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Comment by powerhour | Hacker News Reader

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.

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"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.

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.

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