I did the math and if I subscribed to all the major streaming services, games, plus YouTube, plus news sites, other subscription/paywalled sites I’ve wanted to check out, I’ve be paying around $700/month on subscription services
Yeah, like I said earlier on a YouTube adblock post, they are the same problem as piracy.
It's a service problem, not an adblock/piracy problem. Gabe Newell hit that nail on the head so perfectly.
I used to watch and listen everything pirated, because:
Most content I wanted to consume took years if not decades to be shown on TV or be available on VHS or DVD in my country.
Most music I wanted to consume was on CDs that had 1 or 2 good songs with the rest being filler.
When video media was broadcast, it was at times I wouldn't be able to watch.
When music was broadcast, it was all radio edits and constantly interrupted by annoying radio hosts.
All this cost 100+ a month for TV, 25-30€ for every movie I wanted to watch, 20-30€ for every CD I wanted to buy totaling several hundred Euro a month.
Then Netflix and Spotify came along and changed all that. All of a sudden, 99% of what I wanted to watch and listen to was available for 25-30€ a month combined.
Now, if I want to watch everything I want to watch, I'd have to pay multiples of what it cost before streaming services came along.
So, yeah, I'm almost completely back to sailing the high seas and while I have no affinity for collecting anything, supplemented my viewing and listening habits buying Merch where I know the merch is handled by the artists and go to conventions where shows I like are represented and buying merch and signatures directly from actors and crew of those shows.
The thing with even legitimately subscribing to all this is that there are some old shows and movies that aren’t even on any of these platforms.
But I’ll be nice and say I want to watch something that’s on one of these platforms, which one is it on? Say I want to watch Curb Your Enthusiasm, Seinfeld, Rick and Morty, etc. Am I gonna look it up to a site that shows which service it’s on? Then I gotta log into the website, but wait, the ip address needs a verification. I could already be watching the movie or show through a grey streaming site or if it’s on my Jellyfin server in the fraction of the time.
Lately it seems every movie or show that pops into my head and I feel like watching, is on yet another streaming channel or service I don’t have. The content is spread so thin that we barely get any content on any one platform. Netflix out here saying they have new content, as if I give a damn about random Korean soap operas they added.
This is honestly hilarious to me. The streaming companies actually had it right to begin with. They delivered on-demand content at a much lower cost than DVD distribution, without having to negotiate with cable companies to deliver it. They had a working system that delivered value for money, and kept the profits in their own pockets.
Then they shit the bed. Classic case of killing the goose that laid the golden eggs. Greedy dickheads.
Same story as everyone else… I used to have Netflix, Spotify, Disney+ and Tidal, now I only have Tidal. I have always owned a NAS and that is my main source of media consumption now. I just cant justify the $100 or so a month it costs to keep all these services and I struggle to find anything I am interested in. The worst thing about streaming services is the disruption to the movie industry… movies these days either feel like a couple of $200m+ productions or straight to streaming… there is no in between, and the straight to streaming stuff feels half cooked
We’ve gone full circle. When streaming became mainstream I was on board. At one point I had 4 simultaneous streaming subscriptions; I now have 0.
These people found the breaking point and leapt right past it. I pay a fair price for video games, ebooks, music, and software. There is nowhere that offers a fair price for films and TV shows.
Considering that Netflix are planning on dumping their popular midrange plan in favour of either the more expensive and less popular 4k plan, or the ad ridden cheaper plan - This almost sounds like an attempt at swaying the masses, by making them believe that most Australians are somehow ‘happy’ to pay for the cheaper ad ridden plan.
Bend over Netflix, I’ll show you what you can do with your ad ridden bullshit, and I’m not paying more for the 4k plan.
we had Netflix, Amazon, Disney and Binge for nearly a year simultaneously.
Binge just hit us with a 20%+ price increase so its gone. Amazon is likely to stay as the video is just an added bonus. We watch netflix and disney a lot but any silly increases and they can say good bye too. I guess its only a matter of time
The report shows 48 per cent find it hard to know what content is available and where, 70 per cent wish they could manage multiple subscriptions in one place and 73 per cent wish they could search and discover content across all their subscriptions in one place.
Streaming platforms make it hard to find their content outside of their apps because they don’t want to be a service, they want to be a destination. Just one of the many ways they are anti-consumer but expect they can demand premium pricing.
People want to pay a reasonable price for a reasonable service, and that’s increasingly no longer the case.
The moment we learnt how to wear the skull n bones hat, it was tattooed into our brain.
We grew up from Napster, Limewire, edonkey, mIRC bots, mega upload, torrents… The list goes on. It was intoxicating the feeling of finding the newest, more reliable, faster, better way of pirating. We never forgot. But we started living on land because it was easier.
So once the land living came with advertising, and 15 different taxes wanting a cut…
The hesitation to set sail once again never existed.
This article is based on an Australian consumer study. So it might be just us that’s saying yeah nah fuck this while the rest of the world is still willing to pay.
We have a history of being very adept sailors, the early days of Netflix where a huge library of content was available on demand for a reasonable price meant it didn’t make sense to go to the trouble of taking to the seas because the legal alternative was a better experience. Now that the market is fragmented and you have to pay through the nose to have the same level of variety, it’s not surprising Australians are some of the first to jack up.
I would be interested to see if there had been a commensurate increase of ships on the high seas from Australia.
I don’t think this is the reason. I think it is purely because there is nothing new worth watching.
The writers/actors strike means that there will be no new content for at least the next 6 months. All except the most Potatoish TV Viewers have reached saturation point on current content and after COVID, people want to get out of the house and do things, rather than languish at home.
The whole point of Cable cutting was so we could ditch the $60 Foxtel bill and just have our $100 Internet bill. If we have to pay for AppleTV+, Netflix, Prime, YouTube Premium, Stan, Kayo and Binge, it add up to much more than a Foxtel bill.
This is why we’re such skilled sailors - other countries got things cheap on Netflix that in Australia were locked behind a $100/month Foxtel subscription.
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