For a moment, it seemed like the streaming apps were the things that could save us from the hegemony of cable TV—a system where you had to pay for a ton of stuff you didn’t want to watch so you could see the handful of things you were actually interested in.
And the CEOs running the companies and making all the money claims it sucks for them too because after their last couple years of shit decisions, they’re making slightly less money.
So maybe those shareholders should re-evaulte who their CEOs are?
Maybe get rid of the people who killed the Golden Goose because they wanted to eat it?
If they’re not losing money, shareholders do not care. The end goal of a corporation is to maximize profits for the shareholders within the confines of the law. So until they start actually costing shareholders substantial amounts of money they will do nothing.
Yep. It’s easier to just break the law, pay the fine, and continue making billions over actually stopping the activity that causes the fine. That’s what happens when it’s almost impossible to hold anyone actually personally responsible force actions of a corporation.
In a way it would be really nice if you couldn’t sell short term stocks and there were minimum holding periods of 1 to 3 years based on the company metrics. That alone would flip a lot of these quarterly incentives, heck quarterly earnings calls themselves would probably be less frequent. Even if you had to register the sale 6 months in advance would solve a lot in my opinion. But of course again, that would destroy the entire finance industry as we know it.
At this point, the best way to go (besides sailing) is to subscribe to one or two services at a time, cancelling others month-to-month based on what you want to watch.
We need an app that lets you search for content across all platforms and easily cancel and start subscriptions - queueing them up and helping you easily limit the amount you’re paying monthly.
But with these prices, it’s worth doing that manually.
Right now it’s smart to cycle through but I wouldn’t be surprised if that is the next thing to go.
What I could see happening is they keep raising monthly prices until the math doesn’t work out of them. Then they’ll introduce a small discount for locking in multiple months (3,6,12mon). Both will continue to rise in price but month to month will be quicker.
Or straight-up contracts. But I think the next step will be more slow-dripping content.
Netflix just pulled an obvious one by splitting the Witcher season 3 to the release half at the end of June and the other at the end of July. They claim it was for “an effective cliffhanger” but it’s clear they just wanted to squeeze one extra payment out of its viewers who aren’t interested in their other content. Paramount meanwhile stretches all of their Star Trek series out across the entire year.
I imagine platforms will start slow-releasing more of their most popular originals. I wouldn’t put it past them to flood social media with spoilers to punish anyone who’s waiting. I also wouldn’t be surprised if we start seeing one episode per month someday.
Each streaming service will release their own aggregator app. Each of these will have a fee associated with them. Each of these will have certain services they don't work with because the lawyers are still fighting over things. Each of these will eventually reduce their search coverage and promote their own content. "You searched for Star Trek, would you like Star Wars instead?"
Even if an open source third party wrote something that did this, companies would change their API pricing or authentication to break it so people don't leave their walled gardens.
Companies are incapable of making a service that doesn't eventually enshittify.
A third party app can just scrape catalogues, and then direct you to the platform’s website through an integrated browser to manage each account. They can push notifications when a subscription is about to be renewed just by remembering when you subscribed, and send reminders to cancel and subscribe to the next service in your queue.
The streaming companies won’t hide their catalogues because that’s how many people find what they want to watch through simple web searches, e.g. “Where to stream Barry” or “when does the new season of x come out?” The app could pull metadata from other sites for graphics and info like many already do.
It wouldn’t be as convenient as flipping a switch which would require proper API and probably login info, but seeing everything and managing it from one place would still help a lot.
I think a bigger danger would be platforms countering by requiring phone calls to cancel, or contracts, or slow-dripping content over months to keep you subscribed (some already do the latter.) IOW continuing to become more like cable.
just ordered a nice OTA antenna so I can watch my local channels, anything else needed will be purchased for exactly 1 month and then cancelled
I’ve also started looking at smaller streaming services like CuriosityStream and MagellanTV cause I’m more interested in documentaries and such instead of the latest weekly tv dramas
I didn’t really like Nebula. I signed up and canceled my subscription before I even finished a single video. Almost everything is available on YouTube for free (albeit with ads if you don’t have Youtube Premium) and it just didn’t feel like they had enough content to be charging $5/month.
Videos earlier than on Youtube for most (i think) creators (the least valuable of the 3)
Exclusive bonus videos (this one i like, it varies what the exclusive is, but it is usually as high quality as the rest of the creators content)
The creators get paid much more (even if you have Youtube Premium). The payout of Nebula is like Spotify where Nebula (the company) takes 30% of money earned and then split the rest to the content creators based on watch time.
These 3 things are what I think make Nebula worth it for me, though it’s fair if you don’t think it’s worth it to you (to each their own). Also, i don’t how long ago you signed up but for me I think there’s a good amount of content on Nebula (at least for the types of videos I watch)
Things you never hear people say: I couldn’t sleep last night worrying about corporate profit margins because I stole some of it. It’s the least culpable crime in history.
Over the past few months, I’ve canceled my subscriptions to Audible, Disney+, Netflix, and appleTV. I still have Amazon Prime since it’s an annual subscription, but that’s it. It’s been a surprise to realize how much pressure I was feeling to consume all this content and how freeing it felt to just get rid of it all. I have a lot of audiobooks I haven’t gotten around to listening, and books I haven’t read yet. I can still watch stuff on Amazon and ahem other places if I want. But really, there has to be more to life than just endlessly binging tv shows.
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