It’s time to rethink our relationships with streaming services
theverge.com
theverge.com
Streaming has broken the movie business model. What used to be a regular night out experience or a looking forward experience has turned into a lonely one person commonly sad experience.
There's no quality problem that I can see. There are a good number of excellent TV shows lately. Yes, it's extremely hard to create quality show or movie, but this is nothing new. It's always been that way.
>90%+ of what these services produce is not worth watching.
Right; how is this new? It's always been this way, ever since the dawn of television or movies. 90% is generous; the normal law is that 95% of everything is crap.
>It's too hard to sort out the gems.
No, it's not. It's easier than ever before. Now instead of having to ask your coworkers what to watch in the evening, you can read about it on the internet, and you can watch it whenever's convenient for you, instead of 7PM on Wednesdays.
The problem with streaming is that it's become too fragmented. Now, if there's 3 shows you really want to watch, they're all spread across 3 different streaming services, so you need 3 subscriptions, just to watch one show on each. And each show only lasts for 10 episodes for a year. Back in the old days, you just tuned your TV (or later, set your DVR) for channel 13 at the correct time-slot, and you got one episode per week, for 26 weeks. (Then the other 26 weeks, you could watch reruns.)
There’s nothing good on cable anymore. My cousins kids have no idea what a commercial is on TV. I was with them on vacation, turned on the TV to something they would watch and commercial came on. They didn’t know what was happening.
Streaming services are meh now. If there’s something I want to see, I’m accessing it via the old methods of the early 2000s.
Ditching cable was a chore and when I did it almost 20 year ago people thought I was insane. Streaming was easy to drop.
Now I buy what I want digitally and since I’m buying individually I feel each purchase.
Turns out you don’t need 10000 hours of “content” for an such a small time window.
I wonder how misleading this is, I know that I downgraded my plan to add the second location since we only have Netflix for the kids, so they may have "more subscribers" but that isn't the same as more income.
It's not confusing to me. I get pretty much all the content from Netflix/Hulu/Prime/AppleTV/Paramount+/etc. from the same source. Usually at the max resolution/bitrate that my equipment can display.
What's more, I don't have to deal with dark patterns or regular subscription price increases either.
I don't mind having multiple services, we used to have that 10 years ago with Netflix and a couple of the TV networks. The incoherent interface would be better if we could just have Boxee back.