Tech’s broken promises: Streaming is now just as expensive and confusing as cable. Ubers cost as much as taxis. And the cloud is no longer cheap::Some tech is getting pricier and looking a lot like the older services it was supposed to beat. From video streaming to ride-hailing and cloud computing.
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Alternate Title: Tech Journalists Continue to Make Wild, Inaccurate Predictions
Webtorrent has been serving wonders combined with a usb stick or even a NAS
I’d love a distro for raspi etc that made onroading to pirating really easy. like LibreElec for Raspberry Pi is great, but you have to manually verify the debrid and trakt in settings, i need something boomer-friendly. Like, first run, it gives a debrid verification url prompt, waits for it, then trakt, waits for it, then asks like “which of these popular shows do you like” and offers suggestions to start
The pattern is: Offer something really cool for cheap or even free, then once people are hooked slowly reduce service while increasing price. It’s a giant bait and switch.
Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves.
- Doctorow, Cory (23 January 2023). “The ‘Enshittification’ of TikTok”
I never expected ride hailing apps to save money. Where from? Taxis were never a high margin business with some superfluous middleman.
Could there be some decentralized ride hailing platform?
most open source devs have other jobs
Techno feudalism is the keyword.
Platform capitalism.
If the FTC wasn’t such a limp dick for the past 2 decades, things may have turned out differently. All of these problems are the result of too much consolidation and not enough competition.
That’s why I’m excited about Khan’s FTC since she is actually doing her job. Despite a couple of high profile losses, they’re winning more than they’re losing and, most importantly, they’re deterring anticompetitive mergers since companies now have to think twice or risk a lawsuit.
So tired of this trope.
Streaming is like HBO in the old days — you buy a channel for a few months, watch what you want, cancel it. Rotating channels costs $20 a month. Cable costs $80-100.
Canceling a streaming channel is easy. Canceling cable requires calling the cable company and arguing with them. Then you have to return the set top boxes. Then you get a bill for the set top boxes anyway, and you have to argue some more and show them your receipt.
Also free streaming channels are a thing. Plenty to watch for free (unlike cable).
With CableTV management people moving over to Streaming, this will soon be …“rectified”. I think Netflix has one of them and look at them now.
No way who could have guess
Uber always cost as much as a taxi, it’s a private hire taxi company exactly like any other private hire taxi company, their rates are controlled just the same. In the UK, anyway.
Obviously I’m not talking about black cabs, those bastards are ripoff merchants that only tourists use. I’m talking about normal taxis.
In the UK sure, but in the States Uber was half the price of a taxi if not a quarter. In its infancy it was this amazing way to hail a cab, no more run down disgusting vehicles, no more asshole taxi drivers taking the longest route possible to run up the meter. It was nice vehicles and a set price for the ride. It’s still mostly that but the prices have sky rocketed.
Yeah for real. Taxis were fucking horrible. Public transit is needed but it’s a good stop gap until that comes on fully.
I think we’ve started to discover what the ??? steps before profit were.
The model was:
- Start streaming service
- ???
- Profit
It’s now:
- Start streaming service
- Subsidise it heavily creating premium content whilst undercutting competition.
- keep doing it until competitors go broke
- Raise prices to an actually sustainable level
- Profit (although we’ve lost a ton of capital)
This is a form of market manipulation which is outright illegal in some countries (e.g. Australia) and can be illegal in the US and EU if it meets certain criteria. It falls under anti-trust and monopoly prevention laws.
Basically our regulators aren’t doing their job well enough, but what’s new?
So stop using that shit, problem solved
Get a server and TrueNAS and start self-hosting. Much better value long term.
It’s a nice idea but not possible for everyone. I tried with a Synology NAS but gave up since I do not have a huge living space and any mechanical device with fans and hard drives is just annoyingly loud to me. I want a silent home and that thing was very far from silent even at optimal settings. A 64 bit 8-16 GB RAM device running TrueNAS will also not be silent unless I spent a fortune.
Then comes the price for electricity. I don’t know where you live but where I am it is extremely expensive and prices will continue to rise.
Then there is networking skills. Do I want to expose my home IP and my most private personal data to the internet from home? It might be doable in a somewhat safe way but … not doing it will always be safer. And the time spent setting it up (and constant safety worries) is not negligible.
So I faced reality and sold my NAS. All in all to me it’s better to stay 100% offline with my data and backups (like I do now) or spend the money on some proper E2E cloud service.
I live in an RV. I’m having no problems running a small server aside from 5g internet and CGNAT.
Don’t blame tech, blame the bait-and-switch business model of loss leading products.
Uber never made money because they chose to undercut prices of all competitors and bleed them out.
I’d argue that newer streaming companies (those founded by studios, such as Disney +) did the same thing by roping in customers before jacking up prices.
It may be the “fault” of capitalism, but consider it was capitalism that birthed streaming in the first place. In the long term, the expectation would be a better solution will surface in reference to streaming… the same way streaming was a solution to cable. Thus is the business cycle.
A better solution already exists. It’s the arr stack.
You had me until that utterly stupid drivel at the end. You cannot give credit to the system that happened to be in charge at the time…
Then you’d have to thank Monarchy for a billion things that weren’t invented by monarchs…
You’re confusing economic systems with systems of government.
I’m interested to hear how you explain the drive to create streaming as an option to cable without including tenets of a market driven economy.
Reddit/Lemmy/Etc really has a hard-on to blame all bad things on capitalism. Capitalism is amoral. It is cold and uncaring. But not recognizing it as a driving factor for growth, innovation and societal advancement is a path of willful ignorance.
Everything has pros and cons in life.
Also worth noting in the case of uber, even if price is equal with taxis, the experience is much better. Nicer cars, better drivers and much easier app use. Even at price parity, its a very superior product in most cases.
Other than the ease of app use I wouldn’t say any of these are accurate anymore. I’ve been in plenty of hoopties using Uber, dealt with drivers juggling different apps at once and literally driving past me with some other customer in the car on the way to their destination (while Uber app shows you your driver is arriving), and had plenty of awful drivers take me places. I think this was true in the beginning but once the facade came down and people realized they aren’t really making any money, Uber lowered their standards and took what they can get.
Uber never made money because they chose to undercut prices of all competitors and bleed them out.
I think that is only the first part of it. Uber invested a ton of money in autonomous vehicles. I think they were originally betting that they would undercut prices, bleed out competitors, and then be the only one who has the capital to deploy fleets of driverless vehicles.
We are still far from having driverless vehicles and I think investors are realizing that so Uber upped their prices and lowered their pay. There is nothing revolutionary about them. They implemented a good tracking system and the ability for drivers to more easily figure out which rides would be best. They do not have that advantage anymore since taxi companies now largely have the exact same tech but without the massive overhead that Uber has.
I always thought [dumping](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumping_(pricing_policy\)) was illegal.
FTC has been asleep at the wheel for 50 years
the expectation would be a better solution will surface in reference to streaming… the same way streaming was a solution to cable.
What would that look like though? The current streaming model was pretty easy to predict ~15 years ago with the advent of online video streaming in general, especially mainstream forms of it such as YouTube. I have a hard time imagining how any other business model for distributing video content would look like, but then again I don’t have a very entrepreneurial mind.
If you had the answer you could make a lot of money
The answer was already found with music streaming. Whether you’re using Spotify, Apple Music, or YouTube whatever, you’re still getting 99% of the same content. These companies compete on price and features not on content.
That case is a bit different. Most music streaming platforms haven’t leaned heavily into the production of exclusive content like Netflix or Amazon, or own a huge swath of IPs like Disney. We might get there yet, however…if we do, we’d likely see the same price hikes and fractured availability of content.
I would do the same as was the case with cinemas: anybody can buy any streaming content. If you produce a movie, you are forced to sell it to anybody who is willing to buy it. (Just like every cinema can have any movie which wasn’t the case back then. There were specific cinema exclusives before the law forced this shit out.)
This is the way. Unfortunately, it requires competent lawmakers that dares to target anti-competitive business practices. I guess we could pin our hopes on the EU, but they might not want to open this can of bees (yet). Besides, they are plenty busy dealing with all the other areas that the US allowed to run rampant, my guess is that there’s a hard limit to how much can can be targeted at once. Let them handle right-to-repair and big tech privacy violations first, since they don’t have soft solutions / workarounds.
Remember that every invention discovered and improvement made before capitalism, happened before capitalism.
Remember that even in a system in which workers own companies, those workers still want to make more money
A profit motive is not unique to nor a product of capitalism.
Those workers still want to live. The money is the means- controlled by those with the most money.
Capitalism and democracy as exclusive concepts.
None of this makes any sense, both on its face and as a response to my comment
Bold deconstruction of the argument. Capitalism didn’t invent iPhones, workers did. There are economic systems other than capitalism, that can do better, without the unilateral domination of capital.
Not making any profit does not imply running for losses.
Many companies can run for minimal margins, ensuring they can pay staff, stock and services.
Profit is what is left on the table after every expense is paid, including salaries, which usually doesn’t reach the workers pockets.
No but companies raising prices to make more money is absolutely related to making profit, and a worker-owned company still has a profit motive.
Companies being able to run at a loss is a feature of capitalism, not a bug. Most small businesses do not turn a profit for two to three years.
If a company sets its mark at not making profit, it does not mean it runs at a loss.
Was I unclear?
Profit is what is left after all expenses are paid, including salaries, and a company can run with a non profit objective and still create jobs with fair salaries.
Profit is the end goal for the so called investors that have no real involvement in the day to day operations of companies and demand quarterly reports with ever increasing revenue.
If a company makes enough money to pay salaries, replenish stocks and/or provide ita services and pay its daily and monthly expenses it is not running on a loss. Profit is not a requirement for a business.
I am aware that non-profits exist as a concept, but that’s irrelevant to what we are discussing which is how profitability and viability are not necessarily linked
You act like capitalism is something that was invented. Market economies have existed since the dawn of time.
Think of it more like a spectrum where free market and unregulated capitalism is on one end and economies under total state control are at the other.
There is clear evidence that one side of that spectrum favors innovation more than the other.
I guess you could argue that one end of the spectrum is more “moral” than the other, but I would counter that the opposite end is amoral rather than immoral.
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You mean capitalism is inherent in the matrix of the space-time continuum as opposed to invented?
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Market economies have not all been capitalistic.
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Innovation is not the singular motivation of mankind. Survival, comfort, stability, peace, equality are more important.
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An amoral society is no better than an immoral society.
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