Netflix is the only one I'm left using but I'll cancel that soon. Not because of the swelling price tag (although that doesn't help) but because of the increasingly diminishing catalogue. I used to watch and re-watch People Just Do Nothing, Fresh Meat, Peep Show and Inbetweeners (judge me) until they were removed. My Watch List is shrinking, not growing. I can't remember the last time they added something to the catalogue I actually cared about (Dahmer, I guess).
I subscribed to Peacock for a while to catch Premier League soccer and have greatly enjoyed other international sports like the Rugby World Cup. I think it's the best deal in sports programming, particularly compared to MLS on Apple TV.
I've been on a sports photography kick these days though and when I go to a game on Friday and maybe two games on Saturday and spend Sunday with Lightroom and DxO I'm not so inclined to roll out of bed to watch an Arsenal game so I'm not sure if I really need to keep Peacock.
Peacock is actually the most promising-looking of all the streaming services to me, but they don't offer it in my country (unlike Netflix, Prime, Disney+, Apple TV etc). Thankfully the Pirate Bay and Plex have never tried to geo block me.
Isn't it all just a classic enshittification curve? Start with low price, no ads. Soon it's higher price if you want to avoid ads. Then it's higher price plus ads and we took away the content you wanted. Then the content you wanted moves to a different platform so you cancel and move over there. Rinse, repeat. For any given provider there might be a few shows that make it the choice of the moment, but when charges start closing in on $40+ / mo per provider, consumers will make choices. Don't get me started on the mess that is sports content.
Ive subbed watched something than canceled (thus paying for a month at a time) 6+ times this year on various streaming services (paramount+, mgm+, appletv+, disney+, etc etc). Wonder if that is skewing data?
If they are giving up TV, what are they doing instead with that time? Volunteering to prepare meals for elderly shut-ins? Or social media doom-scrolling?
I doubt TV watching stats collected by Nielsen were anywhere near as accurately as streaming analytics. Plenty of Americans kept the TV on all day, while they did housework or took care of a child. TV doesn't ask "are you still watching?"
I was a Nielsen household. The way it works is that you tell it which members of the household are watching at a given time, so it can do demographic attribution. You also periodically push a button on a remote to confirm you haven't left the room or stopped watching.
Is that how they do it now? I am old enough to remember when they sent you a crisp 5'er and a little notebook. I was the one who checked the mail at my house (I had a penpal) so I used to be the one who did it. I always filled it up with the most random stuff, though.
I know people that just turn the TV on when they get up or get home. They aren't even paying attention in particular, it's just a habit and source of background noise. It's a bit like the way some people always have music playing.
Cancelling everything but Viki and iQIYI. More than enough great content on those and watching the most. Netflix has a lot of boring tv shows and a lot of their Korean shows are also on Viki [1] or iQ [2]
What happens when you need 5 subscriptions as content is divided by the streaming services? I suppose you could make the analogy to paywalled websites.
Paywalled websites are "leaky" and there's syndication, or we'd need subscriptions to get different news feeds.
It's not as if there were some electronic currency we could send per item, since companies are still really big on bundling. More money for a lot of stuff you don't want. Will that ever change? (oh, the monopoly over content factor)
The companies are market-driven, so what would drive them to a la carte pricing? And wasn't that predicted ages ago?
I think 'cutting the cord', ie., streaming content instead of paying for cable, was supposed to be the driver behind much lower monthly fees. But even 5 years ago, when I added up monthly fees for each streaming service needed to replicate what I had on cable, it was still ridiculously expensive. And it's even worse today with much higher fees. To your point about paywalled websites, the internet isn't the tool it was 20 or even 30 years ago. As others have pointed out, it's the shittification of the web. 20 years ago, I really looked forward to watching HBO on Sunday nights. These days, it's hard to get excited about any content.
I used to shout the name of HBO from the housetops, as they always had something to keep me paying up each month, even if it were only the one show. After the latest acquisition (who is it this week? Warner?), throwing in all the Discover crap, et al., in addition to not having a show we want to watch, we finally just cancelled what used to be HBO streaming. Customer from Day One, and they lost me. The last straw was when I went to go finish the final season of West World and...now I can't. WTF, HBO? Used to be you could watch the entire back catalog (Six Feet Under was, what, 25 years ago?). Now I can't finish the final season of a show that was released in the last couple of years.
Netflix: if T-Mobile didn't pay most of the sub, we'd cancel. We've certainly subscribed to their streaming since the first day, and we were very early to the DVD mailing service. But with little content of interest lately, they are about to lose an early subscriber, too.
We sub to Paramount once a year to binge various Star Treks, then cancel.
The only month-to-month sub we keep is Apple TV+, which is to us the new HBO: they always have at least one show we want to watch. And, like the HBO of old, if it's on Apple TV it's probably good. Might not be to our tastes, but it's probably a good production.
When cable TV came out, there were three compelling improvements over broadcast TV.
The picture was excellent, no interference from over-the-air broadcast conditions.
There were no commercials, naturally, or what would have been the point to begin with?
Plus it was not regulated by the FCC.
It's no surprise without these incentives, people have been looking elsewhere for quite some time.
Then when HBO came out, cable was still in its younger stages.
HBO did not have enough material licensed to fill up a weekly schedule at all. It was only full-length movies to begin with, that's why they called it Home Box Office. They only ran a handful of movies a week, repeated often according to a published schedule. It was pretty cool since you could watch the end of a movie later in the week in case you didn't finish it the first time it showed. Watch the whole thing a few times if you wanted.
It was accepted that HBO was just starting out, and they said eventually they would have full weeks of programming, and that the often-repeating short playlist would eventually be filled with different movies all week or at least one day at a time.
That turned out to be false.
Before they even got to a half-full schedule, additional content then began to appear on an additional new channel called HBO2.
Which you could subscribe to in addition to "regular" HBO.
> Under pressure to improve profitability and avoid having to reacquire users, streamers are trying a range of tactics to retain customers, from launching lower-cost ad-supported tiers of service, to teaming up with rivals on bundled deals and providing discounts or free months of service.
Going back to the cable TV model just as everyone predicted.
Worse, free ad-supported tiers seem like they may be more profitable for them, so there's incentive to raise prices more to see if that can push more people to their free tiers.
I only ever look at prime a couple of times a year and it just keeps getting worse. You used to be able to filter out the shows they demand you pay them even more to see. That option seems to have vanished a while ago, but I found I could still search using terms like "free movies" or "included with prime" and get a list of shows my membership fee had already paid for. A couple weeks ago I tried searching and the results were still full of shows where they wanted more money. Pretty sure I heard somewhere they were going to be adding ads to the shows themselves too.
Between amazon's increasingly limited and ad filled video service, their inability to deliver packages when they say they will, the total lack of quality control in what they sell/ship, and the fact that I'm finding more items that don't even have "free" shipping with prime, I'm about ready to cancel.
Just dropping in to plug physical media. 4k Blu-Ray is always higher quality than streaming, and Blu-Ray almost always is. I'm talking noticeably, obviously better in terms of both picture and sound quality. Also, nobody can take it away from me and I own it outright with no subscriptions or services. I don't even need internet. For anything I want to watch more than once, it's a no-brainer.
I agree. I don’t have the physical space to keep the content I’d like to keep, however, so I don’t buy physical media. What I do have is a lot of pirated BluRay et. al. rips in cloud storage hooked up to Infuse for viewing. Works well. So long as I manage the storage properly and don’t go to platforms that scan for this stuff I shouldn’t lose it.
Many new shows these day never see a release on physical media. Disney is notorious for this with popular series like Star vs the Forces of Evil (2015!), Amphibia, and The Owl House all unavailable for purchase.
I agree that physical media is ideal, but that only works when companies are willing to take our money. There are a growing number of shows you can't see anymore at all, can't see without a streaming service, or can't see uncensored unless you're willing to pirate them.
There was a work around until very recently for that, the Netflix DVD service was still available and working. Giant library and barely any blackouts for shows.
I signed on with netflix at their start and kept the DVD plan right up until the end. Somewhat ironically the first thing I'd do after getting a DVD was create a digital copy, but I agree selection back that couldn't be beat by any streaming service since (with the possible exception of Amazon, if you're willing to pay for the rental of individual shows on top of what you're already paying them monthly for prime)
If the trend of never releasing shows on physical media continues, we'll never get the chance to see something like netflix's DVD service again. Even public library systems will only be able to provide what was previously released on disk. Considering how public libraries are already pushing people to third party e-book services I wouldn't be surprised if they eventually stopped offering physical media to card holders too.
I cancelled Netflix, but I'll go back when the new Stranger Things is out at some point. Then catch up on maybe some other stuff I missed, and cancel again.
I don't understand why people are cancelling their streaming services, the increasing prices, additional advertising, and spreading the content among different services creates a much more traditional viewing experience. This is more reflective of how the artists wanted their work presented, much like the use of vinyl rather than higher quality digital formats.
More seriously, previously I would have said "just buy the stuff you think you'll want to rewatch" but as Sony (it was playstation right?) just demonstrated that is a fiction as well :-/
HistoryHit and similar are amazing. As in - decades ago if you were a history nerd, your choice was to get a PhD and becomes a likely poorly paid professor. The opportunities for direct-to-consumer content via self-publishing and streaming are opening doors for all these niche specialists to make money doing what they love, and I think that is just awesome.
In the last decade or so I’ve kept subscriptions to one or more streaming services at least all of that time. Recently, though, I couldn’t really be bothered to manage the horde of new platforms and accompanying content splits and weird platform content wars. Looking at you Disney. So I went back to piracy because the current situation isn’t worth spending the effort on. Glad, too, because more and more platforms are pushing ads in some capacity and half the reason I used the services is to get away from ads by giving money. Sure, the “lower” tiers may be ad supported for most, but give it a bit of time before they start working them into the regular tiers and start charging more for no ads.
I do pay for yt premium and Apple TV+ since they’re either bundled with Apple One or worth paying for (for now) like YT. The clickbait shitshow is getting worse though and I’m soon to cancel that since I only keep up with a handful of channels.
Netflix was great until everyone else caught up in the streaming war. Everyone else holds the licensing authority and they don’t give Netfli what they want. Plus, Netfix keeps killing their popular original content for reasons that fans don’t understand.
Music on the other hand is so strange and different. I knew the big 4 tried again and again in 2000s to offer form of music store but failed. Since none of the existing large music streaming services (YT. apple, Spotify) license, labels are happy to hand them licensing agreements.
> Netflix was great until everyone else caught up in the streaming war.
Everyone else jumped on the video service bandwagon because they wanted to kill off netflix and bring us back to the days of cable TV. It's slowly working, and netflix being terrible at producing quality content for their library, littering the service with more and more ads, and refusing to give users features they've been asking for, all while jacking up prices is only helping.
Well, you can't truly be sure it's not worth money without actually trying it out for yourself.
For me, I finally got Netflix less than a year ago, free with a T-mobile multi-line cellular plan.
Months later when I did decide to watch one of their shows, it was a much smoother web experience than I had anticipated, always just a few clicks away.
Still not really engaging so I guess it's good it's only going to be a couple hours a month of screen time for that.
One interesting thing about the T-mobile plan is it's only free with a multi-line account, but naturally only one user can be on Netflix at a time.
Apparently to build pressure so customers will add paid Netflix accounts for users on their plan who feel left out.
47 comments
[ 0.11 ms ] story [ 302 ms ] threadI've been on a sports photography kick these days though and when I go to a game on Friday and maybe two games on Saturday and spend Sunday with Lightroom and DxO I'm not so inclined to roll out of bed to watch an Arsenal game so I'm not sure if I really need to keep Peacock.
The amount of time Americans spend watching TV is staggering, and in my opinion, often to their own detriment.
Anyone have the distribution curve for that? Is it like alcohol, where the top 20% of drinkers consume almost all of it?
https://archive.is/j3lg3
>in my opinion, often to their own detriment.
If they are giving up TV, what are they doing instead with that time? Volunteering to prepare meals for elderly shut-ins? Or social media doom-scrolling?
[1] https://www.viki.com [2] https://www.iq.com
Paywalled websites are "leaky" and there's syndication, or we'd need subscriptions to get different news feeds.
It's not as if there were some electronic currency we could send per item, since companies are still really big on bundling. More money for a lot of stuff you don't want. Will that ever change? (oh, the monopoly over content factor)
The companies are market-driven, so what would drive them to a la carte pricing? And wasn't that predicted ages ago?
Apple TV app, Google Play store, Amazon Digital, etc. Plus you can pay for just 1 month.
https://www.reddit.com/r/comics/comments/bcdlbf/hello_old_fr...
Netflix: if T-Mobile didn't pay most of the sub, we'd cancel. We've certainly subscribed to their streaming since the first day, and we were very early to the DVD mailing service. But with little content of interest lately, they are about to lose an early subscriber, too.
We sub to Paramount once a year to binge various Star Treks, then cancel.
The only month-to-month sub we keep is Apple TV+, which is to us the new HBO: they always have at least one show we want to watch. And, like the HBO of old, if it's on Apple TV it's probably good. Might not be to our tastes, but it's probably a good production.
The picture was excellent, no interference from over-the-air broadcast conditions.
There were no commercials, naturally, or what would have been the point to begin with?
Plus it was not regulated by the FCC.
It's no surprise without these incentives, people have been looking elsewhere for quite some time.
Then when HBO came out, cable was still in its younger stages.
HBO did not have enough material licensed to fill up a weekly schedule at all. It was only full-length movies to begin with, that's why they called it Home Box Office. They only ran a handful of movies a week, repeated often according to a published schedule. It was pretty cool since you could watch the end of a movie later in the week in case you didn't finish it the first time it showed. Watch the whole thing a few times if you wanted.
It was accepted that HBO was just starting out, and they said eventually they would have full weeks of programming, and that the often-repeating short playlist would eventually be filled with different movies all week or at least one day at a time.
That turned out to be false.
Before they even got to a half-full schedule, additional content then began to appear on an additional new channel called HBO2.
Which you could subscribe to in addition to "regular" HBO.
Going back to the cable TV model just as everyone predicted.
Between amazon's increasingly limited and ad filled video service, their inability to deliver packages when they say they will, the total lack of quality control in what they sell/ship, and the fact that I'm finding more items that don't even have "free" shipping with prime, I'm about ready to cancel.
I agree that physical media is ideal, but that only works when companies are willing to take our money. There are a growing number of shows you can't see anymore at all, can't see without a streaming service, or can't see uncensored unless you're willing to pirate them.
If the trend of never releasing shows on physical media continues, we'll never get the chance to see something like netflix's DVD service again. Even public library systems will only be able to provide what was previously released on disk. Considering how public libraries are already pushing people to third party e-book services I wouldn't be surprised if they eventually stopped offering physical media to card holders too.
More seriously, previously I would have said "just buy the stuff you think you'll want to rewatch" but as Sony (it was playstation right?) just demonstrated that is a fiction as well :-/
I do pay for yt premium and Apple TV+ since they’re either bundled with Apple One or worth paying for (for now) like YT. The clickbait shitshow is getting worse though and I’m soon to cancel that since I only keep up with a handful of channels.
Music on the other hand is so strange and different. I knew the big 4 tried again and again in 2000s to offer form of music store but failed. Since none of the existing large music streaming services (YT. apple, Spotify) license, labels are happy to hand them licensing agreements.
Everyone else jumped on the video service bandwagon because they wanted to kill off netflix and bring us back to the days of cable TV. It's slowly working, and netflix being terrible at producing quality content for their library, littering the service with more and more ads, and refusing to give users features they've been asking for, all while jacking up prices is only helping.
For me, I finally got Netflix less than a year ago, free with a T-mobile multi-line cellular plan.
Months later when I did decide to watch one of their shows, it was a much smoother web experience than I had anticipated, always just a few clicks away.
Still not really engaging so I guess it's good it's only going to be a couple hours a month of screen time for that.
One interesting thing about the T-mobile plan is it's only free with a multi-line account, but naturally only one user can be on Netflix at a time.
Apparently to build pressure so customers will add paid Netflix accounts for users on their plan who feel left out.