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This is true and it is annoying, but there is an upside. When a streaming service starts to suck, it is super easy to cancel just that one service. Consumers finally have some pushback on the programming.

Cable ate itself when most channels realized that reality programming is astoundingly cheap to produce and it made no difference on their income. If you are subscribed to the Sci-Fi streaming service and it switches to pro wrestling content, you just cancel the service.

The anticipation on the executives part is probably something like a total squeeze on consumers, where they have no other option but to pay for these services to be in the know with the times or whatever (like how Squid Game memes have popped up everywhere overnight).

The reality on the consumer end is that people are paying less money over all. Me personally I pay for like one service and have the logins from like six family and friends. I don't even know who is paying for the underlying account, someone's mother down the line I'm sure. I'm not alone with this either. As more services pop up, people become less likely to want to have yet another individual subscription, and its very common to hear about people sharing account info among friends and family.

However it's gotten to the point of annoyance where even I will just resort to piracy half the time, with access to every streaming service at my fingertips, because there are still some movies that for whatever reason are rented digitally for something like $4 for 72 hours as if we've stepped back in time and reverted to the brick and mortar blockbuster business model for the information age vs offering a sane alternative.

It really blows my mind how merciful the RIAA has been on the otherhand allowing Spotify and Apple Music to have such a vast and unsplintered catalog.

Hulu, for Showtime and HBO pre-HBO-Max, had the best approach I've seen to bundling. Amazon offered the same stuff - and more add-ons, even - but their UI is godawful, while Hulu's has improved a lot since it's crazy redesign.

Disney doesn't seem interested in keeping a one-stop-shop, though. There's weird crosstalk where I can see NHL games from my ESPN+ subsciption on Hulu, apparently, now, but not Disney's own Disney+ stuff? And the HBO deal seems unlikely to live forever with HBO Max being its own thing now, with its own separate set of content.

> The predicted fracture has started

They'll eat themselves then. We're being nickeled and dimed to death with all the streaming services and the kids at least are not going to pay: they'll share accounts. And when that stops working they'll just go somewhere else where the content is free.

The predicted fracture and uptick in downloading. I subscribe to several services, yet I still download copies to watch in Plex because it's so much easier. Some of the streaming apps (HBO Max, looking at you) are horrible. I don't feel bad shifting my usage to a working app.

> The predicted fracture has started, with different networks starting their own streaming services.

I do not understand why anyone would have expected any different. Is that not the beauty of the internet? That you can consume the content from anyone, regardless of the owner of the wire coming into your house? (which should not be a private entity in the first place, but that is a different topic)

I think people clearly want something like a Spotify or YouTube music, but for video content. You can host videos all you want on the internet, but YouTube and Spotify are popular because of it's aggregation and suggestions.

I want to watch shows that I'd like, I don't care who makes them. Finding good stuff to watch is harder than watching it, and people would clearly pay for a unified service that recommended you (and enabled 1 click viewing) of content regardless of license holder.

You can clearly see why content owners wouldn't want to do it, you lose the "stickiness" of your product, and have to compete with other shows for eyes, without the friction of "exit the app, open another app, find what you manually have discovered".

There's probably a 9 figure startup idea in there if you can figure out how to do it without getting sued.

Your last two lines here co-explain each other. You will get sued, bceause content owners like their "sticky" to remain "sticky".

I think that the hope was that you could pick a single service, pay them, and access anything.

When stated that baldly, it's fairly clear that this was never going to happen. Nevertheless, I think many of us would have preferred if, for example, content creators [0] did not all have their own streaming service, and cross-licensed to different streaming services, meaning that stuff wasn't available on only 1 such service.

[0] of course, in reality, no content creators have their own streaming service. They strike up deals with production companies, who strike up deals with distribution companies, some of whom have a streaming service, and those that don't strike deals with streaming services.

Personally I stick to netflix and pirate other content.

Selfish. Pay for what you're watching or find something else to do.

Agreed. I always find this argument from people really odd.

"They don't sell what I want in the form that I want therefore it's OK for me to steal what I want in the form I want"

Would they apply to same logic to Costco for instance? "Costco only sells the widget I want in 10 packs so that gives me the (moral) license to steal one widget from the producer"

Theft deprives the seller of the object, causing direct financial losses. With piracy, there's no difference between someone who doesn't consume the media and someone who pirates.

If consuming media without paying the copyright holder is morally wrong, then so is second hand purchasing and selling, as well as rentals. Indeed, copyright industries have a long and storied history of trying to shut down rental chains, to some success in Japan.

Just because you paid someone some money to view a TV series, doesn't mean you paid the people who funded production.

> With piracy, there's no difference between someone who doesn't consume the media and someone who pirates.

This assumes everyone who pirates media would not have paid for the media if piracy was not an option. If piracy was truly impossible or was highly enforced with strict penalties, do you think everyone who pirates media would just stop consuming that media?

I know of people who pirate every minute of content they watch on TV and pirate nearly every second of music they listen to. Do you think they would just cease watching TV shows and movies and cease listening to music? Or would they start purchasing access to some?

There's obviously some percentage of piracy that happens because content is truly unavailable in a way for the consumer to reasonably consume (region blocks, licensing deals, etc) or because the content is just astronomically priced out of their reach ($10/mo for someone who makes $100/mo income, $1,000 software packages for students) that would not have purchased it. I fully agree there would be some percentage of people who truly would never buy the media regardless of the ability to pirate. But I think if piracy was truly impossible or had almost assured steep penalties there would be some amount more sales.

No, but I would go and buy that from Amazon. Because Amazon is practical. Like pirating.

How does not paying for something you weren't going to pay for anyway harm anyone? If it was a physical good, sure. But a zero marginal cost good? nah that's not selfish at all.

I'd add that I watch it, and then I talk about it, making more people want to watch it.

I think if the copyright on the work is older than 25 years, its immoral to extract rent on it. As much as a lot of Netflix's stuff isn't that great, at least they're making new content to talk about. Disney doesn't really deserve any more money for A New Hope.

I think this is a reasonable point. There is no cogent argument that society benefits from Disney having a 100+ year copyright term.

Hey, I got some boots that need licking too...

Na, I want to watch what my friends are watching without paying for 6 different streaming services. Do you have a problem with that?

I pay for Netflix and pirate what is available on Netflix, because my local video player has much better hardware acceleration than web browsers, is more efficient and as a byproduct gives me better video quality.

The most insane part of streaming is all services are capped at 720p on desktop. This is the biggest thing everyone should be yelling at lol. To watch anything on desktop I have to pirate it just to have watchable quality

Occasionally do this because I don't want to give Disney and Amazon another cent. Sometimes you can pay content creators directly, but not always.

But you still want to consume the media that Disney and Amazon makes (and at the end of the day, is hiring artists, writers, and animators), so you see some value in it.

Kind of muddies this righteous stance you're pretending to take.

> Kind of muddies this righteous stance you're pretending to take.

You're projecting.

> But you still want to consume the media that Disney and Amazon makes

Barely. I'd never pay for it, except as stand-alone content.

Have you tried Peacock’s UI yet?

Is that Paramount+ now? I have the service, but I don't think I've actually watched anything on it yet. My wife wanted Showtime for Dexter and was interested in things on Paramount+, too. She's used them, but she isn't as picky about UIs as I am, but I haven't heard any complaints.

What services are you using that have no commercials? I would definitely consider Netflix auto-playing content by default a type of commercial.

I must have touched a nerve among the Netflix base

First, I don't consider auto-playing content a commercial, and I don't consider the promoted content to be a commercial, either. (It's an advertisement, but not a commercial.) To me, a commercial is something that advertises something I'm not watching and prevents me from watching what I want to. A non-skippable trailer for a movie is a commercial, for instance.

So I don't consider Netflix to have commercials... And I'm pretty sure I turned that autoplay crap off in every instance that I could anyhow.

We've also got Disney, Showtime, Paramount+, HBO Max, and ... I feel like there's another. I haven't seen commercials on any of them, though I understand that some of them have forced commercials for certain shows on them, which I think is total BS. The live TV streams on them still have commercials, also, which I don't watch, ever. When available, I chose the subscriptions that eliminated commercials.

> To me, a commercial is something that advertises something I'm not watching and prevents me from watching what I want to. A non-skippable trailer for a movie is a commercial, for instance.

Autoplaying content is the advertising of something you were not watching (if you wanted to watch something you would have selected it) and prevents you from watching what you wanted to (again, you wanted to watch nothing, otherwise you would have selected something).