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Comment by cwales95 | Hacker News Reader

This has been happening for years with the spawning of all these streaming services.

At one point a lot of content was on Netflix but now it’s been bundled into the owners own streaming platform.

So we’ve effectively went from cable tv to digital streaming freedom and almost back to square one.

Most of those owners are bleeding out, so to stanch the flow they are licensing their content to other companies like...netflix.

It'll end up with a little oligarchy of a small number of streamers and then quality will plummet and ads will be unavoidable.

And pirate bay will once again be the place to go

You both are using future tense for something that's already happening for at least a year now.

It still is, for me. And 1337x.

one company (netflix) delivering the majority of streaming content wasn’t “digital streaming freedom”. you enjoyed the price compared to cable. it went from $100+/mo to $10/mo

and now the price is going back to where it was to get a similar content experience

> similar content experience

You mean 5 channels of shopping, 1 channel for black programming, several in Spanish, 10 news channels all with BREAKING NEWS, sports channels that I don’t watch, kids channels that I don’t want, reruns of Law and Order and COPS, 1 or 2 female-oriented channels like Hallmark, reality TV, cooking and baking TV, America’s Bachelor…

No thanks. I’ll keep my $100/month.

No, you’d still end paying that but in subscriptions to several streaming services and then some extras to rent or buy shows that are not freely available anymore. In the meantime those other channels that a smaller number of people watched just get cancelled.

Unbundling was never going to make watching cheaper unless you limited the shows you watched and were lucky enough that they shows you wanted were available on the same services.

These fragmented "plus" services ultimately led me to stop watching them altogether. Subscribing to each one becomes costly, and I don't find them compelling enough to justify the expense. In fact, I can't even recall the last Star Wars movie I watched.

We've been okay cycling through them every 6 months or so

While I agree that there is ongoing enshittification, I do not think it's fair to say we're back at square one yet or any time soon. With Cable I am forced to buy a single ~$70+ plan with 100s of channels I don't need. With the streamers, at least I can get their ~$20 options independently.

Yep! And you can alternate from month to month, you don't need to get ALL STREAMING SERVICES every single month. Unsubscribing is extremely easy.

Now try to disconnect your cable and reconnect it months after months.

We are nowhere near the cost and the pain of cable

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