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.
This is why I Plex/Jellyfin.
Yup, came to say they should move to Plex/Jellyfish to get away from the streaming shitshow.
Exactly. It’s funny because if one streaming company were more like Valve, they could have all of the content on one platform like Steam has with Valve. Piracy is a convenience problem, after all, not a pricing problem, and it sure as hell isn’t convenient to have to be subscribed to 5 or more different platforms just to get all the content I’d want to watch.
Charge the analysts more first. I’m sure they’ll charge their tune.
Yarrrr, we be seein’ about that…
Yeah I don’t have the budget to subscribe to multiple streaming services, let alone cable or even one service. Thank god there’s not a lot I’d want to watch…even if sailing high seas.
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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.
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.
Yeah some of the arr software is pretty fucking cool for being entirely free.
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
Some observers see another reason for the frequent price hikes: to push subscribers to their breaking point, and compel them to opt for a lower-priced, or even free, ad-supported plan instead.
Disney CEO Bob Iger said as much during an August earnings call: “We’re obviously trying, with our pricing strategy, to migrate more subs to the advertiser-supported tier.”
I’ll cancel my account before I willingly subject myself to advertising. I’m sure I’m not the only one.
It blows my mind that advertising could be worth more than a subscription.
Their evaluation of advertising must be tied with brand recognition and other general brain washing tactics.
I think it is possible advertising is over valued. There I’ve said it. I’m not alone in this: https://freakonomics.com/podcast/does-advertising-actually-work-part-2-digital-ep-441/
I’m already in the process of replacing my streaming services with cheaper alternatives.
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.
Only reason I still have Netflix is that T-Mobile pays for it for me. I also used to have Funimation, but Crunchyroll taking over stopped adding captions to translate written text from new dubbed anime. Especially anime that uses a lot of written segues and such that is important to understanding what’s going on. So I had to pirate anyway. And now so many services are removing features, especially as they merge, but still continue to raise prices. There just aren’t any services worth the cost anymore and I’m not willing to pay hundreds of dollars. That’s one of many reasons! why I dumped cable ages ago.
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.
deleted by creator
Why are you pirating dogshit?
No reason to stop raising prices for any business, except for the fact that demand goes down as price goes up. People will cancel or downshift to a cheaper service.
People will cancel or downshift to a cheaper service.
Streaming platforms make more money from you if you use the cheaper ad-supported plans. The price hikes are to get you off the ad-free plans.
deleted by creator
And as a bonus you have less customers to provide support to!
Sorry mate this is not some special fight club logic. It’s not even really accounting or economics logic, it’s just kinda common sense.
What price should I sell my lemonade for? I’ll have more customers if I sell it cheaper…
The part which seems lost on most commenters is that these companies have huge and very sophisticated market research campaigns. They can predict with great accuracy how their demographics will respond.
The part which seems lost on most commenters is that these companies have huge and very sophisticated market research campaigns. They can predict with great accuracy how their demographics will respond.
That’s pretty much what the above person said lol
They have a good idea of how many people will leave before they do it.
That’s literally what they teach you about basic economics at school…
The standard graph of price increasing on one side and customer demand decreasing on the other, and how companies try to find the crossover point.
downshift to a cheaper service.
Yarr matey
Really? No reason to stop raising prices? My Jolly Roger got something to say about that.
Piracy has never been easier or safer or faster than it is now, and these platforms think driving people away with overpriced subscriptions for shitty content is beneficial for them?
Piracy isn’t easier than not bothering to cancel your subscription for most people. I’m sure they’ll lose some people, and especially the demographic here, but I don’t know about the average person.
And yet I see all sorts of articles saying these platforms complain that piracy is now even higher than before Netflix became a streaming service.
Piracy has never been easier or safer or faster than it is now
What?! It was way easier and safer in the era of Napster, edonkey and emule. Easy discoverability and companies didn’t pay any attention yet. Since then it’s a cat and mouse game.
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.
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
VPN?
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.
