 15 different ways and you need 15 different streaming services to finish a series? Or when it costs $100 CDN to have 5 streaming services...
This is getting out of hand, now there are ~~two~~ sixteen of them!
JUST LET US TURN OFF THE LOUD AND OBNOXIOUS BOOTUP SOUNDS IN EVERY APP!!!!!!!!
For me it’s: remember the last user on this device!
If I open Hulu and I have ONE account, why are you making me select the ONE account? I have to select it every time. They should know.
if(accounts.length === 1) {
setAccount(accounts[0]);
}
There. I fixed it. Give me a job.
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Peacock disabled auto play previews for a while and it was great. But that was only because the whole screen would go black for a couple seconds as it tried to load the preview. They fixed that issue and now the previews are back. Mute button is doing a lot of great work these days.
I can't afford all these streaming services. I'm basically back to one at a time, churning through them until I run out of things to watch.
I absolutely can afford them, but I'm canceling them purely on principle at this point.
My final straw was watching Fallout, when Amazon said "this program is ad-free thanks to this sponsor" and then not only showed an ad, but didn't even acknowledge that it was me paying them for the service, like I should be grateful to some stupid company for shoving their advertising in my face when I'm the one giving them my hard-earned money.
I rally enjoyed Fallout! I didn't see any ads. Might be because I won't give my money directly to Amazon.
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fuck them. I built my own streaming service on my NAS and pirate everything. If there is a consumer friendly service where I can watch everything, I am willing to pay for content again.
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I'm still waiting for this shit to come full circle back to how it was with Cable, where someone links the various streaming services together in one convenient app and they tell you you can switch and save!
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