Executives at streaming services are having a change of heart about commercials | Hacker News Reader

Executives at streaming services are having a change of heart about commercials

nytimes.com

7 pointshoppyhoppy210 comments

Public companies have shareholder pressure to never let revenue plateau. You won’t be CEO for long if you aren’t driving revenue growth. However there are only so many people in the world who will pay for something like Netflix. Netflix is looking for ways to keep the good times rolling, but it only has so many levers to pull to increase revenue:

1. Increase subscribers

2. Increase the monthly sub price

3. Clamp down on password sharing

4. Find a new revenue stream—games or new tiers of service

5. Ads

Netflix is actively pursing 3 and 4 so 5 is the next lever to pull to keep the good times rolling.

Money > customer satisfaction. Wasn’t cable supposed to replace ads with a subscription fee? Then cable channels did this. Aren’t car makers are trying to make options a subscription service? There is a price point that makes the most $$ balancing customer gain vs. loss. But it’s based more on customer pain tolerance than joy.

Shocking how I’m going back to my childhood Limewire days and torrenting everything now after I’ve been burned by streaming services and offline downloads. Here are my attempts…

1) Apple TV - Some weird DRM issue prevented playback of a movie that couldn’t be resolved due to being on a plane.

2) Hulu - “Downloaded movie not available in this country”

3) Apple TV - I tested playback of a rented movie (because of 1) but this started a timer and I lost access to the movie before my flight

4) Prime TV - Downloaded a couple movies to my phone so that I could AirPlay to my laptop on the plane, but Amazon has disabled AirPlay.

I’m done always second guessing if the “right” way of doing things is going to work. I just want media files on my laptop now.

You wouldn't know it from these comments but the change of heart is related to introducing ad-supported subscription tiers (eg, free-with-ads).

There is, however, this lovely bit:

> Andrew Essex, a longtime advertising executive who now runs the consulting firm GoingConcern, said that the “streaming industry is maturing, becoming much more realpolitik, where they’re saying to hell with the user experience — we need revenue, we will explore additional forms of monetization. It’s basically game on.”

And that quote is exactly why there should not be an endless push to turn corporations into financial "growth" machines.

When you solve a problem, you stop. Scale your solution, but stop. Otherwise it's just psychopaths playing out power fantasies.

http://archive.today/7BTfH

When Netflix starts showing commercials, that will be the trigger to finally make me cancel it.

Aren’t they already showing commercials? Just for their own shows?

The "golden age" of legal streaming media certainly didn't last very long...

The reality is that American/capitalist enterprises are in a sprint desiring infinite growth. They will do whatever it takes to increase the bottom line, whether it means screwing over customers, or in some cases, misrepresenting and distorting number. Their God is the shareholder. That’s who their loyalty is for - not the customer.

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