When given choice, people escape them - via netflix or adblock. The same people spend their free time watching youtube reviews, chatting on gear forums, or recommending each other deals on social media; it looks like people genuinely want to learn about good and fairly priced products.
I sincerely hope we’ll find a better way of reaching an audience than forced ads.
I just subscribe to paramount plus again to watch discovery. Seems perfectly reasonable, they give me a program I want (with no product placement from what I can gather - unlike the JJ Abram’s films with their “Budweiser classic”. I don’t think a self sealing stem boot counts), and I give them £8 a month. Everyone is happy.
However you try to double dip and I don’t give you a penny.
Content doesn’t appear effortlessly on all your devices. Some subtitle languages may be missing. Less mainstream content may be of low quality, slow to download or missing too. Plus, you have to plan ahead or wait for the download to finish. At this point I would double check the streaming plan price (as long as there is an ad free tier).
However start putting adverts in that and it’s changes, it’s either “don’t watch at all” or “get from pirate bay (or elsewhere)”, because the product I want isn’t available.
20 years ago I used to get tv from places like irc because it was the only way to get the material. 25 years ago I hd no choice by to wait for the vhs to come out.
It’s a service problem, not a price problem. Sadly it seems companies want to make the service bad, which means they throw the baby out with the bath water.
This sucks for those of us in the middle ground (having taste but not unlimited budgets), as we get shoved into "eat shit and smile" group.
This enshittification part looks especially interesting to me. For that you need a user base. So I guess any rules promoting fair competition would be relevant and pro consumer in this context. If the users can easily migrate to a non-enshittified provider, then all is well.