Consumer demand for content will continue, it’s just a matter of how they will access that content going forward."
I wish some of these corporate analysis articles would mention how the inclusion of advertisers directly effects the downgrade of show and platform quality. It's hard to have a show speak to the pains of the American foreign policy and healthcare system when it's bankrolled by defense, oil, gas, and pharma.
My wife and I started to watch a where the main character was a heroic ICE agent who flew around breaking up a child sex trafficking ring. We couldn't finish it. I can often suspend disbelief when it comes to cop shows by pretending it's set in a fantasy world where cops are somehow good, but claiming ICE are somehow fighting to keep families together is too much.
Also the show las lurid and voyeuristic in the most upsetting way possible.
Counter points:
When the ad loads and the show doesn't, I just find a torrent of the show I want to watch. When it keeps happening, I'll downgrade my subscription to the lowest tier or just cancel it.
When the ad server crashes, fails to load the ad, and error messages are thrown instead of moving on to the show, I'll downgrade my subscription to the lowest tier or just cancel it.
The fewer subscriptions, means ads will have to be sold for cheaper as they'd be less valuable to advertisers.
Ad-free models cap profits. You can only sell as many subscriptions as there are people. Ad-supported models can make infinite money.
The biggest issue is that subscription income isn't tied to titles, which each individually cost money (see: the Matt Damon clip about DVD sales).
infinite money
Has not and never will be more than a pipe-dream invented in boardrooms by assholes shooting their industry in the foot. Same shit with "games as a service".
Never say never! Chase your goals and believe in yourself, don't let the haters keep you down!
Ad-supported models can make infinite money.
Well I see absolutely nothing wrong with this statement, 10/10 makes complete sense
Assuming that were even true, what makes a company entitled to 'make infinite money'? Are they 'making infinite 'value' too? Or are we totally fine with them fucking their service (that has exclusive access to their titles) by holding it hostage for targeted propaganda?
You know what, actually I like it better this way, because it makes the below-board alternative feel way more justified. It makes it feel like getting your capitalist treats is doing an activism.
Piracy is and always will be a service problem and nothing else. If you price things fairly and make them easy to access people will pay. If you don't, they won't.
Capitalism doesn't allow for fair pricing though, it demands ever increasing profits and that demands ever increasing prices or ever decreasing services... usually both. It is a snake forced to consume itself forever
Also crazy how even though there are so few media companies, streaming has become so fractured that it destroys ease of access. Some shows and movies aren't even completely available on a single service.
Gabe Newell had a point when he argued piracy was a platform and distribution problem.
We saw the piracy community practically collapse in the last decade or two as a result of streaming platforms having really good deals, subscriptions being cheap and easy access to huge amounts of content.
Now we're seeing pullback as enshittification happens to these previously good services and people return to piracy as they no longer solve the distribution and platform issues.
I'll probably get some flak for calling these services good but they really fucking were originally and that's why they killed rental markets and changed so much so quickly.
Netflix as it was when founded was truly a great service, lots of movies and shows from various sources, and it was relatively cheap
If they didnt sink so much money into producing their own content, I think it would have kept some quality today even with the big fracturing of streaming services into a million different platforms
They would've lost all their licenced content and been left with nothing. That's why they pivoted.
The real problem is that their strategy was to "become HBO" in an era where HBO could no longer exist - in the end, it was HBO and everybody else who "became Netflix".
the media monopolies saw their success and undercut them by fencing all their content off behind their own streamers. netflix could've pivoted international (and to some extent has) but the original product in the US was doomed from the moment everyone realized it was a good idea
Hell, I was one of those. I used to torrent movies and TV shows, or stream them off numerous shady servers via Kodi. Then once legit streaming became viable options, I figured paying a few bucks a month is well worth not downloading a potential virus or risking getting kicked off my ISP for torrenting.
The thing that pisses me off the most about the enshittification of these streaming services is the ads. Being able to watch stuff ad-free was my biggest draw factor for paying a few bucks a month. Then they started putting ads at the beginning of a stream. Fine, whatever, I was ok with that. Now they interrupt what you're watching every 10-20 minutes with 30, 60 or even 90 seconds of unskippable ads. It's especially infuriating if it's during a movie. Also, the fact they're doing all this shit on top of raising prices.
Time to start flying the skull and crossbones again.
The streaming wars have been so funny because it really is just media conglomerates rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.
“Sinking? My
end of the shipprofits are higher than ever!”
Streaming was an attractive proposition to viewers when subscriptions were relatively inexpensive and content libraries were vast. But there are more companies with streaming platforms, and they have been steadily raising prices, making it less affordable for fewer options.
Bro, what the fuck is capitalism even? For streaming, at least, more competition has led to a more expensive, shittier product in every day.
Here's the fucking invisible hand
Competition leading to a better product at lower prices is capitalist propaganda not borne out in the real world. Its depressing libs believe it cause they stand by while public services are dismantled and privatized. They fall for it every time.
More competition leads to higher prices
Less competition leads to higher prices
Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmm
Gone are the days of companies shelling out untold riches to create content and pay for top-notch talent in the hopes of attracting new customers; now they're under pressure to actually turn a profit. That means less new content, more ads, and higher prices.
Weird that they don’t mention cheaper shows as an option. Last week I got around to watching Rings of Power. It was… okay. Didn’t think it was great or anything. But I thought I saw the show cost $500 million (maybe that includes rights for more shows, either way it was really expensive). Likewise, Star Trek Discovery is considered pretty mediocre by most Trek fans - certainly not as good as TNG or DS9. And yet I bet a whole 26-episode season of 90s Trek cost as much as a single episode of Discovery ($8-10 million). These streaming platforms are spending ungodly amounts of money on these shows but no one is really blown away with the results of what they’re spending that money on.
Funny, I love LOST but it’s often forgotten how much that show changed TV. I’d argue maybe the two most important shows of the last 25 years are LOST and Survivor (Survivor is mostly forgotten now but that was the show that launched a thousand reality shows).
This is very true. From a macro perspective those are prolly the two big ones. An argument can be made for Big Brother as the patient zero, but survivor has much bigger reach
Kinda insane that getting assholes drunk on camera is just a genre of entertainment
Survivor is mostly forgotten now
Survivor still airs new seasons and has an audience in the millions.
I bet a whole 26-episode season of 90s Trek cost as much as a single episode of Discovery ($8-10 million)
I was curious so I did some research. The costs:
TOS: $190,635 per episode ($1.7 million when adjusted for inflation)
TNG: $1.3 million per episode ($3.3 million when adjusted for inflation)
Discovery: $8 million per episode ($9.8 million adjusted for inflation)
Definitely more, but considering that Discovery's seasons were half as long (13 episodes per season to TNG's 26) and could thus allocate twice as much of the season's budget to an episode, it's surprisingly not that much more. About 50% higher.
They still should have taken some of that CGI budget and spent it on the writers, though.
I’ve started buying stuff on Blu Ray. I own it, I can watch it offline, and some company can’t randomly remove it.
I suspect there’s going to be a mini resurgence of physical media.
For stuff I don’t care to own, and can’t find on the 2 services I pay for, there’s the high seas.
(CW: SA mention)
How the hell is it that someone being conventionally attractive is "asking to be SA'd" according to the courts, but if someone
d software because of all the rent-seeking, that's not 'asking for it'?"For many years, streaming services offered subscriptions at rates that were enticingly low,"... But those rates were ultimately unsustainable.
This is me pointing at the entire Xbox Game Pass. I know a lot of people IRL that are all about it, but it's no secret that it's underperforming and with Microsoft sucking up key studios, there are very questionable things ahead.
The irony of this article existing behind a paywall and 150 cookies
Not entirely wrong from the standpoint of the bourgeois (innovation that will be wielded for further exploitation)
Yeah kids shows just don’t get seeded very much.
At least for shows for younger kids, if you’re in the US the PBS Kids app is pretty great. I’m annoyingly particular about what shows I let my kids watch, and pretty much all the PBS Kids shows are cool with me.
I guess technically that app has ads, I’d say about half the time there’s like a 15 second ad that plays when you start the app but it’s basically fine.
Just download decades old kids' shows that are still being seeded by nostalgic olds
Yeah that’s a good one but there’s only so much content. My kid gets free reign on pbs kids only.
It’s kind of wild how many kids shows now in this year of our lord 2024 still have like gongs and dragons and shit for countries in Asia or kids donning pith helmets for trips to “Africa” (never a particular place, just the whole ass continent)
And don’t get me started on how prominent copaganda is in kids’ show.
I’m the exact same way - kids have free reign on PBS Kids but everything else I’m pretty strict on.
