6mo ago

Tech's broken promises: Streaming is now just as expensive and confusing as cable. Ubers cost as much as taxis. And the cloud is no longer cheap.

www.businessinsider.com Tech's broken promises: Streaming is now just as expensive and confusing as cable. Ubers cost as much as taxis. And the cloud is no longer cheap.

Some tech is getting pricier and looking a lot like the older services it was supposed to beat. Namely video streaming, ride-hailing, and cloud computing.

Tech's broken promises: Streaming is now just as expensive and confusing as cable. Ubers cost as much as taxis. And the cloud is no longer cheap.

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They've missed AirBNB and the likes.
- That is a lower circle of hell.

Isn't that how silicon valley worked for years even within itself? Run a loss for long enough until you've overtaken the market and then raise prices when the competition has lost their edge.
- That's what China is trying to do with their EVs in other markets right now too as another example.
  
  Yet you still see people grumbling about how restrictions on chinese EV imports are just "American/Western Imperialism", since people apparently don't understand how valueable domestic production is

You might want to look up "Enshitification".
No surprises here...
- It didn't suddenly go that way. It was always the plan. A loss leader.
  
  I think you give the idiots in charge of the corps that can't see beyond a 3 month window of time too much credit. It is just the natural progression of unchecked and unregulated Capitalism that will always lead to this place, regardless of the industry or technology.
  Don't get me wrong, I want to blame them too for their evil plot, but they're too dumb to have contrived the whole narrative.
  Example with the cloud:
  Look over past decades, storing your data in servers has been a thing for decades. Companies have tried time and again to get the concept to stick in various forms, and it always waxed and waned. (Reverse-example right now is AI, since people barely want it, and having it in the cloud is even creepier, manufacturers are trying to make people comfortable with cloud-executed AI queries, and otherwise releasing limited subsets of compute that run locally on the phone.)
  Voice recognition tech like Voice Command (predecessor to Siri for those super young) started on phone-only. Then Siri used to run on the cloud until phones became powerful enough to run more commands locally and they moved more commands to the phone.
  Apple used to synchronize SMS messages between iPhones and other Apple devices in a secure local method on your local WiFI network. Then, as they sold more types of devices, it made it evolutionarily (made up word) necessary to move that logic to the cloud. They probably didn't pre-think that all this would be clouded, they just got there out of need to sell a new toy, and suddenly screw the alleged privacy they purport to worship.
  The reality is, a lot of these cloud techs have been held up by:
  Lack of fast enough Internet bandwidth to make it doable, nobody is going to spend 4 hours a day uploading photos somewhere
  Lack of fast local compute, hilariously, local compute can do most things now, but in the past, the local compute wasn't fast enough to be able to parse/process the data to send to the cloud
  Lack of local storage, again, prepping data for cloud transport and having local caching be performant requires enough throwaway space on the local machine that users don't become frustrated with the latency of remote disks in a datacenter
  Lack of metadata for trust verification like FaceID, fingerprint, GPS geolocation, and other security functions so the company could avoid fraud
  Lack of quality mobile cameras and recording devices making the input content garbage
  Once these problems ended up being solved, it wasn't some visionary with a big plan executing. It was just another Business Weenie being paid 9 figures having the same idea 300 other people had, and it just sticking this time because the technological environment is different.
  (Replace Apple examples with Google, Microsoft, Cisco whoever as necessary.)
- First new word I learned on lemmy a few months back.
  I think of it multiple times a day when browsing my RSS feed
  
  Hell yeah to those websites that still publish RSS feeds, though
- Chokepoint capitalism moreso than enshittification. Both are terms from Cory Doctorow.
- yeah that's basically what this

Turns out making everything into a subscription service doesn't make it better, it just makes it worse.

Surprise we got scammed again.

Cloud was never supposed to be “cheap”. It has always been a utility based model where you pay for how much you use it. The problem is, way too many people used is as a 1:1 replacement without rearchitecting their workloads, so of course it’s gonna be more expensive.
- Not just that, but the big value proposition was supposed be that you wouldn't need sysadmins. In practice, these services are so complex that you need a dedicated skill set to use them, except now it's specific skills for each provider that aren't directly transferable.
  
  Which means you can sell support in addition to the service itself. Mission accomplished!

next up: ai is 100x more expensive than people
- Well it may not be accurate or effective, but at least it's expensive.
  
  Hahaha

Wait till the CFOs start tallying up the GenAI bills...

Uber was always more expensive then a taxi, at least in NYC/London. It was originally marketed as a "luxury" transportation option. The cloud was always ~2x more Operation Expenses with the value proposition that you didn't have any Capital Expenses so if you were a startup it was easier to sell-out and get started with lower risk. Streaming is still cheaper then cable, but it is getting shittier.
- Streaming is still cheaper than cable
  That really depends on where you live. With my current provider here in the Netherlands, I would be paying 12.50 euros extra for TV.
  Netflix standard is already more expensive than that at 13.99.

I poem you.
Stremio, Torrentio, Realdebrid, Shieldtv.
- I use Stremio which has tbs torrentio plugin. But what are the others?
  
  Realdebrid serves torrents instantly from torrentio at 3 bucks a month. Nvidia shieldtv Pro is the best media steamer (*in my opinion which is probably worthless). I had Apple TV's running Stremio, but it was a pain in the butt syncing, so I gave those away.

I've been adding a bunch of torrent-focused features to both lemmy-ui and jerboa this week, the next releases of both should have them.
- Oh that's very exciting!

A primary purpose of technology under capitalism is the violent control of people and the planet. Any actual progress is an unwanted side effect.

capitalism.jpeg

Long live plex, set sails
- Jellyfin FTW! Free for all.

Is there a reasonable explanation for this or is it plain greed? In my book, technology gets always cheaper, but scalability is also always a concern.
- It's just greed. Companies exist to create profit for their shareholders, any social value they produce in the process is strictly incidental.
  
  That's not "greed". It's capitalism.

Clowd was never cheap; it was versatile, and it still is.
Just, please, get over this 'cheap' fallacy. It's expensive as shit, either in direct costs or the labour required to min-max for savings. If you're not regularly bulldozing a massive portion of your stuff or running in two regions for resilience, then you should just look at another idea -- and Don't say Azure, as there's a reason we call that cheap hot-garbage 'unsure'.
- thank you. came to the comments to say exactly this.
  cloud could be cheap, but it's a lot of work, or at least attention. people get disappointed with the costs, paradoxically, because cloud is easy and, as you put, versatile. and often between any two options allowing to do the same thing, the easier one will be more expensive.
  the biggest irony of the cloud is that many companies it seems, just like different species evolved into crabs, discover that all they need is a couple of own servers in a managed hosting environment, a CDN and outlook.
- Indeed.
  Cloud is useful for things like flexibility - you need massive dynamic expansion/contraction of resources? Cloud can do it... But at a cost.
  Or for a startup - you need resources quickly, but don't want to invest in physical hardware because that's a risky investment if the business doesn't survive. But again, it's not cheap.
  Worst of all, each cloud provider has a convoluted system of features, by design, intended to lock you in to their system once you learn it. So you still have staff dedicated to that.
  The problem with cloud is much better explained here (I have no idea who this person is, just found their blog to be well written).

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