• ClimateChangeAnxiety [he/him, they/them]
    ·
    1 year ago

    while the streamers are all jacking up their rates/introducing ads/locking down sharing/enshittifying

    This has been fucking baffling to watch. Like, even if I try to put myself into the shoes of a wealth hoarding dragon who opposes good things and only wants to increase the size of his hoard, raising the prices of streaming services while everyone is on strike is a fucking insane choice. You’re going to have less new content, everyone’s already pissed at you for treating writers and actors so badly, you just had record profits, and you think now is the time to raise prices?

    What are you doing??? That’s a terrible idea! Wait until the strike resolves and raise prices THEN, and claim you had to do it to afford to strike demands!

    It’s honestly frustrating to watch capitalists be so fucking bad at capitalism and just fail upward anyway because if you have billions of dollars it’s impossible to do anything other than make billions more

    • daisy
      ·
      1 year ago

      Wait until the strike resolves and raise prices THEN, and claim you had to do it to afford to strike demands!

      But that could be a whole fiscal quarter away. There's cash to be grabbed now.

      • don@lemm.ee
        ·
        1 year ago

        Shareholders require infinite money, and we are their cash cows. The cattle should stampede the shareholders, but are too busy being distracted by influencers, and so stay impoverished. It really is the perfect crime.

    • don@lemm.ee
      ·
      1 year ago

      History seems intent on demonstrating that the more money a person has, the more detached from reality they become. Holy shitsnacks, just look at the average wealthy influencer: they’re the mentally absent funded by the very same.

    • came_apart_at_Kmart [he/him, comrade/them]
      ·
      1 year ago

      my guess is it's some kind of pre-emptive move. there is still completed content from before the strike trickling out, so now is the time to pull the trigger.... before the perception of "there is nothing to watch" / stagnation becomes intolerable to a subscriber.... before people have finished their rewatch of some beloved series and scoured the catalog for everything worth a fuck.

      as stupid as it is to do it now, it would be a major boner jam to do it in 90 or 180 days if the strike hasn't been resolved. doing it now gives them a little extra cash now to either make a play for a merger/back catalogue purchase or give a quick handy to the shareholders to cash out or re-organize from a position of strength.