Are we going back to the cable days? | Hacker News Reader

Are we going back to the cable days?

thehustle.co

122 pointsthund373 comments

"Starting to reveal"? The first time Netflix had to remove content from their catalogue because a competing streaming service was getting set up by the license holders, this was both the inevitable and immediately obvious conclusion.

There was a brief utopian moment in time where you could just watch what you wanted, when you wanted, the way you wanted, `from a single service, and then reality kicked back in. In the same way the internet was a weird and free place and then reality went "actually, no, we can make more money if we make it a terrible place and charge you a fee to temporarily make it slightly less terrible for you".

It's not that simple. Providers simply can't go back to the old days. They will push consumers to their limit, but I just don't think people are interested in paying $150/mo for scheduled programming with ads any more.

In the end it will likely be a compromise. But it's a good time to vote with our wallets.

I never said it was sustainable, but the chain of events definitely is that simple. Netflix ran into the fact that it offered literally too good a deal for others to not cash in on by making the ecosystem worse so that they can charge people to make it convenient again instead. The fundamental principle behind making money is having something that people want, and then making sure it's inaccessible to them unless they pay you for it.

The "making things terrible" comes from content companies going "we have a licensing system in place, we've used it for cable providers for decades, and we even used it for streaming services, but now we're going to cancel that and start our own vertically integrated lock-in service because we'll make way more money that way". While it makes sense, and everyone could have, and very much did, see it coming, it's still the kind of move that historically would have gotten your company broken up. But that's a power modern government seems to no longer want to wield anymore, despite our wishes they did.

As long as barriers to entry to hosting content and releasing streaming apps remain low, this all seems fine. Where is the potential to abuse the vertical integration?

Even if Disney owned Akamai or something, there's decent competition in CDNs.

Piracy is still better and cheaper.

Piracy has always been better and cheaper, but it (thankfully) isn't how the vast majority of people consume content.

Piracy isn't all about price though. It's about convenience too. And it's not actually free. You're not paying the rights holder but pirating these days requires a lot of storage, a VPN perhaps a pay site or Usenet subscription.

But also all the time to set up a media server etc. Connecting it to the TV (and all the tablets and phones) in a way the wife and kids can also grok. They don't want to search for Westworld_S04E01_H264_1080p_BLAHBLA.mkv in a long list. Oops no that's the one with the audio glitch, you need to find the PROPER instead. But why are the voices so quiet compared to the sound effects? Must be a Dolby Atmos downmixing problem. This stuff can really ruin the mood after a long work day.

When you come home you just want to click on the man with the hat and not have to worry about issues. So you'll need time to review the downloads, categorise content or pay for Plex and a beefy server for the transcoding etc. Fix it when it's down. Keep it all updated. It's not very convenient.

Netflix really beat that out with just click & play for a decent price. It was a good deal even being more expensive than piracy because it saved so much hassle. Most people have a life and more money than time to spare now.

But the insane fragmentation is now screwing this up. Soon it may be more convenient for the masses to pirate again. Who wants to juggle 10 different subscriptions and player apps on all their devices, each with their own UI peculiarities? Having to deal with all the ads? But what show is on which service now?? Oh Prime Video has the movie I want to watch but it's only the Spanish dubbed version??? The industry has to do a very bad job to make piracy interesting again but they are well on their way.

I'd pay €50 a month (which is a lot here in Spain) for a service that carries everything. If I watch all of Westworld this week they can send a big chunk of that HBO's way. If I watch for all mankind the next they can pay Apple. This is what Spotify etc do. Why does it have to be so difficult with video :(

Early in 2012-2014 I worked for a SaaS paywall provider that offered what we called a National Model. You would pay once and get access to all major newspapers in the country. The fee you paid was divided into provider fee/a reward for the newspaper you bought your subscription at/time spent reward divided by user behaviour.

The company has a successful business selling single instance paywalls. Why? You're in essence asking competitors to cooperate. One of them has higher costs and needs to raise the price? All the others need to agree on it. There's all kinds of complexities in this kind of system.

> I just don't think people are interested in paying $150/mo for scheduled programming with ads any more.

They were never interested in that, it's all that was available. "Pay TV" started off with no ads. Eventually, it will be all that is available again.

You'll always be surprised at what peoples' limits are when you push them slowly enough.

I don't know, where I grew up in the Midwest in the 90s there were many different cable packages and people always prided themselves on having the all inclusive package even if it was not that financially prudent. But maybe that was not the norm.

I never paid that kind of money. At least in my circles nobody ever had extravagant cable packages. Just the basic and perhaps one special interest package like sports.

Problems for Netflix started when they started competing against other content providers with their own original content. If they didn't produce their own content and just provided a distribution platform for others I think we would still have everything on Netflix

Is that how it happened? My memory is more: Content started disappearing so Netflix started producing original content as a safety net.

I wish it could be that way, but the content providers started to jack up their prices and withhold certain content a long time before Netflix started their own content factory. Hulu, owned by one of the largest content providers out there, was the turning point. In retrospect it might have been a good time for government to step in and declare that content providers and streaming services must be separate for the good of consumers.

Interestingly, the same thing almost happened with Spotify, but most artists eventually came back instead of defecting to other services. I know there are some exclusive artists on each platform, but we've somehow dodged that same bullet with music streaming. Maybe because there are 3-4 relatively popular services, and artists have a little more sway over their distribution? Of course, Spotify is currently commiting this same sin in the podcast space so it's not like their hands are clean.

This is a huge point that I bet there will be many business case studies around: why didn't what happened to Netflix happen to Spotify?

I thought Tidal was going to be that. Remember their first promo video [0]? Full of A listers pretty much declaring that they're making an artist collective? It had every reason to occur...except it didn't. Why?

[0] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cYYGdcLbFkw

Was it not that Spotify let record companies in on ownership, making it a joint venture of sorts?

Reason #1: if your work is still available on a cheaper, bigger platform, people are not likely to switch to the the more expensive, smaller platform.

If your old work is still available on the cheaper+bigger platform, but the new work is only on the more expensive+smaller platform, maybe the true fans will switch, but A-listers don't make money just from the true fans.

It is my understanding - and correct me if I'm wrong - that a-listers have the leverage to move their entire catalogue over if they wish.

Could they have, en masse, done this over to Tidal? Would that have broke Spotify?

Spotify is not exactly a shining beacon on the hill for a successful company. They aren’t profitable and they are total beholden to the record labels. They are forced to give 70% of their revenue to record labels. Their fixed cost go up in lockstep with their revenue - not exactly the model of a successful tech company.

Netflix paid a fixed amount to license content and then could spread that cost as it gained customers. It’s the same with their own content. They never have to pay the content producers again for the content they fund.

...until Netflix's licensing agreements expire, which they do regularly. Then the networks demand twice as much money and they have to either keep growing to outpace the cost of licensing or jack up subscription fees, or both.

Or they “become HBO before HBO becomes them”. That was the entire reason for them doing their own content.

I would argue they are in a much more stable position vs Netflix. They are the one stop shop for every kind of audio. Retention will be the true barometer here.

How is a company that is not profitable and will never make more than a 30% gross margin on a customer in a more stable position?

They are also suffering from the “DropBox problem”. Streaming music is not a product. It’s a feature. Their largest competitors don’t have to make money on streaming music. Streaming music for Apple and Amazon are just features to sell hardware.

Is this were the case, why is Amazon's and Apple's pricing the same as Spotify's?

Spotify isn’t profitable. Apple and Amazon don’t need for their streaming products to be profitable as stand a line services.

Just like Microsoft doesn’t need for OneDrive to be profitable by itself - hence the “Dropbox problem”.

https://www.inc.com/will-yakowicz/why-dropbox-founders-said-...

Do you think AppleTV+ is profitable as $7.99 stand alone service?

Doubtful. The studios were always going up launch their own competing service and not license their content to Netflix. HBO plainly refused to even entertain that conversation and then the race was on - could Netflix become HBO faster than HBO could become Netflix.

Nope. That's the fast lane to getting ground down by content owners; they'll determine how much profit you're allowed to make. See also: Pandora, Spotify.

There was never a time that Netflix streaming had a majority of the popular movies available.

It didn't need to, we were still happy enough to go the cinema for box office releases back then. Remember that streaming, despite how it might feel, is a stupidly recent thing. Disney went "let's get in on this cash cow" less than 5 years ago.

Netflix started streaming in 2007. It came to mobile in 2010 with the introduction of the iPad. Hulu was also launched in 2007.

Netflix streaming was unexceptional. I dropped it when it became an extra cost option and didn’t pick back up again until House of Cards. Sadly their DVD service has decayed considerably.

I agree with the point of your post, however I question whether streaming's utopian moment even actually happened. I was a very early adopter of Netflix streaming and their catalog was quite poor for a long time. Just tons of cheap no name filler content, old public domain type stuff, and a surprising amount of softcore pornography. There were high profile movies and shows sometimes too, but they were the exception and even back then they would get removed regularly. Today's streaming landscape, greedy as it may be, at least offers the ability to stream premium content that Netflix never would have had even in their days of solo dominance. Perhaps the streaming golden age is closer to something that could have been, rather than something that actually was.

Perhaps people are remembering DVD rental Netflix. It was slightly less convenient but had literally everything.

Netflix streaming had literally everything for a time. Now it's literally all Netflix productions.

No thanks.

> Netflix streaming had literally everything for a time.

No that's not true - it was never even remotely as extensive as their DVD catalogue, which was almost literally every commercially available DVD. I wouldn't be surprised if the majority of films have never been available on any streaming service. Streaming rights entirely different to them buying some DVDs.

You can operate a rental service for physical media with zero licensing required. The cost to Netflix to rent out a niche DVD only five people care about is the cost of buying one copy of the DVD and shipping it out to five people. The cost of a streaming license could be hundreds of thousands of dollars, minimum, no matter how niche the work.

For us it was. There was a ten-year period when we had young kids and didn't do anything. Once that was over we caught up with tons of movies we hadn't seen, on Netflix.

Maybe they've never had newer releases, but for seeing nearly everything from 4-10 years ago at one point was very much possible.

> For us it was.

This just isn't a truthful statement.

Netflix's DVD catalogue was like 100,000 titles. They've never had 100,000 titles on their streaming site. There aren't 100,000 streaming titles anywhere today across all streaming services!

"At its peak, in fact, the number of DVD titles possessed by Netflix would have dwarfed the entire streaming libraries of all the major streamers today … combined."

https://www.pastemagazine.com/movies/netflix/netflix-dvd-ser...

The reason is that the rights are different.

https://www.quora.com/Why-does-Netflix-still-have-much-of-it...

You're right. I'm lying. I didn't watch any movies. I just have ESP or something.

It’s pretty hard to judge catalogue sizes from scrolling, so I don’t know how you’d know from just using the services?

That article I linked gives actual data. Do you think it’s wrong?

I still use Netflix's DVD service, despite it being a pale pale shadow of its former glory. It makes me sad when I browse their catalog and either fail to find a movie, or find that's its only available in DVD. I find at least 25% of the movies I search for unavailable in Blu-Ray format, and I get furious. Blu-Ray has been out since 2006 and watching a DVD today is like looking at 640x480 jpegs.

There was a period when they had a content deal with Starz that their catalog was pretty beefy. They also had a lot of Disney's stuff for a long time.

They were on the way to free over the air free HDTV till the cable companies started trying to kill it.

To me it is messed up the commercial/programming/cost ratio if you look at providers like youtube and Hulu. We are all getting less for more money.

And all this streaming just fragmented society even more. I remember when we all used to (locally) talk about the recent show that we all watched at the same time, or the same news program. Now you have to catch up to all your friends because they streamed a whole series in one night. I mean we should just call them extended length movies anyway.

Streaming shows can drop weekly. HBO and Apple do it. Arguably it would help keep people from hopping around services.

I'm ok with content being spread across competing services. If Netflix was the only game in town (like it pretty much was for a while) we'd see less content.

I don't find the pricing of any existing service objectionable. I can pay about $15 and watch whatever I want in their catalog for a month, then cancel if I decide to try a different service. It'd be different if I were stuck in some long contract but I've yet to see that in the streaming market.

Agreed. Just subscribe for a time to watch what you consider their AAA content and then move on to next service. Suits the binge series watching habit.

You can sign up with trials that require a CC and utilize something like privacy.com to create hard limit virtual cards so you aren't chasing services around to determine when it'll pull from the card and the unavoidable PITA it is to cancel said services.

They're planning on clamping down on users like you. One of their next moves will be getting rid of the binge model and returning to trickling out episodes over months.

They're going to try to stop me from resubscribing? I'm small time but I'll still say it: their loss.

The likely first step will be heavy discounts for paying annually rather than monthly.

Frankly, I doubt it. There's no way they want to give "heavy discounts" for anything. They want to get the maximum they possibly can, period.

At most, you might get a discount equivalent to about a dollar a month. Whooo, I save $12 by committing for a full year.

Heavy discounts can be reworded as sharp increases to monthly.

A couple months ago, prior to the latest season of Better Call Saul, I signed up for AMC+ to catch up on old episodes. I was very surprised to see _none_ were available to watch. Furthermore, there’s a banner warning now at the stop stating the latest season (now over) is only available until August 30th.

I’m not sure what happens after that, but the assumption that all released episodes will always be available is no longer true.

"I can pay $15 a month" is literally ignore the article we're commenting on. Can you pay $100 a month for TV? Because many households can't. Streaming briefly made it affordable for them, and then everyone went "actually, no, instead of paying service X, who pays us a license fee, you get to pay service X without our content, and then the same amount on top for our own service Y". Repeat some ten times, and we're right back to "guess I'll just pirate everything, because I can afford internet, but not internet plus another $100 for all the streaming services because the five shows I like are all on different platforms".

> Repeat some ten times, and we're right back to "guess I'll just pirate everything, because I can afford internet, but not internet plus another $100 for all the streaming services because the five shows I like are all on different platforms".

... or you wait to watch a show when you subscribe to the platform it is on. I just don't buy the argument that we must have access to everything at every moment from a single provider.

It's not a given that a show will ever end up on the platform you already subscribe to. And this seems to be increasingly more likely with the ongoing emphasis on exclusivity as a way to lock in users.

The obvious alternative is for the platforms to charge for actual use, and then they'll get paid for the fair share of my attention that they manage to attract. But their pricing kind of implies that they expect most people to only have one subscription.

This is why everyone should pirate.

People on here love to complain about Facebook hating their users.

I don't see any companies that despise their users quite like Comcast and At&t and Disney.

> I don't see any companies that despise their users quite like <snip> Disney.

I don’t get this take. Disney spends billions of dollars to make movies and TV shows that I and my family want to watch. I pay them $8/mo, and I get to watch all of them, whenever I want.

How is that a bad thing?

After an update, my tv got unavoidable disney ads on its home page. I had to downgrade it and disable updates. And I dont even have Disney app is installed. I consider them to be pretty evil

Sounds like you made the mistake of enabling your TV to gain access to a network. There's dozens of articles that spell out why that's a horrible idea, your experience is one of those reasons.

Never allow a television access to your network, you get a dedicated device to do the streaming/airplay/chromecast features and that's it.

The fact that connecting your TV to the network is a mistake is just more proof of current dystopian trends.

You're not wrong but that's the world we find ourselves in. No idea why my comment got down voted considering anyone in the tech industry knows that TVs don't belong on networks.

Oh boy, where to start? Screwing up copyright and preventing things from going public domain when they were supposed to for generations? Suing little girls over their fan websites?

Or back in the 80s to early 90s, pricing their movies' VHS tapes at $89.95 (about $234 adjusted for inflation) while also refusing to ever allow the movies to be shown on TV (because people might record them), thus ensuring that poor kids missed out on all the Disney classics?

Admittedly, that last one is not a really strong argument - a company should be free to price stuff however they want. However, if you were one of the kids that couldn't afford Disney movies, it left a lasting impression.

Maybe their streaming service is ok, but the company that owns it has a well-deserved reputation for being evil.

I'm starting to think the NFL really hates their viewers. It's quite expensive and challenging to watch every game a single NFL team plays in a season.

The local games are all broadcast over the air, even the ones that are shown on the pay services. (I live in Philadelphia, and I watch all the Eagles games with a TV and an antenna.) However, if you're a fan of an out-of-market team, it may be a pain to see all their games, as you say.

> it may be a pain to pay to see all their games

FTFY. It's never been easier.

Strange thing though that the music industry managed to do fine without resorting to this. Dr Dre is not exclusive to Apple music.

So why does it have to be this way with video?

The music industry sells music by the minute, not by the hour. If you could only buy entire albums, the music industry would have guaranteed moved in this direction too.

They totally managed it in the video rental days though. There were no exclusives then, at least not where I lived.

First, those streaming services are ad-free. Cable is not. Second, those streaming services cover what would be considered "premium" content on cable, so that price comparison is grossly misleading. They're comparing subscribing to all of those services to what likely amounts to "basic" cable.

The great thing about those streaming services is you can pick and choose. I used to subscribe to more services than I do now, and there's so much content on each of them that I found myself neglecting about half the services I subscribed to. So I dropped it down to what I actually use. You can't do that with cable. I spend far less with my ad-free streaming content than I would if I purchased ad-filled cable content.

And when I say ad-filled, so much of it is every 5 minutes or so you get about 5 or so minutes of ads. For how much you pay for the service, that is completely unacceptable.

So, no, I will not be spending MORE on cable in order to be served ads constantly. I'm doing fine on my small collection of ad-free streaming services.

Excellent reply!

Many were frustrated for so long with paying for alllll of the cable channels so we could watch < 10. All I ever wanted was to pay a flat fee per month for each channel. Well, now we live in a world where that's possible and it's great!

Being able to subscribe to one service for a month or two, catch up on a favorite program, then cancel paying for it when that's done is an unimaginable convenience. Some make it unnecessarily difficult to do that, but it seems like those are the services with less interesting content anyway.

Anyway, I think where we're at with this is fantastic. Likely we'll see some consolidation in the market where less successful services disappear and other services suck up the shows left behind. If that pendulum swings too far it'd be unfortunate, but where we are right now seems to be a sweet spot.

Exactly. Also, who actually subscribes to everything in that list in the article? Maybe 3 of them with the freedom to jump around. Definitely an improvement over cable.

When I dropped it my basic cable TV was more than $100/month. Now I pay something under $50 (depending on how you count Prime and my Apple One bundle) for what's probably frankly more streaming options than I need. I don't have any live TV though I could always add a service if I wanted to and I still wouldn't be more than my cable bundle was.

>First, those streaming services are ad-free. Cable is not.

like that will never change. Also in the case of Disney at least, and maybe HBOMax, the existence of the service itself is one giant platform for the media of the studio.

furthermore, where the studio based platform is concerned, it used to be when you bought product placement in a movie you were thinking not about how it would do after theatrical release, but in the case of product placement in the large studio associated movies, especially the ones Disney own of shared universes, I think that should be a real consideration and also in the coming years a selling point.

So you really think HBO is not going to offer an ad free version even though they have had an ad free offering since 1980?

are you under the impression that HBOMax is exactly the same thing as HBO?

I am well aware of the fact that HBO Max is the only way that you can pay for standalone HBO content. Again do you think that after 42 years that HBO will not allow you to pay for ad free content? Has there ever been a premium channel that was ad free that went ad only?

No basic cable was never ad free.

> Again do you think that after 42 years that HBO will not allow you to pay for ad free content?

maybe, although I'm thinking more that WarnerMedia might have a say in it as HBOMax is a combination of HBO and Warner Bros, and at some point I might expect numbers cruncher at WarnerMedia come up with argument.

How I expect ads to arrive (streaming media industry wide, not in any particular order) -

1. Maybe changes to how product placement work - extra edits for placing in products. Think of it as an impromptu streaming "Director's cut" for putting in a few cute but nonessential scenes with product placement in them.

2. Some special trailers, for example Coming attraction hero trailer at top of page autoplays like Netflix autoplays, maybe can't turn off but ok, it lasts for 5 seconds at first, slowly gets pushed up to 10.

3. Netflix is already rolling out an ad supported tier next year for its original movies, will lose some people but I suppose it will work out in the end and the industry will follow with however they do the ads because every company will say see how much money Netflix made!

I mean my theory is that companies have no morals and capitalism means always having to find new ways to increase profits and the future is uncertain but there are trends pointing to companies obviously wanting to add Advertising layers in streaming services. So basically the pessimistic view when applied to "Will streaming services start pushing advertising?"

Your theory seems to be just that HBO wouldn't do that - because they didn't in another industry (Cable).

HBO is definitely going to have an optional ad tier.

And BTW, I didn’t even realize how old HBO was. It came online as a premium channel in 1972.

HBO has been owned by Warner since the merger between Warner and TimeLife decades ago.

>HBO is definitely going to have an optional ad tier

ok well then it seems we're in agreement, no one will have an obligatory ad experience they will just have different levels of allowing you to pay to opt out.

I don't disagree with your overall point, but calling cable ad-filled compared to streamers like Netflix, Disney+, and HBO Max is a little unfair because you are comparing live TV with on demand TV. As long as you aren't watching live content, which you can't even do with most streamers, it is pretty easy to avoid ads with cable since DVRs have been an option for decades. If you are watching live content like with streamers like Hulu or YoutubeTV, you will see just as many ads streaming as you do with cable.

YoutubeTV is cable, not a streamer.

What is your definition for "cable" and "streamer"?

cable is a collection of tv channels. Streaming is a collection of on demand content.

That’s what it means for you.

In many contracts it refers to the medium of transmission. Cable requires a coax cable. Streaming comes over the top on an internet connection (which ironically might be provided via a coax cable).

I, for example, get my live TV as a bundle of channels from DirecTV stream. It’s called “stream”. It requires no cable box, is a mix of live and on demand, and I can receive it anywhere over the internet (phone, home, work, etc). I’d never consider this cable. I’d also never consider satellite delivered TV cable, even if they are very similar.

I think the nuances are a little more subtle than you are admitting.

What is a TV channel? Several streamers align their content into different verticals. When I log into Disney+, the first thing I see is a selector for Disney, Pixar, Marvel, Star Wars, and National Geographic. Are those channels?

What is a "collection" of TV channels? ESPN+ allows me to watch what is currently airing on ESPN, ESPN2, etc. Their content is primarily live rather than on demand, but they only offer a very limited scope of content that all falls under the same category and only originates from the same family of channels. Are they actually cable?

Don't basically all cable companies offer some form of on demand content? Are they all streamers too?

Honestly, I don't care about the answers to these questions. They are rhetorical to show that it is hard to draw nice clean lines around these which is part of my original point that ads isn't what defines cable. Ads come with live content, not with the distribution channel for that content.

You’re not “avoiding ads” by manually having to skip over them.

Cable also paid for infrastructure costs. Streaming piggy backs off internet infrastructure.

Further, every streaming business is deep in the red and are being supported by other parts of the business. If they have to carry their weight they will show you ads and increase prices.

Netflix is very much profitable and has been for years. Well they did just stop borrowing money to produce and acquire content in 2020.

Disney expects Disney+ to be profitable including “transfer payments” by 2024.

Streaming doesn’t piggyback off of getting access to the internet cheaply no matter what cable providers say. They pay for their bandwidth.

> First, those streaming services are ad-free. Cable is not.

https://www.nytimes.com/1981/07/26/arts/will-cable-tv-be-inv...

Those streaming services will eventually be premium + ads. Quarterly earnings DEMAND it.

This has already started. Hulu has a base plan with ads. Netflix will follow suit. Before too long it probably won't be possible to get an ad-free plan.

Hulu has always been ad supported. There free tier is obvious, but even their paid tiers still have ads even if it may be fewer interruptions than the free tier.

The way I read it, makes it sound like you're suggesting it was ad free at some point then switched.

There was at one point 3 shows that had ads at the beginning and end because of previous contract negotiations.

What incentive will they have to make ad free not an option? When they can just charge any amount extra for the premium ad free version?

Cable + DVR is more or less ad-free.

Oh, but they're trying soooo hard to overcome that. For example, on HGTV, they intersperse "Sneak Peak" ads for other shows on the network. They always follow a commercial break, but my TiVo's ad skip button usually skips over the 3rd party ads and puts me at the beginning of the "Sneak Peak". It's so fucking irritating. Now I have to manually fast-forward through it.

Then during the shows, literally, for the entire program, not just for a minute here or there, there's an animated logo for some other show from the same network. And it gets larger every year. First it was about 1/10th of the screen. Then it was like 1/8th. Now it's up to about 1/5th of the screen. In another couple years, it will be bigger than the actual content you're trying to watch. I've taken to logging into their site (via my cable subscription), copying my cookies, then downloading the shows using yt-dlp and putting them on my AppleTV because it's less annoying than trying to watch the shows in the format they were broadcast in.

Cable also started off ad-free.

And netflix is adding advertisements.

I thought that but it turns out that Netflix is culturally/principally anti-advertisement. They’re caving to shareholder demand and introducing a cheaper, ad-supported plan but their regular plans are - at least for now - to remain ad-free.

To a cheaper tier to try to get people away from account sharing. I fully intend to keep the tier that I've purchased.

Exactly. A lot of folks forget that cable was offered as an ad-free alternative to OTA broadcast TV. The selling feature was that since you are paying for a subscription, the platform was monetized and profitable, ergo no need for ads. Sound familiar?

Cable was also started because certain areas had bad reception so they multiplexed the signals together down a single cable to avoid the reception issues.

There's a lot of competeing "cable was started" stories

There aren’t any competing stories. It’s not like the inception of cable is loss to the annals of history. There are just truths and falsehoods.

Basic cable was never ad free.

Well, I was being "friendly". Cable was never started as an ad free thing. Cable was started to get a signal to people that couldn't get a signal. That signal was the same signal as everyone receiving over the air broadcast, so it included all of the ads.

Premium cable channels came later. to quote a post up stream "Sound familiar?"

Premium cable was HBO, Showtime and Cinemax that you paid extra for and were Ad free and still is.

If by basic cable you exclusively mean network television rebroadcasts, then of course that's true, unless they were editing interesting content in on the fly.

But cable channels were ad free, and advertised as being ad free.

"Well, Pay TV is fine to see

You get much better quality:

Broadway shows, heavy-weight fights

First-run movies every night.

Viewers of Denver, unite! . . . Nothing to lose but commercials."

-- Talkin' Pay TV by Phil Ochs, 1963

Basic cable included USA, MTV, CNN, ESPN, etc.

Premium channels like HBO always cost extra and were ad free and still are on cable.

According to most articles I see, for the first 24 years after commercial cable TV was a thing, it was solely used to retransmit broadcast TV.

https://web.archive.org/web/20100905133543/http://www.ncta.c...

I knew this myth was going to be repeated as soon as I saw the parent comment.

Basic cable has never been ad free. Cable started out as a method to get broadcast TV - with ads - to people who couldn’t get it over the air.

Then the “Superstations” came like TBS and WGN. They were local stations - with ads - that got transmitted nationwide.

Then the early cable TV only channels came online like CNN, ESPN, and MTV - with ads.

OTA HDTV is free, but with ads, and you do not have to pay $90 a month for internet on top of it.

Your ad free streaming services cost more than cable if you include the cost of internet.

Your argument would make sense if all I used my internet connection for was consumption of streaming media. Regardless of whether I'm streaming media or not, I'm also going to be working, chatting with friends and colleagues, playing games, buying and selling, browsing the news, etc. My streaming content just also happens to use that same communication channel.

Best thing about streaming subscriptions vs cable IMHO is NO ADS - I find it baffling people spend a hundred bucks a month on cable and still accept like 30% of the airtime is ads…. just no

There are plenty of streaming services that have ads - Hulu and Disney+ have an ad-supported tier, for example, and it's foolish to think that Netflix won't introduce an ad-supported tier as soon as they think their customers won't revolt. It's the most obvious solution to login sharing - give a very cheap or free ad-supported tier and then monetize the hell out of them.

Netflix already has ads - just for their own shows.

Netflix has already widely announced their intention to add a with-ads tier.

> Netflix already has ads - just for their own shows.

I think the industry term for this is "in-house ads," and they've existed for as long as I can remember on premium-cable channels like HBO, Showtime, etc. The experience would be better without them, for sure, but they're less ugsome than the typical programmatic ads you get on Youtube or Hulu.

Or you call them trailers in the movie theater (which also have ads). I don't mind them and they're pretty easy to skip in my experience.

Paramount+ has ads even if you pay for the ad free experience. Really irritating.

I ran into this too, It was a bug in my view because according to the service description ads would "sometimes" show up during live programming. I guess it doesn't say that ads WON'T show up elsewhere, but my assumption was that they wouldn't.

I had signed up in '20 or '21 and I am curious if this is still the same way.

I dropped it, but picked it back up for the Nick programming. Still ads, but only a few, mostly at the beginning. Really irritating, but I hear the ads version is practically unwatchable.

Many streaming subscriptions have ads on their cheapest tiers, requiring you to pay more if you don't want to see ads. And if you're watching anything live, whether it's streaming or cable, you're getting ads regardless.

I paid extra for the ad-free Paramount Plus. I was getting un-skippable pre-roll ads before and during Star Trek Discovery episodes. I contacted support and they said that ads would sometimes show up during live TV. They didn't have an answer for why ads were showing during Discovery. They pre-rolls would sometimes take 5-10 minutes! I could go fix a snack, put in a load of laundry and when I'd come back the pre-rolls would still be playing.

Anyway, other than the programming the service itself was awful and after going through the Star Trek back catalog I cancelled. I may sign up again but after the bad experience, I am not inclined to watch again. I really wouldn't want to watch with ads if they paid me to do it.

For now. Eventually the greed is going to get to the point where ads are mandatory regardless of what package you choose. It's just a slow burn similar to what happened in publishing. First there were ads. Then there were popup ads. It took an entire army of people to get rid of the popups. So they increased the ads, got more sophisticated on placement, and made them far more insidious in terms of privacy violation. Then they added paywalls, but removed the ads. Now they're adding ads to paywalled content because of "added value for our customers" when they aren't also doing sponsored newsletters.

I don't think this is a realistic take. There are a large number of consumers willing to pay for no adds, and fewer barriers to market entry than cable.

Even cable, with its relative monopoly had packages with no adds like HBO.

When cable first started many, many channels had no ads either, and they caved once they realized they could get away with it.

No many channels were not ad free when cable first started. Only channels that were premium,

When cable first started, it was a method to rebroadcast local stations where you couldn’t get a signal over the air. The first basic cable only channels were also ad supported.

I recall hearing about spammers and mailing lists that some advertisers are a special kind of stupid who think "willing to pay not to see ads" means "extra lucrative demographic". Hearsay but it seems consistent with bad advertising practices like "punch the monkey and autoplay banner ads".

If you're attracting eyeballs, and not selling some time in front of those eyeballs to advertisers, then you're leaving a lot of money on the table.

For paying eyeballs is under the assumption that those eyeballs are yours permanently and won't leave. It is that kind of thinking which got cable disrupted hard.

If you're waiting for that golden goose to produce more eggs, instead of cutting it open and taking them all at once, are you also leaving a lot of money on the table?

I am probably more extreme than most, but I simply will not pay you if your offering has ads.

Your publishing analogy is interesting, but I would tweak it, because most of "publishing" online was free and anonymous, not paid, so the analogy to streaming video services isn't a fair one. What _has_ happened, however, is that even paid subscriptions on publishing sites such as the NY Times include ads. That's bullshit, and I really hope streaming video doesn't go that direction.

Do any paid online video services NOT offer an ad-free experience now? To my knowledge they all do. Yes, Netflix has rumblings about starting an ads tier, but the OP is still correct, as far as I know, that the option for ad-free viewing still exists.

This used to be a selling feature of cable. In the not too distant future, all of streaming will have required ads too.

Sure, maybe they all do add ads. I wouldn’t hesitate to cancel everything. I’m happy to pay money for service, but I’m also happy to cut ties with companies that actively disrespect my time.

This creep has already happened. Hulu started free with ads and the paid tier was ad free and had more content. Now the base tier is paid AND has ads. Once the subscriber growth plateaus all the streaming services will look for was to keep revenue increasing. In swoop the advertisers with a big fat stack of cash and an evil smile.

There was never a time that basic cable was ad free.

Best thing about piracy is that not only is there no ads, it's that you don't have to even think which streaming service has the particular show/movie you want. You also get to watch it on any device of your choice, in any player of your choice, completely offline. And you get to take screenshots. And it's free. I simply see no reason to ever pay for movies and tv shows — you pay money AND get a worse experience.

It's one of those weird things where if everyone chose the superior experience it would cease to exist.

That hasn't always been the case, though - for many years, I put away my parrot and eyepatch and rented or bought content because it offered the best experience, even though it cost a little money. Only recently has piracy again become the least unpleasant way to consume content, and it's not because piracy has become any easier.

Only for certain modes of that experience:

there is already far more content than I will ever be able to consume in 50 lifetimes.

My distaste for a lot of contemporary cultural products aside (I'm okay if they never make another episode of Cheers or MASH, but I can see how that would happen if the creators weren't being paid for that), it feels likely to me that if commercial media ceased production I still wouldn't run out of stuff to watch even if I lived longer than I expect.

I am perfectly fine with that outcome as it would mean a reset on how IP is delivered and owned.

When there are convenient options which respect users, piracy goes down. It’s as simple as that.

It's fiddly, though. You need to pay for a VPN (and try to pick one you can trust, which if you're even a bit paranoid is none of them) or your ISP will shut off your service (happened to me), if you require subtitles there's additional hassle & they're not even always available, quality is sometimes an issue and fake or mislabeled torrents exist.

I got tired of screwing around with it and decided 50 cents or less a day per service was worth not having to. As a side bonus, I get exposed to a lot of things I otherwise wouldn't know existed.

Usenet is worth the price. Sure, you can still VPN if you're super paranoid, and sure, things get DMCA'd (slowly and inconsistently), but with the fairly easy OSS automation out there (radarr, et al, and sabnzbd in my case) everything runs very smoothly (and way faster; I can saturate my gigabit connection for nearly anything regardless of popularity).

The funny thing about subtitles is that there are many, many cases where you can find bootlegged subtitles for content that don’t even exist on the paid streaming service that provides that content. The streaming services seem to be getting better about this, especially for new content, but there is still a vast library of content on e.g. HBO in the U.S. that doesn’t even have Spanish subtitles.

We're probably a couple years away from some AI service that actually translates with character's voices. Heck probably even adjust the mouth visual too.

I'll support A.I. that translates those characters' voices with different mouth visuals per language. That would be convenient for people who get distracted by subtitles and characters' mouths not matching words to different languages.

I'm pretty sure I've found bootlegged subtitles that are just machine translations of official subtitles in the original language. And YouTube's speech-to-text automated captioning is actually pretty good with single speakers in English with good audio production, enough so that I often use them to follow along with videos.

Yes. It's enormously frustrating that I can not pay Netflix, Google, Hulu to deliver me content in a language other than English. Google's own support pages seem to indicate that if I did do a locale switch to, say, France, that this was a fiddly process and that I would lose all my purchases if I switched it back.

Physical media on Netflix DVD, however, still work just fine and tend to have English and French and often Spanish.

Also, a much larger catalog that hasn't been diced up by license holders.

I have an IPTorrents account (private tracker) that I have heavily used for over 10 years without any VPN. Haven't gotten a single DMCA.

> You need to pay for a VPN

Not where I live. We instead use VPNs to access websites blocked by the government.

None of this is true with private trackers.

Well, there are plenty of benefits for all kinds of criminal activity, they just share one common drawback.

I liked Pirates of the Caribean I, II and III !

Having to remember to use a VPN? Hardly a drawback.

Well, there are really two drawbacks. Personal risk (which, as you say, can be well-mitigated) and the externality of other people being less well-off. Yes they could choose to make things that aren't copyable instead of things that are, but most jurisdictions have structures telling them that free copying of the thing they're making won't be tolerated.

I was talking from a purely mechanical perspective.

Myself and several friends have several vpns and as we can mostly use up to 5 devices we share the logins, as required.

Pirating is not a criminal activity in my country.

It likely isn't a criminal activity in your country either.

Considering that HN slants heavily in the direction of the US, I'm not sure the latter statement is that accurate.

It's civil, not criminal in the US. Nobody's going to jail for copyright infringement.

You just might get a crippling fine.

Copyright infringement may or may not be criminal. While it may technically be for the operators of the streaming services, it is a civil matter from a user standpoint.

In this case the drawback is the off chance you get a strongly worded letter from your isp you can throw away

But quality varies, subtitles are an issue, and sometimes the movie isn't complete and sometimes it doesn't match the title at all.

I still prefer reasonable paid alternatives

Yes it’s a better experience but so is getting money by robbing someone over working 40 hour weeks. I’m not saying the two are the same because piracy is effectively victimless (at least in the short term).

You're not robbing someone because you're not depriving them of anything.

You can make a case for the idea that if art is not paid for then you’re eventually stealing from content creators.

Yes now all I have to do is trudge the internet for content, make sure my Plex server is running, wait for content to be available, hope it’s popular enough that it is being seeded. Then have to worry about the quality.

Or I can just pay a few bucks and watch what I want on any of my devices.

> Best thing about streaming subscriptions is that pirate sites have all their content.

FTFY

I just watched the new Game of Thrones show on NowTV. It had ads before and during the show.

$79 would not have gotten you any of those premium content providers. That collection of content would have easily hit 120+/month, plus a bunch of bs service charges for devices. They also did not give you the ability to drop the content you didn't want. So much of it came as packages and bundles.

Where I am in Canada, if you wanted all that content for that price you'd also be stuck with a lot of content you did not want.

If you wanted a la carte offerings then you'd pay a premium for going outside the packages they offered.

While I'm not in love with the current situation, it's much better than where we were in the 2000s. At least I can say I don't want X and cancel it.

And the best times were the free weekends when they'd show great movies to lure new subscribers.

Instead of the normal couple new movies you'd watched 4 times by the end of the month.

Yeah, those were the days.

This is a terrible comparison because no one has to buy all those services and in fact few do. The problem with cable was, regardless if you wanted it you got almost everything, particularly the most expensive package ESPN, whether you watched sports or not.

Also, in Los Angeles, without any premium channels we have always paid more than $80.

Not only that but I feel that a lot of these “are we going back to cable” are people too young to have used it.

Having to pay for a bunch of a channels you didn’t want wasn’t at all what separated cable from streaming.

Being able to choose what you watch along with not paying for the pleasure of watching ads is why streaming won out.

Not to mention being able to cancel a streaming membership without going through the eight layers of contact center hell that still exists to this day for many cable providers.

And I remember being locked into a contract term as well for cable or satellite. All of these comparisons of streaming to cable of yore seem pretty far off, since you can mix & match services, binge, cancel some or all of them, re-subscribe later, etc. All without contract terms, and all without needing to do more than a few mouse clicks.

Not only that but I feel that a lot of these “are we going back to cable” are people too young to have used it.

The worst part of cable is the ads - when I travel and go to a hotel, I find that cable TV is unwatchable, it feels like 25% of the playtime is devoted to ads.

I've started carrying an Amazon Fire Stick with me if I'm going to be in a hotel for more than a few days (usually for work) since most TV's have an accessible HDMI port, then I can watch all my streaming channels. Hotel Wifi is so spotty that I normally use a hotspot.

>>because no one has to buy all those services and in fact few do

I don't know if it's strictly the case. I think it depends on how we slice and dice.

I cannot pay for Marvel movies without paying for Alladin and Little Mermaid (Disney+)

I cannot just pay for Star Trek Strange New Worlds without paying for... I don't even know what, honestly, CBS All Access / Paramount + / whatever it's called these days holds no other interest to me.

I get Prime, but increasing amount of movies I want are behind complex channel bundles. wtf is STARZ?

If you are a family with parents, children, and perhaps even a grandparent, you will have an increasingly comparable number of subscriptions, monthly outlay, and hassle ("I want to watch X; is it on any services I subscribe or do I have to commit my life to yet another" is a privileged but unnecessary problem I do not desire to have and it's solely on industry's shoulders)

Netflix had promise. Netflix was the Spotify of visual content. My one place with simple good interface that I can find all the content available, or at least good 80-90% of the middle of bell curve. The one monopoly I wholeheartedly desired to remain a monopoly.

Here's a statement of personal perspective: "For me and anybody I know (friends & family), we are 100% moving toward Cable days in any and every way that matters to us". While we may be able to find a lens through which that is not technically the case, I personally find that immaterial. The immense prolifieration and fractalization of streaming providers benefits them, and is absolutely 100% against my convenience, budget, preference and best interest.

> I cannot pay for Marvel movies without paying for Alladin and Little Mermaid (Disney+)

> I cannot just pay for Star Trek Strange New Worlds without paying for... I don't even know what, honestly, CBS All Access / Paramount + / whatever it's called these days holds no other interest to me.

Do Blu-rays and VODs just not exist anymore? You can absolutely pay for just what you want. I mean honestly how much does a collection of all the MCU movies through Endgame cost if you were to buy them discretely? $20 per in iTunes/TV, and what was it something like 20-25 movies? So $400-500 if you wanted every single one, and you can get at least some of them for cheaper if you get the Blu-rays off Amazon and Renting is an option if you only want to watch a particular movie once.

Or $80/year if you don’t mind subsidizing Walt Disney Animations and Pixar. Honestly I think it’s a toss up whether renting, buying or streaming is more economical because it comes down to your habits, and streaming is only the clear winner if you binge a lot.

For me, a few streaming services make sense even without binging. But people do seem to forget there's a la carte streaming and DVD rental/purchase. In fact, if you want to watch a lot of films, you may be better off with something like Netflix DVDs by mail than another streaming option.

For sure. I think streaming is still the winner—but more debatably so—under certain other circumstances (international access, availability after air date, exclusivity, etc.) but only the clear winner versus the other options if you binge a lot.

>Do Blu-rays and VODs just not exist anymore?

Yes. My mom watched an episode of Ted Lasso on a flight recently, and was interested in watching more. It is straight up Apple TV+ only. No physical media release or VOD. Subscription only.

Same with a bunch of animated shows that HBOmax axed recently. They were streaming only with no other releases, and it is now impossible to watch any of the past episodes legally.

That sucks. I’m sorry.

I am curious whether Apple might release the TV+ VODs sometime down the line though.

Sure, but Blue rays or DVD or VHS existed in time of cable too, so either they're irrelevant go conversation / comparison, or we've moved the goalposts.

> I cannot pay for Marvel movies without paying for Alladin and Little Mermaid (Disney+)

Lol yes you can.

> Netflix had promise. Netflix was the Spotify of visual content. My one place with simple good interface that I can find all the content available, or at least good 80-90% of the middle of bell curve. The one monopoly I wholeheartedly desired to remain a monopoly.

No, it didn't. Netflix never had anything like this. Netflix never had even a tenth of modern, mainsteam content. Not even close. Never in it's entire history. It just used to be aimed more at Hacker News typical audience demographically.

Netflix streaming never had the majority of video content available like Spotify has the majority of music available

But that was the promise and hope.

Or to put it another way - myself and everybody we know would prefer if Spotify for video content existed. The proliferation of services that are removing content from Netflix so they could host it on their own crappy system and app is purely bad for me with no benefit. Just like I don't want Spotify to suddenly become Columbia+ and bmg all access and whatever million music publishers there are each with their own crappy service.

No one who knew how movie licensing work with the various release windows thought that was possible.

It worked with DVDs because of the first sale doctrine.

> But that was the promise and hope.

There was no promise, no sign of this ever happening, and no chance of it ever doing so.

There is no economic model that makes sense for it - music is licensed collectively because the economic cost of producing music doesn't vary that dramatically (and the difference has shrunk dramatically since the advent of Spotify et al). That's not true for AV, nor would it ever become so.

I really don’t understand the issue — you’re not forced to pay for more than a month at a time. Pay for a month of Paramount+ and then cancel once you’re done watching Strange New Worlds. You just paid $10 for 10 episodes of Trek. Seems fair.

Disney+ is an even better deal — _all_ of the Marvel movies you can watch at their monthly price.

And did you ever actually use cable? Top end packages can be $200 a month, and you generally don’t get to choose what to actually watch when you want to watch it. And most of it is unwatchable trash.

The cable days bordered on a dystopian nightmare. Channel flipping, appointment viewing, endless ads. Most content was inaccessible most of the time. Miss an episode? Tough shit. We were watching what someone else wanted us to watch, when they wanted us to watch it, and we payed for the privilege. The only people that ever seemed to like that grotesque relationship with TV were the Boomers.

It was ESPN years ago that broke the camel's back for my family and i to cut the cord...and the cost involved was only $4.95 per month. I say "only" because compared to the rest of my monthly cable bill, that didn't repsrenst a majority. It was the fact that i had no choice to remove ESPN - which i never watched anyway. So, Cablevision - or really maybe Disney/ESPN's contracts with cablevision - forcing me to pay a fee every month for something that i don't want was just so annoying, that i forever killed my cable subscription. And, in fact, all those years ago i even stopped watching "regular" TV...and i got my news from the web...and i'm not a mileniall which is often the assumption that many poeople make of me, when i tel them my streaming services origin story. Finally, all those years ago since i cut the cord, i have been hell bent promoting to everyone about the advantages of cutting the cord and moving to streaming services...in essence Cablevision and Disney/ESPN converted me int o an unpaid PR person for years now for streaming services! :-p

There was always OTA (over the air). To hell with ESPN.

Exactly. That was my thinking.

Who would pay for all these services that have so much overlap in content with one another?

Terribly inefficient way of doing shit.

The one big advantage beyond on demand hs scheduled programming is a la carte pricing. Consumers asked cable for a la carte pricing for years and it was never an option because no one would subscribe to a 200 dollar package then. People only really watch 5-10 channels.

With that said this was the perdictable end. These companies are going to want to grow their revenue and they are all peaking in subscriber growth so increasing pricing is the logical step.

I feel like I got into the habit of watching way too much TV during the pandemic, and haven't managed to shake it yet, but still only have like 2-3 shows in the queue at any given time. How are people watching 5-10 channels?

If you are a sports person you might watch just one team but it could be spread across multiple channels. Then you might watch a couple of shows each on a different channel. And then maybe you have one or two other niche channels you like.

Ah, I forgot about sports. Well, that sounds pretty annoying!

My sports teams are LSU, the New Orleans Saints, and the New Orleans Pelicans.

LSU has games on CBS and ESPN.

The Saints have games on Amazon, ESPN, CBS, NBC, and ABC.

The Pelicans have games on NBC and TNT.

And when I say ESPN, that could be ESPN, ESPN2, ESPN-U, The SEC Network, etc.

And for tennis if you go pure browser, no set-top boxes:

Normal tournaments on tennistv.com for 15€/month.

Australian, French and US Open on Eurosport (online over Eurosportplayer) for 7€/month.

Wimbledon however is only on Sky, that's 35€/month, I skipped that. (That is for Germany).

It's a lot of content, affordable, and you deal with slightly broken websites. Why can't they just show the unspoiled bracket, a notification if a match is complete or ongoing, allow manual unspoilering of individual matches or rounds, and a direct link from the bracket view to the individual match video or stream? /rant

Even without sports, my spouse and I watch a bunch of shows that air at different times of the year, on different services. We watch a bunch of AppleTV+ shows (For All Mankind, Severence, Invasion, Ted Lasso, etc.), a few shows on Netflix (Stranger Things, Umbrella Academy), a few shows on cable channels (Home Town, The Gilded Age, etc.), a few over-the-air shows (The Good Doctor), etc. Like you say, there are only 2 or 3 available at a time, but they're still spread all over the place. I don't mind too much. We actually had a lull so we subscribed to Hulu for Reservation Dogs and Only Murders in the Building. When those end in the next month, we'll cancel and move on to something else.

I've worked in the cable TV industry in the past. For the most part, the cable companies have little control over the channel bundles, they really wouldn't mind offering a la carte options, but they are forced themselves to get channels in bundles from the content owners. Much of this has changed in recent years with NBC/Comcast and Charter owning more of the source content, but a lot of the other channels are sill provided by outside companies, who do not want to unbundle them.

Once upon a time I consumed content by keeping video files in folders and watching them with VLC. Then I subscribed to Netflix. Now I'm back to keeping files in folders, except now I have Plex to give me the convenience.

IRC + Plex = automatic download of any content I want available for streaming on any device anywhere in the world.

I still have Netflix (free with my mobile provider), Disney+ (free with my Internet provider) and Hulu (got Black Friday deal for $1 per month).

Don’t really watch anything on any of those streaming services though.

Do you have any references/documentation for how the IRC side of this setup works?

I, too, am interested in learning more.

Most common method of using IRC is using the irssi client with autodl-irssi typically done on a seedbox. Everyone's setup is different though.

https://autodl-community.github.io/autodl-irssi/

Use any IRC client - I use MIRC on Windows.

Join a good IRC network - I use Abjects. Subscribe to the shows and movies you want to automatically download, one of their bots sends you files as they are posted. Write a script to copy them to the appropriate folder that Plex monitors.

Who is subscribing to all of them really? It is actually mentionned in the article that typical streaming spending is around 20-30$ per house.

Also, despite not being allowed by terms of service most accounts are widely shared accross families and friends which mean most of us pay for only one service.

I wouldn't, but when providers are randomly removing shows and movies it's really annoying. For example Netflix just removed Rick and Morty in 16 countries and a few more pending. Should I just subscribe to another provider because of that, jump between apps or rely on a good old and convenient technology which has everything (torrent)?

You can do n months on one service, m other months on another. Especially when talking about series with seasons. I don't usually mix series and follow one at a time It can take me a 2 weeks to a month watching a season, why would I be paying for another service at the same time?

Rick and Morty is good for a quick relax for 20 min after dinner, another might be good for thrills for longer time, how about a documentary the next day? It's easy to pick shows that match my interests and fits my taste, but they are scattered across platforms if they are available at all.

Unsubbing for shows feels wrong. What if I just want to watch a pilot? I'm not that calculated to manage my subscriptions based on a schedule.

What if friends come over? Sorry, no Netflix since yesterday :)

That is mild inconvenience.

I would tend to say that if you watch shows on a daily basis you are probably in an addiction pattern.

You can always use your friend's netflix account if they have it. By showing netflix content to people outside of your household you are already breaching terms of use anyway.

I'm easily annoyed with mild inconveniences, people on HN are already furious for closing an email newsletter modal. I feel managing subscriptions, entering CC details is a lot of hassle.

LOL, watching a 50min show daily is addiction? I highly doubt any therapist would back you with this.

Breaching terms for watching a random movie with a group of friends? Probably there's a bullshit clause for that, but here comes LOL#2. Crap like that was always on rented content since the VHS age, nobody cares and nobody enforces it :)

>. Crap like that was always on rented content since the VHS age, nobody cares and nobody enforces it :)

Which is exactly why I say that you can uae your friend's account if they visit you and you agree on watching something you do not currently have access to.

Right, but kinda awkward in romantic settings :)

Add to this, you can also rent/buy through some services (usually big tech). It might seem steep, but if you're paying $10/mo for streaming with barely anything you want to watch, one-time payment of $5-8 for a film maybe once a month isn't bad. TV seasons are overpriced but I think of it the same way, at one episode per week. That used to be the norm before streaming allowed "binging". Occasionally some content is only available through streaming in which case I burn through what I want and cancel.

just checked my situation and i’m subscribed to: netflix 4k, amazon prime, disney+, paramount+, sky/nowtv, apple tv plus, youtube premium and spotify. and this is just entertainment.

This factor pisses me off. I pay for Netflix so my kids can watch shows. They go over to their moms house and log in on a computer so they can continue to watch their shows but now I guess Netflix assumes I shared my password? They have effectively pushed me to the point that just tonight I was looking at going back to piracy. The effort to pirate is low bar these days and I can use it on any device, and house, have access to all shows and movies across all services, don’t have titles go missing, and can watch it all in 4K. I was happy to pay Netflix a fair fee while it was quick and convenient but now the price has crept higher then I like and is not convenient.

Netflix said they were going to crackdown on password sharing. But it hadn’t happen yet. L

They cannot because they are struggling to maintain growth. Imagine they start banning all shared accounts, a wild guess is that 50% of them are at the very least. That would make them lose so many customers at the same time they wouldn't be able to recover from it. This + all the false positive from household members travelling. People would be so pissed of they would turn to other services that do not crack down on shared accounts before going back to netflix.

They were going to not allow you to use Netflix accounts on set top boxes when you are away from home. But they were going to allow you to use mobile.

But some Hiltons have Smart TVs with Netflix built in that let you enter your own Netflix credentials and automatically sign you out when you check out.

Hulu Live TV (not the VOD only service) was very strict about not allowing you to use it on other TVs and forcing you to change your “home” location and only allowing 5 changes a year.

You couldn’t use it on mobile for more than 30 days without going back to your “home”.

I have a vacation property. There solution was to pay for two separate accounts.

Not me. The only steady one has been Netflix (and Amazon Prime I guess, but that's more for package delivery, I've only watched a small handful of shows on there), and I might even take a break from that once I get through Better Call Saul. I sometimes get a month of HBO Max or Hulu/Disney+, but not that often.

Still a lot cheaper than cable.

> Who is subscribing to all of them really?

My wife. Because the shows she enjoys are spread unevenly across the various streaming platforms.

It feels very much like the bad old days with cable.

Watch the shows on one platform for a couple months. When you've seen them switch to a different platform. Rinse and repeat. Most streamers are still dumping seasons all at once so unless you're watching reality tv this strategy works great.

Streaming services are wising up to this, and are starting to no longer dump entire seasons. They're also testing out expiring episodes before an entire season is finished.

Expiring episodes is a good way to make users hate you. It will annoy people who want to rewatch the series.

Most people subscribe to Netflix, Prime, and Disney+ and get the free hulu package while also still using cable.

I've pivoted to buying DVD box sets and then ripping and NAS-ing them. It takes time but: zero ads ever no matter what, cheaper in the long run, and my shows never get taken down or moved to a different company.

Why pay $20 per month to rewatch Friends/Seinfeld/whatever if the box set is $60?

I can even set up some sort of internet-facing NAS server that I can watch on the go.

Up your game and start getting the dvds from the library

Or better, if you are in the US chances are your library has collaboration with Kanopy so you can just stream for free using your library card.

Kanopy's great, but it's probably not gonna have Friends/Seinfeld or whatever the parent comment was ripping.

Yeah but for someone like me who rarely rewatches things it’s not really a solution.

I'm the same. I want new content. I very rarely go back and watch something I've already seen. (And I never need to see Seinfeld or Friends again! After long runs, they ran in syndication for years, and then were on streaming services that were ad-free for years. Really, they weren't that good to begin with!)

Yeah. I’ve even bought some DVD box sets. I find I watch some episodes here and there for nostalgic purposes and then they gather dust.

It is if he gives you a login to his NAS.

Haha, I should start a service. Fredflix

If it’s on DVD I’ve probably already seen the content at that point.

I did that too. Though i'm finding it difficult to get a lot of newer content on DVD these days. Ie most new streaming shows.. do they have box sets in your experience? My wife has been looking and so far i think we have .. well, none.

But we have quite a bit of content. Netflix (DVD), ironically, is a good source for this too. .. rules aside, i'm sure.

Can you name a few that you haven't been able to find?

Just asked her (she's been the one buying our collection haha) and sounds like fairly early on she had trouble with many of them and so eventually she just gave up looking. The only example she had off the top of her head was Stranger Things Seasons 3 and 4. A quick search on Amazon seems.. confusing haha.

On the flipside i'd be curious if you have had luck from any sources on buying boxsets for modern streaming shows. Any tips?

edit: She replied with additional items:

> Off the top of my head:

> None of the Marvel shows on Disney+ have physical

> None of the Amazon Prime shows have physical

> None of the AppleTV+ shows have physical

> The first 2 seasons of stranger things do but are out of print. Subsequent seasons and any other show from that time period on are not available.

> Star Trek streaming shows ARE available but insanely expensive (8-10 ep seasons for 50-70)

Thanks for the examples. Indeed, I would assume that finding physical media for $STREAMING_SERVICE exclusives/originals may be tricky.

I'll admit I'm totally an old fart when it comes to movies/TV shows. I like old stuff and don't like much of what's been done after the 2010's. I usually easily find physical media for what I like to watch. It is a very saddening trend if it is true that modern shows/movies do not end up on BR.

I usually follow the idea of letting new content (books, TV’s, movies) sit around for a decade or so and then going for the ones that are still well known.

Of course there are exceptions. Those ones are available for purchase on Apple TV or are showing in theatres. For the rest, there are box sets on Amazon/EBay

Doing that as well. And let's be clear, unripped DVDs contain ads (if I have to skip through previews and crap before I can watch the content, that's advertising.)

I have an app that plays this ripped content on a schedule very much like a TV channel (no pausing, rewinding, no way to choose what is on when — the schedule dictates). I love it. Even though I am creating the schedule with my own (local) content, there is still the serendipitous nature of walking by the TV and seeing a particular old Twilight Zone on.

> Why pay $20 per month to rewatch Friends/Seinfeld/whatever if the box set is $60?

For technically inept people ... the convenience of not ripping or learning how to set up their own NAS.

I had a media PC from 2006-2012 and then a Plex server until 2020. I really got sick of dealing with it. I pay for convenience.

Just a reminder there is only one way you will ever own what you purchase, and it involves Jolly Roger and a bottle of rum. https://www.theoatmeal.com/comics/game_of_thrones

I have a PLEX server/torrent box behind a VPN. I then wrote a fairly simple Apple Shortcut that grabs the magnet link off whatever page I’m on, then shoots the magnet link over the torrent API.

It took some work to set up, but I shared the Apple shortcut with my wife and she now uses it and it’s super easy and convenient. So much so that I need to buy a new hard drive as she’s filled up our 8TB drive with TV shows.

18 TB drives are the sweet spot for price right now.

I feel this year around the holidays (US) will see good deals on HDDs. Prices have held steady for a rather long time e.g. 4TB still around 80-120 for consumer and nas based drives.

Drive shucking is still viable depending on the external drive, for anyone who wants cheap(er) drives but with some work.

Do you watch content more than once?

Just curious because I tend not to (except for Equilibrium, of course).

I've heard most things worth watching are still out there later on, maybe just keep the links.

> there is only one way you will ever own what you purchase

Other than the gigantic number of blu-ray and 4K discs available for movies and shows, which you can purchase to own.

Sure as long as the player you buy continues to operate, the regional keys don't get borked, and the market continues to support that blu-ray player, and doesn't deprecate with a "newer", "better", "smart" version that is incompatible with previous discs.

All of which seem roughly as likely as your hard drive falling over at the same time as it's backup.

For now. The comic OP linked to pointed out that (when it was written) GoT wasn't available on DVD anywhere. Disney is particularly bad about making their stuff unavailable in any form - expect DVD distribution to slowly go away as the content owners push you to their streaming sites.

I've been really disappointed with Reservation Dogs' arrangement. Brilliant little bite-size show, but their network means they only stream on Hulu or Disney+ (not sure if it's even on Disney+ in the US?) and they don't sell episodes á la carte at all, right now, in Canada. Even if you are okay subscribing to a new streaming service just for that show, you need to spend a ridiculous amount of time figuring out which one it is for the country you are in. So I'm sure the show will soon be cancelled due to "weak viewership", probably oblivious to how difficult they've made it to actually watch the thing legally.

I feel like there was a very nice short-lived window where networks were just trying to distribute stuff profitably instead of using everything as a vehicle to increase subscriber counts, but that moment has clearly passed.

I think I said this a few months ago, but the main difference is that I'm not paying for all those services all the time.

I only get HBO when the entire next season is out of something I am watching.

Prime is probably the exception, however even for that, with inflation I'm considering cancelling that too and just upping my Amazon orders past the $35 (or whatever it is) minimum to get free shipping.

Point is, Cable is like one giant minimum price of boring with ads. Individual services are better even if I can't watch some netflix show right now, I can do so after I cancel Hulu or whatever I am binging is done.

Yeah, we've taken to signing up for services, watching what we want and unsubscribing. We do it all through AppleTV, which allows us no-hassle cancelling, so no calling anyone or whatever. For several services, there was so little we were interested in that we ended up cancelling before the free trial was up.

Going back to? We’re already there.

Every media company decided they wanted to take their own slice instead of having a small number of services cover different types of entertainment.

At this point I’d rather pirate because a) it’s cheap as free b) I’m not at the mercy of my ISP deciding how fast my stream can go, and c) I never have to worry about a show I’m watching getting pulled and locked into another paywalled garden that probably has a shitty app that my HTPC doesn’t support in the middle of me watching it.

it's not even pirating in EU if you use DDL (or torrent without uploading), check question 8 and 11 for instance in Czechia, Slovakia, Spain, too lazy to check other countries, but these are well known for allowing streaming/downloading unauthorized uploads

https://euipo.europa.eu/ohimportal/en/web/observatory/faq-cs...

It’s illegal in Germany

I don't think "pirating" is a legal definition.

By the way, point 8 has an important caveat at the beginning:

"It is possible to make a copy of a work for personal use under the exceptions contained in the Czech Copyright Act."

(Emphasis mine)

Point 11 only says that you're not responsible for copyright infringement if your use falls into what's described in art.29 of the copyright act (the "three steps", which according to point 8 are described in that article), which according to google translate says

---

> (1) Exceptions and limitations of copyright can only be applied in special cases established by law and only if such use of the work does not conflict with the normal way of using the work and neither does it the legitimate interests of the author are not unreasonably affected.

> (2) Free use and legal licenses, with the exception of the official license and news (§ 34), license for school work (§ 35 par. 3), license for reproductions of works from own collections for archival and conservation needs [Section 37 paragraph 1 letter a)], license for temporary reproductions (§ 38a), a license for a photographic likeness (§ 38b) and a license for non-essentials secondary use of the work (§ 38c), apply only to the published work.

---

Which to me reads like the usual fair use exceptions you find in other countries.

In Italy, at least, downloading copyrighted content without authorization is not a felony, but you can still get fined. I expect much of the EU to have similar provisions.

The cost for streaming is pretty reasonable right now, but HBO splitting their offerings in half and most of them having ads unless you pay more to not have them will push a lot of people back to piracy.

It is really easy these days to set up a media streaming app that automatically downloads new movies and shows, all you need is a VPN. No ads, and you don't need 300 different streaming apps.

Wasn't it obvious that if you want all shows/services, you will still pay at least the same amount? The cost of producing content is not going down just because there are more content providers. As long as the same amount of content is being produced, consumers still need to pay the same amount of money to see it all. If consumers decide to pay less, there will be less content.

You don't have to subsidize digging down another cable for streaming. One could expect streaming to be cheaper than cable since you pay for internet access separately.

Also no satellites to rocket into space.

...but lots of content providers with their own infrastructure, people sharing accounts and many people are subscribing only to a few content providers.

> You don't have to subsidize digging down another cable for streaming.

You don't have to, but your streaming content is usually being delivered over the same cable that provides TV anyway.

You pay for that with your internet bill though. If your internet bill included all the streaming services, that might be different.

I don't think it is obvious. The default option is to hang on to your accounts, right? So if you cycle subscriptions, you are in a sense being subsidized by the people who just stick to a service.

Or, if the expectation is that most people subscribe to multiple streaming services, if you just subscribe to one (not a big TV watcher for example) you would expect to pay less I guess.

The point of the article was that if you subscribe to all services at the same time, you pay as much as for a cable package.

If you do not subscribe to all services simultaneously, but only a select few, it's still cheaper. At least as long as most people don't do this.

Ah, that's fair.

The point of the article was that if you subscribe to all services at the same time, you pay as much as for a cable package.

If you do not subscribe to all services simultaneously, but only a select few, it's still cheaper. At least as long as most people don't do this.

> As long as the same amount of content is being produced, consumers still need to pay the same amount of money to see it all.

And indeed this isn't the case - a LOT more content is being produced, and a lot more high budget drama is being produced. The reason we have a glut of amazing content is because of the competition between services.

This type of conversation always upsets me. No one person can consume so much content that they would subscribe to 8+ services.

That's the beauty of streaming services. No forced ads, watch whatever you want whenever you want, and no yearly forced on contracts.

The problem is that content is pretty well dispersed across multiple platforms.

Personally I think the problem is just our need to consume everything as fast as possible.

Content being spread out means you use one for a while, then switch, the content won't run away (unless of course HBO's new CEO has something to say about it).

But it's us, we're the problem. Like for example, you have Game of Thrones back on HBO and you have Lord of The Rings coming up next week on prime. Logically you subscribe to one, watch one, then cancel and switch to the other.

A lot of people just can't do that, they must watch both as fast as possible, they must consume the content the moment it releases.

One advantage of streaming over cable is no contracts. This makes it easy for you to cancel/switch services.

Because of this, and the fact that streaming is async, you can alternate services every month to save money while at the same time not missing out on exclusives.

> One advantage of streaming over cable is no contracts. This makes it easy for you to cancel/switch services.

The deal will soon change from $10/mo to $10/mo (with annual subscription) or $20/mo (month to month)

There's a simple solution to this: stop watching TV

Consume media that you own. Buy physical copies. Pirate. Read. Play!

We gave up control of our media and now we pikachu_sad_face.gif when it turns against us.

This is what we get for being lazy consumers.

Meanwhile those of us with hoardes of media files, DVDs, and Blu-Rays can sit atop our pile of entertainment and laugh at the peasants that gave it up

Couldn't agree more. In my house, Han shoots first.

Waiting for the old Slashdot meme: “I haven’t owned a TV for 20 years. Do people still watch TV?”

Yes how much have you spent for your “hoards” of DVDs?

For some of us, a lot, but at the end of the day... it's paid for and ours in perpetuity. The will and greed of adversarial publishers means nothing to us. Can you say that about the cloud?

Now that I think about it... I've probably spent less on my physical media than you've paid in subscription fees, in total.

And again, I can do what I want with it.

I’m slowly getting through all of the Star Trek series right now.

The box sets for TNG, DS9 and Voyager alone are $135 each. I didn’t bother to look to see the cost of the box sets for TOS, ENT, and the movies. Let’s say around $900 in all.

Paramount+ has all of those available for $9.99 a month and I can watch them while I’m traveling on my phone, my iPad, the hotel TV using the Roku stick I bring with me. Yes I know I can set up a Plex server and spend the time to rip all of those DVDs. Been there done that. I had a Mac Mini connected to my TV running Front Row from 2006-2012 and then a Plex server from 2012-2020.

And that doesn’t take into account all of the new series that are only available for streaming - Discovery, Strange New Worlds and Lower Decks.

If you’re not a ST fan, substitute whatever you are a fan of.

I've picked up the ST:TNG Blu-Rays and most of the movies for far less than MSRP. I mean if you want to pay retail price for everything than go right ahead...

But the whole time-share cornucopia argument doesn't work for me because the video quality for most streaming is ass. Some of these shows it's like watching web videos in the 90s through RealPlayer

Meanwhile AnyDVD HD and Plex licenses are cheap, and also perpetual!

How much is your entire collection compared to $9.99 a month for Paramount+?

I don't know (I get everything on sale or bargain bins, maybe a couple hundred bucks in total?)

It's also unfair to not include Netflix, Disney+, a portion of Amazon Prime, and whatever else, multiplied times however many months you've been using them (so likely 50+)

If you factor in the cash spent on computer hardware, software, and storage media, we're still sitting on maybe a thousand or two over a 10+ year period. But that gets murky as nearly all these things have other uses.

I'd bet that still costs less than most households' cable/streaming bills over time

Being extremely picky with your media consumption helps a ton!

I don’t need but one service to get all of the Star Trek episodes. Also, I used Star Trek as an example because it had by far the largest library of any franchise and the most box sets.

Disney franchises are basically movies and streaming only TV series so it wasn’t as extreme as Star Trek. Besides, there are still a couple of gaps in their Marvel Universe library.

Netflix really doesn’t have much worth paying for anymore. The only reason I keep it is because T-mobile gives me a $14 discount.

Amazon Prime Video by itself wouldn’t even be something making it worth keeping Prime.

I also get HBO Max free (for now) by having AT&T fiber for internet.

I limit myself to 3 streaming services, when I get bored with the content in one, I cancel it and switch to another.

It's still annoying that content is spread over so many streaming services, but I'm never going back to cable.

Same here! And, on the rare occasion, my partner every once in a while wants to watch a "blockbuster movie" that is out only in theaters (not includied in any streaming services' regular content library for the subscription price)...so on a rare occasion we will rent/buy a "blockbuster" from amazon prime, vudu, etc. I dislike it because sometimes just 1 new, big-budget movie might cost as much as a full month's worth of streaming service...but it is still waaaay cheaper (and pletny more convenient) than both of us going to see the movie in an actual, physical theater (with the rest of the germ-producers out in the world). ;-)

We hit peak content years ago (more content produced in a year than you could ever possibly watch). As more and more streaming services use their data to tailor content creation, we'll also hit peak personalized content as well. However, it's split up between all of those streaming services.

IMO, all content should be available to license on a per-second basis (like radio music). Maybe with some tiers for more or less desirable stuff. Then streaming platforms could compete on features, and content studios could focus on content. And we can finally have one service for everything.

Comparing a stack of unbundled $5-$20 items to a monolithic bundle isn't very wise.

That $75 bundle is one thing: a service with channels.

Each one of those items is a thing like that: a service with channels. It's almost like those 8 services that add up to $89 are 8 different cable boxes in one (and in theory you could own 8 streaming boxes and install each on a separate one).

Pick one or two and be happy.

You can share passwords with friends and family members easily on some of them to save money.

I don't know about cable everywhere, but cable boxes in Canada are tied to a particular subscriber line. You can't just put one in your suitcase and watch your stuff in another location, like a hotel room.

They have shitty, antedeluvial remote controls with way too many buttons, which are hard to use. The software is garbage.

You can't go back in time to view programs, except ones you've laboriously arranged to be recorded.

The Shaw cable boxes don't even have their own HDMI-level volume control. The volume control on the remote sends IR commands to the friggin' TV to change the TV volume.

With any decent IP streamer, that's not the case; you set the TV volume to 80% or whatever, and then forget about it, using the streamer's own volume control: the quick, responsive Bluetooth-based volume control that doesn't need a line of sight to an IR LED, and doesn't go through 100 steps.

I don't understand why that has any customers at all, or any who are under 75.

The cable subscription has commercials. The experience of time shifting and fast forwarding through commercials is inferior to streaming.

Also, a cable bundle forces you to pay for Fox News, which is primarily funded by carriage fees. They wouldn’t last long on robot insurance ads.

Fox news has been beating out the other networks in ratings for a while now though. I have no love for fox news, but it doesn't seem true that they wouldn't last. Even more far right news networks, that have been cut out of the normal media distribution channels seem to be doing fine with organic viewer support.

If Fox news ratings fall, it's because they are bleeding viewers as they attempt to move back to the center and ditch Trump. Notice that Carlson consistently has the highest ratings of any fox news show...

Since you're an expert, how long did CNN+ last?

I have an incentive to minimize the number of streaming services I have, because the more I have the more time I spend flipping between them looking for who has what I want to watch. Example: The family sat down to watch a specific movie this weekend, and after trying 4 services I decided to buy it on one of them, clicked purchase exactly when my wife announced she had found it on 5th service I didn't know we had.

canistream.it used to be my go-to, but they're currently "rebuilding". For now, you can search movies on https://reelgood.com/ (and probably a half dozen other sites) and it'll list the services the movie is available on.

Of course, if you didn't even know you had a particular service, it's not going to be terribly helpful...

justwatch.com is one I've had good luck with.

But as you mention, if you don't remember what all services you have or what your logins are, you'll have to figure that part out yourself.

I gave up piracy in my 20s. Looks like it might be time to sail the high seas again.

PirateBay ftw eh? haha.

The difference is I pay for ad-free content. Otherwise I would never watch the shows to begin with.

As these providers look to profit with more ways to add ads to their services, I'm sure people like me will find new ones who respect that transaction of pure content.

I don't want images to be implanted in my head because I'm too cheap. I don't think you can put a price on that.

This was obvious to me in 2014, when I was part of the earliest discussions at Disney for building a streaming service. It was obvious to everyone working in the space.

As we started discussing partnerships with various providers to help distribute, it became clear they wanted a window into our service where they could see what was available and direct link to content in our streaming apps. Essentially, they wanted to keep owning the customer's experience and pass them to us to watch something. Everyone wanted to be in the position to be the next cable company.

Even Apple. Apple TV+ is one of the latest movers here, and I think it's because they were pushing hard for a while to be that "we own the customer experience" layer but the content companies had gotten wise to Apple's tactics since the early days of iTunes.

This is fascinating. Can you share more on when and why Disney decided to build their own streaming service?

The bundling and unbundling cycle continues.

I pay $85/month for my broadband cable alone, via the Comcast Xfinity monopoly I don't really have any other option. but I guess I'd need to pay that even if I watched no streaming TV.

Jim Barksdale [1] is right again, the only way to make money is by bundling and unbundling. The cable companies bundled, streaming/cordcutting unbundled, and now we're seeing bundling again (Disney+, Hulu included w/ Verizon cellular as an example).

[1]: https://hbr.org/2014/06/how-to-succeed-in-business-by-bundli...

Most of the carrier "On Us" offers are just free trials, that Verizon one for example is a 6 month trial. T-Mobile does an ongoing one for Netflix, but even the most premium plan only gets the Standard tier, they're clearly counting on people being tempted to pay for 4K and more than 2 devices.

The Verizon one is not a 6 month trial. It's included in their highest tier along with Apple Arcade or Google Play Pass, and it's "permanent".

My parents used to pay $110~ a month for a cable package, decent number of channels, and HBO back in the late 90s. This is significantly more expensive than it is today.

The biggest issues I have with cable are:

-There is no option to pick a few channels you want for cheaper than the package of channels. I would love to pick a dozen channels (which are otherwise are only available with the more expensive bundles that come with hundred+ other channels I have no interest in).

-Lack of availability of international channels. These often cost 30+ for each small separate package offered in cable, while better channel bundles are much more affordable through streaming providers- not to mention individual programs available in different platforms and news streams free online.

I don't spend a lot of free time watching things, and I have specific things I enjoy (documentaries, foreign films/TV, educational content) so paying more for cable doesn't make any sense when I can get a better variety through streaming and/or through resources freely available online or through the library. Not to mention paying high prices and still having to contend with advertisements taking up ~20% of the time and interrupting what you're watching.

We're going back to the piracy days, ya harr!

> Streaming services…

> … are making price increases a regular occurrence

This was (is? idk) the case with cable. I used to have Xfinity and they would increase the price every year, by non-trivial amounts. My company was paying for internet, so I didn't feel that the cable price was too steep, but in retrospect I should have cancelled it earlier.

I'm not seeing discussion of key comparison to steaming vs. cable: the ability to buy and access a variety of content from one source.

"Having to buy more than you need", "annoying contracts", "ads", "bundling"... all true... for both streaming and cable in different ways.

What's most annoying with the streaming ecosystem as it exists right now, is having to deal individually with each provider. That means multiple transactions, different apps, silo'd searching, etc.

I like the ability to turn different services on and off at will... I want the ability to manage and access those services in one place. Having a single relationship with a cable-esque provider to abstract away the complexities of different streaming services would be awesome.

At least with cable, I didn't have to buy Verizon and Comcast and Cox to watch ABC, ESPN, and HBO.

Cable would be awesome if it let you purchase channels individually.

I let cable TV go after my bill (including Internet) crawled up to $250 a month and then I realized the only thing I was watching was occasionally Food Network and most of the time everything else had either reality TV garbage I had no interest in, re-runs of shows I've seen a zillion times, or infomercials.

I like streaming. For example, I got bored with Starz so I dropped it, but wasn't anywhere near as bad as the over $100 for cable TV part of my cable bill, nor as painful to cancel.

If I could simply pick and pay for the couple channels I wanted and switch without hassle, yes, it would be awesome. Until then I'm fine dealing with separate providers. I'm sure it will be ruined soon though.

Here's the thing though - we have almost two generations who did not grow up watching broadcast TV and aren't in that habit. Cable TV was able to jack up its price and keep people paying in my opinion because older people grew up with TV being a default background activity and kind of just wanted it there.

That's not true anymore. Your default background activity is your phone. Make these streaming services too complex and too ad-ridden and I think people simply will give them up. They're already really easy to give up. Especially with the current trend of inflation and rising housing costs people aren't going to let subscriptions stick around they aren't really using.

Apple TV+ has a unified search (although Netflix doesn't participate), but something about the handoffs between APIs is painfully sloooow and the UX can get a little confusing if you're managing multiple user profiles (both at the Apple TV level and in each individual service) as well as getting very confused if you're able to access the same content through multiple services (e.g. HBO shows via Hulu or HBO Now).

It needs improvement fast. Ideally we'd decouple the technology/UX side of it from the content library management side of it but that'll never happen.

> At least with cable, I didn't have to buy Verizon and Comcast and Cox to watch ABC, ESPN, and HBO.

Perhaps not, but you were also driving to Blockbuster to get additional titles every two weeks in person.

Well now you're talking about technical delivery! Not withstanding the advancement on 4K content, VCRs, RCA antennas, remote controls, etc.

Heck, for a while I could rent new releases from my Verizon subscription, too! (Or I'd have the o.g. delivery-service Netflix to bring them to my door.)

I can pick and choose which streaming service to subscribe to. I can cancel and resume at the click of a button w/o dealing with some retention salesperson. It's ad free. There's exclusive content. The apps are higher quality. I could go on and on.

Cable seems to be advertised as cheaper somehow (if I bundle probably), but I'm stuck with Spectrum in my area and I refuse to give them more money than I need to. Knowing them, they're just going to raise prices quietly hoping I don't notice.

The problem is that there are simply too many shows being made right now and quite honestly I don't think people actually have the time to watch all these shows so it's not sustainable that so much high quality content is being produced. At some point these services are going to drop down to just a few winners.

I have an exceptionally hard time with the value proposition here, for either streaming or cable.

$90/mo is about $3.00 a day (streaming) and $80/mo is about $2.66 a day (cable).

I have a life, I don't have time to watch something every day. So maybe every other day, or every 3rd day. That has me paying $5 or $6 to watch maybe an hour every other day. There is nothing they can show me that's worth that - my time is too valuable. And really, I watch something maybe 4 times a month, and that breaks down to $22 a view. WTF.

So I have Netflix DVD, and that's it. I watch a movie every once in a while, and the rest of the time am out and about which I'm fairly certain is a way better use of my time from just about every perspective.

My questions becomes, why would anyone pay this much?

> My questions becomes, why would anyone pay this much?

The simple answer is that "anyone" is really broad! More specifically and to state the obvious, not everyone is you! There are a _lot_ of people who watch far more than you do. If you watch two 1-hour episodes per day, then it becomes $1.50 per hour is a pretty great deal in terms of entertainment. (Compare that to $25+ for a movie at a movie theatre, or $60 for a Broadway show, or $20 for an hour at your local rock climbing gym.)

I don't disagree with your overall premise -- it's expensive! -- but it's not _not_ worth it for a lot of people, including myself.

Who's got time to watch shows from all these services?

Streaming isn't really competing with cable but with torrents.

If DRM ever gets good enough to block piracy (imagine displays themselves using ml to recognize what are you watching and if you are allowed to) streaming will become worse than cable ever was.

The price advantage was always going to be temporary. People have clearly demonstrated that they are willing to pay however much for access to content. Furthermore, the content producers have gotten used to a certain amount of funding, and are unlikely to give it up willingly. The biggest difference is that today people can pirate content that they can't otherwise find conveniently. But people are likely willing to pay even a very high fee to stream content conveniently, and if streaming services play there cards right, I suspect they will manage to raise fees substantially.

At one point I was subscribed to most of those listed. I like a lot of niche/older content and it's just really split up now. I was getting sick of it. Every single one of the shows I wanted was on a different service, almost no overlap.

I wasn't using any one service enough to justify their monthly costs. The alternative would be to cancel and re-subscribe when you want to, but that gets exhausting very quickly for 6+ services.

I decided to cancel all of those subscriptions and go elsewhere. It's just not worth it at this point for me.

Ha! You are all going to be charged three times for content now! Once for the internet connection, once for the subscription service and again for the ads.

This is progress? They have you by your addictions.

The flexibility is a nice option in contrast, at least. Like you can easily subscribe to Apple TV+, watch Severance in a month, cancel, and then use HBO to watch The Rehearsal the next month.

I wish I had the flexibility to ditch Prime Video whilst keeping the rest of Prime at a discount.

Amazon knows exactly what they're doing with this. Prime Video is a crap service on its own, but it isn't bad for "free" and means when you do buy/rent a movie you do it there.

It's not free though, the subscription went up by about 100% when they launched Prime Video.

Yep, but I suspect that for most people the "free prime shipping" is valued at 110% of the price, and the video/music at basically nothing.

Amazon apparently thinks Prime Video is worth $9/mo as you can subscribe to that alone (not that anyone does).

I would take the tenner discount if I had the option to be honest, even though it's still worse value than pre-Video Prime.

I ditched Prime altogether and don't miss it. Deliveries from amazon are still free over some threshold and they sometimes arrive early.

I liked a couple of shows a few years ago but like most streaming platforms they don't invest in them or the good actors move on to other projects. There is one coming up that I might like so I might do the signup for a month near xmas shopping season and binge the show, get faster shipping on gifts, then bail.

Well... Cable has real time streams and programming you need to catch (some do offer on-demand as well, and some extra services such as Disney and Netflix) and has tons of channels bundled in such ways you can't get the service without them (I'd pay extra not to have Fox News, for instance, even more for nobody within a 10 mile radius not to have it).

The traditional streaming services? You don't have to subscribe to all of them. I'm very happy with Amazon, Apple TV+ (bundled with iCloud) and Netflix.

> I'd pay extra not to have Fox News, for instance, even more for nobody within a 10 mile radius not to have it)

With old-school analog TV, injecting noise at the right frequency in the cable will blank the channel of your choice for all the people connected to the same cable, up to some distance... of course it's definitely illegal and the cable company can probably find you. Unfortunately with digital TV it's much more complicated as several channels will be modulated on the same stream/carrier frequency...

> I'd pay extra not to have Fox News, for instance, even more for nobody within a 10 mile radius not to have it

nobody stops you from buying big land

I am happy with my subscription to these streaming services:

My household has Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime, ESPN+, and something else I can't remember. Yet I still find myself sailing the black seas for material that's been removed from or can't be found on those platforms. Sometimes I'll just buy the blu-ray on eBay then rip the disc onto my hard drive. My torrent downloads went from like 5 a year between 2014-2018 back up into the hundreds and continues to climb each year.

The site is almost unreadable since it aggressively tries to redirect to itself with my adblocker active, but there’s a point that it doesn’t address: non-US viewers are still getting the short end of the stick where it concerns content availability, and moves like HBO’s removal of content are twice as hurtful to us.

(We have our own streaming services and telco bundles, of course, but the content itself does not move freely)

i primarily torrented initially because i was broke. i was a super early netflix adopter (back in the DVD by mail days). for awhile netflix, hbo, and amazon prime were all i needed to watch 80% of the stuff i wanted to, and it felt fair to pay what i did.

with more content being paywalled behind the proliferation of superfluous streaming services, consistent rate hikes, and a huge drop in quality of content i've eliminated everything except prime (which i keep mainly for the two day shipping). i don't want to declare myself as a bellwether, but i got into netflix early and i got out early as well (cancelled my subscription Dec of 2021).

at the end of the day, torrenting is always the best value proposition. you can possess the files you download, they are not subject to being randomly taken down, and there are plenty of options for streaming them to multiple devices in your home. i download some really weird obscure stuff and i have never had an issue not being able to find subtitles. sometimes quality can vary but for most things you can get a decent 720 or 1080 rip.

>at the end of the day, torrenting is always the best value proposition.

Weird that the one that is free and doesn't pay anyone who had a hand in creating the content is the one with the most value. It is almost like creating content has a cost that needs to be passed on to the consumer.

for content you have purchsed (ie: prime) there is nothing stopping them from giving you a file in case they delist the content (Bandcamp is a good example of a service that offers exactly this).

this may be more of a political stance, but most of this content is produced by huge media corporations with deep pockets and histories of nefarious business practices. do i really care if disney gets paid for their content? no not really. if they amortize this loss by paying their employees less than that says more about them than it does about anyone pirating from them.

>for content you have purchsed (ie: prime) there is nothing stopping them from giving you a file in case they delist the content (Bandcamp is a good example of a service that offers exactly this).

Sometimes you aren't purchasing the content and are instead getting a license because Amazon doesn't have the contractual right to sell you the content because they are also just licensing it rather than owning it themselves.

>this may be more of a political stance, but most of this content is produced by huge media corporations with deep pockets and histories of nefarious business practices. do i really care if disney gets paid for their content? no not really. if they amortize this loss by paying their employees less than that says more about them than it does about anyone pirating from them.

Disney isn't the content creator I am talking about. I am instead referring to the actual individuals that were hands-on with the creation of the content. One of the primary reasons that HBO Max is removing content is they don't want to pay residuals to the individual artists involved in creating the removed shows. Keeping those shows on the platform means HBO Max would have to literally send out checks to the writers, actors, etc. who have negotiated for those ongoing payments. They would never have gotten those checks at all if you never pay for that content.

I value my time way more than dealing with having a Plex Server set up. I had one from 2012-2020 and before that a Mac Mini running Front Row from 2006-2012. I haven’t had it plugged up in 2 years.

FYI, you can still get 2-day free shipping from Amazon by spending >$35. In my experience, there are very few situations where I really need an item in 2 days but can't bundle in other necessities like toothpaste or toilet paper to pad the cost to get free shipping.

Never left cable, in part because third world problems, but also couldn't justify the extra expense a streaming service meant. Not an avid consumer of TV content anyway, one can get almost as many TVs as they want without extra stuff or extra money and since the signal is through digital the quality is on par with optic fiber.

I'd like to be able to binge a series for a one-time fee without having to subscribe to the monthly service.

Food Network did that with Alton Brown's Good Eats Reloaded in 2018. You could watch it for free if you had a cablevision subscription.

Or you could go to the Food Network site and watch the 1st season like renting a movie.

I wonder if there is a room for a single viewer to bring all these subscription services into one place. You log into this one portal, connect all your streaming services with it and it creates a singular viewer.

As a user I don't want to jump from app to app to find my fav programs.

Perhaps a wishful thinking or a new YC startup?

It's called Pirate Bay :P

oh yeah.. I kinda forgot about that.. :)

At that point they are little more than fancy file servers with some form of shared auth instead of walled gardens which I'm sure will not happen. The main issue being that content hosts lose control over playback which the content owners want tight control over to ensure every penny is extracted.

The only "feature" I would introduce to streaming services like Netflix/Disney+/etc. is make possible to "constantly stream content". When I had cable, I liked to just turn on the TV, and bang! I got content on the screen. Switch channel, and bang! we are now in the middle of a classic movie! Next channel, and bang! in the middle of a great song from the 90s!

Now, of course, I could just use "normal TV" for that. The difference is that "normal TV" doesn't offer a great catalogue like Netflix/Disney+ (to some extent).

More often than not, when I want to sit down and watch something on Netflix/etc. (e.g., some weekends), I do this:

- sit on the sofa

- turn on TV, switch to Netflix (HDMI channel)

- spend 30 to 40 minutes browsing the catalogue to find something decent to watch

- I cannot find anything decent, so I give up and turn off the TV

I like to have "background noise" from time to time, and I would prefer to have background noise coming from the Netflix/Disney+/etc. catalog than the one coming from the "normal TV" (mainly because I live in a country where I'm not fluent in the local language).

“ - I cannot find anything decent, so I give up and turn off the TV”

This is me about 50% of the time. I always hear that there is just so much content. But I would never watch most of it. I’d rather watch YouTube wood working videos all day.

The feature I really want to see is a "marathon mode" for tv shows: play episodes in a random or shuffled order.

> I liked to just turn on the TV, and bang! I got content on the screen.

Netflix gets this, and random content is one button press from the first screen. Kinda neat, even if it's not something I use.

That's why my wife will never move over to streaming. She has a few channels she likes to watch, and knows when her favorite shows are on. She just wants to sit down at that time, switch to the right channel, and watch her show. None of the streamers offer this, from what I can tell.

My wife and I have started traveling again, and when we visit AirBNBs, we've noticed that fewer and fewer offer basic cable with their homes anymore, so we played around with streaming and hate it. Instead of "turn on HGTV at 8PM" it's now:

1. Do some research on the Internet about which streaming service offers HGTV.

2. Sign up for it.

3. Figure out how to log into that streaming service in the AirBNB.

4. Scroll through the streaming's terrible UI to find the name of the show.

5. Decide which episode to watch ("I don't care--I just want to watch whatever is on right now!")

In some AirBNBs you can skip 2 and 3 if the host left the previous occupants logged in. But either way, it's a terrible user experience compared to "sit down and turn on the TV". So, cable still wins in our household even though it's expensive.

Youtube TV and the Hulu TV option both offer exactly that. You go to the Live tab and scroll down to your channel. You can also use an internet-only DVR if you want.

Interesting. Didn't know that. Looked it up and both Youtube's and Hulu's "Live TV" plans cost more than the incremental cost of Cable TV, so we're still back where we started.

Around here it's about the same given my options, but I do like the portability.

I doubt many would subscribe to all services.

Most people I know are 2 to 3.

Would would be interesting though is if you started adding other digital services into that mix. e.g. you tube premium, Spotify and the like.

I know my kids and their friends watch very little TV and movie streaming services, it's either gaming or you tube.

Not really.

1) I get multiple services bundled with other things I already pay for 2) I only need to subscribe to 1 or 2 a month. You can drop one to go to another unless you live by the FOMO 3) Many of these services will die over the next few years. It's unsustainable.

I'd like to pay creators directly for the things I watch and cut out the middle man entirely.

Isn't that what Patreon is for?

Patreon is a middle man. But that aside, there's a limit to the type of content you can get via Patreon, and TV shows / movies are largely on the other side of that line.

And it makes sense, film requires up-front funding and takes a fair bit of time to produce. Even one-creator studios like Adi Shankar only put out one video every year or two.

With cable you can't just choose "I want Disney and Discovery". If those channels are on the most premium subscription, you get 100 channels of useless content. Also, as other commenter pointed out, cable has ads

Anybody try this out? Looks interesting, but might be a pain to use with a family.

https://bobstreamingclub.com/

I just pay for 2-3 streaming services BUT I haven't stopped paying for TV. They don't compete at all to me. Streaming is pretty bad for news and other live non-sports TV.

Yeah the market share war is ending and now it’s about consumer surplus capture from whatever market you’ve established + acquiring/merging with other services.

thehustle went from putting together decent articles to absolute garbage like this low effort graphic. Sure if you purchase all the popular streaming services it will be more expensive than cable. But like cable you will be paying for a lot of content you dont actually watch. That content will be on demand but that doesnt mean you will ever actually watch it.

Cable? Nah, a NAS and torrents is the way to go.

Well the internet is the new tv - full of ads, mediocrity and misinformation. No surprise some form of paid “channels” evolved.

Streaming services are already as bad as the cable days, it seems to me.

Only 2 things you can do in business. Bundling and Unbundling

It is only a problem if you subscribe to all those services.

Once Netflix had a competitor and shows were forced to pick their streaming service it was only a matter of time before Cable 2 Electric Boogaloo happened. And now that markets are saturated and people are stretched thin by the last two years, we'll start seeing the nastier tricks like bringing back ad tiers, and maybe punitive and labyrinthine cancelation policies will be next.

Yeah? The Walmart model works; start low, inflate prices to make up margins as interest/competition falls off.

You expect the owners to adapt?

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