Say what you will about streaming, but I think everyone born before 1995 will understand that todays streaming is way way way better than renting and old school cable. In the old days there was no on demand, so you could only watch what was on at the time you wanted to watch it. You literally had to go to to block buster to rent physical media that wasn’t always available for things like new releases. TV shows weren’t easily available by VHS/DVD. So with streaming, it’s basically cheaper than what Cable + Renting movies used to cost, but I can do it without limits of physical media and have access to crazy amounts of back catalog. I purchased Band of Brothers back in the day on DVD box set for like 70 bucks which is 10 1 hour long episodes. For 99 bucks a year I can get all of band of brothers and a lot more content than that. Sure I don’t own it all, but that’s fine for most of my purposes. With streaming, I think we are actually getting a lot more for less in the grand scheme of things. And bundling make it even cheaper.
Bundling works at scale if you maximize customer pool. I don’t think ESPN cable would be affordable to most people without bundling it into cable packages; their TV is subsidized by every non sports watching household. I wish there was more transparency into the costs to determine if you are coming ahead or behind in the bundling.
But at the end of the day everyone hates paying for multiple streaming apps. To me that means people just want a bundle that magically has everything they want to watch.
I don’t think ESPN cable would be affordable to most people without bundling it into cable packages
Then it’s not a viable network.
their TV is subsidized by every non sports watching household.
But that’s exactly why people started ditching cable in the first place. They wouldn’t be bundling ESPN with non-sports channels, they would bundle other less popular sports channels with ESPN so they can jack up the price because ESPN. But ESPN doesn’t carry the sports I follow, and I can’t get the network that does without paying double because it’s in a bundle with ESPN.
Yeah. It took a while to work out the kinks of getting TV dvd seasons in the right order, but watching TV was easier when you didn’t have unlimited options and more or less a pres defined playlist.
Thanks to streaming we don't spend quite as much time thinking about the media we consume and the deeper meanings and subtext and generating internal fanfictions about what could possibly be coming up in the next episode a week from now.
Streaming makes media easier to consume but fills it with culturally empty calories.
The grand majority of conversation I see about a show is, "Have you seen _? No? You should totally watch _, it's really good!" Or alternatively, "Yeah, it's great isn't it?"
Since Netflix came out we've definitely taken one step down the ladder rung closer to Idiocracy ass movies.
Yeah my sp has been doing this in Canada for over a year. They bundle streaming services. It sucks but you do get a deal if you already use the ones offered. The problem is like cable, when they start to bundle bullshit services nobody wants
Tons of tutorials online and it’s dead simple to set up. Takes ~ 5 mins
I have some family members that have HBO and Hulu that I borrow logins for, but I never visit the apps directly anymore, it’s just not worth it when you can get all the content all in one place with no hoops to jump through
It’s gonna take a miracle to pull me back off the high seas again. Netflix was big enough to do it all those years ago, but I can’t even imagine what could do it now.
The only thing that MIGHT take me off piracy is the ability to do legally and for reasonable cost what I do with piracy. If I buy something, I download and store it wherever and it’s mine forever. I have no problem paying for my content, once. The problem is that we’re being driven towards paying for our content over and over. Just like we’re being asked to pay for our everything else over and over.
I can’t wait for 10 years from now when this all comes full circle and we start getting commercials to “ditch your streaming bundle for whatever new service.”
The sad thing is it'll probably start with infinite anime. There are so many currently existing manga that could be quickly and easily adapted to a full anime given the proper AI backing that it could take you years just to catch up.
Our great grandkids will probably be watching Spotify remixes of aitv shows recommended to them by influencers paid for by micro10gapplesoft
Really you pay for convenience and legallity. Not everyone knows how to or feels comfortable pirating. With a service you know you aren’t breaking any laws and you’re not worried about quality, storage, captions, and sketchy files.
It’s funny how hard it is for providers to get this concept. I feel we’re about to enter the cycle where we see an uptick in mainstream piracy because the price is starting to outweigh the convenience and legality.
You’re definitely paying for legality and safety, but when you have to search through five different streaming apps to find that the movie you’re looking for can only be rented via yet another service, the convenience becomes debatable.
Apple and others have tried to fix the discovery issue. And some of the platforms tell them to fuck off. Such as Netflix. And formerly Amazon.
If you’re not aware, AppleTV will list things across many streaming services and take you right to the shows/movies in the respective apps. As long as a platform is participating. So you just browse/search in a central place.
Apple and Amazon worked out their differences a few years ago and their stuff is now part of the index.
I wonder if this bundle will change that. Currently, Netflix does not integrate with these sort of features.
Boomers still boom in though. My dad has a smart TV and easy access to a whole bunch of streaming services but chooses to pay telus and watch on his cable box mostly because all he knows is his cable remote control. And those steaming “channels” are just like, channel 473. Anything else is too complicated. Enter your password? No way.
I don’t think you understand how pricing works. Someone like Disney demands a high carriage fee agreement and mandates that ESPN must be in the basic cable package for all comcast subscribers, otherwise comcast doesn’t get any Disney owned TV. As a result Comcast has to charge basically 10 bucks a month to all subscribers to have ESPN, not counting the general cost breakout for other disney owned channels. Sure, comcast leases STB’s for X dollars and gets a cut of the subscription fees as well, but the point is the people that make the TV programming are the same. So it’s not magically going to make the cost of TV significantly cheaper by cutting out comcast. Comcast is the person that collects the bills, but Disney, ViacomCBS, etc, are very much involved of setting up the prices consumers pay on cable and streaming.
Edit: Also add in the risk and churn factor. With cable bundling, TV programmers had scale and predictability on their side. Basically all cable subscribers had long term subscriptions and could guarantee a high volume of subscribers to collect from. With DTC (Direct to Consumer) streaming apps, consumers can churn and temporarily subscribe for monthly intervals. That means you have less subscribers at any one time on your app and for shorter durations. Guess what that does to the revenue. So if you no longer have the economics of scale in terms of long term subscription length and volume of subscribers, the cost for individual subscribers will probably have to keep creeping up and get possibly more expensive than cable.
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