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Streaming went to shit when everyone made their own. It was good and worth the money when it was one portal with everything available.
Now i am back navigating the stormy high seas, to avoid the treacherous shores of bankruptcy
And the funny thing is, rather than competition driving down prices, they only seem to be competing for who can charge the most while showing more ads.
Streaming infrastructure is expensive, and all these smaller networks that decided to spin up their own didn’t seem to realise that. Prices go up, ad tiers get added because none of them are actually making any money. It’s just quarter after quarter of loss even with substantial revenue due to the fact that producing content, hosting and then scaling globally to make it available to a wide variety of geographic locations just isn’t cost effective. Even Amazon, the lord of cloud compute itself, hasn’t been able to maintain this.
So in this case, competition limits the only way they make money: people subscribing. Greedy bastards.
The fucked thing is that it wouldn’t be such a huge deal but they all want to make money on the current number of customers instead of their potential. People are poorer and poorer and have to choose maybe one or two services at a time at the prices they are.
They would rather get one customer for $15/mo than 4 or 5 customers for $5/mo. And they together created an environment where it’s hard for any one of them to make the first move. Healthy competition only really works when people act in good faith and none of these people are capable of that even when it benefits them.
Business people are truly dumbest creatures on this planet. “What if we make them poor and then charge them a bunch of money? That makes sense, right? And if they get upset we tell them it’s their fault.”
A lot of the infrastructure is provided to ISP’s free for local caching/deployment. Netflix has the Open Connect program to greatly relieve stress on interconnects and backbones.
If memory serves, ISP didn’t like this and would rather profit from fees for the internet traffic. I feel like those fees and licensing fees account for a significant increase in subscription costs.
Yeah, this definitely was not a case of “competition makes everything better.” More a case of every greedy motherfucker wanting to have their own private walled fiefdom making everything worse. Who’s going to be the first to bring up the GabeN quote?
I’m with you, I am proud to say I subscribe to precisely zero streaming services. There’s very little on any of them I actually want anyway, and anything I might actually want to see is readily available… elsewhere.
Yep, and everyone having their own exclusives. I’m neither paying hundreds of bucks for a gazillion streaming services per month, nor am I juggling subscriptions between them like some sort of puzzle game.
Studios shouldn’t be allowed to own the channels. It’s a problem similar to when studios owned the movie theaters.
And all the different interfaces that lack basic functionality… and proper filters.
Not only that, but all of their interfaces are trash. These services should model there UI off of Plex.
When was it ever just one portal with everything available?
Early Netflix was pretty close.
I live in the Uk. We used to have a DNS workaround to give us access to the US Netflix. It had everything we wanted. I stopped torrenting and was happy to just stream box sets & movies.
Roll on 10 years I now have a server with Hetzner that is my own personal Netflix of the high seas. Now rather than giving Netflix / Disney / discovery / Amazon etc a piece of my £35 a month I can curate exactly the shows and movies I want.
They brought this on themselves and I have zero regret.
Getting out of hand? They’ve been out of hand for a while.
Came here to say this.
I switched away from piracy to streaming because they offered a legitimately good value proposition that benefited both the consumer and the producer.
Currently switching back to piracy because these greedy fucks just don’t know when to stop.
It’s cable with extra steps.
To be fair, everything is on-demand now, but it doesn’t change their greediness.
Tv is $999.00 a month? What?
Not sure if the writer had a stronk, or just written by an LLM. It gets rather repetitive later on as well.
Confir. Am stronk
This article could not have been written by a human. It’s like nobody ever reads past the title.
I think he meant that all the streaming subscriptions add up.
I’m assuming it’s unnecessary and out of place sarcasm
This article very much reminds me of this video: https://youtu.be/ObL2xm5NrCk?si=p6_aVvIYaFrVpDML
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/ObL2xm5NrCk?si=p6_aVvIYaFrVpDML
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
I am curious his much it would be if you got top tier of ALL the streaming services. Probably more than most would guess.
The quality also went downhill. In my region Disney+ removed HDR support from all titles and dropped the bitrate to very low on top of that there are so many ads. Video quality is shit now. Even with subscription I’m watching PSA encodes.
Are PSA encodes terrible? The file size is always appealing but I guess there’s a reason they’re small
“Now” Not when the license rights to shows get chopped 15 different ways and you need 15 different streaming services to finish a series? Or when it costs $100 CDN to have 5 streaming services…
My NAS and the *arr apps aren’t getting out of hand.
Only just now? Really?
I can’t afford all these streaming services. I’m basically back to one at a time, churning through them until I run out of things to watch.
I absolutely can afford them, but I’m canceling them purely on principle at this point.
My final straw was watching Fallout, when Amazon said “this program is ad-free thanks to this sponsor” and then not only showed an ad, but didn’t even acknowledge that it was me paying them for the service, like I should be grateful to some stupid company for shoving their advertising in my face when I’m the one giving them my hard-earned money.
I rally enjoyed Fallout! I didn’t see any ads. Might be because I won’t give my money directly to Amazon.
When you say that it sounds like a bad thing. I’m hopping from service to service too.
I don’t get why people think they can have 15 streaming services for the price of one, and get served the $100 million movie of the day.
And the icing on the cake is that many use this as an excuse to pirate that stuff as if they were entitled to being entertained.
Most say it because they remember when Netflix had everything. It was a nice easy one stop shop and they want that again. Maybe it would need to be more extensive, sure, but every company stopped agreeing to license to Netflix because they wanted a larger peace of the pie. Sure they have the right, but people also have the right to not like it.
Honestly, I’m tired of seeing all this great tech get ruined. We could have all these things. But someone has to make money so we don’t get it.
This is getting out of hand, now there are
twosixteen of them!fuck them. I built my own streaming service on my NAS and pirate everything. If there is a consumer friendly service where I can watch everything, I am willing to pay for content again.
Paying is for people who don’t know how to download.
Most content on those services isn’t even worth your time.
I’m still waiting for this shit to come full circle back to how it was with Cable, where someone links the various streaming services together in one convenient app and they tell you you can switch and save!
Stremio/Kodi + a debrid service or your HDDs carefully crafted with content though Arr services and with Plex/Jellyfin, or both.
That setup will be infinitely better than any streaming service.
