Tech’s broken promises: Streaming is now just as expensive and confusing as cable. Ubers cost as much as taxis. And the cloud is no longer cheap::Some tech is getting pricier and looking a lot like the older services it was supposed to beat. From video streaming to ride-hailing and cloud computing.
You say “broken promises” I say “the plan all along” and “bait and switch”.
Yep. The business model has always been “Lure them in and stifle competition with a low initial cost. Then when we have the market we can jack up the price.” Enshitification at its best.
A lot of these things were proudly unprofitable, which is basically their way of getting around anti-trust violations. If they had a revenue stream to make the business profitable (outside of investors handing them more cash) then they’d be hit with anti-trust lawsuits for offering services at a loss in order to drive the competition out of business. But instead they just convince investors to hang on long enough to achieve the same goal, then raise their prices when they’ve got too much power to fail.
Yarrrrr…shiver me timbers. Fly the Jolly Roger high matey, there be booty ta plunder!
We should have seen this coming. I remember the early 80s when cable was the new hotness, and it was cheap, with no ads unlike broadcast television. That was its major selling point.
Then over the next decade the ads crept in, and we were all paying for cable with ads, even though the whole point had been no ads. Then the price skyrocketed and the ads remained.
Steaming was always going to follow the same path. Cheap with no ads at first, then adding ads, then skyrocketing prices, then crazy prices with ads too.
They know as long as all of them raise their prices, where are we gonna go? They have exclusives. We can’t just take our money elsewhere.
What’s surprising to me is that anyone didn’t see this coming. The ideal of online streaming being cheaper and better was very alive and well when Netflix was the only streaming service. However, I started to note that some content from specific copyright holders started getting removed from Netflix and from that single indicator, I saw this happening…
I could almost see them gearing up to launch their Netflix competition service which would be analogous to channel “packages” on cable. You get the Netflix package for x, y, and z shows, the $studioG package for shows a, b, and c, etc etc. Creating the exact problem that we’re trying to eliminate with going to streaming. From that moment, I committed myself to sail the seven seas and download all my own Linux ISOs. It seemed like everyone else couldn’t see what I saw, and nobody cared. Then it happened… HBO, Hulu, Prime video, Paramount+, Disney+, etc, all came out of the woodworks, and now this.
My argument is that the MPAA needs to learn the same lesson that the RIAA did after the Napster lawsuits. Some people who were “sued” by the RIAA actually fought back. Most couldn’t because they didn’t have the money to pay for a drawn out legal battle, so they settled, but a few brave souls fought back… The story is long but it’s clear to me that the RIAA learned a very important lesson: it’s not profitable to sue everyone who pirates their content; and if you look at the music industry now, there’s very little piracy, and almost everyone has a music subscription service, whether Spotify, Apple music, tidal, YouTube music, or something else. Anyone without a subscription generally suffers through ads, with very little difference between which service you use (at least, regarding what’s available), or how you use it… There’s still people pirating the music (far fewer than in the days of Napster), and still people buying physical media, but long term, they’re safe from going under from P2P sharing. The vast majority of consumers are paying for the content either through ads or subscription and all music is available on all services.
The MPAA is still hard headed about all of this. Disney is trying to fix the problem by buying everything up, so other studios are forced to have their work on D+, because the big D bought them… I’d argue that Disney is doing a better job at squashing video media piracy than the MPAA… The problem right now is that the various video streaming services are all run by the studios that publish the content on them. A truly third party streaming service (that is not also a competing studio) is needed, who can license content from everyone… Most won’t license their content to a third party service because it’s not as profitable compared to running their own service… So we’re stuck. If the MPAA stepped in and made such a service, and not-so-politely asked the various studios to license their content to it, then made it affordable, I would hang up my black hat and skull flag and never look back.
The chances of this happening are so small that I’ll just go ahead and order a new flag… My current one has been flying for so long it’s looking a bit sun-bleached.
I have zero hope or expectation of this happening, and bluntly, if it did, whether we admit it or not, I think most of us would hang up our hats and relent, because it’s far easier to simply pay a (reasonable) monthly fee than to do all the crap associated with getting it another way. They won’t, so yo-ho-ho.
It’s economics 101, prices will rise to what the market will bare… Unfortunately the market is irrational and has access to credit cards.
The alternative is simple. The seven seas are calling out to you. :)
LONG LIVE PIRACY!!!🏴☠️🏴
Is this surprising? The prices were always going to adjust to the market. Any new cheap thing that undercuts the market will eventually become the market as it becomes mainstream, and prices will be increased to what the market will bear to maximize profits.
Tech never promised anything. They cut the price for people to be dependent to them and then rise the price.
It’s just basic capitalism.
The cloud was never cheap.
Where did you get such a weird idea?
It’s your fault for believing the promises of a salesman. Tech bros are just industrial middlemen who pedel new technological solutions for problems that may or may not benefit from it, but that doesn’t matter to them, they’re just here to sell the tech. Thats how they get paid.
it’s MY fault that there are fewer cabs because other mother fuckers stopped using them?
Yep, my entire post was about was about TimewornTraveler and no one else. Its definitely all your fault. Pay no attention to the fact that I said ‘for believing tech bros’ which would exclude anyone who didn’t believe tech bros from the statement, Instead just get upset about nothing.
You can see the absurdity of my statement but not of yours… odd
You literally ignored half of the sentence you have a problem with so you could be contrarian. Odd.
I dont know why I’m still responding to this tedious, disingenuous bullshit but here goes… You made a statement: “It’s ‘your’ [sic] fault.” Then you gave a supporting statement: “Tech bros only want money.” Cool. I agree with the latter part. But you are using it to support a conclusion that I don’t agree with. Hence I attacked the fucking conclusion instead of the supporting details.
Do you understand now? Or did you always understand but you can’t take accountability for making a shitty statement and instead you harp on meaningless bullshit?
Instead of blaming the people who use these services - and make blanket statements as if we are all using those services - how about you either A) stick to criticizing the bad actors or B) shut the fuck up.
Okay? Thanks. Talk to you later.
And yet you still omit the very same words you omitted from the beginning. I get it though, you have no arguement if you acknowledge it was in the very same sentence qualifying my statement you wanna be mad at, keep digging friend. How many times are you gonna ignore it? Also how are you gonna use quotes if you don’t copy the actual sentence and just put your own period in it before my real sentence ended? You as good at citing things as you are at logic.
maybe don’t make such a general blanket statement that anyone could take offense from, next time maybe? maybe don’t blame anyone for corporate greed except the corporates who are greeding instead of getting upset about nothing
Remember when we could only watch what had recently been on TV and cable companies were trying to lock people in to specific cable boxes that couldn’t skip ads and we paid $120 per month for ad supported content and cable companies would attach random fees and everyone had to buy hundreds of channels to only watch 4?
And we’d build movie and music collections of physical media we had to keep in our homes and cars and we’d listen to the same three albums for months and if we were lucky enough to get a TV series box set, it’d set us back many hundreds of dollars and we’d have to remember which disc we were on and navigate arcane and slow menus?
And when we had questions, we had to find the answers ourselves by reading long form content and just be satisfied that there were many questions we couldn’t answer at all because the information wasn’t available?
Or when we wanted cabs, we’d not know how much a ride would cost until after we got to our destinations and they smelled like rotten farts and were covered in boogers and our only goal was to not touch anything and look out the window because what’s a smartphone?
And when we wanted to go somewhere, we had to ask for directions and use atlases to figure out how to get to the general area of the destination, then drive in circles, accidentally drive past a turn 5 times because the street we were supposed to turn onto had two different names and we had been given the wrong one?
I was there and anyone who pines for the old days can just go there. We have cable and encyclopedias and taxis and atlases. Go nuts.
We have all these conveniences now and somehow people are not happier. Maybe the improvements you showed weren’t improvements after all and society should have spent more time to focus on people instead of developing and selling the next great music platform.
You are missing the point when you tell people to go back to cable, encyclopedias etc. because it’s not about those things, it’s about escaping into an idealized past while being depressed in the present. They should have your sympathy.
It was the free hit to get you hooked and dump your cable subscriptions. Now they have you and they’re going to increase costs every year from here on out and then start with advertisements because fuck you you’re going to pay it anyways.
That makes sense, thanks for the insight!
The thing about unregulated capitalism is it will always fuck over society in favour of sociopaths. Unregulated capitalism rewards sociopaths because it focusses on profits above all else – shareholders get stupidly rich only if they don’t care about the damage done to workers and the public, sociopaths who don’t care about such damage can promise the highest profits, and that’s rewarded by a hyper-focus on the bottom line.
Unregulated capitalism rewards ruthless cost-cutting, treating people like robotic assets, slash-and-burn corporate policies, and a culture of near-slavery.
Adding new tech only makes inhumane policies easier to implement. It’s why people like Musk have more money than they could spend in a thousand lifetimes. When the goal is to maximise profits at all costs, of course the consumer will get fucked. That’s rather the point.
E: in short, prices will continue to increase as these people try to find the ceiling. Ps: there is no real ceiling.
Hello L4S!
Test reply
As far as Ubers, I’m happy to pay them as much as taxis in tips at least — the people driving them are hard working people who could use it.
But dang, there’s lots of streaming services. The new rise of piracy is not surprising.
I think it says something that people feel the need to subscribe to half a dozen services.
Never even mind piracy, people don’t need to be binging TV endlessly.
Don’t blame tech, blame the bait-and-switch business model of loss leading products.
Uber never made money because they chose to undercut prices of all competitors and bleed them out.
I’d argue that newer streaming companies (those founded by studios, such as Disney +) did the same thing by roping in customers before jacking up prices.
It may be the “fault” of capitalism, but consider it was capitalism that birthed streaming in the first place. In the long term, the expectation would be a better solution will surface in reference to streaming… the same way streaming was a solution to cable. Thus is the business cycle.
the expectation would be a better solution will surface in reference to streaming… the same way streaming was a solution to cable.
What would that look like though? The current streaming model was pretty easy to predict ~15 years ago with the advent of online video streaming in general, especially mainstream forms of it such as YouTube. I have a hard time imagining how any other business model for distributing video content would look like, but then again I don’t have a very entrepreneurial mind.
If you had the answer you could make a lot of money
The answer was already found with music streaming. Whether you’re using Spotify, Apple Music, or YouTube whatever, you’re still getting 99% of the same content. These companies compete on price and features not on content.
That case is a bit different. Most music streaming platforms haven’t leaned heavily into the production of exclusive content like Netflix or Amazon, or own a huge swath of IPs like Disney. We might get there yet, however…if we do, we’d likely see the same price hikes and fractured availability of content.
I would do the same as was the case with cinemas: anybody can buy any streaming content. If you produce a movie, you are forced to sell it to anybody who is willing to buy it. (Just like every cinema can have any movie which wasn’t the case back then. There were specific cinema exclusives before the law forced this shit out.)
This is the way. Unfortunately, it requires competent lawmakers that dares to target anti-competitive business practices. I guess we could pin our hopes on the EU, but they might not want to open this can of bees (yet). Besides, they are plenty busy dealing with all the other areas that the US allowed to run rampant, my guess is that there’s a hard limit to how much can can be targeted at once. Let them handle right-to-repair and big tech privacy violations first, since they don’t have soft solutions / workarounds.
