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"Why don't people want to pay for streaming anymore?" cry the companies who split streaming into 40 different services that keep increasing in cost while randomly removing content without warning, and shoving ads into our paid services.
Yup, sure is a mystery. A real head scratcher.
For real though, the fact that so many companies entered the market, each with a lukewarm offering that's like 6 of the existing 9 series of a show you want, but then you have to get a new service for season 7-8, and wait to see who has 9, is fucking wild. I remember when Netflix had everything. Now it's a smorgasbord of crap, at a minimum of 20 quid each a month. What did they expect to happen?
@Zenbuffy
What happened was that Netflix became successful enough and other media companies wanted a piece of that pie. They did so by creating their own streaming service to offer their own IP and whatever content they could buy the rights for cheap.
So now you have two dozen of streaming services each offering some of what they made.
Ideally you would want to pay $10/m to have access to all the (multi)media ever made available in the world. But the world doesn't work that way.
@Zenbuffy
Regarding Netflix and its waining offering, in part this has to do with their licenses for content expiring and not being renewed. Either these licenses aren't on offer, or prohibitively expensive. To combat this NetFlix is creating/investing in its own content.
This happened in the gaming space much earlier with Steam, and when all the large publishers started to launch their own software platforms. EA's Origin, Ubisoft Connect, whatever M$ is doing. Same story...
@ligthert @Zenbuffy Netflix has made some original series I really loved, and they all had crazy cliffhangers, but then they cancelled them less than a month after release because not enough people immediately binged them. I refuse to be forced into binging shows immediately, i like streaming because I can watch when I want. And expecting people to magically find new shows when there isn't any advertising is crazy. I cancelled Netflix in January after they cancelled yet another show I loved.
@Jennifer @ligthert @Zenbuffy this has been my argument with Netflix for ages now, no series on there has ever been given the promotion as Stranger Things. But now that they have started going down the traditional broadcast route of cancelling a series, even though it's popular - it makes it harder to justify investing your time in the latest new series. For example 1899 - that had so much potential to be a 4 or 5 season arc. But nope. Cancelled. Daybreak - cancelled.
@asjmcguire @ligthert @Zenbuffy 1899 is what made me cancel my account. I loved that show, and the final cliffhanger was insane, but we'll never know the rest of the story. I was so mad they cancelled it so fast.
@ligthert @Zenbuffy ideally what i want is to pay a $10 one-off fee for exactly the one thing i want to watch, not a subscription. we hardly watch enough television in this house to make a single subscription worthwhile, let alone several of them. it often works out cheaper just to buy the DVD box set.
@Zenbuffy regulators and the public were repeatedly warned this would happen during the golden age of netflix. and here we are. enshittification will not ever end, unless people find a way to *make* them end it.
in the meantime, anyone who's capable of torrenting, and setting up jellyfin, will be all set.
@briellebouquet @Zenbuffy There’s also the fact that many people seem to have gotten used to not paying for stuff.
There will never be a good service for film or music that costs $20/month.
@Zenbuffy @briellebouquet Name one?
Spotify has been effectively paying people to listen to music for 15 years. On Youtube you pay with your data. Libraries, as magnificent as they are, are funded through taxes.
A month’s worth of quality content costs more than 20 bucks to produce and distribute. The only way it doesn’t is if someone isn’t paid fairly, and even then …
@briellebouquet @Zenbuffy People found a way to *make* the music industry offer music by the song.
It was called Napster. And the 2nd wave services that followed.
What we need is an all in one integrated i2p torrenting system in widespread use. Make it easy to torrent safely without any technical skill.
Someday society will have to reconsider whether artificial scarcity is the right way to get creators paid. Until then, slightly effortful piracy is a necessary restraint on monopoly power.
In my work life, we had a plain-language editor, whose framing I’ll paraphrase as:
“Most people want to do what’s right, and most people want to do what’s easy. Forced to choose, most people will do what easy rather than what’s right.
So, if you make it easy to do what’s right, that’s what most people will do.”
1/
In this context, when networks & cable locked everything down with high prices & fixed schedules, the only other source was torrent, or buy a full season of [show] on DVD, which was expensive & required heading to your local store, in hopes they even had it.
Torrenting was “wrong,” but *way* easier.
Along comes Netflix with a one-stop, low-cost, easy means of doing the “right” thing, and people bought in. In a huge way!
2/
Fast-forward (pardon the play on words) to the mess you (accurately, IMO) describe today, and streaming is no longer an easy source except, maybe, for platform-produced, exclusive content.
Hence folks in this thread (understandably, again IMO) discussing torrenting content.
It shouldn’t be hard for studios/services to figure out … Assuming they actually care.
3/3
@Zenbuffy it's not so much that any of these services expect to win, more that they just want everyone else (netflix) to lose
@Zenbuffy A number of years ago, when video streaming platforms were just starting to split away from netflix, someone wrote that they thought the directives were thinking of cable/satellite tv. This person speculated that their end goal was for people to go back to paying $70+ (sometimes $100+) a month like they had with cable packages. I don't think they considered even slightly how easy it is now to get sufficient entertainment out of like, YouTube, or (
) TikTok.
@Zenbuffy I wish video streaming was more like music streaming as in all the services would have mostly everything and you would actually have a choice between them, so they would have to compete also on other grounds than just exclusives.
Or like movie rental stores used to be.
They expected us to sit and take it, like we do everything else. And if we go around them they'll keep cranking up the criminal penalties as if that will make up for people truly not having the fucking money for all this bullshit. They expect it to work forever.
@Zenbuffy Gabe Newell’s argument about piracy being a service issue also applies to streaming.
It’s not so much that people aren’t willing to pay, it’s just you get a better experience from pirating than when paying.
Why pay $20 a month for a streaming service if the content library is constantly subject to change? Double dipping with ads in the streams, restricting the number of concurrent streams, and no availability to pre-download content for playback while offline.
@Zenbuffy If streaming services all stopped blindly chasing monthy subscriber numbers and profit above all else they might actually stand a chance of being competitive to piracy.
The way I like to frame the argument comes down to one word: Greed.
Greed is what makes these companies want you to buy but they have no interest in actually selling you anything. You pay for a license that is worthless the moment the company determines it’s no longer profitable for them.
Capitalism at its finest.