Cancel your $100/m cable service, and replace it with 10 different $10/m streaming services. Progress.
- No ads
- You can watch on demand
- Orders of magnitude more choice in what to watch
- Writers have a lot more flexibility. They don't have to be advertiser friendly.
- Writers don't have to write cliffhangers every N minutes so you come back after the ad break.
- Writers don't have to worry about sequence like they did with TV/Cable, because they know you'll be able to watch the show in order. Meaning that their worlds and characters can change and have real consequence.
Just pick your favorite 2 or 3 services. You don't have watch everything.
> - No ads
Not really, Hulu still has ads for the TV stuff, even if you're on Hulu plus. But yeah, overall, way WAY less ads. For now. But I foresee this is more of a capture strategy. After most of us cancel cable, I think we're gonna see a lot of ads on streaming services. Greed is good. In the meantime, product placement galore. Stranger Things was IMO disgusting from this perspective. Ads just moved from interrupting you to basically taking over the shows.
> - You can watch on demand
I agree, this is indeed a good thing
> - Orders of magnitude more choice in what to watch
Yes, but no. Most streaming services have a lot of filler. A lot of garbage is counted against the 'we have a 10k catalog of movies' but in the end, you have a lot of choice, between a douche and a whole bunch of turds.
> - Writers have a lot more flexibility. They don't have to be advertiser friendly.
Nope, nope, nope. Yes from the show's structure perspective, but in general, It's the exact opposite. Now, they have to write in way more product placement pieces.
> - Writers don't have to write cliffhangers every N minutes so you come back after the ad break. - Writers don't have to worry about sequence like they did with TV/Cable, because they know you'll be able to watch the show in order. Meaning that their worlds and characters can change and have real consequence.
While it's true writers don't have the same problems, they have different problems. Now they have to pander to specific user-research needs, they need to create season-wide cliffhangers and because they know you'll watch the show in order, there's way less shit they can get away with.
Another benefit is less shitty pricing models, none of this first year pricing after which it goes up 50% that Comcast loves to do, and no year-long contracts.
yes!, and am I glad about it, we have more paced stories
Streaming is only convenient when products aren't siloed. If I need to keep track of more than n services (different n for different people), piracy just becomes the more convenient option.
I'd like to pay the hard working people that produce shows I really like. The middleman is just making it really difficult to do.
It costs a certain amount of money to make these programs, if everyone is paying 50% less to get channels/services 'a la carte', then there's not enough money to make all those shows anymore.
How do you know 50% of this money isn't going to executives,shareholders, and bloated corporate hierarchy...and the actual budget for the shows is the same no matter the pricing.
Streaming services charge way way less than cable with much better content.
But now that you have a more complete picture of the lifetime value of a show you know which top 50% (or top XX%) of shows to keep producing in which to cancel.
I am trying to understand what you mean by this. Why cannot the shows you all watch overlap? Pretty much every streaming service allows for sharing accounts by allowing multiple user profiles.
Across me and my group of friends, we have all major streaming services, with one person paying for one, another person paying for another, etc. Each one of us has their own personal profile on each of them, so when I watch something, it gets added only to my own profile without messing with my friends' profiles.
All of us have our own preferences, but a lot of popular shows we watch obviously overlap, and I don't see what issue that could cause. We just use our own profiles and have had zero issues with treating those as our personal ones.
My parents overlapped on some shows, but could have highly different tastes. I'm 6 years older than my sister and 11 older than my brother. We had a little bit of overlap, but not a lot simply because of maturity differences. If you are looking at the same amount of money, streaming would have seemed better simply because of less actual crap, more convenience, and increased satisfaction.
And no, we were not isolated at all. Public school and everything, though the city sizes changed. We were never that far from a somewhat bigger city, though.
Here, you can pick and choose much better, and even if you have shows you want on every single service, you can very easily rotate with on-demand.
Though lately after recently canceling Netflix we haven't subbed to another service. We are planning to do HBO next but haven't felt the need yet.
And that's not even getting into sports.
Also YouTube TV has local channels and sports I believe. But that's 50$/mo
Your local news coverage is probably already streamed on the web for free already but if it's not, they definitely stream it over the air.
All you need is to buy a 15$ antenna and you should be able to receive local news in HD to your TV.
I bought one specifically for that. I see this as just as important as having a battery radio for emergencies. We never know whether the internet will be up, but the antenna will certainly mostly always works as long as I can power my TV (and I'm equip for it).