Finding new subscribers in a saturated streaming video market isn't easy. And with legacy media companies desperate to recoup revenue declines in their linear TV businesses, the cost of your monthly plan is likely to keep rising.
Consumers are paying more than ever for streaming TV each month and analysts say there’s no reason for the companies to stop raising prices::Finding new subscribers in a saturated streaming video market isn't easy. And with legacy media companies desperate to recoup revenue declines in their linear TV businesses, the cost of your monthly plan is likely to keep rising.
No reason to stop raising prices for any business, except for the fact that demand goes down as price goes up. People will cancel or downshift to a cheaper service.
With prices going up and likely subscribers going way down the next logical move for the Streaming Companies is to start cracking down on Piracy again as they already had a go at password sharing.
Now I am not saying they will be successful in prosecuting those that are careful, just that there will be a few high profile cases against groups of people who aren't using the best hygiene when it comes to piracy. Fear is their best weapon against piracy that they actually want to deploy, just make sure you do enough research to make sure you aren't in that harvest of low hanging fruit.
Weird... why is piracy growing then? Every reasonable person should pay $300 to watch the shows they want on the weekend... and then pay a couple more hundreds in the theater.
Really? No reason to stop raising prices? My Jolly Roger got something to say about that.
Piracy has never been easier or safer or faster than it is now, and these platforms think driving people away with overpriced subscriptions for shitty content is beneficial for them?
I've no problem with paying for good services, but when I get a better service from a random pirate streaming site than I do from Amazon Prime, why would I continue paying for that?
I'm just sick of things either being exclusive to one service even though they're decades old, or just plain not available.
Oh, and if I'm paying, I don't want ads. Not ever.
Thanks for the reminder to cancel Disney+ and HBO Max - I almost forgot! ;)
Still have Peacock, because that's comped through my mobile provider.
My wife does Amazon Prime, Netflix, and Hulu. I had Prime but realized I only ever used it for free shipping, which I can get anyway by bundling my orders and setting ship dates.
Streaming services, digital services in general, should be made to compete on having the best platform, not on exclusive content.
It's all the same wires going to the same machines. Internationally, too. I can see maybe allowing for different pricing for countries with very different wage levels, but if it's online, it should be available everywhere.
I already unsubscribed from prime and if Disney+ is changing to the Netflix way of "no no no you cannot share your account" than that will be gone too. I already thought about unsubscribing from Netflix as well.
But I guess me and my friends are not the norm with a plex server that gets feeded by ~10 persons who like to buy blurays :D
One option that exists for the price-averse is going for the low-subscriber streaming services. This doesn't give you the popular shows everyone else is watching, but it's suitable if your goal is to just entertain yourself with something distracting for a while.
I was briefly subscribed to Shudder, a niche horror flick service that doesn't cost much and has a few decent items on there. Crunchyroll is relatively cheap for anime, has been buying up other properties to give itself a large library. That said, there are accusations that the money doesn't ever reach the original creators. HiDive is another anime service with some weird options.
There's free services like Pluto TV, usually ad-supported (but hey, a lot of the paid options are giving ads)
Haven't read it, but there's also articles out there about other options, should people decide the major entries are too expensive, and they don't want to go for piracy. Knowing your options is always good.
Hulu is currently the only streaming service I still pay for, and that's mainly because TV shows are a removed to pirate (disk space and download times being the main annoyance), but it won't take more than one or two more price hikes for the balance to shift so that it's worth the effort to just go full pirate instead of forking out so much cash.
The fact that Disney just fully bought Hulu bodes very poorly too - I'll bet anything that it's going to get folded into Disney+ soon as a "pay an extra 15/month to access Hulu content, but only through your Disney+ membership sort of deal"
Some observers see another reason for the frequent price hikes: to push subscribers to their breaking point, and compel them to opt for a lower-priced, or even free, ad-supported plan instead.
Disney CEO Bob Iger said as much during an August earnings call: “We’re obviously trying, with our pricing strategy, to migrate more subs to the advertiser-supported tier.”
I'll cancel my account before I willingly subject myself to advertising. I'm sure I'm not the only one.
Remember March 2012, when SOPA and PIPA were about to pass, and many websites were blacking out as a form of protest, some people were advocating for a "Black March" to have everyone boycott Big Media, pirated or not, for the entire month? Yeah sure it didn't spread like wildfire because of course, the population is already too addicted to popular culture to drop it cold-turkey, but at this rate people may be forced to give it a go by force.
Wouldn't it be great if one company would get with each of the streaming services and put them under one umbrella. They could rent you a device that is mandatory for the service. While charging you a large subscription fee. Even better yet that could lock additional content behind another paywall. Direct TV and the cable companies need to hurry before someone beats them to it.
Only reason I still have Netflix is that T-Mobile pays for it for me. I also used to have Funimation, but Crunchyroll taking over stopped adding captions to translate written text from new dubbed anime. Especially anime that uses a lot of written segues and such that is important to understanding what's going on. So I had to pirate anyway. And now so many services are removing features, especially as they merge, but still continue to raise prices. There just aren't any services worth the cost anymore and I'm not willing to pay hundreds of dollars. That's one of many reasons! why I dumped cable ages ago.