Americans are canceling more of their streaming services
wsj.com
wsj.com
Netflix: if T-Mobile didn't pay most of the sub, we'd cancel. We've certainly subscribed to their streaming since the first day, and we were very early to the DVD mailing service. But with little content of interest lately, they are about to lose an early subscriber, too.
We sub to Paramount once a year to binge various Star Treks, then cancel.
The only month-to-month sub we keep is Apple TV+, which is to us the new HBO: they always have at least one show we want to watch. And, like the HBO of old, if it's on Apple TV it's probably good. Might not be to our tastes, but it's probably a good production.
The picture was excellent, no interference from over-the-air broadcast conditions.
There were no commercials, naturally, or what would have been the point to begin with?
Plus it was not regulated by the FCC.
It's no surprise without these incentives, people have been looking elsewhere for quite some time.
Then when HBO came out, cable was still in its younger stages.
HBO did not have enough material licensed to fill up a weekly schedule at all. It was only full-length movies to begin with, that's why they called it Home Box Office. They only ran a handful of movies a week, repeated often according to a published schedule. It was pretty cool since you could watch the end of a movie later in the week in case you didn't finish it the first time it showed. Watch the whole thing a few times if you wanted.
It was accepted that HBO was just starting out, and they said eventually they would have full weeks of programming, and that the often-repeating short playlist would eventually be filled with different movies all week or at least one day at a time.
That turned out to be false.
Before they even got to a half-full schedule, additional content then began to appear on an additional new channel called HBO2.
Which you could subscribe to in addition to "regular" HBO.
I've been on a sports photography kick these days though and when I go to a game on Friday and maybe two games on Saturday and spend Sunday with Lightroom and DxO I'm not so inclined to roll out of bed to watch an Arsenal game so I'm not sure if I really need to keep Peacock.
Going back to the cable TV model just as everyone predicted.
Between amazon's increasingly limited and ad filled video service, their inability to deliver packages when they say they will, the total lack of quality control in what they sell/ship, and the fact that I'm finding more items that don't even have "free" shipping with prime, I'm about ready to cancel.
Music on the other hand is so strange and different. I knew the big 4 tried again and again in 2000s to offer form of music store but failed. Since none of the existing large music streaming services (YT. apple, Spotify) license, labels are happy to hand them licensing agreements.
Everyone else jumped on the video service bandwagon because they wanted to kill off netflix and bring us back to the days of cable TV. It's slowly working, and netflix being terrible at producing quality content for their library, littering the service with more and more ads, and refusing to give users features they've been asking for, all while jacking up prices is only helping.
I agree that physical media is ideal, but that only works when companies are willing to take our money. There are a growing number of shows you can't see anymore at all, can't see without a streaming service, or can't see uncensored unless you're willing to pirate them.
If the trend of never releasing shows on physical media continues, we'll never get the chance to see something like netflix's DVD service again. Even public library systems will only be able to provide what was previously released on disk. Considering how public libraries are already pushing people to third party e-book services I wouldn't be surprised if they eventually stopped offering physical media to card holders too.
The amount of time Americans spend watching TV is staggering, and in my opinion, often to their own detriment.
Anyone have the distribution curve for that? Is it like alcohol, where the top 20% of drinkers consume almost all of it?
>in my opinion, often to their own detriment.
If they are giving up TV, what are they doing instead with that time? Volunteering to prepare meals for elderly shut-ins? Or social media doom-scrolling?
More seriously, previously I would have said "just buy the stuff you think you'll want to rewatch" but as Sony (it was playstation right?) just demonstrated that is a fiction as well :-/
I do pay for yt premium and Apple TV+ since they’re either bundled with Apple One or worth paying for (for now) like YT. The clickbait shitshow is getting worse though and I’m soon to cancel that since I only keep up with a handful of channels.
For me, I finally got Netflix less than a year ago, free with a T-mobile multi-line cellular plan.
Months later when I did decide to watch one of their shows, it was a much smoother web experience than I had anticipated, always just a few clicks away.
Still not really engaging so I guess it's good it's only going to be a couple hours a month of screen time for that.
One interesting thing about the T-mobile plan is it's only free with a multi-line account, but naturally only one user can be on Netflix at a time.
Apparently to build pressure so customers will add paid Netflix accounts for users on their plan who feel left out.
Paywalled websites are "leaky" and there's syndication, or we'd need subscriptions to get different news feeds.
It's not as if there were some electronic currency we could send per item, since companies are still really big on bundling. More money for a lot of stuff you don't want. Will that ever change? (oh, the monopoly over content factor)
The companies are market-driven, so what would drive them to a la carte pricing? And wasn't that predicted ages ago?
Apple TV app, Google Play store, Amazon Digital, etc. Plus you can pay for just 1 month.
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