Consumers are paying more than ever for streaming TV each month and analysts say there’s no reason for the companies to stop raising prices::Finding new subscribers in a saturated streaming video market isn’t easy. And with legacy media companies desperate to recoup revenue declines in their linear TV businesses, the cost of your monthly plan is likely to keep rising.
Streaming services, digital services in general, should be made to compete on having the best platform, not on exclusive content.
It’s all the same wires going to the same machines. Internationally, too. I can see maybe allowing for different pricing for countries with very different wage levels, but if it’s online, it should be available everywhere.
I’m paying for the services that produce the best content, not simply platforms that host content from others. It would be nice if they shared it to other streaming services, but then they would have little reason to create them.
Streaming services, digital services in general, should be made to compete on having the best platform, not on exclusive content.
The way to get that is to split them and say: a streaming provider can’t be a content creator as well. That way, content creating companies would be incentivized to sell their content to every streaming provider at a price that the market will bear, and streaming providers would be incentivized to compete on providing the best experience to their users.
We’re also getting more than ever from streaming. That is if you like shitty remakes and sadistic defacto porn.
Now chart hours of content against cost across the market, and watch it go vertical. Bonus for weighting by critical rating.
Piracy is the only reasonable choice.
I do pay a little for Usenet and my NZB indexer, about $115 per year all said and done. And I pay for hardware and electricity, but I wouldn’t have it any other way.
Any recommendations for usenet provider?
I use Eweka.
Why is piracy costing you 4$ a month.
VPN?
I’d say piracy is not even free, if done right. I mean, you may want to support JDownloader, MediaFire, Mega, your VPN, and whatnot.
I’m not into piracy (wink), but if I did, I’d pay my monthly Plex subscription, MediaFire account, and tip JDownloader monthly for their effort.
not everyone can torrent freely
With prices going up and likely subscribers going way down the next logical move for the Streaming Companies is to start cracking down on Piracy again as they already had a go at password sharing.
Now I am not saying they will be successful in prosecuting those that are careful, just that there will be a few high profile cases against groups of people who aren’t using the best hygiene when it comes to piracy. Fear is their best weapon against piracy that they actually want to deploy, just make sure you do enough research to make sure you aren’t in that harvest of low hanging fruit.
I am slowly cancelling services with each price increase. I uave cancelled Netflix and HBO. Will continue until morale improves.
Raise prices. Blame “the liberal agenda”. Profit.
Arrrrrr
Nope, because every time another one raises the price we cancel it. It’s working out quite well
Thanks for the reminder to cancel Disney+ and HBO Max - I almost forgot! ;)
Still have Peacock, because that’s comped through my mobile provider.
My wife does Amazon Prime, Netflix, and Hulu. I had Prime but realized I only ever used it for free shipping, which I can get anyway by bundling my orders and setting ship dates.
Bundling orders and set ship dates - what? This is something I don’t know about.
Even without Prime, you can get free shipping if you spend over a certain amount.
So instead of placing multiple small orders and paying shipping, I’ll wait until the combined dollar value qualifies for free shipping.
Also on check out, you can specify a delivery date with free shipping.
And then everything comes in separate packages with different parcel services anyway… Amazon really has become shit.
Hulu is currently the only streaming service I still pay for, and that’s mainly because TV shows are a removed to pirate (disk space and download times being the main annoyance), but it won’t take more than one or two more price hikes for the balance to shift so that it’s worth the effort to just go full pirate instead of forking out so much cash.
The fact that Disney just fully bought Hulu bodes very poorly too - I’ll bet anything that it’s going to get folded into Disney+ soon as a “pay an extra 15/month to access Hulu content, but only through your Disney+ membership sort of deal”
I’ll give you a reason, pirating. Pirating with obfuscated networks (VPN, onion, etc) will never die. People just put it down because the convenience was worth the price. When it no longer is, ships will sail the seas again, and having everything already digital in these services will make it that much easier.
torrenting over tor would be exhaustive for the onions.
I2P
Charge the analysts more first. I’m sure they’ll charge their tune.
Remember March 2012, when SOPA and PIPA were about to pass, and many websites were blacking out as a form of protest, some people were advocating for a “Black March” to have everyone boycott Big Media, pirated or not, for the entire month? Yeah sure it didn’t spread like wildfire because of course, the population is already too addicted to popular culture to drop it cold-turkey, but at this rate people may be forced to give it a go by force.
I’ve no problem with paying for good services, but when I get a better service from a random pirate streaming site than I do from Amazon Prime, why would I continue paying for that?
I’m just sick of things either being exclusive to one service even though they’re decades old, or just plain not available.
Oh, and if I’m paying, I don’t want ads. Not ever.
Source on better pirate streaming service?
Any of these will do. Prime is not a high bar to get over. Some may work better than others, and I think it’s down to where you are and time of day than anything else.
https://fmhy.pages.dev/videopiracyguide/#multi-server
It’s not as good as downloading yourself and running Jellyfin, but it’s convenient.
Yeah some of the arr software is pretty fucking cool for being entirely free.
I have a problem paying for DRM. I want to use open source and DRM is the opposite. I like (and buy sometimes) Creative Commons music/audio-books just because it tastes better when artist isn’t supporting restricting me. Cory Doctorow is a creative worker who lives and breaths anti-DRM, if you’ve not explored this. I recommend his old talk “The Coming War on General Computation”.
I’ve no problem with paying for good services
Exactly. It used to be that netflix was all you needed to get most quality content, and it was a fair deal for customers: you pay a reasonable monthly amount, and you and your family gets convenient access to most streamable movies and TV series.
Now that quality content is spread out and locked out over half a dozen other streaming services, and subscribing to them all is not just a hassle but also incredibly bad value compared to the original offer.
In a healthy competitive environment, you would expect companies to counter reduced value by increasing customer value in other ways or by reducing prices, but instead we got price hikes, lots of low quality filler content, crack downs on password sharing, advertising, various unpopular UI changes and other service reductions decreasing value even further.
To solve this, I think the content producers and streaming services should be split up, because right now they’re not really competitors in a true sence but small monopolies who each clutch the keys to their own little franchises. It should be noted for example that music streaming works a lot better: there are various competitors that each hold a viable content library on their own, so you don’t need more than one music streaming service. IMO that’s because Spotify, Tidal, YT Music, etc. are merely distributors and not the actual producers.
Being totally serious, you should copy and paste your comment and email it to your local US Representative.
Yeah, the music industry finally got their shit together and made something that was more convenient than just nicking it online. Took their sweet time over it, but I think they realised that it was taking like a minute to download a whole album by that point.
It’s really the model of how to do it well. Very little in the way of exclusives locked to one particular service. Occasionally an artist kicks up a fuss over something and pulls all their stuff from one of them, but it’s rare enough that I don’t care.
