2y ago

The TV streaming apps broke their promises, and now they’re jacking up prices

arstechnica.com The TV streaming apps broke their promises, and now they’re jacking up prices

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.

Archived version: https://archive.ph/K4EIh

17 comments

The low price was always just a strategy to get people invested. Joke’s on them, I find it easy to switch streaming services now. If all my familiar apps are charging $20 a month, I’ll check out what’s showing on a newfangled app that’s trying to drive up its subscribers with a $5/year promotion.

The time of walled gardens over. Unfurl yer flags, me mateys! String 'em high for the lord's in their towers of iv'ry!
- I wish I could find a way to do streaming on my Xbox. It has turned into the entertainment device for me and my partner; with every streaming service on it the only thing I hook up my computer to the TV for is sports. Guess it’s time to get IPTV.
  
  Plex/Emby/Jellyfish server on a spare PC streaming to the relevant Plex/Emby/Jellyfish app on Xbox is such a better experience to the streaming apps, no ads, clean interface and works even if your internet is down. Add in Sonarr and Radarr with NZBGet or Transmission for automated downloads and you'll never go back.
  
  I consume my media on anything that can access the internet. Even on a stream deck, thanks to Plex. As another user posted, Emby and Jellyfin are alternatives as well.
  Edit: consume not costume

I feel more like the different streaming companies tried to copy Netflix rather than realize they should have copied HBO Max instead.
Don't try to make a ton of content to justify $20 a month, but target a more focused media library that would cost $6 a month but you can charge $10 a month.

At the moment I’m sharing Netflix/Gamepass with a friend who is sharing their Hbo/Hulu. Once they start cracking down on passwords im going to only subscribe when there is something there for me to watch.
Yeah I could resort to piracy but I want them to know why I subscribed and unsubscribed each time.
The day I go back to piracy is when they start drafting up 1/2 year contracts for their services. I don’t think it’s that far honestly . Probably another year or so we’ll see at least one streaming service try it .
- I wonder if they even evaluate cause of unsubscription. A re-subscription simply brings their DAU/MAU (daily-active-users/monthy-active-users) stats up, and maintains the average trend...
  A real message would be to not give them that count....
- Agree with that. That’s my plan as well and I am also expecting them to tie us down for several months at a time in the near future (2024?).

This is the best summary I could come up with:
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.
I'm a bot and I'm open source!

Yep, back to bittorrent it is, (for a while now actually.)

Op-ed: Apps promised to free us from ad-supported subscription bundles. Oops!
I feel like that was never the promise. It was just incidental. When Netflix started out they were mailing people DVDs. When Hulu first started out it was free, but completely ad supported.
When Netflix focused on ad-free subscription streaming I think consumers just asserted that that was the standard they wanted.

This line stands out to me:
TV seems to be settling into something that's not all that different from the cable era we left behind. Except it's even less hospitable for the artists actually making TV.
I don't think the writer intended this, but it sounds like it's setting up the consumers vs. the artists divide. Like, we should have been thankful for what we had and the executives and shareholders, lacking any agency themselves, are now forced to pay less to artists because consumers don't want to pay for content. No one wants to work and no one wants to pay for anything, or so they say. And, yet, the multi-billion dollar industries keep on keeping on.
- And, yet, the multi-billion dollar industries keep on keeping on.
  And as more people refuse to pay and pirate, studios enlist copyright trolls to chase down piracy as an avenue of compensation. That is until a new game-changing service that disrupts the industry (the way Netflix first did by offering a single solution at a reasonable price), followed by copycat services fragmenting access to media at price increases, and the cycle repeats.
  Such is the disgusting routine cycle of capitalism and greed.

Stop spamming this. We don’t need it to be in our feeds 20 times.

17 comments