Below is a look at the most exasperating news from streaming services from this week. The scale of this article demonstrates how fast and frequently disappointing streaming news arises. Coincidentally, as we wrote this article, another price hike was announced.
We’ll also examine each streaming platform’s financial status to get an idea of what these companies are thinking (spoiler: They’re thinking about money).
Netflix starts killing its cheapest ad-free plan in June
Sony bumps Crunchyroll prices weeks after shuttering Funimation
Peacock is raising prices
Fubo cuts 19 channels
In a seemingly desperate push, many streaming services prioritize revenue and profits ahead of building the best streaming service for customers.
We could go on about how this might force people to reconsider their subscriptions, but we should publish before another service makes yet another policy change.
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Late-stage capitalism going full steam ahead.
I honestly think they offered good deals for a couple of years to lure the new generations into a false sense of security and make them forget how to pirate :D
They absolutely did. I used to pirate all my media 20 years ago, but then streaming became so convenient and relatively cheap that I just didn’t bother with it anymore.
Now, they’ve pretty much pushed me back out to sea with their ever increasing prices and decreasing content that’s worth watching. I’m not paying $15-20 per service, when they insist on fragmenting it to hell so I’d need 3-4 subscriptions to watch the things I want.
The joke is on them, piracy was motivated by the extreme convenience of streaming to make it as convenient as ever.
One thing that we have learned is that piracy is not a pricing issue. It’s a service issue. The easiest way to stop piracy is not by putting antipiracy technology to work. It’s by giving those people a service that’s better than what they’re receiving from the pirates.
- Gabe Newell
https://www.gamesradar.com/gabe-newell-piracy-issue-service-not-price/
Still as relevant today as it was 13 years (dear god) ago. Sure, not every pirate would pay for media, just like not every pirate pays for games, but charging increasingly more money for a worse product is going to push people towards a solution that basically allows you to search for and watch anything you want, ad-free.
There’s people practically begging to spend money for certain shows and movies to be available, but they’re just not available on any streaming service. What else are they going to do?
So, who wants to help a landlubber learn to sail the high seas?
Where the fuck is this all heading? There isn’t any new medium to deliver media to people that will revolutionize content delivery. It’s already delivered directly to the device its viewed on. Back to $20 per individual movie like DVDs were before streaming took off? Except 10 more steps away from actual ownership of what you buy?
I just started using the public library apps this week. Piracy has gotten too difficult for me recently.
Stremio and realdebrid just google those together and I promise you’ll be happy you did!
Thanks very much. Looks interesting.
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Unironically, yes. Everything we had 20 years ago, but worse.
Worse for us. Better for the corporations.
Greeding corporations saw something was popular and profitable 10 years ago and are now doing everything they can to take a slice of the pie and get their fingers it. With more hands in the pan, there is less pie to go around, so they squeezing every last dollar they can out while lying to consumers about why. The income on these ventures is so laughably high and many production costs of the few original programming offered so low that they could cover everything on 5 dollars a month if not less. But if they did that they couldn’t give their executives million dollar bonuses, which is the only reason they are in the business.
DVDs but they can also come to your house and snap the disc in half without offering a refund. Now that’s customer service!
ref. Sony/Crunchyroll/Funimation – Sony is erasing digital libraries that were supposed to be accessible “forever”
My over-the-air tv antenna saves me $60/mo.
I’d love to do this, but I don’t get many channels where I live :(
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Honestly, there is cheap stuff out there to do besides watch screens so much. Draw, write, cook, carve, read, walk. It’s better for the mind all around. Absolutely, go pirate some shows. But taking a step back from the content stream hurts them too.
We could go on about how this might force people to reconsider their subscriptions…
That’s one way to put it lol.
They let people believe that streaming is cheap, but it is not. A server can send streams to many people at the same time, but not so many as it seems and sever up time is a cost, in terms of energy and in terms of sysadmin time. Maintenance of the network is also expensive, especially in the US where most of the people live in low density neighbourhoods.
To that you have to add the cost of the big data servers that check everything people look at and profile their customers.
The dirty cheap subscriptions were meant to attract new customers, the service was heavily subsidized. The companies looked profitable just because other companies bought more ad space than necessary. Overadvertising is the preferred method to give stealth subsidies, but it is a cost for the other businesses of the network. After a while they have to shift those costs to the customers.
Yeah, that could be true. But seeing as how 99% of companies are following the same business model of squeezing more and more profit out of people, I’m gonna go with Occam’s razor on this one and say they’re most likely just trying to make more money because they can. As long as it keeps working, they’ll keep doing it.
To get an idea of the cost choose any cloud service and see how much you pay for the server usage by the hour. Try to llok at all the other costs involved in the business, production of dedicated content is not cheap. All the company staff, the administration and the billing have a cost.
Do not go by assumptions, measure, try to get an idea of the real costs.
I have access to 40€/month 10Gb symmetric (this is a commercial offer, so it’s obviously cheaper for them). Now tell me bandwith is so so expensive.
It was expensive back in the day, not so much any more, and prices plunge every year.
When I worked at an internet provider, Netflix sent us a cache (I’m sure they have several at that ISP now). I can’t imagine it cost them more than a few thousand dollars, as it was just a bare bones box full of hard drives. We gave them free power, internet, and rack space in our data center. Every night during the slow period it would fill up with whatever they thought would stream the next day.
There was nothing to do with neighborhoods, the cache served customers all over Maine and they didn’t pay us anything. Netflix’s costs are more likely content and licensing.
Netflix have been making a profit since 2003 and only recently introduced ads. They are just trying to squeeze more profit.
Netflix is a public company, you can just go look at how wrong you are about this.
They took in $9.3 billion in Q1 2024, and spent $702 million on “technology” and $3.7 billion on adding “content assets”
Their net profit was $2.3 billion, for one quarter. They could afford to just charge less money, but the line must go up.
