this post was submitted on 15 Aug 2023
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Oh, you mean to tell me that paying for a gazillion streaming services individually is somehow more expensive than bundling them all together with cable? Who could have seen that coming?
I don't know if you were old enough to pay for cable when that was normal. But I have never felt so ripped off as I did when I was paying $100/month for 50 channels when 10 of them were news channels, 10 of them were church channels, 15 of them were shopping channels, 10 of them were in Spanish, and the other 5 I might watch sometimes but 95% of what was on was junk and they ALL played more commercials than actual content.
I went from that to piracy. Then the streaming services came and they became more convenient. I am more than ready to raise the black flag again and dig my peg leg out of the closet.
Cable wasn't exactly popular where I was growing up. I mostly watched movies in theaters or through DVD's.
I remember a time when all the Disney content used to be on Netflix. That was the first time I actually invested in a streaming service. But, then they decided to make Disney+ and I went, "Well it's time. Argh Matey!"
Where are you that cable wasn’t popular?
This is assuming that you actually pay for all the services simultaneously. I still think streaming is a way better service since it's easier to pick and choose what you want.
Plus there are no long term contracts and no equipment rentals to worry about. And canceling can be done by clicking some buttons on my phone in seconds whereas with cable you have to block off time on your calendar to sit on the phone for an hour to cancel.
It's annoying to see these comparisons with cable cause it's like people forgot how bad of a consumer experience it actually is.
A better comparison is with studio-owned movie theaters, which eventually led to the United States' Paramount Antitrust Consent Decree (which was the law of the land for movies until the DOJ killed this ruling in 2020.)
I don't feel that studios should get to have their own streaming services much like how I don't feel movie studios should be allowed to run their own theaters.
For all of its faults, cable had a ton of competition between studios on the same distribution system, often with multiple channels with the same focus by entirely different studios. With current streaming services, ther are more accounts to keep track of, completely different (and often lackluster) UX between each streaming service which can make navigating a pain, and instead of competing with new content it can be just as- if not more- viable to buy up as much pop culture video content as possible and centralize it behind one studio-owned streaming services' paywall. (Looking at you, Disney.)
If streaming services weren't allowed to have their own studios, we'd probably have a better streaming landscape than we currently do.
I'm glad to finally see someone else mentioning this aspect. Streaming services creating their own content is Vertical Integration and it's a big reason for a lot of the problems with streaming. It's essentially a conflict of interest where the platform wants to create as much content as fast as possible, which puts them at odds with the realities of creating quality content: it takes time, and is heavily dependent on the artists involved; there's no simple formula to make something good consistently. Netflix originally had some good shows at first with House of Cards and Orange is the New Black but then both shows fell off and Netflix switched tracks to putting out a much as they could and cancelling anything that didn't catch on (which is most things).
I think this also contributes to lowering payouts to the actors involved because of the lack of licensing agreements. I have seen a few news articles about how bad the pay is for residuals on streaming sites, and it's not hard to imagine ways that a streaming platform could massage the numbers to make any specific show seem less profitable since all content is behind the same paywall. However, when a show is licensed, like the big popular shows such as Friends or Seinfeld, there is a public announcement for how much money is paid for the rights to stream that show, and this makes it much more straightforward to calculate how much money goes to everyone involved.
I agree, streaming was a lot better when the main players didn't produce their own content. And it could get to be a bigger problem as the streaming players consolidate more which we're already seeing with the HBO+Discovery merger for instance.
Not to mention how much media is consolidated under Disney currently.
This feels like a false history. Hulu had original content all the way back in 2008, with Dr horrible
No one is saying streaming is less convenient. Just more expensive to maintain the same level of choice. Some services did let you pick and stream things to watch too, so live choice isn't unique to streaming.
I guess I still disagree with that premise. A single Netflix subscription offers more variety of content than a basic cable package for a lot less money.
And if you rotate services every 1-2 months you can get all the choice in content for a lot less money than a cable bundle that way as well.
It's like saying there are too many restaurants because if you ate at all of them every month it would be more expensive than going to one really expensive restaurant that serves every type of food. Meanwhile it's cheaper if you choose 1-2 of the cheaper restaurants to eat from every month and rotate. Probably a bad analogy but that's kinda what I'm trying to say