It makes sense from the point of view of a giant corporation. If people are paying irrespective of recent price increases and declining quality, why not try to increase profits even further?
Succumb? They're going to be at the forefront of creating it, reducing their expenses and therefore increasing their profits.
If you're saying that people will just watch other variants of video slop posted on youtube or other free sites instead of paying for some sort of curated entertainment service, history indicates otherwise.
Well we are already seeing the effects of it. No one wants to watch a film made with generative models. The sentiment is pretty clear online outside of the aibro sphere.
I would argue we have a duty to do so, as a counter incentive to the network and streaming execs for making it so annoying and inconvenient to watch anything. I do not pay for YT TV w/ NFL Sunday Ticket, but there was one weekend last year where ESPN and Google were fighting, and no NFL games were shown on YT TV.
There have been times where I will pay to "own" instead of rent a tv show I really like, and then a year later that streaming service loses the rights to it, and so do I.
Funnily enough, the high seas remain unsailed around here because content got so formulaic I rarely see the point.
I can't remember the last time that talk about a show in my inner circle made me check it. Season 1 severance maybe? It feels forever ago, it used to be an almost weekly thing.
I don't know how to tell younger people (if you are going the legal route) that we live in a worse that is notably worse than broadcast + cable in many ways.
Every other show is on a different streaming service, which has no incentive to keep it around for more than two seasons unless it's a blockbuster. Oh and content will get vaulted for no good reason.
Same company that also announced that their supposedly "ad-free" plans will now be allowed to include ads and promotional content before and after content.
These streaming services learned nothing from cable are just pushing people back to pirating
Maybe they haven't learned anything. Or maybe they crunched the numbers and decided losing a percentage of users to piracy was worth the risk? The only thing that is crystal clear is the greed - no amount of money/profits will ever be enough.
As a user, probably the best thing to do is get a library card and read books published prior to 1980 or thereabouts. Much of the movies/shows produced these days is not that good anyways, and anything that is good gets canceled after a season or two
For the streaming services, its far easier to negotiate a contract with one advertiser than it is to raise your price for X customers and reach the same revenue increase. If they don't believe they'll lose more customers than they gain revenue, the move is inevitable.
Capitalism requires users to vote with their wallets. And advertising still isn't enough of a deterrent to most users to vote differently. Books and grass don't have ads.
Surprisingly, increasing user hostility is a filter of users' tech savviness and IQ. I doubt most HN dwellers will tolerate price increases or ads or anything like that. They can pirate shit, and they can block ads. They're better off compared to the rest of the population who is not tech-savvy enough or smart enough to bypass these user-hostilities. These companies basically extract revenue out of people who are relatively poor.
This seems backwards. The salaries around here are relatively high, so a marginal increase in monthly entertainment costs wouldn't be noticeable in the first place. People can get self-righteous if they want, but these are entertainment services, not essential goods.
Only speaking for myself, but these streaming services would need to increase costs A LOT to make me invest valuable time replacing them.
It's a big world out there, whatever "here" means.
That last sentence makes me wonder, do you enjoy ads?
I went to a Super Bowl party a while back and the half time show glitched continuously. Random weird glitches for the rest of the time. => note to self: don't pay for this.
The "relatively high" salaries also mean that 20 minutes of ads in a 60 minute session "costs" more. It's not quite as simple as applying my hourly rate to the ads, but it's at least a decent place to start the analysis, and by that metric it doesn't take long before the ads are the dominant cost of the service. It gives me a lot of virtual money to deploy to the task of turning to entertainment that doesn't annoying vast quantities of my time to squeeze out fractions of a penny from me because they can do it in bulk.
If you live in the DMV, you can get a free DC library card. You then get free access to Kanopy - a good streaming service with no ads. That could scratch the streaming itch without having to pay for these expensive services.
The Kanopy model is fascinating. Library members get free views but there are limits as the library has to pay for those views. Our county library system has a Kanopy subscription at each library and county residents are eligible to become members at every location. Kanopy supports adding multiple library cards, so you can boost your limit.
I've been to the DMV and experienced hours long waits, and I thought I might never leave, but I didn't know living at the DMV was a big enough group to warrant a shout out.
Several times I got a free or discounted Disney+ subscription. Every time I watch a few shows on it, then let it go once those promotions ended. It's just not worth the money no matter the price tier, even at older prices (that considering in my country it's already cheaper than in the US), and even less so with any kind of ad thrown with it.
I didn’t realize Disney+ had twice as many subscribers as Hulu. Hulu has been around a lot longer than Disney+. Goes to show the value of the content mix.
Not what everyone wants to hear, but I think there’s more headroom for price increases than the HN crowd likes to admit. Compared to how much people spent on cable or satellite TV, these prices feel like peanuts.
D+ exists outside of the US only: Everywhere else al things owned by Disney that are streaming are in D+, like ABC and FX series. Also, nobody streams more than children that have Moana in the background, and thus watch it 4 times a day. It makes it far stickier.
Hulu is not long for this world anyway, as Disney has been trying to merge them for years, if you believe investor calls. They'll probably be just one streaming service within the year.
"I didn’t realize Disney+ had twice as many subscribers as Hulu. Hulu has been around a lot longer than Disney+. Goes to show the value of the content mix."
Brand awareness is more likely. No one knows wtf a "Hulu" is outside the US, and even parts of the US too (it was never the biggest player).
Parents see "Disney" and sub for a free** babysitter.
**With all these price hikes this dynamic may have shifted.
Eh. Kodi, Torrserver, and Jacktook, Jacktor if you rather stream torrents and not have to deal with storage. Fairly easy to keep track of your shows and view on demand within Kodi.
This but Jellyfin way before Plex, which is always revenue hungry. You bought a lifetime pass? That's cute, try on some advertising unless you disable it.
They'll continue to make anti-consumer choices in order to attempt to drive growth. Jellyfin has done nothing but improve.
What's a reasonable setup for sailing the seas safely?
It's not only the price hikes and the atomization/fragmentation of content, what made me cut the wire was that I couldn't get high quality in my computer unless I used X browser for Y service.
Just a note, sailing the seas safely is fairly easy today but unless you want a more involved setup and only want to keep unwatched or unwatched plus a few "keep forever" shows, the cost of hardware is not going to be much "cheaper".
I have a friend who calculated up their hardware costs (before ram/ssd/hdd-ageddon) and paying for all the streaming services costs came in lower over the span of something like 10+ years. That said, they have the best UI/UX experience I've seen and don't see ads so I'd still count it as a win.
Oh sure, you can use an old laptop (or seedbox-type thing), an external drive, and get pretty far but if you want to replicate streaming services for all the shows you care about, it's not cheap.
Yeah its not a panacea. IMO there is no full turnkey solution that doesnt involve cobbling multiple services together (ie jellyfin, seer, etc). Then you have high cloud prices that, in order to save money, would require a local setup with old hardware to be cost effective.
You shouldnt be spinning up cloud resources to host your media stack. You should be buying used hardware off cycle and cobbling it together. All of which costs time to operationalize it, ie tweaking gpu drivers on linux to get that old hardware working.
It only really makes sense if youre a real enthusiast, or amortize it across your family, friends, etc. But then youre breaking a bunch more laws and as a working professional that just isnt worth the liability for the value provided.
The real answer I think is simply to consume less content.
I don't understand why there isn't something as simple as PopcornTime (open source, nobody owns it, nobody hosts it, you run it and creates a server you can use, simple), which includes TV stuff (like EZTV.it had it ten years ago) and sport streams (even with info from Rojadirecta stuff, "cleaned") now.
It's something that a good weekend with a local abliterated Qwen 3.8 local model could cook.
I have no idea what you're talking about. have plex on my beefy Linux PC and before that was using a Mac with an Intel i7. unless you need to transcode you can use what ever ancient hardware you have, there are people using raspberry pi's for running plex/jellyfin
The additional system load of downloading and subsequently streaming some video isn't particularly intense, even with real-time transcoding.
The same old 6th-gen i7 desktop rig that I do everything else with also does this job quite well. It's not beefy by any modern measure, and I'd have built it and kept it going (and powered on) even if I never had any intention of running these background processes on it.
The only added hardware expense is one external hard drive (redundancy? hah, no -- not for this). This cost a couple of hundred bucks a several years ago, which is the equivalent of surprisingly few trips to Taco Bell.
One certainly can spend a quite lot on nice kit to accomplish any goal, but that's not an indication of any necessity to do so.
I spent my free time over the last two days setting up a Ubuntu server on an old mbp with arr stack and it’s up and running now without any issues. Great time
Investment imo
I use prowlarr and radarr in my hone proxmox setup. I have a container locked behind a VPN running my torrent client and everything pipes into my Jellyfin server.
My non-techie partner honestly uses it way more than I do because it's just so damn easy. You punch a request into radarr and after some time it magically appears in Jellyfin.
It was a bear to set up the first time, but smooth sailing after that
Did you buy a boat with the money not being spent on media, or using that money to pay for renting? Either way, it made me think of the old saying, "the two happiest day's in a man's life are the day he buys a boat and the day he sells that boat".
I'm seeing "average" people adopt piracy at astonishing levels because of these decisions. I went over to a friend's house the other day and his relative sent him one of those Android TV devices with access to all the pirated content you could ever want. I would never have imagined him to be ok with it. This has been happening in my social circle at an accelerating rate. People that would have scolded me for doing the same 10 years ago are now doing it.
The unfortunate reality is this is why we have residential botnets. Your friend is probably paying for his free TV by attacking things over the Internet.
You don't need a special (often compromised) device, and usually there is a service you will have to pay for as well.
Search up IPTV on any social media and you'll start getting loads of ads for these services, for like $25 a month for a trillion channels, a catalog of VOD content, etc. You can use a simple client like Chillio on Apple TV as the client and have a safe stack.
I subscribed to one. And just to be clear, I subscribe to and pay $ for every streaming service available in Canada, and a maxed out cable plan. My cable company (Cogeco) serves up some pixelized dogshit low bitrate/obsolete codec feed for both NFL football and F1 racing. Via some dodgy IPTV provider (there are a million names and resellers but they're all ostensibly the front for the same service) I get amazingly crisp, excellent visuals, better accessibility, etc. It's crazy. Technically and usably an infinitely better option, at a fraction of the price.
"Oh but you might fund organized crime!" -- yeah, when most media empires are oligarchs pushing their politics and kleptocracy on people, I have more faith in those organized criminals than I do garbage like the Ellison family.
> Via some dodgy IPTV provider (there are a million names and resellers but they're all ostensibly the front for the same service) I get amazingly crisp, excellent visuals, better accessibility, etc. It's crazy. Technically and usably an infinitely better option, at a fraction of the price.
Your dogshit provider must be better than the one I was using. Live sports was usually good, but sometimes very flaky. Video on demand files were served with uniform rate limiting that was too low to handle scenes with people on horseback riding through confetti parades. Also, no bandwidth adaptation (which wasn't a real issue for me, but is needed for many users). Captioning was very weird... IIRC I would have to either have no captions or all captions, there was no option for captions only for non-english you're supposed to read to follow the plot.
I went through a few IPTV providers, but the channel list and services seemed identical across them, and I am pretty certain they are largely just fronts on the same network/backend.
But the quality across many channels were extraordinary (for some reason primarily the European channels were top tier - Sky, BBC, France channels, etc), and far above anything my cable co offered. Skysports F1 was 4K and just perfection, and just obliterated the trash TSN feed of F1. NFL games were spotless, where they are an overcompressed pixelated mess on my cable cos high cost feed, which I am paying approximately 8x as much for.
There was a lot of junk as well. Like a lot of the VOD content was a mess (a lot of it would "compress" the content by dumping frames, which is just crazy. A 12FPS movie is just ridiculous).
I guess mileage varies.
As one aside, I notice that Chillio that I mentioned before actually got removed from the app store, apparently because they use a plug-in system that Apple forbids. So that recommendation might not hold. It was far and away the best IPTV client in my experience, and hopefully that gets sorted.
I mean, you really don't. They are mostly infected with malware, it will probably try compromise as many devices on your network as it can to make them part of a botnet and try to access as many files as it can.
The pre-stuffed, pre-configured, plug-n-play, extra-spooky-box method described in the article is just one of many methods.
Someone I know buys cheap "IPTV" service by the year. Access is paid for by buying potted plants or something else that looks random on some web store and is delivered in the form of a .m3u playlist that hides behind a username/password pair.
The usual way they use it is with slimey-feeling closed-source sideloaded apps on mass-market streaming devices from such unknown companies as Amazon and Google, or directly on a smart TV itself. Wherein: Despite the dingy back-alley ambience of the subscription and installation processes, the UI is snappy and responsive in use.
And the slimey software is also avoidable. Since it's all based around a playlist that is hiding behind basic http auth, it also works with open-source projects like Dispatcharr, which in turn can emulate an HDHomeRun network-connected OTA TV tuner. This combination can then present new possibilities, like live streaming TV for Plex users.
(It'd all be very interesting to me if I had any motivation to sit down and absorb live television like a slug, but I didn't do much of that even when I worked for a cable company and got the uber-premium package for free as a perk.)
> People that would have scolded me for doing the same 10 years ago are now doing it.
I can see how they could tell themselves it's not the same. This is a device that just shows a library of content that they can watch. There's no needing to know that P2P, warez, torrents, seeding, etc even exist let alone know what they are or how they work. They couldn't sell these devices if it was illegal, right?
This will be what makes companies start pursuing legal action. Once it's not mostly people in poor countries who are pirating, companies will try to reclaim that lost revenue. I'm not sure if they can do anything about torrenting, but I would be surprised if TV devices like what you mentioned are still available in a couple years.
I'm looking now to cancel my Netflix/Apple TV/Disney+/Prime subscriptions and have 1 at a given time for a few weeks/months while watching some particular series.
My family has been assembling a DVD collection for the past couple years and it's really starting to pay off. Wow, I own this media and can play it whenever I want without ads, and fear of it randomly disappearing or having scenes cut out of it? It really feels like magic.
I've got a record player coming tomorrow. My song streaming service of choice keeps jacking up prices and now feeds me AI slop; it's time for a change.
I suspect kids growing up right now will experience a renaissance of physical media from fed-up parents.
This is Cancerpitalism, more money for the leachholders, extract more from customers, more...
Capitalism idea is that you have a free market, and several companies offer high quality products and services, then people vote with their wallet; in order for you to compete and become the "best seller" the dominant implementation you have to offer a best product/service...
Cancerpitalism is I have trillion of dollars, so you start acquiring other services and once there are less options you can start decreasing the quality of the service because there is nowhere else to go... the more concentrated the worst it is.
The more companies there are the more work there is, break disney into disney and disney park services and disney television/network services and get out marvel... and get out whatever else has been ingested by it..., you need HR, you need management, you need people working on the products those companies, you need buildings, someone has to fill all those positions, more offers, more diversity...
Growth for growth sake is cancer and cancer kills.
I'm saying capitalism always had anti-monopolies, they were anti-merger... but once all of the companies are held by the ultra wealthy you can start decreasing quality... because all of them do it at the same time and there is nowhere else to go...
It happens with the hedge funds having all the pet veterinaries... all the hospitals... that "emergency clinic" that is promoted as "150$ top visit" in your healthplan is never 150$... more like 1200$... 500$ for the veterinary to look at your pet 15 minutes... ads on your new car screen... ads before the ads...
And then just as cancer it extends... google has internet services.. the browser, email, search, ads, the operative system
Facebook has almost all the "social" networks
News are served/comming from just a couple of pockets...
If you are "free" to decide but the only 2 options are set by someone else... are you really free?
Oh yes.. try to get into the market... lobby takes care of setting "rules"/labs/criterias that cost a couple millions to pass... of course ran/evaluated by the big ones...
I already cancelled Netflix and HBO, I guess Hulu is next. It feels almost like a yearly 10-20% increase across streaming services and the content hasn’t improved. There’s just more crap to filter out. I think I may just be happy with Criterion only once I’m done with a couple of shows on Apple TV.
I use the language immersion for learning languages. And with the streaming platforms you can't get cc captions in the original language. There is many foreign media thay is on the platform but not on your country, there is extension that are useful for making flashcards or small clips, but for some reason you can't watch whatever you want to watch in the original resolution if you're on the browser and if you use linux they dare to limit you to 720p. Compare this to just downloading anything you want and using mpv with any extension you want that does whatever you want it to do.
Imagine my dismay to find out Crunchyroll does not offer Japanese subtitles for anything.
Netflix is a little better in this regard, but Neflix in particular goes out of its way to obnoxiously clutter the screen when I pause...even though I paused specifically to try and read something on screen or mine vocabulary from subtitles.
97 comments
[ 0.17 ms ] story [ 9.7 ms ] threadAt some point the customer base is going to shrink, especially when the AI slop hits the market, right?
If you're saying that people will just watch other variants of video slop posted on youtube or other free sites instead of paying for some sort of curated entertainment service, history indicates otherwise.
BTW here's the Disney 1937-2008 megatorrent, including lots of movies they "hold in the vault" (aka wont republish)
https: SLASH SLASH thepiratebay DOT org SLASH description.php?id=5657801
We are back to cable pricing, but shows and movies are all over the place and now we need multiple apps to track us.
Any good starting point for a fisherman not interested in stashing fish but just capturing and releasing?
There have been times where I will pay to "own" instead of rent a tv show I really like, and then a year later that streaming service loses the rights to it, and so do I.
I can't remember the last time that talk about a show in my inner circle made me check it. Season 1 severance maybe? It feels forever ago, it used to be an almost weekly thing.
Every other show is on a different streaming service, which has no incentive to keep it around for more than two seasons unless it's a blockbuster. Oh and content will get vaulted for no good reason.
These streaming services learned nothing from cable are just pushing people back to pirating
There is constant pressure towards enshittification.
As a user, probably the best thing to do is get a library card and read books published prior to 1980 or thereabouts. Much of the movies/shows produced these days is not that good anyways, and anything that is good gets canceled after a season or two
Capitalism requires users to vote with their wallets. And advertising still isn't enough of a deterrent to most users to vote differently. Books and grass don't have ads.
Only speaking for myself, but these streaming services would need to increase costs A LOT to make me invest valuable time replacing them.
It's a big world out there, whatever "here" means.
That last sentence makes me wonder, do you enjoy ads?
I went to a Super Bowl party a while back and the half time show glitched continuously. Random weird glitches for the rest of the time. => note to self: don't pay for this.
Someone like Nathan Fielder would have the balls for this.
I've been to the DMV and experienced hours long waits, and I thought I might never leave, but I didn't know living at the DMV was a big enough group to warrant a shout out.
(is this the level of discourse we're going for here?)
Not what everyone wants to hear, but I think there’s more headroom for price increases than the HN crowd likes to admit. Compared to how much people spent on cable or satellite TV, these prices feel like peanuts.
Hulu is not long for this world anyway, as Disney has been trying to merge them for years, if you believe investor calls. They'll probably be just one streaming service within the year.
Brand awareness is more likely. No one knows wtf a "Hulu" is outside the US, and even parts of the US too (it was never the biggest player).
Parents see "Disney" and sub for a free** babysitter.
**With all these price hikes this dynamic may have shifted.
They'll continue to make anti-consumer choices in order to attempt to drive growth. Jellyfin has done nothing but improve.
It's not only the price hikes and the atomization/fragmentation of content, what made me cut the wire was that I couldn't get high quality in my computer unless I used X browser for Y service.
I have a friend who calculated up their hardware costs (before ram/ssd/hdd-ageddon) and paying for all the streaming services costs came in lower over the span of something like 10+ years. That said, they have the best UI/UX experience I've seen and don't see ads so I'd still count it as a win.
Oh sure, you can use an old laptop (or seedbox-type thing), an external drive, and get pretty far but if you want to replicate streaming services for all the shows you care about, it's not cheap.
You shouldnt be spinning up cloud resources to host your media stack. You should be buying used hardware off cycle and cobbling it together. All of which costs time to operationalize it, ie tweaking gpu drivers on linux to get that old hardware working.
It only really makes sense if youre a real enthusiast, or amortize it across your family, friends, etc. But then youre breaking a bunch more laws and as a working professional that just isnt worth the liability for the value provided.
The real answer I think is simply to consume less content.
It's something that a good weekend with a local abliterated Qwen 3.8 local model could cook.
The same old 6th-gen i7 desktop rig that I do everything else with also does this job quite well. It's not beefy by any modern measure, and I'd have built it and kept it going (and powered on) even if I never had any intention of running these background processes on it.
The only added hardware expense is one external hard drive (redundancy? hah, no -- not for this). This cost a couple of hundred bucks a several years ago, which is the equivalent of surprisingly few trips to Taco Bell.
One certainly can spend a quite lot on nice kit to accomplish any goal, but that's not an indication of any necessity to do so.
(Couple with Plex/Jellyfin).
My non-techie partner honestly uses it way more than I do because it's just so damn easy. You punch a request into radarr and after some time it magically appears in Jellyfin.
It was a bear to set up the first time, but smooth sailing after that
Search up IPTV on any social media and you'll start getting loads of ads for these services, for like $25 a month for a trillion channels, a catalog of VOD content, etc. You can use a simple client like Chillio on Apple TV as the client and have a safe stack.
I subscribed to one. And just to be clear, I subscribe to and pay $ for every streaming service available in Canada, and a maxed out cable plan. My cable company (Cogeco) serves up some pixelized dogshit low bitrate/obsolete codec feed for both NFL football and F1 racing. Via some dodgy IPTV provider (there are a million names and resellers but they're all ostensibly the front for the same service) I get amazingly crisp, excellent visuals, better accessibility, etc. It's crazy. Technically and usably an infinitely better option, at a fraction of the price.
"Oh but you might fund organized crime!" -- yeah, when most media empires are oligarchs pushing their politics and kleptocracy on people, I have more faith in those organized criminals than I do garbage like the Ellison family.
Your dogshit provider must be better than the one I was using. Live sports was usually good, but sometimes very flaky. Video on demand files were served with uniform rate limiting that was too low to handle scenes with people on horseback riding through confetti parades. Also, no bandwidth adaptation (which wasn't a real issue for me, but is needed for many users). Captioning was very weird... IIRC I would have to either have no captions or all captions, there was no option for captions only for non-english you're supposed to read to follow the plot.
But the quality across many channels were extraordinary (for some reason primarily the European channels were top tier - Sky, BBC, France channels, etc), and far above anything my cable co offered. Skysports F1 was 4K and just perfection, and just obliterated the trash TSN feed of F1. NFL games were spotless, where they are an overcompressed pixelated mess on my cable cos high cost feed, which I am paying approximately 8x as much for.
There was a lot of junk as well. Like a lot of the VOD content was a mess (a lot of it would "compress" the content by dumping frames, which is just crazy. A 12FPS movie is just ridiculous).
I guess mileage varies.
As one aside, I notice that Chillio that I mentioned before actually got removed from the app store, apparently because they use a plug-in system that Apple forbids. So that recommendation might not hold. It was far and away the best IPTV client in my experience, and hopefully that gets sorted.
https://www.fbi.gov/investigate/cyber/alerts/2025/home-inter...
https://krebsonsecurity.com/2025/11/is-your-android-tv-strea...
Someone I know buys cheap "IPTV" service by the year. Access is paid for by buying potted plants or something else that looks random on some web store and is delivered in the form of a .m3u playlist that hides behind a username/password pair.
The usual way they use it is with slimey-feeling closed-source sideloaded apps on mass-market streaming devices from such unknown companies as Amazon and Google, or directly on a smart TV itself. Wherein: Despite the dingy back-alley ambience of the subscription and installation processes, the UI is snappy and responsive in use.
And the slimey software is also avoidable. Since it's all based around a playlist that is hiding behind basic http auth, it also works with open-source projects like Dispatcharr, which in turn can emulate an HDHomeRun network-connected OTA TV tuner. This combination can then present new possibilities, like live streaming TV for Plex users.
(It'd all be very interesting to me if I had any motivation to sit down and absorb live television like a slug, but I didn't do much of that even when I worked for a cable company and got the uber-premium package for free as a perk.)
I can see how they could tell themselves it's not the same. This is a device that just shows a library of content that they can watch. There's no needing to know that P2P, warez, torrents, seeding, etc even exist let alone know what they are or how they work. They couldn't sell these devices if it was illegal, right?
https://www.fbi.gov/investigate/cyber/alerts/2025/home-inter...
I've got a record player coming tomorrow. My song streaming service of choice keeps jacking up prices and now feeds me AI slop; it's time for a change.
I suspect kids growing up right now will experience a renaissance of physical media from fed-up parents.
Capitalism idea is that you have a free market, and several companies offer high quality products and services, then people vote with their wallet; in order for you to compete and become the "best seller" the dominant implementation you have to offer a best product/service...
Cancerpitalism is I have trillion of dollars, so you start acquiring other services and once there are less options you can start decreasing the quality of the service because there is nowhere else to go... the more concentrated the worst it is.
The more companies there are the more work there is, break disney into disney and disney park services and disney television/network services and get out marvel... and get out whatever else has been ingested by it..., you need HR, you need management, you need people working on the products those companies, you need buildings, someone has to fill all those positions, more offers, more diversity...
Growth for growth sake is cancer and cancer kills.
I'm saying capitalism always had anti-monopolies, they were anti-merger... but once all of the companies are held by the ultra wealthy you can start decreasing quality... because all of them do it at the same time and there is nowhere else to go...
It happens with the hedge funds having all the pet veterinaries... all the hospitals... that "emergency clinic" that is promoted as "150$ top visit" in your healthplan is never 150$... more like 1200$... 500$ for the veterinary to look at your pet 15 minutes... ads on your new car screen... ads before the ads...
And then just as cancer it extends... google has internet services.. the browser, email, search, ads, the operative system
Facebook has almost all the "social" networks
News are served/comming from just a couple of pockets...
If you are "free" to decide but the only 2 options are set by someone else... are you really free?
Oh yes.. try to get into the market... lobby takes care of setting "rules"/labs/criterias that cost a couple millions to pass... of course ran/evaluated by the big ones...
Netflix is a little better in this regard, but Neflix in particular goes out of its way to obnoxiously clutter the screen when I pause...even though I paused specifically to try and read something on screen or mine vocabulary from subtitles.