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
Sounds like a good time to cancel a subscription and finish the ol’ Steam library
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.
Let me introduce you to the wonderful world of steam deck
Yar har har matey.
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
Can recommend Nebula if you’re interested in explainer Youtube videos (they have other content, though afaik mostly explainers)
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.
Well for the $5/month you get:
- Videos earlier than on Youtube for most (i think) creators (the least valuable of the 3)
- Exclusive bonus videos (this one i like, it varies what the exclusive is, but it is usually as high quality as the rest of the creators content)
- The creators get paid much more (even if you have Youtube Premium). The payout of Nebula is like Spotify where Nebula (the company) takes 30% of money earned and then split the rest to the content creators based on watch time.
These 3 things are what I think make Nebula worth it for me, though it’s fair if you don’t think it’s worth it to you (to each their own). Also, i don’t how long ago you signed up but for me I think there’s a good amount of content on Nebula (at least for the types of videos I watch)
I watch a lot of educational explainer content and I’ve thought about trying nebula. Who do you watch on there that you think makes it worth it?
Cable companies: You could not live with your own failure. Where did that bring you? Back to me.
Watch The Wire!
Since these are turning to shit, are there any good Soap2Day replacements?
Bflicks.something
I’ve never threw away my jolly roger, it’s just safely hidden away
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!
Good bot
Ah, well. There’s always piracy.
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I’m sure Google will find a way to kill that too
Fr, they’re already trying to get rid of adblockers
Time for a google free internet alternative.
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Do what i did and stop watching TV completely. I have watched maybe 10 hours of TV in the past 12 years.
Cool story bro.
I didn’t quite completely quit, but there’s lot of other things to do than watch TV.
But…Ted Lasso…?!
Who’s Ted Lasso? Some sort of cowboy?
Hm…Kind of… 🤔
Some of the greatest television ever made is coming out these days. Fuck that. Just build a piracy machine. Yar.
Yeah, i dont find tv to be worth my time. I always heard people talking about the hottest new thing and was like “meh” i dont care.
Do you watch movies, or are those also a waste of time in your opinion?
Very few. I can count the movies i have seen in the past decade on 1 hand.
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The only reason I even have Hulu is because I pay for Spotify. Otherwise, it’s just not worth the price tag for me.
Spotify, though…raised its price recently, but also gave me new features that I use, so I’m not complaining.
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The one I know for sure is new that I use is an AI DJ feature. It plays music in sets it thinks you’ll like, then lets you know when a new set is starting and what it’ll be like; lets you start a new set manually if you don’t like the type of music being played.
As someone who lived alone, when it came out it was nice to have a friendly voice (sounds like a young, 20-something guy), even though fake, to talk to me about my music.
Clearly I need to do research on them, though; I’m out of the loop on their nastiness.
I’m on a Disney/Hulu bundle for $19.99, that isn’t bad. Hopefully that won’t change. But as soon as Ahsoka is over I plan to cancel.
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I can’t see any removing the ad free option, they’ll just make it more expensive.
This is what happened to cable too I think. My grandpa was saying back in the day cable was what you got to avoid ads
Yeah but sometimes there’s nothing better than a good foie gras
I gave them a chance. They collectively became more & more rapacious & greedy.
Back to sailing the high seas.
Arrr
You know after years and years of using it, the name Radarr makes way more sense now.
The only reason I have Netflix is because I get it through T-Mobile as a last resort. Fuck the state of streaming content. Raise the pirate flag boys!
It sucks for consumers…
It sucks for writers…
It sucks for actors…
It sucks for vfx workers…
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.
The end goal of a corporation is to maximize profits for the shareholders within the confines of the law.
And if the fine is greater than the profit, or they don’t get caught, that’s okay too.
Yep. It’s easier to just break the law, pay the fine, and continue making billions over actually stopping the activity that causes the fine. That’s what happens when it’s almost impossible to hold anyone actually personally responsible force actions of a corporation.
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.
Disney+ (at least in Canada) gives a 15% discount if you pay for a year up-front.
Here’s how that will go:
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.
Apple TV and Plex both do this already.
