Op-ed: Apps promised to free us from ad-supported subscription bundles. Oops!
For a moment, it seemed like the streaming apps were the things that could save us from the hegemony of cable TV—a system where you had to pay for a ton of stuff you didn't want to watch so you could see the handful of things you were actually interested in.
And the CEOs running the companies and making all the money claims it sucks for them too because after their last couple years of shit decisions, they're making slightly less money.
So maybe those shareholders should re-evaulte who their CEOs are?
Maybe get rid of the people who killed the Golden Goose because they wanted to eat it?
If they’re not losing money, shareholders do not care. The end goal of a corporation is to maximize profits for the shareholders within the confines of the law. So until they start actually costing shareholders substantial amounts of money they will do nothing.
In a way it would be really nice if you couldn't sell short term stocks and there were minimum holding periods of 1 to 3 years based on the company metrics. That alone would flip a lot of these quarterly incentives, heck quarterly earnings calls themselves would probably be less frequent. Even if you had to register the sale 6 months in advance would solve a lot in my opinion. But of course again, that would destroy the entire finance industry as we know it.
Discovery's David Zaslav have also indicated that their services were initially priced "too low" in an effort to draw a huge and unendingly expanding subscriber base.
In the early-to-mid 2010s, a subscription to Netflix and Hulu and your friend’s borrowed HBO password could get you access to the vast majority of all the TV that was worth watching.
Netflix had a huge archive of older shows plus a slowly growing library of its buzzy releases like Orange Is the New Black, Jessica Jones, and Stranger Things.
Not content to let Netflix have what looked like a lucrative new market all to itself the companies that made and distributed TV decided one by one as the decade wore on that it was time to create their own apps and generate their own subscription revenue.
Tech companies also decided to jump in, with Amazon Prime Video pushing into expensive scripted dramas and Apple TV+ becoming relevant by dint of throwing untold gobs of money at all kinds of projects.
Netflix announced its first subscriber loss in a decade in early 2022, cratering its stock; despite some recovery, it's still only worth about two-thirds what it was at its peak in late 2021.
Things you never hear people say: I couldn't sleep last night worrying about corporate profit margins because I stole some of it.
It's the least culpable crime in history.
I will forever wonder how these companies actively choose $0/mo over a cut of $XX/mo and everyone in the decision chain thinks it's the right decision.
Because your 0$ per month after dropping them doesn't hurt their bottom line.
Corporations generally weigh the risks and the benefit often wins out and they make more money because there are enough people that either reluctantly cave into the fee increase, forgot about their subscription or just don't care that it's going up.
It's fairly seldom (but seems to be increasing over the years) to see so much backlash that a company walks back on what they were planning to do.
My favorite example of the reverse in recent memory has been Wizards of the Coast essentially going back completely and then some on their unpopular OGL changes after a significant portion of their DnD Beyond members canceled their subscriptions.
Everyone thinks they're better at making business decisions than the financial analysts at major corporations lol
Yeah, these changes suck for the customers (/ex-customers) but do you really think that was a big part of the equation? They do not care about you and the research says they will make more money increasing the cost despite the backlash. And they're almost definitely right.
At this point, the best way to go (besides sailing) is to subscribe to one or two services at a time, cancelling others month-to-month based on what you want to watch.
We need an app that lets you search for content across all platforms and easily cancel and start subscriptions - queueing them up and helping you easily limit the amount you’re paying monthly.
But with these prices, it’s worth doing that manually.
Right now it's smart to cycle through but I wouldn't be surprised if that is the next thing to go.
What I could see happening is they keep raising monthly prices until the math doesn't work out of them. Then they'll introduce a small discount for locking in multiple months (3,6,12mon). Both will continue to rise in price but month to month will be quicker.
Or straight-up contracts. But I think the next step will be more slow-dripping content.
Netflix just pulled an obvious one by splitting the Witcher season 3 to the release half at the end of June and the other at the end of July. They claim it was for “an effective cliffhanger” but it’s clear they just wanted to squeeze one extra payment out of its viewers who aren’t interested in their other content. Paramount meanwhile stretches all of their Star Trek series out across the entire year.
I imagine platforms will start slow-releasing more of their most popular originals. I wouldn’t put it past them to flood social media with spoilers to punish anyone who’s waiting. I also wouldn’t be surprised if we start seeing one episode per month someday.
Each streaming service will release their own aggregator app. Each of these will have a fee associated with them. Each of these will have certain services they don't work with because the lawyers are still fighting over things. Each of these will eventually reduce their search coverage and promote their own content. "You searched for Star Trek, would you like Star Wars instead?"
Even if an open source third party wrote something that did this, companies would change their API pricing or authentication to break it so people don't leave their walled gardens.
Companies are incapable of making a service that doesn't eventually enshittify.
A third party app can just scrape catalogues, and then direct you to the platform’s website through an integrated browser to manage each account. They can push notifications when a subscription is about to be renewed just by remembering when you subscribed, and send reminders to cancel and subscribe to the next service in your queue.
The streaming companies won’t hide their catalogues because that’s how many people find what they want to watch through simple web searches, e.g. “Where to stream Barry” or “when does the new season of x come out?” The app could pull metadata from other sites for graphics and info like many already do.
It wouldn’t be as convenient as flipping a switch which would require proper API and probably login info, but seeing everything and managing it from one place would still help a lot.
I think a bigger danger would be platforms countering by requiring phone calls to cancel, or contracts, or slow-dripping content over months to keep you subscribed (some already do the latter.) IOW continuing to become more like cable.
I am going to need more gaming PCs to keep the family engaged in the post streaming world. Not sure how I am going to do it. Even finding space for them is going to be a challenge.
If companies are so adamant in both raising prices to the point of unaffordability, and making alternate routes to enjoy their art illegal, then what we should collectively do is to just go without them, maybe use that free time and money for something more useful than art.
According to CNN article, in a recent earnings call Bob Iger indicated that ad-supported streaming is a better revenue stream for them than ad-free subscriptions. So they're apparently raising prices on ad-free subscriptions to get people to drop down to ad-supported.
Some people can't stand advertising and will turn off rather than sit through it. I have been ad blocking and ad skipping for 20 years. I am not going to change my habits. The alternative is piracy. I don't want to go back to piracy. It is a superior product in many ways but it isn't sustainable and I want a fair share of my subscriptions to fund creative jobs (not that that is happening). There are a lot of shows I can't stream or buy digitally here that are only available via the black market which is crazy in 2023 when streaming was supposed to fix this. We have companies taking shows off their services to claim tax writeoffs now.
The super rich and powerful think we are livestock to lead to slaughter and often they aren't wrong. The sensible thing is for consumers is to walk away (same for X, Facebook, Reddit and all the other time wasters) and let the whole thing burn down and hope that whatever replaces it learns from the mistakes and greed. Unfortunately I don't think enough will to make a difference.
just ordered a nice OTA antenna so I can watch my local channels, anything else needed will be purchased for exactly 1 month and then cancelled
I've also started looking at smaller streaming services like CuriosityStream and MagellanTV cause I'm more interested in documentaries and such instead of the latest weekly tv dramas
I didn't really like Nebula. I signed up and canceled my subscription before I even finished a single video. Almost everything is available on YouTube for free (albeit with ads if you don't have Youtube Premium) and it just didn't feel like they had enough content to be charging $5/month.
Over the past few months, I’ve canceled my subscriptions to Audible, Disney+, Netflix, and appleTV. I still have Amazon Prime since it’s an annual subscription, but that’s it. It’s been a surprise to realize how much pressure I was feeling to consume all this content and how freeing it felt to just get rid of it all. I have a lot of audiobooks I haven’t gotten around to listening, and books I haven’t read yet. I can still watch stuff on Amazon and ahem other places if I want. But really, there has to be more to life than just endlessly binging tv shows.
Not that it doesn’t suck, but did everyone really think the industry was going to replace a $200/month cable subscription with $30 worth of streaming? Also consider streaming taking over theatre releases too.
It's also still only like less than 60 for five different services. And more then that is a little crazy. The average cable bill is like $83 and people who didn't have basic were paying like $200 as you said. If you wanted to buy all paid streaming services it would be ~$102 with ads, ~140 with ads. It's still cheaper and better than cable, that's why people haven't stopped paying.
Yeah idk what people were thinking. Ads have ALWAYS been around, there were ads on radio, ads on TV and now ads on streaming. Facebook's entire revenue came from selling digital ad space, well not entirely true, 99.999999% of it was ad revenue, the rest were shareholders. YouTube is the one outlier though for some reason, they don't seem to care about people using adblockers, no idea where they're getting their revenue from