Streaming service prices have more than doubled since coming onto market

Of course we're not going to see that solution for many reasons.

I just quietly download copies of media I may want to watch to an archive NAS so that they'll always be available when I want to watch them. I don't try and justify this to myself as a good thing; it's just the pragmatic thing I do because I don't like being at the whims of some publicly traded company or other (I've had WAY too much of that in my life). Most of my friends do the same.

Netflix bought DVDs to ship out as rentals. Content providers had no say (first sale doctrine?).

Netflix then saw that streaming was going to eat the legacy physical-disc market and pivoted.

At this point, streaming was a new revenue stream. Most content provider money was still coming through cable/broadcast. So they said "Sure, we'll license you a bunch of stuff for cheap to do this thing we don't care about."

Streaming's growth led to it overtaking other revenue streams. At this point, content providers looked at the numbers and said "The main channel for eyeballs is getting our content for cheap. We should do something about that."

And then built their own streaming services, e.g. Hulu.

The biggest miss here seems to be by Google and Microsoft. Why, for the love of profit, didn't they say "Hmm, we have data centers, software expertise, and bandwidth... let's build a B2B streaming platform offering for content providers."

Prevent all exclusivity deals, and force identical pricing on all streaming platforms.

Do this, and we'll have competition for stability, and cost.

And it's 2023 ffs. There should be a backend deal, where you can watch anything ever made, and the streamer can on demand snag from the studio if rare. EG "Please wait 2 minutes, while we snag and cache super-rare content from studio X." This sort of dynamic arrangement should be so logical, but instead, I have 120TB of storage. All with rare, hard to get media.

Because the people that own it, won't make it easy to consume.. if they'll even keep it available.

Those MBA's are doing what they were hired for under a capitalist model. Their companies controlled IP's and those IP's are profitable outside of the Netflix umbrella, which ended up being true considering the success of Disney+, Hulu, etc. Of course now you're seeking a equilibrium. Will lower-tier offerings work like some no-name services or services with lesser content like Paramount? Maybe some players won't survive this, but that's also part of this model.

Not to mention nearly all these services opened with predatory pricing. Disney+ was not going to work at $7 a month, but it got people to sign up, maybe cancel with someone else without predatory pricing, and now Disney just needs to boil the frog to higher prices. Under capitalism these anti-consumer tricks are perfectly legal and oddly acceptable. It seems now we're in the stage of the capitalist entrepreneur cycle where predatory pricing is out the door, and everyone is clamoring to get to the price point that works. All the players who would make a streaming service already have, so this little masquerade can stop.

It just may be the case that your average US household can afford $150 in streaming services and everyone is just fighting to get that, which is close to what they paid with cable before streaming with inflation. This is the goal, not "lowering prices for good American families" and other dishonest marketing. If there's a $150 slice to be had per household, then capitalism will extract it. Or more, then people will revolt, cancel, and that will lead to price cuts and maybe some consolidation (say two weak services combine).

I find it amusing that Americans who claim to love capitalism, actually dislike what it does, and instead quietly pine for socialism without knowing the word or concept. "Hey why dont all these inefficient companies just combine already? With strong consumer protections? Under a non-dishonest marketing scheme where efficiencies and where they co-operate deeply to maximize value and lower prices?" That's not the system you live under. Instead companies will fight each other, steal marketshare, raise prices, etc and maybe there's efficiencies there, but often not, but what matters is learning what the consumer can pay, and charging her that exact maximum.

Which is what's happening here. No one but account sharers and college students etc are cancelling. Middle America isn't cancelling Disney or Netflix anytime soon. Maybe paramount or a weaker service, but everyone is in contention for that $150 and they're going to fight for it. It makes no sense under capitalism to consolidate back into a Netflix-like service. Its not going to happen again. Netflix was just capitalism getting there, but now that replicating the Netflix model got easier thanks to the cloud, these big IP holders just made their own.

Imagine asking "God I hate paying to the Disney parks, why don't universal and disney and MGM just make one big park with all their IP run by another profit-seeking entity?" That would be absurd to ask under capitalism, but people are asking this for streaming?

A probably-dumb idea that I haven’t seen discussed anywhere: a federation of services (I pay $30/mo to the federation -- if I spend 2/3 of my time on Netflix and 1/3 of my time on Hulu, then Netflix gets $20 and Hulu $10)

Look at music streaming. Music was a crusty old industry rife with nepotism and abuse of artists, where some big companies scooped up all the profit. It was heavily disrupted, but the artists and their agents were free to list their music on any service, no exclusivity required, the services were just conduits that took a small cut. Now, that's mostly the world we live in.

The problem with video is that a single artist with a computer can't usually make a complete season of a TV show or a marvel movie. It cannot be disrupted in the same way because content cannot be produced unless big players are involved, its just too cumbersome and expensive.

But you already see that it's moving to the music model anyway, more people spend time watching tiktok, Instagram and YouTube than they spend watching TV shows and movies. And, with compute becoming cheaper and AI generated this and that, soon it will be possible for a single artist with a good computer to make good content. The key thing here is that video content will move the way music content did, except the incumbent content producers will not make it to the other side, whereas with music they can.

[1]: https://www.theverge.com/2023/10/13/23915567/best-buy-discon...

Also a regular Plex user so would like something that integrates with it to handle antenna / live recording.

I’ve yet to go all the way with an antenna and capture device, seemingly waiting forever for ATSC 3.0 broadcasts in my area.

I have a real life example of this from the other day. My friends and I were about to watch an NBA game. I pay for Youtube TV with all the requisite sports packages and my friend had Sling with the corresponding sports packages. We tried both services only to realize that the game was "blacked out" in our area.

So we seeked out a pirate stream and watched the game that way. It's not that we don't want to pay for the service, no we are both more than happy to pay for it, there was simply no way to watch the game outside of a pirate stream.

I get that there are contracts in place that require blackouts and probably other agreements in place that prevent X game from being streamed at Y location. But as a consumer who just wants to watch an NBA game, I really don't give a s**t.

When I was a teenager in the late 00’s, I could totally rent “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” from Blockbuster, but I didn’t have any money. Once I got a job and had money, I started paying for streaming services because they were more convenient, and I’ll likely keep doing so.

But my friends outside of tech who make less money are pissed off about the unbundling and rising prices of streaming services, and I won’t be surprised if some of them switch from paying multiple expensive streaming services to paying for one of the VPNs that advertise on every YouTube video everywhere.

Piracy exists because people inherently want to pay as little as possible, it's why people by knock off LV handbags and why people buy cheap TVs from the supermarket which have terrible picture quality.

The other psychological thing is FOMO, or the idea that you have to watch these things, so if you can't justify the expense then you might as well pirate. Ultimately people don't need to watch those shows, but they want to and they just don't want to pay what's being asked.

The frustration is that people think that the streaming services are scalping, when the reality is that streaming is not very profitable. It's hella expensive to get CDNs to deliver video in good quality and it's hella expensive to encode video at good quality.

You used to be able to use a VPN to create a streaming account in the US, but now everyone has cracked down on that, so they are actually making less money from us.

I feel like studios are shooting themselves in the foot with this kind of stuff.

Normal consumers who are not obsessed with things behind the scene took the glorious streaming future at its face value.

Then streaming services want to increase their reach, so their sales teams will do a deal with as many partners as possible to tap more audiences.

If you follow the torrentfreak blog you can see that anti-piracy forces really do make big moves. They are capable of passing laws internationally, international enforcement, dictating the technology in our devices.

So far things have worked out in favor of Pirates, but every year another piece of the cage is created, from device attestation, secure enclaves for decryption keys, infiltrating and busting piracy groups, shutting down the latest applications that people use, etc.

That's the thing, in the past I I'd go months without watching anything on Netflix yet still pay them for it, so they were essentially getting a free $8 a month (or whatever) off me during that time.

Now the prices have gone up so much it doesn't make sense to keep subscribed for something I'm barely using, just so I can easily watch a single show that interests me once every three months or so.

The only streaming service that has makes some sense for me to pay for right now is Youtube's, since that's my goto for videos anyway, and it's nice not to have ads for those.

Additionally they also have a bunch of great older movies free to watch movies on Youtube, probably a better selection (of movies I care about) than Netflix right now (saw/rewatched Train to Busan, Little Shop of Horrors, Ghostbusters, It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, Tropic Thunder, Fifth Element, Big Trouble in Little China, Dr. Strangelove, 12 Angry Men, Pee-wee's Big Adventure, The Truman Show, Air Force One, Dirty Work, and Dracula: Dead and Loving It recently).

The Netflix model worked when it was the only one with all the content; but now each studio wants to repeat the Netflix model and pulled their IP to self host it. It was pure greed, naivety and incompetent foresight on the part of the studio.

A wise man once said, "I'm gonna ride this horse till I can't no more"

I've been looking for a way to pause my accounts, but after looking specifically at Netflix, there's no way to do that. Maybe the empty account is the way to go??

From the article

Then, they deleted a bunch of first-party content to get a dubious tax deduction.

Finally, they doubled prices.

I refuse to do do all that so guess what….

Last i checked many of them in US are on strike because they're not being paid fairly and it has nothing to do with piracy.

They aren't having their pay doubled by this. Some executives are getting a bonus.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Writers_Guild_of_America_...

One of their main issues was residuals from streaming.

Executives deserve to have pay slashed and massive executive position layoffs before consumers, artists, or production staff feel any inconvenience. That will never happen, so it's on us consumers to overpay to keep artists fed.