> companies in the streaming space have turned toward nickel-and-diming users at an alarming rate in order to deliver Wall Street its sweet quarterly returns (at any cost).
Or maybe just less stuff will be made! Do we really need (or want) ANOTHER re-interpretation of Robin hood or whatever made for modern times? How many Breaking Bad seasons could you make if Disney killed off two Marvel movies a year? One would hope that if the market for content production shrank, the quality of the content would go up. (maybe thats a misguided hope but still)
I think because there is an overlap between tech and streamers, and also because tech employees are well paid, this philosophy comes up a lot. However, these companies are scum and of course low level employees aren't accruing any of the benefits you mention. These companies are cutting production, cutting quality and raising prices. They would ideally insert adds AND get paid. Also, as I commented in another thread content has grown linearly but it has been fragmented across at least 4 core services while prices double. Thus the real price to an honest consumer is 8x. Sorry but as long as pirating is a better experience than paying this will happen. Demand for TV is extemely elastic and we are outside the bell's curve where demand plummets...
OR...now hear me out...the prices could be reasonable and a bunch of greedy executive middle-men who exploit the artists and other workers could take a smaller cut.
That's not the fault of consumers. That's the fault of greedy overpaid executives.
Executives deserve to have pay slashed and massive executive position layoffs before consumers, artists, or production staff feel any inconvenience. That will never happen, so it's on us consumers to overpay to keep artists fed.
The Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos had a $40M salary in 2022, which is definitely too much money. However, it's a drop in the bucket compared to the company's $31 billion revenue.
So I'm pretty sure the streaming services are charging whatever they can get away with, aka the market equilibrium price, regardless of their executives' salaries.
The title has been changed. It should be edited here to: Streaming TV Prices Double As ‘Enshittification’ Takes Root, Likely Driving Users Back To Piracy
"One interesting wrinkle in this march towards consolidated annoyance is the streaming sector’s interest in driving more users toward ad-based tiers, where profits can continue to skyrocket:"
Ah, but one must remember, we are in the streaming situation we are in now because the consolidation already happened. Netflix was The Streaming Service. But the content providers to Netflix looked at Neflix's profits and said, "Hey, we could have a larger slice of the pie if we ran our own services." So they went off and made their own. And, yes, they discovered they were wrong.
But even if they consolidate again, it's just the nature of a MBA-executive in a content producing company to look over at the consolidated streaming service and say, once again, "Well, my predecessor couldn't make it work last time, but I'm sure that I can get a larger slice of the pie if I just make my own service. And look, customers will flock to my service because according to my numbers we can charge them a mere $9.99 a month whereas the consolidated service is $109.99."
Streaming service consolidation requires all the MBA-executives to humbly submit to the idea that they have no effective choice but to fork over control of the revenues to the consolidated streaming service. Who will, of course, be taking full advantage of their position to squeeze the content providers and push them as hard as they possibly can in the direction of the economics of running their own service making sense again.
I don't know that there's a stable solution to this. If there is I don't think it's the naively obvious consolidation solution.
> Disney’s streaming operation lost $512 million in the most-recent quarter, the company said, bringing total streaming losses since 2019, when Disney+ was introduced, to more than $11 billion. Disney+ lost roughly 11.7 million subscribers worldwide in the three months that ended July 1, for a new total of 146.1 million.
It seems unlikely they were losing money on the Netflix licensing deals.
I'm intensely curious about how Disney has lost $7.5 million per day running Disney+. Could that be a real number? Surely there have to be accounting shenanigans at play... right?
I mean, if they're really losing half of a billion dollars per quarter, they'd need to do something like doubling their subscriber count to even approach breaking even. Is that really the case?
But in general, Netflix was in a broad Silicon Valley sense profitable at the time (in that I don't recall and I'm not going to dig it out, but if they weren't profitable, they were in a growth mode and definitely pulling in revenue and choosing debt-for-growth, which isn't really the exact same thing as straight-up losing money), and the competition is losing billions at a time. That's not a "larger slice of the pie".
Maybe they'll make up for it later, but at the moment I wouldn't bet on all of them managing it. I actually think the recent Hollywood strikes were darkly funny; the writers were striking because they want a bigger slice of what they perceive to be that sweet, sweet streaming money, whereas almost all of the news about the actual streaming services is them losing billions. When the real numbers come out we'll probably hear accusations of more Hollywood accounting, and while there will be some truth to that (inevitably), Hollywood is already reporting huge streaming losses when it is actually against their interests to do so.
At the moment, it is against Disney's interests to admit to losing that much on streaming. The primary effect it has is to tank their stock price.
Once they have to pay out more people based on streaming success, their incentives become more mixed. But at the moment, if anything I'd say their motivation would be to minimize their streaming losses.
See how Disney and other pulled their content away from Netflix. Considering Netflix as existential threat to them, they thought its better to have their own streaming service. And now Disney of all is pulling their content away from their Disney+ because.. wait for it... it is too expensive to put their own content there.
Whereas with Netflix they could have gotten nice stack of money which they forgo dreaming about their own service ruling streaming.
The solution would be one where the user could just "ask the internet" to deliver them the content they're interested in watching, and they paid per-hour.
Of course we're not going to see that solution for many reasons.
Amazon basically provides that right now. If my mom wants to watch some movie or series she checks if it’s on a streaming service then rents/buys it from Amazon.
D+ for a month is a lot cheaper than paying 20$ for The Last Jedi, but they are happy to take 20$ from you.
I'm pretty sure having a single service act a monopoly for all film/video content will not be a net win for consumers going forward. Also the DVD/physical media market is now mostly dead and never coming back. Those rights will not be given away for almost nothing again.
Physical media has been trending towards poorly. But in a changed world where streaming media costs for consumers are doubling, at the same time content on the services are shrinking, it's not clear that this trend will continue. Why wouldn't consumers want own more media as the relative value of streaming options plummets?
I mean, sure, Best Buy evidently thinks this is the right time to exit physical media. They might be right. But "never coming back" seems like an a possibly overly confident prediction at a time when the major substitute causing the decline is on fire?
It's never going to be what it once was. Like physical music, which has a healthy niche vinyl audience so it's not completely dead, I think there's going to be physical media for the diehard fanatics (who want to be able to watch again and again and like collecting).
The previous physical media world existed without ad-supported and subscription based streaming / social media competition for eyeballs and vast majority of people are going to choose that v. buy physical media.
> I don't know that there's a stable solution to this.
I just quietly download copies of media I may want to watch to an archive NAS so that they'll always be available when I want to watch them. I don't try and justify this to myself as a good thing; it's just the pragmatic thing I do because I don't like being at the whims of some publicly traded company or other (I've had WAY too much of that in my life). Most of my friends do the same.
Netflix bought DVDs to ship out as rentals. Content providers had no say (first sale doctrine?).
Netflix then saw that streaming was going to eat the legacy physical-disc market and pivoted.
At this point, streaming was a new revenue stream. Most content provider money was still coming through cable/broadcast. So they said "Sure, we'll license you a bunch of stuff for cheap to do this thing we don't care about."
Streaming's growth led to it overtaking other revenue streams. At this point, content providers looked at the numbers and said "The main channel for eyeballs is getting our content for cheap. We should do something about that."
And then built their own streaming services, e.g. Hulu.
The biggest miss here seems to be by Google and Microsoft. Why, for the love of profit, didn't they say "Hmm, we have data centers, software expertise, and bandwidth... let's build a B2B streaming platform offering for content providers."
The missing piece here is that streaming was not profitable for a very long time, and all the studios and content producers cannibalized their existing profitable businesses to make equally unprofitable deals with Netflix, just to be where all the users were going.
Now that industry is stuck in a situation where they wrecked their own income streams, expectations have been set with customers about what streaming costs, and they are scrambling to figure out how to re-gain that income but no one wants to go back to those pre-streaming prices.
This whole problem was one of the foundational issues behind the recent writer and actor strikes.
The people who write the movies, build the sets and act in the films are in guilds. Surprised there wasn’t a more direct-to-consumer avenue to explore. Maybe they could bootstrap a production and distribution guild.
At the end, it's the startup problem. Would you rather gamble all your money and get all the winnings? Or get a salary regardless of how things turn out?
> The biggest miss here seems to be by Google and Microsoft.
Bear in mind that you’re talking about Ballmer-era mobile’s-no-big-deal Microsoft here, not Nadella-era reimagine-the-company-around-cloud-and-services Microsoft. That kind of smart strategic offering was never going to happen during the time period it would’ve needed to happen.
> Netflix then saw that streaming was going to eat the legacy physical-disc market and pivoted.
Netflix was started with streaming in mind from the outset. It's in the name, for one thing. They didn't pivot, (they only stopped their DVD mailing service this year, I believe,) they just started streaming as soon as the hardware, software, and network could be built up to a point where it was feasible financially.
Netflix was founded in 1997. DVDs were brand new technology and dialup was the primary means of accessing the internet. They didn't begin streaming until a decade after that. They were called Netflix because you could rent movies on the internet.
Netflix was always intending to stream movies via the Internet. it wasn't possible when the company was founded, but streaming was the vision from the outset. they began the dvd-shipping service to build the company and bootstrap their way to the streaming service.
I've read this in multiple places, but I'm not going to do your homework for you.
I don't know that there's a stable solution to this. If there is I don't think it's the naively obvious consolidation solution.
Prevent all exclusivity deals, and force identical pricing on all streaming platforms.
Do this, and we'll have competition for stability, and cost.
And it's 2023 ffs. There should be a backend deal, where you can watch anything ever made, and the streamer can on demand snag from the studio if rare. EG "Please wait 2 minutes, while we snag and cache super-rare content from studio X."
This sort of dynamic arrangement should be so logical, but instead, I have 120TB of storage. All with rare, hard to get media.
Because the people that own it, won't make it easy to consume.. if they'll even keep it available.
> Prevent all exclusivity deals, and force identical pricing on all streaming platforms.
In addition I'd add, force identical pricing for all TV/Movie actors auditioned for same role. All players same salary for same position in team. That will definitely change landscape for sports and entertainment business.
Under capitalism this is the stable solution, the same way there are so many auto makers, essentially making the same 3 or 4 cars/trucks, the same way there's the same PC OEMs making the same 3-4 laptops, desktops, etc. Consolidation, central command, efficiencies of centralization, guiding towards lower prices via these efficiencies, etc isn't capitalism. Maximizing profit by maximizing acceptable price is capitalism. What you're asking for isn't capitalism, but these are capitalist industries, not socialist ones controlled by, say a co-op or the government.
Those MBA's are doing what they were hired for under a capitalist model. Their companies controlled IP's and those IP's are profitable outside of the Netflix umbrella, which ended up being true considering the success of Disney+, Hulu, etc. Of course now you're seeking a equilibrium. Will lower-tier offerings work like some no-name services or services with lesser content like Paramount? Maybe some players won't survive this, but that's also part of this model.
Not to mention nearly all these services opened with predatory pricing. Disney+ was not going to work at $7 a month, but it got people to sign up, maybe cancel with someone else without predatory pricing, and now Disney just needs to boil the frog to higher prices. Under capitalism these anti-consumer tricks are perfectly legal and oddly acceptable. It seems now we're in the stage of the capitalist entrepreneur cycle where predatory pricing is out the door, and everyone is clamoring to get to the price point that works. All the players who would make a streaming service already have, so this little masquerade can stop.
It just may be the case that your average US household can afford $150 in streaming services and everyone is just fighting to get that, which is close to what they paid with cable before streaming with inflation. This is the goal, not "lowering prices for good American families" and other dishonest marketing. If there's a $150 slice to be had per household, then capitalism will extract it. Or more, then people will revolt, cancel, and that will lead to price cuts and maybe some consolidation (say two weak services combine).
I find it amusing that Americans who claim to love capitalism, actually dislike what it does, and instead quietly pine for socialism without knowing the word or concept. "Hey why dont all these inefficient companies just combine already? With strong consumer protections? Under a non-dishonest marketing scheme where efficiencies and where they co-operate deeply to maximize value and lower prices?" That's not the system you live under. Instead companies will fight each other, steal marketshare, raise prices, etc and maybe there's efficiencies there, but often not, but what matters is learning what the consumer can pay, and charging her that exact maximum.
Which is what's happening here. No one but account sharers and college students etc are cancelling. Middle America isn't cancelling Disney or Netflix anytime soon. Maybe paramount or a weaker service, but everyone is in contention for that $150 and they're going to fight for it. It makes no sense under capitalism to consolidate back into a Netflix-like service. Its not going to happen again. Netflix was just capitalism getting there, but now that replicating the Netflix model got easier thanks to the cloud, these big IP holders just made their own.
Imagine asking "God I hate paying to the Disney parks, why don't universal and disney and MGM just make one big park with all their IP run by another profit-seeking entity?" That would be absurd to ask under capitalism, but people are asking this for streaming?
What you are describing isn’t how any functional capitalist system has worked.
Predatory pricing is illegal, and the first sale doctrine is core to how capitalism works. Similarly, current copyright terms are laughably long.
The problem here is not capitalism, it is corruption: The US has laws that will not be enforced, or that have been modified via regulatory capture / bribery.
No true scotsman arguments are pretty unconvincing. What I described is how much of the world economy works in capitalism. It may not be to your ideological liking but this is what capitalism does, and the laws its writes, the social norms it dictates, the types of governments acceptable under it, the way it fights reform, the way it creates incredible inequality, the way it seeks for max allow price, and the politics it creates.
Had waving this with a vague "but but corruption" ignores the forest for the trees here. Not to mention your comment is provably false. Even the least corrupt capitalist states suffer from the exact same mechanisms and their own streaming prices are going up as well.
> I don't know that there's a stable solution to this
A probably-dumb idea that I haven’t seen discussed anywhere: a federation of services (I pay $30/mo to the federation -- if I spend 2/3 of my time on Netflix and 1/3 of my time on Hulu, then Netflix gets $20 and Hulu $10)
I don't believe there is a stable solution. I think what we are witnessing is an industry hitting a wall it can't overcome. I do firmly believe that Hollywood is dying. Their structure just can't work in the world we live in.
Look at music streaming. Music was a crusty old industry rife with nepotism and abuse of artists, where some big companies scooped up all the profit. It was heavily disrupted, but the artists and their agents were free to list their music on any service, no exclusivity required, the services were just conduits that took a small cut. Now, that's mostly the world we live in.
The problem with video is that a single artist with a computer can't usually make a complete season of a TV show or a marvel movie. It cannot be disrupted in the same way because content cannot be produced unless big players are involved, its just too cumbersome and expensive.
But you already see that it's moving to the music model anyway, more people spend time watching tiktok, Instagram and YouTube than they spend watching TV shows and movies. And, with compute becoming cheaper and AI generated this and that, soon it will be possible for a single artist with a good computer to make good content. The key thing here is that video content will move the way music content did, except the incumbent content producers will not make it to the other side, whereas with music they can.
It's really hard to find quality programming on the streaming services. A lot of the original Contant seems to be going for quantity over quality.
I think greed is what kills good programming. Quality cost money, but there never seems to be enough money, and if the program is successful, then the people want more money to keep making it. Studios pushback, people, leave the project, and many of them eventually fail or slowly die.
I think it's just me, but I find 99% of the original content shows on Netflix to be unwatchable. There is some combination of writing/acting/cinematic style that simply doesn't appeal to me.
For Netflix costumes, all characters, no matter what their situation, wear brand-new, perfectly clean clothes. The streaming resolution shows all the perfect polyester threads of the knit without lint, or pills, or pet fur.
This is a minor complaint, but somehow when it registers I notice all the other contradictions and poor writing, suspension of disbelief collapses and I can no longer pay attention.
Sharing this because I wonder if it's a personal quirk or if other people notice this?
Also it makes me desperate to read an interview from someone who works in the costume department for their content factory. What is the process, and why is it so different than other productions?
Most of it seems to be B-tier formulaic. Good enough to not be awful if you're into that genre, but nothing amazing.
Where Netflix pays off for me is their purchases of the rights to foreign shows and films.
That and the occasional mainstream movie or original makes it a decent deal.
I find the sameness of Disney+ to be worse than Netflix, personally. But they have they are anchored by their big movies and Star Wars -- beyond that there is no depth at all.
Have you heard of Viaplay? It's a new streaming service that is European, but mostly Scandinavian, programming. My wife and I are huge fans of Nordic Noir and so far, it's pretty good.
I don't think it is just you. It felt to me that Netflix went down the path of the History Channels alien shows. Cheap garbage, some reality programming mixed it that is easy for couch bingers to enjoy. Nothing wrong with liking it either but none of it feels very high quality to me but I also never enjoyed a lot of the programming on cable networks the past decade.
Yes, I'm dropping Netflix and HBO this month and going back to piracy. They made a mistake and got too greedy and make a subscription I barely paid attention to something that got too expensive and now I will cancel.
The price hikes from both and unacceptable and I don't need to keep paying those prices. Even if they crack down on piracy, which is impossible, I'll still find a better way than paying $20/month for Netflix that I almost never watch.
Cracking down on piracy is totally possible. Pirates winning is not a foregone conclusion.
If you follow the torrentfreak blog you can see that anti-piracy forces really do make big moves. They are capable of passing laws internationally, international enforcement, dictating the technology in our devices.
So far things have worked out in favor of Pirates, but every year another piece of the cage is created, from device attestation, secure enclaves for decryption keys, infiltrating and busting piracy groups, shutting down the latest applications that people use, etc.
Piracy has been going on since the beginning of time and it has never stopped, and never will stop. It will always find a way. A little bit of piracy actually was proven to help copyright holders, so it will never go away.
Well, it depends some people can do piracy because of some principled stand and some other because they have all the time in the world but not much money to pay. For bulk of middle it'd be rather uphill task to have time and motivation for piracy.
> They made a mistake and got too greedy and make a subscription I barely paid attention to something that got too expensive...
That's the thing, in the past I I'd go months without watching anything on Netflix yet still pay them for it, so they were essentially getting a free $8 a month (or whatever) off me during that time.
Now the prices have gone up so much it doesn't make sense to keep subscribed for something I'm barely using, just so I can easily watch a single show that interests me once every three months or so.
The only streaming service that has makes some sense for me to pay for right now is Youtube's, since that's my goto for videos anyway, and it's nice not to have ads for those.
Additionally they also have a bunch of great older movies free to watch movies on Youtube, probably a better selection (of movies I care about) than Netflix right now (saw/rewatched Train to Busan, Little Shop of Horrors, Ghostbusters, It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, Tropic Thunder, Fifth Element, Big Trouble in Little China, Dr. Strangelove, 12 Angry Men, Pee-wee's Big Adventure, The Truman Show, Air Force One, Dirty Work, and Dracula: Dead and Loving It recently).
Precisely. I've unsubscribed from everything years ago after second(?) round of netflix price increasee, on a rare occasion when I want to watch something I just use torrents.
Most of the western content is crap anyway.
Someone recently told me they have put all of their streaming services on their CashApp card while leaving no money in their account and locking their card. They only put in just enough to cover the charge of the service they want, unlock the card, and allow then cover the fee for the service they want to watch for that month.
I've been looking for a way to pause my accounts, but after looking specifically at Netflix, there's no way to do that. Maybe the empty account is the way to go??
Many people pay Apple the 30% upcharge specifically because there is a “cancel this subscription without asking lame questions or making me talk to a human” button in the built-in iOS settings app.
Did anyone honestly think we were going to get out of the old cable world paying less for a better service? This is America, this is capitalism. We're going to drive it right off the cliff (yes, I know there are streaming services based elsewhere, but the big ones are all American)
This is following the exact trajectory that early cable TV did. No ads at first, relatively cheap. Then they figured out we can ratchet up the price, then they figured out not only can we charge to the full extent that the market will bear, we can put ads on it too--just like cable TV did
Growth of subscribers isn't going to get people buying Disney or Warner stock. These aren't all tech companies, and they have to have some way to make money. The idea the ecosystem would generate tons more content on less revenue was always a silly one
We're in a worse net position than we were with cable. Cable commercials can still be trivially skipped. Streaming can give us unskippable ads, whereas a DVR gives us full control of seeking on the video stream.
Oh for sure we're in a worse situation. Even the aggregation of content from multiple vendors into a single menu....we don't have that anymore. It's such a pain to try to find what you want to watch across a half dozen apps
Yeah exactly. I don't want a bunch of different apps/accounts/bills. Cable was a convenience that many people didn't realize.
Of course content costs as much to make as it does and needs to profit a certain amount. There was never any inefficiency that was going to go away and long term pass on benefits to customers. Now we have the extra inefficiency of every media company building out its own infrastructure.
Well, each media company building out a streaming infrastructure in theory should be pretty efficient--it is going to take the same amount of compute and bandwidth from AWS if a hundred million streams are served from one company or six. You do have the overhead of a dev team at each media company, but then we're taking out the theoretical middleman who was taking his cut in the cable company
Although, the cable company is there taking a cut in the form of a broadband bill
The biggest problem with streaming sites is the lack of movies in different regions. For example, if I'm watching Better Call Saul and I do not get all the seasons at once while the rest of the world does, I have no other option but to look at the high seas and immediately without any trouble, get all episodes from all seasons and watch with a simple one click.
The industry just went 6 months without producing any content anyway, right on the heels of 2 years of craziness. There's not going to be much to pay for...
And that's great. At least pirates are good at preserving content (not always, but still). There is a lot of content you can't watch on any service, because it's old or maybe unattractive to them, so there is noone interested in bringing it in.
Agreed. I think piracy is a form of protest at not just the increasing prices but also the dispersal of media amongst too many streaming platforms, each platform wanting your monthly dollars. It all adds up to a hefty monthly fee if you want to access all your favourite shows and they’re dotted all over the place.
The Netflix model worked when it was the only one with all the content; but now each studio wants to repeat the Netflix model and pulled their IP to self host it. It was pure greed, naivety and incompetent foresight on the part of the studio.
Piracy is a service problem, not a pricing problem. I have major doubts that price increases alone drive a significant number of people to piracy.
Maybe a lot of people on this forum, but that doesn’t mean much.
Piracy used to compete with the complete inability to download TV shows and movies and conveniently watch them on a regular TV.
That’s not the world of piracy as it stands today. You have to put significantly more effort into piracy than you do to subscribe (or unsubscribe) from a streaming service.
You can’t just download stuff on BitTorrent without setting up a VPN, and the Usenet stack requires a whole bunch of technical knowledge to setup for yourself. Governments play whack-a-mole with tracker websites.
> Piracy is a service problem, not a pricing problem.
I have a real life example of this from the other day. My friends and I were about to watch an NBA game. I pay for Youtube TV with all the requisite sports packages and my friend had Sling with the corresponding sports packages. We tried both services only to realize that the game was "blacked out" in our area.
So we seeked out a pirate stream and watched the game that way. It's not that we don't want to pay for the service, no we are both more than happy to pay for it, there was simply no way to watch the game outside of a pirate stream.
I get that there are contracts in place that require blackouts and probably other agreements in place that prevent X game from being streamed at Y location. But as a consumer who just wants to watch an NBA game, I really don't give a s**t.
I never understood the rationale behind “We routed your tax dollars away from schools and roads and stuff to build an arena/stadium so you can’t watch this game”
If anything, I’d expect the opposite: If your tax money didn’t directly subsidize one of the teams, then you pay extra.
(Personally, I try my best to just ignore that corner of the industry as much as possible.)
I think you’ve got it backwards: “Piracy is a service problem, not a pricing problem.” is the thing that people on this forum say.
When I was a teenager in the late 00’s, I could totally rent “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” from Blockbuster, but I didn’t have any money. Once I got a job and had money, I started paying for streaming services because they were more convenient, and I’ll likely keep doing so.
But my friends outside of tech who make less money are pissed off about the unbundling and rising prices of streaming services, and I won’t be surprised if some of them switch from paying multiple expensive streaming services to paying for one of the VPNs that advertise on every YouTube video everywhere.
There's a stat that 20% of pirate users are "pay never", so I always challenge the idea that if streaming services had a better proposition then piracy would go away.
Piracy exists because people inherently want to pay as little as possible, it's why people by knock off LV handbags and why people buy cheap TVs from the supermarket which have terrible picture quality.
The other psychological thing is FOMO, or the idea that you have to watch these things, so if you can't justify the expense then you might as well pirate. Ultimately people don't need to watch those shows, but they want to and they just don't want to pay what's being asked.
The frustration is that people think that the streaming services are scalping, when the reality is that streaming is not very profitable. It's hella expensive to get CDNs to deliver video in good quality and it's hella expensive to encode video at good quality.
Outside the US that's not really true. In my country (EU) half the content I want to watch isn't available on streaming services here. It's often bought by cable providers, who want to show it first, then becomes available later. But who wants to wait 6+ months to watch a new TV show? So everyone torrents, as there is no other option.
You used to be able to use a VPN to create a streaming account in the US, but now everyone has cracked down on that, so they are actually making less money from us.
I feel like studios are shooting themselves in the foot with this kind of stuff.
My frustration is that we keep fucking bundling streaming TV shit into things that don't need streaming TV bundles.
Why does my phone plan need to suddenly include streaming services? Why does a retailer's loyalty service need to include a streaming service?
I'm so fatigued by the amount of subscription services and platforms out there and I'm just absolutely bewildered at how normal consumers... accept this.
They accept this because cord cutting pioneers pronounced streaming as a nirvana for all the problems with cable. They did this without ever having the slightest doubt or thought on how things will play out in near future once traditional and streaming companies learn about consumers such heavy dependence on streaming.
Normal consumers who are not obsessed with things behind the scene took the glorious streaming future at its face value.
Phone companies want to make their services look good and differentiate, so they look for any opportunity to do that with the hot properties on the market.
Then streaming services want to increase their reach, so their sales teams will do a deal with as many partners as possible to tap more audiences.
I bought a mini PC (<$100). I started buying blu-rays on FB Marketplace and pawn shops ($.75-$2.00 each). I'm ripping them to a big harddrive (12TB, ~$200). I have Jellyfin installed (Open Source, Free). I bought a digital antenna ($130) and capture device ($200) compatible with Jellyfin. I set up SSL certs and DuckDNS (free). I integrated it with Home Assistant (free).
I can now watch my movie library or live tv from anywhere, and I have all of the bonus features from the disks. It's private!!!! I'm not being tracked. There is no profile anywhere that says "he watches this or that for X amount of time at Y part of the day, and travels to A and B".
I had subscribed to Netflix for over 16 years. Then, when they "cracked down" on my mother accessing it (I had stopped using it myself), I decided that enough was enough.
I don't care if it cost a lot to set up. This is mine, and I will NEVER go back to paying them a subscription.
Lesson: Don't anger the nerds. They can replace you. They will replace you.
At least until they stop selling Blu Rays. Best Buy will stop doing so at the end of this year[1]. Others will probably follow. That same article is saying that Disney is also cutting back on physical media.
I too have gone back to ripping Blu Rays, but it is a pain. Sometimes I buy the blu-ray, then torrent the digital files.
If they'd just sell me a DRM free digital version, I'd be all over it. I'd probably end up paying _more_ than I do in subscriptions knowing I can watch how I want, when I want, for as long as I want.
I spend way more than $15/month on bandcamp for DRM free music (vs Spotify plan), give more money to artists, and cut down on streaming costs of the platforms.
Yeah I did Spotify for a while, but then went back to just buying DRM-free albums instead. I'm probably spending about the same amount, and I choose when I want to spend the money instead of just opening yet another vein for some corporate leech to suck my blood from.
"All songs offered by the iTunes Store come without Digital Rights Management (DRM) protection. These DRM-free songs, called iTunes Plus, have no usage restrictions and feature high-quality, 256 kbps AAC (Advanced Audio Coding) encoding."
The only problem with this is the advent of streaming original content. Netflix, for example, has some really good stuff among the dross that they have produced, and I doubt it'll ever see a physical distribution.
What do you use for a capture device? I'm currently using a Tivo Roamio (with lifetime subscription) and love it, but it's at least 7-8 years old so thinking about what's next. Only real complaint is remote viewing needs a really solid connection and sometimes just doesn't work.
Also a regular Plex user so would like something that integrates with it to handle antenna / live recording.
I got it because it can stream to more than one person simultaneously (although I haven't tested it thoroughly yet).
There's supposedly some issues with the newer encodings and Jellyfin itself (just watch any video on YT that talks about the HD Homerun Flex 4K and Jellyfin), but it's all good for me so far. I don't know if Plex users are affected.
I was able to pick up 41 channels, but I only got a 70 mile antenna, and the big cities are much further away, so I'm happy with it.
I've been hesitant to drop below the provided resolution (1080 for blu-ray), and keep the quality quite high, so a movie is ~8 gigs. But Jellyfin will transcode it on-the-fly if you need a lower quality while streaming, so I wasn't too worried about it.
Do you mind if I ask how large the screen is that you view it on? I'm watching on a 65" tv in my living room, and artifacts are visible during high-action sequences.
Often in Prime I will only have the option to watch the dubbed version (be it French or German) - and a very crappy one at it. I just hate this, especially because I can't even imagine the reason for not serving the original language.
Yo-ho. Yo-ho. No streaming fees for me. You twiddled your thumbs and diddled your sons, while increasing profits yo-ho. You'll never have back those customers you lack, we're done, we're gone. YO HO!
They did it to themselves and I don't feel bad about it at all. Everyone I know is canceling their video streaming subscriptions but nobody is canceling Spotify/Apple subscriptions.
However I'd consider Neil Postman's excellent book "Amusing ourselves to Death" on why Americans (and perhaps many more countries now) are obsessed with entertainment rather than why entertainment is so expensive
The people staying on streaming platforms are going to have a hard time justifying the price hikes in the coming years. The next few years are going to be a drought of new content. Part of me feels these hikes are likely due to both greed and the writers protest.
I feel we are now on abusing users part of "How platforms die".
How many times do we have to say it. It's not about paying. People are happy to pay. It's what you get for the money. It's about the experience.
Go on amazon prime and see what you get for your monthly flat fee. Half the movies you actually want to watch cost extra. Netflix is showing ads now. You have to pay for half a dozen services to get access to all the content you want. Content disappears all the time.
Here's the fundamental problem: people want to stream movies and shows on the internet. But the providers want video on demand cable TV channels. So that's what they're building. From a technical perspective they're the same. From a user experience perspective these are completely different things. From a business perspective, it seems, only the latter is viable. And so they push, and slowly a new reality is born, one where Redbox and Hallmark Channel have a better user experience than streaming services.
The free alternative is I search torrents-csv for a movie, click it and start watching. And if I want I never lose access, just like if I had a DVD. I don't watch all that much TV or movies these days, but I can clearly see what the problems are here, and the entrenched industry leaders either are too detached to see it, or they're trying to pretend it's something else because they don't have a viable business model.
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[ 2.3 ms ] story [ 105 ms ] threadThe artists and staff who worked on the content want to be paid fairly.
It's great that consumers want cheap stuff, but we can't have it both ways.
If we go down this route, either the content will be crap (and AI-generated), or people won't be paid fairly.
From the article
Then, they deleted a bunch of first-party content to get a dubious tax deduction.
Finally, they doubled prices.
I refuse to do do all that so guess what….
Last i checked many of them in US are on strike because they're not being paid fairly and it has nothing to do with piracy.
They aren't having their pay doubled by this. Some executives are getting a bonus.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Writers_Guild_of_America_...
One of their main issues was residuals from streaming.
Executives deserve to have pay slashed and massive executive position layoffs before consumers, artists, or production staff feel any inconvenience. That will never happen, so it's on us consumers to overpay to keep artists fed.
So I'm pretty sure the streaming services are charging whatever they can get away with, aka the market equilibrium price, regardless of their executives' salaries.
As a customer, I might be okay with paying more if there was a transparent effort to cut expenses and a renewed focus on their core business.
Ah, but one must remember, we are in the streaming situation we are in now because the consolidation already happened. Netflix was The Streaming Service. But the content providers to Netflix looked at Neflix's profits and said, "Hey, we could have a larger slice of the pie if we ran our own services." So they went off and made their own. And, yes, they discovered they were wrong.
But even if they consolidate again, it's just the nature of a MBA-executive in a content producing company to look over at the consolidated streaming service and say, once again, "Well, my predecessor couldn't make it work last time, but I'm sure that I can get a larger slice of the pie if I just make my own service. And look, customers will flock to my service because according to my numbers we can charge them a mere $9.99 a month whereas the consolidated service is $109.99."
Streaming service consolidation requires all the MBA-executives to humbly submit to the idea that they have no effective choice but to fork over control of the revenues to the consolidated streaming service. Who will, of course, be taking full advantage of their position to squeeze the content providers and push them as hard as they possibly can in the direction of the economics of running their own service making sense again.
I don't know that there's a stable solution to this. If there is I don't think it's the naively obvious consolidation solution.
> Disney’s streaming operation lost $512 million in the most-recent quarter, the company said, bringing total streaming losses since 2019, when Disney+ was introduced, to more than $11 billion. Disney+ lost roughly 11.7 million subscribers worldwide in the three months that ended July 1, for a new total of 146.1 million.
It seems unlikely they were losing money on the Netflix licensing deals.
I mean, if they're really losing half of a billion dollars per quarter, they'd need to do something like doubling their subscriber count to even approach breaking even. Is that really the case?
It looks like maybe WB is doing OK: https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/war...
But in general, Netflix was in a broad Silicon Valley sense profitable at the time (in that I don't recall and I'm not going to dig it out, but if they weren't profitable, they were in a growth mode and definitely pulling in revenue and choosing debt-for-growth, which isn't really the exact same thing as straight-up losing money), and the competition is losing billions at a time. That's not a "larger slice of the pie".
Maybe they'll make up for it later, but at the moment I wouldn't bet on all of them managing it. I actually think the recent Hollywood strikes were darkly funny; the writers were striking because they want a bigger slice of what they perceive to be that sweet, sweet streaming money, whereas almost all of the news about the actual streaming services is them losing billions. When the real numbers come out we'll probably hear accusations of more Hollywood accounting, and while there will be some truth to that (inevitably), Hollywood is already reporting huge streaming losses when it is actually against their interests to do so.
Though, I suspect this is Hollywood accounting so that they can avoid paying royalties.
Once they have to pay out more people based on streaming success, their incentives become more mixed. But at the moment, if anything I'd say their motivation would be to minimize their streaming losses.
Of course we're not going to see that solution for many reasons.
D+ for a month is a lot cheaper than paying 20$ for The Last Jedi, but they are happy to take 20$ from you.
I thought that £7.99 for D+ was pushing it as there was a limit to the content that we wanted to watch.
Pay for that over multiple months, and you own nothing at the end.
Should have bought the discs instead. At least then I could continue to watch that content at leisure, without spending any more.
I mean, sure, Best Buy evidently thinks this is the right time to exit physical media. They might be right. But "never coming back" seems like an a possibly overly confident prediction at a time when the major substitute causing the decline is on fire?
The previous physical media world existed without ad-supported and subscription based streaming / social media competition for eyeballs and vast majority of people are going to choose that v. buy physical media.
I just quietly download copies of media I may want to watch to an archive NAS so that they'll always be available when I want to watch them. I don't try and justify this to myself as a good thing; it's just the pragmatic thing I do because I don't like being at the whims of some publicly traded company or other (I've had WAY too much of that in my life). Most of my friends do the same.
Netflix bought DVDs to ship out as rentals. Content providers had no say (first sale doctrine?).
Netflix then saw that streaming was going to eat the legacy physical-disc market and pivoted.
At this point, streaming was a new revenue stream. Most content provider money was still coming through cable/broadcast. So they said "Sure, we'll license you a bunch of stuff for cheap to do this thing we don't care about."
Streaming's growth led to it overtaking other revenue streams. At this point, content providers looked at the numbers and said "The main channel for eyeballs is getting our content for cheap. We should do something about that."
And then built their own streaming services, e.g. Hulu.
The biggest miss here seems to be by Google and Microsoft. Why, for the love of profit, didn't they say "Hmm, we have data centers, software expertise, and bandwidth... let's build a B2B streaming platform offering for content providers."
Now that industry is stuck in a situation where they wrecked their own income streams, expectations have been set with customers about what streaming costs, and they are scrambling to figure out how to re-gain that income but no one wants to go back to those pre-streaming prices.
This whole problem was one of the foundational issues behind the recent writer and actor strikes.
I think Netflix, Amazon and Apple were sort of that for a while, with all the deals they were cutting with production companies..
But in the end it was just Meet the new boss, same as the old boss..
At the end, it's the startup problem. Would you rather gamble all your money and get all the winnings? Or get a salary regardless of how things turn out?
Bear in mind that you’re talking about Ballmer-era mobile’s-no-big-deal Microsoft here, not Nadella-era reimagine-the-company-around-cloud-and-services Microsoft. That kind of smart strategic offering was never going to happen during the time period it would’ve needed to happen.
Netflix was started with streaming in mind from the outset. It's in the name, for one thing. They didn't pivot, (they only stopped their DVD mailing service this year, I believe,) they just started streaming as soon as the hardware, software, and network could be built up to a point where it was feasible financially.
Netflix was always intending to stream movies via the Internet. it wasn't possible when the company was founded, but streaming was the vision from the outset. they began the dvd-shipping service to build the company and bootstrap their way to the streaming service.
I've read this in multiple places, but I'm not going to do your homework for you.
Prevent all exclusivity deals, and force identical pricing on all streaming platforms.
Do this, and we'll have competition for stability, and cost.
And it's 2023 ffs. There should be a backend deal, where you can watch anything ever made, and the streamer can on demand snag from the studio if rare. EG "Please wait 2 minutes, while we snag and cache super-rare content from studio X." This sort of dynamic arrangement should be so logical, but instead, I have 120TB of storage. All with rare, hard to get media.
Because the people that own it, won't make it easy to consume.. if they'll even keep it available.
In addition I'd add, force identical pricing for all TV/Movie actors auditioned for same role. All players same salary for same position in team. That will definitely change landscape for sports and entertainment business.
Those MBA's are doing what they were hired for under a capitalist model. Their companies controlled IP's and those IP's are profitable outside of the Netflix umbrella, which ended up being true considering the success of Disney+, Hulu, etc. Of course now you're seeking a equilibrium. Will lower-tier offerings work like some no-name services or services with lesser content like Paramount? Maybe some players won't survive this, but that's also part of this model.
Not to mention nearly all these services opened with predatory pricing. Disney+ was not going to work at $7 a month, but it got people to sign up, maybe cancel with someone else without predatory pricing, and now Disney just needs to boil the frog to higher prices. Under capitalism these anti-consumer tricks are perfectly legal and oddly acceptable. It seems now we're in the stage of the capitalist entrepreneur cycle where predatory pricing is out the door, and everyone is clamoring to get to the price point that works. All the players who would make a streaming service already have, so this little masquerade can stop.
It just may be the case that your average US household can afford $150 in streaming services and everyone is just fighting to get that, which is close to what they paid with cable before streaming with inflation. This is the goal, not "lowering prices for good American families" and other dishonest marketing. If there's a $150 slice to be had per household, then capitalism will extract it. Or more, then people will revolt, cancel, and that will lead to price cuts and maybe some consolidation (say two weak services combine).
I find it amusing that Americans who claim to love capitalism, actually dislike what it does, and instead quietly pine for socialism without knowing the word or concept. "Hey why dont all these inefficient companies just combine already? With strong consumer protections? Under a non-dishonest marketing scheme where efficiencies and where they co-operate deeply to maximize value and lower prices?" That's not the system you live under. Instead companies will fight each other, steal marketshare, raise prices, etc and maybe there's efficiencies there, but often not, but what matters is learning what the consumer can pay, and charging her that exact maximum.
Which is what's happening here. No one but account sharers and college students etc are cancelling. Middle America isn't cancelling Disney or Netflix anytime soon. Maybe paramount or a weaker service, but everyone is in contention for that $150 and they're going to fight for it. It makes no sense under capitalism to consolidate back into a Netflix-like service. Its not going to happen again. Netflix was just capitalism getting there, but now that replicating the Netflix model got easier thanks to the cloud, these big IP holders just made their own.
Imagine asking "God I hate paying to the Disney parks, why don't universal and disney and MGM just make one big park with all their IP run by another profit-seeking entity?" That would be absurd to ask under capitalism, but people are asking this for streaming?
Predatory pricing is illegal, and the first sale doctrine is core to how capitalism works. Similarly, current copyright terms are laughably long.
The problem here is not capitalism, it is corruption: The US has laws that will not be enforced, or that have been modified via regulatory capture / bribery.
Had waving this with a vague "but but corruption" ignores the forest for the trees here. Not to mention your comment is provably false. Even the least corrupt capitalist states suffer from the exact same mechanisms and their own streaming prices are going up as well.
A probably-dumb idea that I haven’t seen discussed anywhere: a federation of services (I pay $30/mo to the federation -- if I spend 2/3 of my time on Netflix and 1/3 of my time on Hulu, then Netflix gets $20 and Hulu $10)
Look at music streaming. Music was a crusty old industry rife with nepotism and abuse of artists, where some big companies scooped up all the profit. It was heavily disrupted, but the artists and their agents were free to list their music on any service, no exclusivity required, the services were just conduits that took a small cut. Now, that's mostly the world we live in.
The problem with video is that a single artist with a computer can't usually make a complete season of a TV show or a marvel movie. It cannot be disrupted in the same way because content cannot be produced unless big players are involved, its just too cumbersome and expensive.
But you already see that it's moving to the music model anyway, more people spend time watching tiktok, Instagram and YouTube than they spend watching TV shows and movies. And, with compute becoming cheaper and AI generated this and that, soon it will be possible for a single artist with a good computer to make good content. The key thing here is that video content will move the way music content did, except the incumbent content producers will not make it to the other side, whereas with music they can.
I think greed is what kills good programming. Quality cost money, but there never seems to be enough money, and if the program is successful, then the people want more money to keep making it. Studios pushback, people, leave the project, and many of them eventually fail or slowly die.
Maybe it's an ego problem..
This is a minor complaint, but somehow when it registers I notice all the other contradictions and poor writing, suspension of disbelief collapses and I can no longer pay attention.
Sharing this because I wonder if it's a personal quirk or if other people notice this?
Also it makes me desperate to read an interview from someone who works in the costume department for their content factory. What is the process, and why is it so different than other productions?
Thanks a lot!
Where Netflix pays off for me is their purchases of the rights to foreign shows and films.
That and the occasional mainstream movie or original makes it a decent deal.
I find the sameness of Disney+ to be worse than Netflix, personally. But they have they are anchored by their big movies and Star Wars -- beyond that there is no depth at all.
Www.ViaPlay.com
The price hikes from both and unacceptable and I don't need to keep paying those prices. Even if they crack down on piracy, which is impossible, I'll still find a better way than paying $20/month for Netflix that I almost never watch.
If you follow the torrentfreak blog you can see that anti-piracy forces really do make big moves. They are capable of passing laws internationally, international enforcement, dictating the technology in our devices.
So far things have worked out in favor of Pirates, but every year another piece of the cage is created, from device attestation, secure enclaves for decryption keys, infiltrating and busting piracy groups, shutting down the latest applications that people use, etc.
That's the thing, in the past I I'd go months without watching anything on Netflix yet still pay them for it, so they were essentially getting a free $8 a month (or whatever) off me during that time.
Now the prices have gone up so much it doesn't make sense to keep subscribed for something I'm barely using, just so I can easily watch a single show that interests me once every three months or so.
The only streaming service that has makes some sense for me to pay for right now is Youtube's, since that's my goto for videos anyway, and it's nice not to have ads for those.
Additionally they also have a bunch of great older movies free to watch movies on Youtube, probably a better selection (of movies I care about) than Netflix right now (saw/rewatched Train to Busan, Little Shop of Horrors, Ghostbusters, It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, Tropic Thunder, Fifth Element, Big Trouble in Little China, Dr. Strangelove, 12 Angry Men, Pee-wee's Big Adventure, The Truman Show, Air Force One, Dirty Work, and Dracula: Dead and Loving It recently).
I've been looking for a way to pause my accounts, but after looking specifically at Netflix, there's no way to do that. Maybe the empty account is the way to go??
People pay Apple the 30% because they have no other choice. Anything else said as an "reason" is just starting the spin cycle.
This is following the exact trajectory that early cable TV did. No ads at first, relatively cheap. Then they figured out we can ratchet up the price, then they figured out not only can we charge to the full extent that the market will bear, we can put ads on it too--just like cable TV did
Growth of subscribers isn't going to get people buying Disney or Warner stock. These aren't all tech companies, and they have to have some way to make money. The idea the ecosystem would generate tons more content on less revenue was always a silly one
A wise man once said, "I'm gonna ride this horse till I can't no more"
Of course content costs as much to make as it does and needs to profit a certain amount. There was never any inefficiency that was going to go away and long term pass on benefits to customers. Now we have the extra inefficiency of every media company building out its own infrastructure.
Although, the cable company is there taking a cut in the form of a broadband bill
The Netflix model worked when it was the only one with all the content; but now each studio wants to repeat the Netflix model and pulled their IP to self host it. It was pure greed, naivety and incompetent foresight on the part of the studio.
Maybe a lot of people on this forum, but that doesn’t mean much.
Piracy used to compete with the complete inability to download TV shows and movies and conveniently watch them on a regular TV.
That’s not the world of piracy as it stands today. You have to put significantly more effort into piracy than you do to subscribe (or unsubscribe) from a streaming service.
You can’t just download stuff on BitTorrent without setting up a VPN, and the Usenet stack requires a whole bunch of technical knowledge to setup for yourself. Governments play whack-a-mole with tracker websites.
I have a real life example of this from the other day. My friends and I were about to watch an NBA game. I pay for Youtube TV with all the requisite sports packages and my friend had Sling with the corresponding sports packages. We tried both services only to realize that the game was "blacked out" in our area.
So we seeked out a pirate stream and watched the game that way. It's not that we don't want to pay for the service, no we are both more than happy to pay for it, there was simply no way to watch the game outside of a pirate stream.
I get that there are contracts in place that require blackouts and probably other agreements in place that prevent X game from being streamed at Y location. But as a consumer who just wants to watch an NBA game, I really don't give a s**t.
If anything, I’d expect the opposite: If your tax money didn’t directly subsidize one of the teams, then you pay extra.
(Personally, I try my best to just ignore that corner of the industry as much as possible.)
When I was a teenager in the late 00’s, I could totally rent “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” from Blockbuster, but I didn’t have any money. Once I got a job and had money, I started paying for streaming services because they were more convenient, and I’ll likely keep doing so.
But my friends outside of tech who make less money are pissed off about the unbundling and rising prices of streaming services, and I won’t be surprised if some of them switch from paying multiple expensive streaming services to paying for one of the VPNs that advertise on every YouTube video everywhere.
Piracy exists because people inherently want to pay as little as possible, it's why people by knock off LV handbags and why people buy cheap TVs from the supermarket which have terrible picture quality.
The other psychological thing is FOMO, or the idea that you have to watch these things, so if you can't justify the expense then you might as well pirate. Ultimately people don't need to watch those shows, but they want to and they just don't want to pay what's being asked.
The frustration is that people think that the streaming services are scalping, when the reality is that streaming is not very profitable. It's hella expensive to get CDNs to deliver video in good quality and it's hella expensive to encode video at good quality.
You used to be able to use a VPN to create a streaming account in the US, but now everyone has cracked down on that, so they are actually making less money from us.
I feel like studios are shooting themselves in the foot with this kind of stuff.
It does seem like they are pushing out a commercial or two every 3-5 minutes, but I haven't ponied up for Premium, yet...
Why does my phone plan need to suddenly include streaming services? Why does a retailer's loyalty service need to include a streaming service?
I'm so fatigued by the amount of subscription services and platforms out there and I'm just absolutely bewildered at how normal consumers... accept this.
Normal consumers who are not obsessed with things behind the scene took the glorious streaming future at its face value.
Then streaming services want to increase their reach, so their sales teams will do a deal with as many partners as possible to tap more audiences.
I gave up. I cancelled my streaming services.
I bought a mini PC (<$100). I started buying blu-rays on FB Marketplace and pawn shops ($.75-$2.00 each). I'm ripping them to a big harddrive (12TB, ~$200). I have Jellyfin installed (Open Source, Free). I bought a digital antenna ($130) and capture device ($200) compatible with Jellyfin. I set up SSL certs and DuckDNS (free). I integrated it with Home Assistant (free).
I can now watch my movie library or live tv from anywhere, and I have all of the bonus features from the disks. It's private!!!! I'm not being tracked. There is no profile anywhere that says "he watches this or that for X amount of time at Y part of the day, and travels to A and B".
I had subscribed to Netflix for over 16 years. Then, when they "cracked down" on my mother accessing it (I had stopped using it myself), I decided that enough was enough.
I don't care if it cost a lot to set up. This is mine, and I will NEVER go back to paying them a subscription.
Lesson: Don't anger the nerds. They can replace you. They will replace you.
[1]: https://www.theverge.com/2023/10/13/23915567/best-buy-discon...
If they'd just sell me a DRM free digital version, I'd be all over it. I'd probably end up paying _more_ than I do in subscriptions knowing I can watch how I want, when I want, for as long as I want.
I spend way more than $15/month on bandcamp for DRM free music (vs Spotify plan), give more money to artists, and cut down on streaming costs of the platforms.
I'm currently just ripping my CDs (flac), but am completely undecided about new purchases.
"All songs offered by the iTunes Store come without Digital Rights Management (DRM) protection. These DRM-free songs, called iTunes Plus, have no usage restrictions and feature high-quality, 256 kbps AAC (Advanced Audio Coding) encoding."
https://support.apple.com/guide/music/intro-to-the-itunes-st...
Also a regular Plex user so would like something that integrates with it to handle antenna / live recording.
I got it because it can stream to more than one person simultaneously (although I haven't tested it thoroughly yet).
There's supposedly some issues with the newer encodings and Jellyfin itself (just watch any video on YT that talks about the HD Homerun Flex 4K and Jellyfin), but it's all good for me so far. I don't know if Plex users are affected.
I was able to pick up 41 channels, but I only got a 70 mile antenna, and the big cities are much further away, so I'm happy with it.
I’ve yet to go all the way with an antenna and capture device, seemingly waiting forever for ATSC 3.0 broadcasts in my area.
Do you mind if I ask how large the screen is that you view it on? I'm watching on a 65" tv in my living room, and artifacts are visible during high-action sequences.
I can pirate a movie/tv show and Plex will automatically grab practically any subtitle language I need.
If I pay for the same content using a stream service its a mixed bag but usually english, chinese and some mix of euro languages.
Yo-ho. Yo-ho. No streaming fees for me.
However I'd consider Neil Postman's excellent book "Amusing ourselves to Death" on why Americans (and perhaps many more countries now) are obsessed with entertainment rather than why entertainment is so expensive
I feel we are now on abusing users part of "How platforms die".
Go on amazon prime and see what you get for your monthly flat fee. Half the movies you actually want to watch cost extra. Netflix is showing ads now. You have to pay for half a dozen services to get access to all the content you want. Content disappears all the time.
Here's the fundamental problem: people want to stream movies and shows on the internet. But the providers want video on demand cable TV channels. So that's what they're building. From a technical perspective they're the same. From a user experience perspective these are completely different things. From a business perspective, it seems, only the latter is viable. And so they push, and slowly a new reality is born, one where Redbox and Hallmark Channel have a better user experience than streaming services.
The free alternative is I search torrents-csv for a movie, click it and start watching. And if I want I never lose access, just like if I had a DVD. I don't watch all that much TV or movies these days, but I can clearly see what the problems are here, and the entrenched industry leaders either are too detached to see it, or they're trying to pretend it's something else because they don't have a viable business model.