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Comment by kornork | Hacker News Reader

Some already punish you by deleting your account history after 9 months.

I'm surprised we haven't seen activation and cancelation fees start to get added.

But this was the whole value add of streaming over cable - the ability to stop paying for channels you don't want to watch - so... duh?

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I think all the streaming providers know adding fees like that is going to lock customers into streaming services, and not necessarily their streaming services. People would be way less likely to subscribe to watch one show if they had to pay fees for either activating or cancelling the subscription.

They'd go back to piracy, as simple as that.

People won't go back to piracy. Most of the people that subscribe to Netflix weren't really pirates. Maybe they had a friend that would burn them a DVD on request, or got the number of some guy who sold bootleg DVDs. They'd probably use these services for a couple of movies a year. Most peoples direct experience with piracy was downloading Metallica songs on limewire when they were 16. It's been a long time since then. There's a whole generation of adults who largely only know TV as it exists today, that is, streaming services.

The ones that were pirates, I never understood why they left. I have yet to pay for a single streaming service in my entire life, or cable, or any of that. This was always going to happen, I saw it coming for years before Netflix even had a viable competitor. And on top of that, the diminishing quality of the content, I've reached a point now that I don't pirate because I don't watch any of it. To be fair to them, my TV watching was always very minimal, I'm an easy guy to alienate. Still, I can't imagine people who know how to pirate actually paying for what passes for entertainment these days.

Also commercials.

How anybody puts up with that is beyond me.

Sometimes I go to YouTube or watch tv at a friend's house. Suddenly a smiling salesman is wagging his junk in my face. You people just accept this?

I don't get it either, when I experience what you talk about I just laugh and sometimes ask my friends how they feel about it. Remember, it's normal to them. It's also amusing to see how TV advertising has evolved (or devolved to be more accurate) since the last time I saw a commercial.

Because Netflix was more convenient than piracy in the golden era of streaming, especially for non-English speaking folks. I think people tend to forget that piracy isn't that much about media preservation at all. It's in fact extremely common for sites to nuke anything non-English as soon as possible.

* Contains non-English dubs? Oi mate, quite the “redundant audio tracks” you've got there, please remove those.

* Only non-English dub? Bloody hell mate, can't have that. Someone please upload a proper release.

* English dub? Go right ahead mate, can't live without that.

So, unless other native language speakers band together to archive and share media in their own little community, they're shit out of luck. Now, of course, also forget about nice pre-made media automation setups since they'll break down as soon as you leave the language of English.

Lol. They create algorithms that are quick to identify what new users are interested in, and then hamper the same algorithms by deleting watch histories.

I'm okay with having a fresh start. I don't want the algorithms knowing a lot about me anyway.

Not showing you your watch history has exactly zero to do with deleting your watch history. Data like that is never deleted, it might be valuable later.

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