Streaming video has surpassed cable subscriptions worldwide
theverge.com
theverge.com
Compared with the 148 channels Spectrum provided (about 1/2 where duplicates) the quality is better on the few I watch intermittently (PBS, ABC, CBS...)
The crazy thing is my bill dropped from over $200 to $70 (for just internet).
Yea, I’m and idiot for not doing it sooner.
I remember when cable was cheap and as-free.
The transition looks good because it has too (to lure customers away from cable). My bet is that it’s only a matter of time till “personilized ads” are forced upon you.
Can't beat it for $7.99/month.
$0.00/month
I'm clearly not the only one who came up with such an idea:
Plus, a comment sibling to this one said YouTube Red has ads, so there's that.
YouTube Premium is ad-free, it says so in their frontpage. Are you saying that's a blatant lie?
That doesn't address my point that content producers should get paid.
From YouTube Premium ad: "Ad-free YouTube, and our new music streaming service, YouTube Music. Services: No ads, Downloads, Background play."
Anyway, now I'm putting my money where my mouth is and am happily watching ad free YouTube content (which I love dearly) on my TV. Totally worth it.
And the fact of the matter is, the ads they do have don't produce enough revenue to support most creators.
I suppose you could argue that's because Google's cut is too high, but in Youtube's case (as opposed to, say, Apple's App Store), I feel Google is providing a substantial service—hosting, encoding, and distributing a huge amount of data.
I pay to watch what I want, not what other people would like me to see. If I’m paying to see what people would like me to see, then I will stop paying. It really is that simple.
Unlike cable TV in the US currently, which is either a monopoly or duopoly, there is a decent bit of competition on streaming. Currently, there is Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu, YouTube, among others. Yes, the content is often only partially overlapping, but the point is -- there is competition. This is much more promising for customers than the current situation -- where you often have one and only once choice and they can do whatever they want.
Overall, I'd say advertisements are the least of worries for me. The greater worry is you sign up for a $90/mo plan and the bill magically becomes $120/mo. You are forced to watch TV on their schedule. You sign up for a 12 or 24mo plan which you cannot cancel, even if you lose crucial channels (e.g., Disney) And the thing is near-impossible to cancel without spending hours in call-wait hell.
With regards to your dismissal of the old school transportation companies:
The cab company I drove for dominated the market because it was basically reliable. There were problems at surge periods (rush hour and drinking holidays), but for the most part people could order a cab and expect it to arrive. The automated phone system worked fairly well to order a cab to an address your phone number had used previously.
The upstarts fixed the 12-hour shift problem: their drivers can start and stop working whenever they want, whereas most taxi companies used 12/24 hour leases or week-long leases.
The upstarts have not fixed the fact that cars are expensive and depreciate rapidly. Our little team put 100,000 miles a year on the cab we shared...
The upstarts have also not figured out how to make driving pay well for the drivers. In the old days, drivers could buy their own cab and make a little bit more every week, and lease it out to other company drivers for the times they needed to take off.
I think the transportation upstarts are going to run out of money. I’ve heard the old taxi company has reworked their business and is making more money than ever. Fewer employees (maintenance, etc) because now their drivers are using their own vehicles to take their contracted fares around.
When/if they need a fleet again (after the upstarts run out of money) I’m sure they’ll figure something out.
If you use Comcast, you could probably lower your bill by visiting https://ns.reddit.com/r/Comcast_Xfinity/
- Quality is too low
- speed is too slow
- many people want to own their movie, not just rent it
- people don’t want to watch movies on a computer
- the large studios and cable companies will never allow it
And within little more than a decade that all changed.
- Slow Internet speeds. This has changed.
- Cable bills not increasing. If cable was cheap no one would care about Netflix. But when it gets around $200/month most people start questioning why they need cable TV. I did and changed my plan to Internet only, and have not regretted it. Cable TV is garbage and it's cheaper to pay $10/month for HBO GO or STARZ rather than have to have a $75, $80, $100 specific cable package and then pay $10 to get it on your cable box. OTA TV has improved and is a lot better than it used to be, at least where I live.
- Netflix and other services not being available on practically anything with a screen and CPU. I think most people who watch Netflix on a computer are broke college students with no other choice or doing so at work, but most are using their smart TV, Roku, game console, or other similar devices.
Regardless, what bothers me and many others is streaming games becoming the industry standard due to the DRM benefits and taking away ownership from gamers. That would be really shitty.
I don’t know if these numbers are true, but poster was not claiming faster than light.
1) speed of light in fibre is 2/3c - unlikely to change soon 2) fibre is laid in the ground on a circuitous route - rarely changes but does happen 3) queueing delay - that's often the main culprit, changeable, but hard (see the buffer bloat debate)
I am suggesting this will be significantly more optimized, not how fast you can communicate over long distances.
Even with free space speeds and tunnels through the earth you only get like one order of magnitude.
But the blame goes back to the cable companies there.
And this is only for the titles Netflix offers in HD: there are many, probably due to licensing issues, which are offered only in SD resolution (which can be confirmed during playback vie the web player debugger). Netflix originals, while seemingly having the most consistent quality, still suffer from poor encoding issues I've noticed, which makes me think most of all that this is aggressive bandwidth management if even their own titles aren't given a proper encoding treatment.
And then for 4k playback on PC, it's required you have not only a compatible browser or app (4k playback in Firefox will not work), but also a recent CPU that supports hardware DRM - just awful. The future of streaming is bleak if you ask me, albeit convenient for the average consumer. And I guess that's the real demographic.
It's marketing bullshit and cost savings, slapping the word HD on everything to lure the customers. Cut the bitrate to save on bandwidth costs.
Many homes don't have the 8+ Mbps required to stream high quality videos, they couldn't get HD even if they wanted to.
I've seen people watch warped video because they, for some reason, prefer it to bars on the screen.
But still. This article has an inconsistency that doesn't require any particularly high level of math understanding.
> world’s entertainment market — encompassing both theatrical and home releases — grew to a new high in 2018: $96.8 billion
repeat:
> consumers spent $96.8 billion on entertainment around the world.
compare to:
> cable subscriptions still rake in the most money, increasing in 2018 by $6.2 billion to $118 billion
Erm, what?
And I checked the original PDF, the same sort of headscratcher is in there: apparently people spent more on cable subscription than on entertainment which is obviously (?) impossible.
> on entertainment around the world. The international theatrical box office grew to $41.1 billion (spending in the US and Canada grew to $11.9 billion), while home entertainment hit $55.7 billion internationally.
Didn't see anything regarding what they consider a subscription. Are hotels, hospitals, bars, nursing homes etc. lumped in with the figures?
Netflix already has most of what's needed in terms of infrastructure and talent.
It wouldn't need to beat YouTube. It could also offer something like what Vimeo does.
Edit: I wonder if buying Roku would be a good move. Their competitors all have players.
Not incentivizing propoganda directed at children?
Netflix could also leverage the same strategy Hulu or the Epic Store has... pay/incentivize creators and partners for exclusivity. I hate this strategy as a consumer, but it does seem to be effective.
I can see them basically poaching top YouTube talent and telling them, we'll pay for your show, just it has to be on our platform.
And YouTube has this weird moat: people know and accept that almost everything YouTube offers is crazily bad clickbait, but this is what enables the exotic gems. People just know to focus on the good parts and not hold the rest against the platform. YouTube only got there through a combination of boiling frog effect and an extremely forgiving audience back when the novelty factor of streaming video dominated their perception. Any new competitor would be instantly burned for even just 10% of the crap ratio that nobody is even noticing on YouTube.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/273883/netflixs-quarterl...
Any money that Disney makes from Disney+ is just additional profit. It’s already recouped most of its costs through theatrical releases, commercial network tv, video on demand, etc.
Netflix also has to borrow money externally. The other companies getting into streaming have free cash flow to prop up streaming.
Even Apple can operate its streaming service at a loss and its just a rounding error.