Take away common features (4K and HDR) from an already existing plan to squeeze out $4 from users at the cost of good-will and subscribers, which is the inverse of increases in subscriber count, which is what matters most to a streaming service along with content.
That’s some smooth brain Exec MBA product strategy right there.
We get Max free through our cell phone plan; I don’t think the merger changed that (we still get it for free), but I’m honestly not sure how this will affect it, if at all. If it ever stops being free, there will be a few shows I’ll miss having instant access to, but nothing that cleaning the sails for a voyage on the high seas can’t fix.
I’ve been quitting streaming providers left and right. I lost count of how many services I had, but it was probably up to $150 per month or more. Because I like the ability to just watch whatever I want, I’d sign up for a service to get a particular show or movie, then just not cancel. I’d forget I had a service, then find some movie in a search, and suddenly remember I had showtime or shudder.
Once they started banning family sharing of accounts and increasing prices, I was done. I could have gone on for years like that - I love movies and I binge television shows, but one of my main uses is watching in remote sessions with isolated family members.
That’s exactly what happened here. HBO sent me a message saying they were getting rid of 4k streaming and I was like, "wait, I’m still paying these guys $16 a month? Wtf I signed up for Game of Thrones and that shit ended like half a decade ago.”
Edit: I just did the math and I’ve paid these guys like $864 since GoT ended. I’ve watched one other show (The Wire) plus maybe a dozen movies since then. No way was that worth that much money. These dumb fuckers could have kept collecting that money indefinitely.
“One thing that we have learned is that piracy is not a pricing issue. It’s a service issue,” explained Newell during his time on stage at the Washington Technology Industry Association’s (WTIA) Tech NW conference. “The easiest way to stop piracy is not by putting antipiracy technology to work. It’s by giving those people a service that’s better than what they’re receiving from the pirates.”
I’m done with streaming for reasons like the one in the article but damn, the arr suite, a Synology NAS, and Plex on my Apple TV are a fantastic combo. Any show, movie, book, or music I want, at the highest quality, and no getting fucked around by greedy media corporations.
I still spend money on media but now I try and make sure as much as possible goes straight into the pockets of the people who make it.
This was my only slight reservation when I cancelled my HBO Max subscription in the wake of all the merger fuckery and cancelations, that I’d lose my grandfathered in perks. I had HBO in some form for decades prior.
Thanks for vindicating me, assholes. If you ever make anything else worth watching, I don’t respect you enough not to sail the 7 seas🏴☠️
Sad as always that the non-wealthy sycophants of capitalism will do mental backflips blaming it on everything but the out of control capital markets absolutely drunk on profit and the power of regulatory/legislative capture.
The problem is that capital will always fight for less regulation. That is literally how we have ended up here.
Capital will never share the fruits of your labor freely. Regulations are useless as long as capitalists just pay politicians to write laws that benefit them.
It is similar to gun regulations. Studies show that cops largely choose not to enforce gun laws on white right wing nutjobs because they refuse to police “their own.” While the people who gun laws are enforced against tend to be minorities, whether they are black, disabled, or trans. Cops are more thn happy to take their guns away.
Similarly, cops are happy to test pregnant women who have had miscarriages for use of abortion drugs, because of course women getting abortions is more important than, you know, enforcing gun laws.
Regulations only work if they are evenly enforced, and we haven’t even figured that part out.
Slavery called, and wants to remind you that it was a legal, formal, and accepted part of capitalism for a loooooooong time. Blaming it all on Reagan is ignoring massive swaths of US history.
The Tulsa Race Massacre in 1921 was also called “The Bombing of Black Wall Street” because it was the most concentrated area of black wealth in the US. Capitalism and Democracy decided the best way to deal with that was to bomb the living shit out of all of them, because the majority white citizentry couldn’t deal with the idea of successful black citizens.
Beyond that, this also ignores the entirety of the labor movement that won you things like a 40-hour work-week and labor laws preventing children from being employed.
And everything was regulated and limited until Reagan came around? Give me the biggest of motherfucking breaks. Upton Sinclair would love to have a word with you.
Read a fucking book about US history before Reagan (The Jungle by Upton Sinclair is a great one, it’s actually about the importance of unions, but most people’s main take away is that the food industry was wholly unregulated at the time). Capitalism has always been evil, has always been willing to turn a blind eye to horrible abuse as long as it makes money, and in general is unable to be constrained. The fact that we’re re-living the labor disputes of the early 20th century during the previous gilded age is proof of that. We already fought these battles and won, but now we have to fight them again, against the same class of rich twats as before.
The other side of this problem is that most attempts so far at actually getting rid of capitalism end up being pretty horrific, and then end up back at roughly the same place anyway, but with more autocracy because people will be rightfully pissed off about having violent revolution imposed on their otherwise decent lives.
The reality is that capitalist forces are a byproduct of scarcity and economic complexity. As long as you have these things you will have something resembling capitalism. You can call it something different but you’ll still just be meditating scarcity via a monetary proxy in some form or another.
This is the biggest thing orthodox/ML socialists really hate to acknowledge, but there is about a century of hindsight and academic thought which builds on Marx, mostly coming to a similar conclusion. It’s extremely bizarre and frustrating to hear MLs reject entire libraries of reformed socialism outright, seemingly because it doesn’t route through violence, and for me at least, it really says a lot about what their real priorities are.
It’s the smartest thing ever people should read about marketing tactics and schemes to get people to pay more money. The smallest thing can be locked behind a $5 increase and people are still going to buy it. It’s all about knowing your audience.
It’s the smartest thing ever people should read about marketing tactics and schemes to get people to pay more money.
I strongly agree with this. In fact, just seek out a college level textbook. Here’s a free one. Its like having a secret decoder ring to a huge chunk of society you interact with daily. You’ll be able to quickly identify an advertising pitch, and identify why its appealing to you and if it is deceptive. You’ll also see the gaps as in “okay product A exists and product C exist, so product B probably does too. Now why am I not seeing that one?”. It also lets you see that you are sorted into a specific bucket because of your age, race, level of education, income, and geography. There are huge parts of marketing that you don’t see because those are for other market segments which you aren’t in.
I would say that was a valid argument a decade ago when 4k came out. I’m completely baffled that we STILL market 1080 as high quality. Furthermore, I would say that was a valid argument if these fucks weren’t taking in record profits over and over and over again. It’s not a cost issue. It’s a greed issue.
I mean they cache it all via CDN. In some cases that means they’ve got 1000 copies of a popular show sitting on CDNs around the world, and in some cases that means they are dynamically pushing content to CDNs on demand.
The cost of storing and serving 1080p is much, much higher than not storing or serving any content yet they still do that. It’s what we’re paying them for. Furthermore ‘streaming 4k’ is pretty compressed already and comes nowhere near the level of bitrate of a 4k bluray.
Not really. I mean there is, but both bandwidth and storage get cheaper by the day. Delivering 4k content today is probably an order of magnitude cheaper per bit than delivering HD content was a decade ago.
If they separate all the features and charge for each of them, then money!
So as with all the other races to oblivion in our economy, sanctioned encouraged private shareholder mandated insatiable greed did it. Same with microtransactions in videogames, “upgrades” to check luggage and reasonably sized seats in airlines, shrinking portions in food service, etc.
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