I’ve been unmotivated in the past but i think it’s time to sort out an alternative.
The answer is apathy.
You have to remember that most users simply don’t care. The majority of consumers are some combination of either not technologically savvy or just outright intimidated by technology, are not very well educated, are incredibly reluctant to read, are not particularly observant, will not leave their routines or comfort zones without very significant motivation, and have spent their entire lives being the very frog in that gradually boiling pot of ever more numerous and intrusive advertising to the point that they just accept this as “normal.” They’re busy. They don’t read tech headlines. They don’t understand what’s going on under the hood, and nor do they want to.
Normal people don’t see the world like us nerds do. I am positive that these streaming services (and many other businesses) have studied this and understand it very well. If they lose 1% of their business which was made up by vocal nerds, but whatever odious change the just rolled out results in an increase in profit that is greater than the revenue from those subscriptions lost, they’ll go ahead and do it anyway.
They think they have a captive audience because by and large they functionally do have a captive audience. This stuff works, and people keep paying for it en masse.
I mean, look at Reddit. Huge uproar last year, nothing happened really.
Pretty much every service, platform, app has become worse over the last two or three years. But people keep using them. And not for a lack of alternatives. They are actively hostile against change and many really don’t care. They are so used to being fucked over, squeezed for pennies and bombarded with bullshit ads, that they gave up.
The same thing happens in politics, btw. People just vote whatever - if at all, because they already expected to be fucked over. All those activists you see on TV or online are a tiny minority.
Which is functionally a captive audience.
You might ditch, but they have enough data that says enough other people aren’t going to.
Just remember whenever you’re annoyed by something and think “why is this a thing? This annoys me so it shouldn’t happen”, there’s thousands of other people who can live with it or just don’t give a shit.
Consumers mostly don’t even care about the content. Over the last 15 years they switched from cable only to now be back on cable again disguised as streaming.
Or they don’t feel like they have a better option. I have never met anyone who said, I like adds on my streaming service.
Streaming services have a catastrophic problem they didn’t see coming.
As they massively expanded the viewing market, they also gave very accurate viewing metrics compared to broadcast TV.
Also, the many, MANY offerings cut the viewing pie into smaller pieces.
And this is the expectation, mostly because while you might stay with a super hit like GoT, they’re super expensive, and huge risks if they don’t take off (see acolyte). Cost sensitive people are likely to subscribe for the season then cancel, or just subscribe the month the season finishes.
The alternative is to try to hook you on a bunch of shows, which means having a ton of them and hoping they nail your niche. People are less willing to do this, but it works if you have more disposable income, or value streaming more.
In any case, they can’t afford all the shows they have to put on, it’s all or nothing now, before they might watch lost on ABC one night, then CBS walker Texas ranger might let the kid fall on the ground the next, but now you have to keep them entertained most days, that’s a shit-ton of content. HBO has it worse, they’re losing their old cable revenue, and their productions are stupid expensive, and they’re one of the winners. Disney has it even worse because disney+ cannibalizes both their cinema sales and they have to put up their crown jewels, star wars and the mcu, all on the same service, devaluing both. Fortunately focusing on kids programming helps because parents basically have to have Disney+ just as a matter of course.
This barely worked on broadcast because the different channels could share the load and cut the ad pie into larger pieces,
If they could count on must-watch blockbusters (ie GoT, which really hurt them when they screwed the landing and killed rewatchability), they could pull it off, but that’s so risky, it’s betting everything on one spin of the roulette wheel.
I liked reading your response. Wish I had a meaningful response other than there is no way I’m going to feel bad for media companies. If they’ve painted themselves in a corner I’m sure it was greed that got them there.
Don’t feel bad at all for them.
They celebrated like crazy when things were good, now the economics is hitting them like it should.
They, like everyone else in life, will have to figure out how to manage, or not.
Eh, the cycle of collapse and consolidation will hit the streaming system exactly the same as it would any other industry. I feel like the system will stabilize around 3-5 big services - maybe amazon, hbo, and disney, with youtube premium and apple TV as the “also rans” - which will all have premium price points and ads, and the average person who subscribes to them will be paying about as much (after inflation) as they used to pay for cable.
That’s exactly what will happen.
There will just be a lot more fuckery involved, a super-premium tier that doesn’t cycle out content but costs 3x as much and such.
Because for every one person like you and me with zero ad tolerance, there’s hundreds, thousands of plebs who can’t be bothered to drop the service. It’s the inverse of the whale (re. microtransactions) problem.
I know a few people that actually claim to like watching ads. They have made consumerism part of their identity and they are proud of it.
Not having commercials has really only been a thing for, at best, like 15 years. Broadcast and cable TV has always had commercials with the exception of specialty channels like HBO and Showtime and a few others.
Streaming only overtook cable TV in viewership in 2020. Even in 2022, cable and broadcast TV still made up 56% of viewership.
Cable TV started out as “pay for your access and you won’t get ads”. It enshitified into its current state, and streaming is literally a rerun. Give it a few more years and you will have price bundles for streaming services where you have to pay for peacock to get Disney. They might even bundle it with ISP services.
No, cable was developed to deliver standard TV (i.e., programming with regular commercials) to places that couldn’t get broadcast TV. It has always been a subscription service and has always had commercials. It was also always “bundled” with a selection of channels. You couldn’t even choose what came in your bundle until much later.
That depends. Yes, the cable standard did carry broadcast TV with commercials, but a big selling point in the beginning was also the existence of cable only paid TV channels that did not have commercials. Premium cable as an offshoot of cable only networks also did not have commercials, it was a major selling point. As the medium expanded and the channel breakdown shifted commercials came back in a big way, and even many premium channels got commercials. Prime examples would be USA Networks, HBO, Nickelodeon, and quite a few more.
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I think about this a lot. In the 2000s, there would be all these music services that hype themselves up. The Downloadable Music Wars. We all used Napster or whatever pirating tool and it was just easier than paying. In the end, they were all smoke and mirrors and the services died out, while Apple and their iPods won.
In the late 2010s was the PC gaming Wars, Steam was really getting some heat. Not just other e-commerce stores like Epic, but also game streaming services like onLive and PC Game Pass. Again, all these wack ass companies (wtf Origin) and most of them have either folded or are on life support and migrated to Steam.
We’re currently in the Streaming Wars. Probably the second or third version of this war, since the first war killed Blockbuster. I honestly don’t believe many of them will survive past 2030. For sure Netflix and Hulu. Maybe half of them die, and six more will crop up. Who knows.
But what I do know is that whenever these “wars” occur, you see a lot of the shittier companies get worse and worse. And if you never picked a side and did your own thing (ignore them or sail the open seas), you get to look back and laugh at these clowns.
Remember Netflix’s password sharing ban outrage? It didn’t work, they gained more subscribers. People stay because they don’t know how to sail the high seas or are too lazy to do it.
I think shoving ads in everything is a bit different then the purging leeches but ok.
Because how else am I going to get those deep creases out of my blouses!
Do your own ironing! It’s quite easy. Heat the iron to the proper temperature. Not too hot. Use steam liberally. Use an ironing board and a sleave attachment. Turn your garment around so you can reach everywhere. Some creases are meant to be there. Make sure they are straight before ironing them.
Excellent advice 👚
Do you remember when EXTREME IRONING!!! was a thing?
Because the “you wouldn’t steal a car” nonsense scares a lot of people off
Because some people want to support the creators of content but digital downloads from iTunes or whatever are more expensive than getting a month of a streaming service
Because there is a level of convenience of having thousands of hours of content at your fingertips without having to store content locally or finding it on a “dodgy” website. Setting up torrents / usenet is more work than giving someone your credit card number
Because a lot of people don’t know where to find content and if they did they don’t know the difference between a 480p avi vs a 2160p HDR DV MKV and get confused with torrents and file formats and how to get them on their TV.
Because - at the moment - the ads aren’t that bad, I got one ad at the start and one episode in the middle of an episode of Gen V - obviously they’ll add more until it’s as bad as cable but they’re not there yet.
The “you wouldn’t steal a car” thing actually backfired majorly for the parties involved. It actually did two things. It highlighted that downloading movies was possible and easy to do when it was new and not many people knew about it. And it made people curious. This led to it having the exact opposite effect of what was intended.
https://knowledgesource.com.au/no-bs-how-those-video-ads-spectacularly-back-fired/
Didn’t they also not license (aka pirate lol) the music in that ad?
Also absolutely true.
Because - at the moment - the ads aren’t that bad, I got one ad at the start and one episode in the middle of an episode of Gen V - obviously they’ll add more until it’s as bad as cable but they’re not there yet.
Yeah, I stopped watching Fallout when it hit an ad in the middle. Why get excited about a show when it is clear that it will be constantly interrupted by ads like we still live in the 90s?
One is too many.
Wife and I started watching the boys on prime. That’s when I realized Amazon is putting ads in the stream.
I just ended up downloading all the seasons in an hour and it’s been no ads on Kodi since.
Pirates life for me
Their entire survival hinges on keeping investment money flowing, which means they essentially have to lie and over-promise.
A chronic issue plaguing the entire tech and media sector right now. Line must go up no matter the costs.
What alternative? Every other service who does the same shit? Or even worse, setup jellyfin with sonarr server to completely automate everything and watch everything for absolutely free and continue to do so forever?? The shit some of these pirates do is disgusting.
Still using Plex because I didn’t like the way jelyfin worked.
Heard Plex has gone downhill quite a bit. Any important features you are looking for in jellyfin? Never tried or checked Plex myself so don’t know much about it.
I’ve been using plex for a while and it works great.
This is just my opinion, but when Google(and… I don’t know, “them?”) started cracking down on the “letswatch” and 123movie sites, streaming was in a good place, so people happily jumped over. Now, in the time between that and the state of things now, some people lost their patience and skill with looking up a movie. Both my mom and grandma were fine with the 123movies and what not. The sites started to go down when Netflix was still alright, so it wasn’t a big deal. Spend a couple dollars, get all the stuff you want and be sure it’s the best quality, and no malware? Fantastic.
By the time it became this state of affairs, my mom just couldn’t wrap her head around it. I tried to explain some sites are still there, you just may need to search duckduckgo (which she hates for some reason). She never understood torrenting even though we’ve gone over it multiple times. I’ve always liked anime or some shit that was not going to be on Netflix, so I kept using those “skills” and kept up with the changes. Moving to torrenting, a VPN, file converters, learning how to apply subtitles, one by one, over years, it’s not a big deal. You just learn as you do. Having to come back to that after how much has changed ostracized a lot of people.
The people who aren’t affected by them were never their main focus. They wanted the people who weren’t tech savvy, lazy even. They can’t figure out a torrent, or how to even find it in the first place. They won’t know what to search for to protect themselves and will likely get scared by the first copyright notice. They’re hoping that the majority of their customer base will be like that and feel “trapped.”
Statistics. You’re still there and only complaining. I purged all subscription parasites from my life in 2019.
I live by the abstraction, “you can’t fix stupid in anyone else but yourself.” All you can do is tell others what you did with your one wallet vote and hope that others do the same at some critical mass.
They do it because you’re still there, and you care while they do not. You want to think you’re human. You’re not. You’re a new deck chair on a yacht if you’re lucky. Most likely, you’re no more than a liter or few of diesel.
They don’t care about you. They don’t even want you as a subscriber, you’re a pain in the ass. Most people are too tired and not tech savvy enough to pirate. A lot of those will eventually do something else, too, but they can cram ads into the streams faster than those people can find the wherewithal to leave.
In short, this is profitable, and no amount of raging will make it less so. Take care of yourself, but don’t pretend you’re making line go down.
I’m not saying I’m going to start a revolution. I’m only saying it’s time to break the chain, again.
