It’s time to rethink our relationships with streaming services
It’s time to rethink our relationships with streaming services
With streamers like Disney Plus, Hulu, and Max growing increasingly expensive, subscribers need to think about what they really want and need from these services.
Compulsory licensing for streaming should be a thing. It exists for radio, why not video? Let services get 1-2 years of exclusivity. After that it's fair game for any streaming service to stream it. All services pay into a pool that gets refistributed to the rights holders. We have been doing that for decades for radio, for the EU blank media tax, etc. It's a solved problem.
84Not rethink ... break up.
61Yaaar 🏴☠️
59The real answer here
11An individual solution, for sure. But unless you get a large plurality to join in, it won't change the landscape that we have.
4👍
2
Seems like for most people they would be better off cancelling most streaming services and only renewing for a month or two when enough new content is there rather than having multiple ongoing subscriptions.
42This is still the major benefit over old cable services. It is trivial to cancel. You can cancel right after signing up again and ride out the month. Not so much with old cable packages.
I think many people are afraid that they’re always going to find content they want is on a service they just let lapse. That isn’t even a big deal, just renew it then, but if it isn’t then you save money.
Disney makes it a little more enticing because their bundle is cheaper than Hulu or Disney Plus on their own, but if all the stuff you watch on a month is on Hulu then you’re not saving anything by keeping the unused Disney sub.
7Hey, let's make a startup! We charge users fixed fee and in return give them account in ONE streaming service. They can choose which one but and change them every month.
5Mandatory yearly contacts incoming.
5Startup time! We buy early subscriptions and rent them on monthly basis. €€€
4
18 years with Plex, and I have zero regrets. I always knew this age of streaming would sour sooner or later. I’ll admit, the good times lasted longer than I expected.
30You know Plex is trying to become a streaming platform, right? Just shoving that add supported streaming into you face all the time.
From someone who's spent around 20 years with xbmc/Kodi. Even better, it's free.
3You know Plex is trying to become a streaming platform, right?
no they’re not. they’ve had streaming options for many years. you can also just turn it off. it’s very easy.
also.. so what? they offer some streaming content alongside their media managements capabilities. people just like you have been crying foul over that for a solid decade, claiming that Something Bad™ would happen. Guess what? It hasn’t.
From someone who’s spent around 20 years with xbmc/Kodi. Even better, it’s free.
they’re free because they’re far inferior. they lack many features Plex has which my users and I use constantly. Same with Jellyfin… none of the alternatives can do all of what Plex does. not to mention that I strongly dislike the interfaces of the alternatives. they’re, at best, undercooked, unrefined. If they work for you, fine, but they don’t work for me.
Finally, Plex is also free. There is a premium tier that’s paid which includes a few premium features, but, as a Kodi/Emby user, it’s nothing you haven’t already been living without. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
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This is the best summary I could come up with:
But with the most recent round of services like Disney Plus, Hulu, Peacock, and Paramount Plus raising their prices — during Hollywood’s ongoing double labor strike, no less — to meet the demand of shareholders for never-ending profits, the time has come for all of us to seriously rethink our relationships with the platforms that have become “the new cable.”
Over the weekend, the Financial Times published a bit of analysis about the current state of streaming that should only come as a surprise to those who haven’t been paying attention to how most of the major Subscription Video On Demand (SVOD) platforms, and many smaller ones like Starz, Shudder, and BritBox, have hiked up their prices in the past year.
After years of burning through mountains of cash to fill their catalogs with original programming, the big SVOD services are now charging their subscribers more than ever because it’s increasingly difficult to draw in new customers — and because the mere perception of growth is no longer enough to keep their shareholders happy.
But much like the practice of memory-holing films and series just for tax write-offs, the push to goose subscription numbers by imposing new restrictions on old customers also highlights how this late stage of the streaming wars is being defined by the prioritization of profit margins over user experience.
Even though the streamers love being seen and celebrated as pop cultural tastemakers, Netflix — like its competition — is a company in the business of making money that owes much of its success to the way consumers have bought into the idea of it being absolutely necessary to keep up with every single new film or show that hits the internet.
To make things even trickier, the success of those streaming hits and others like them was undoubtedly influenced by the degree to which viewers were regularly flocking to social media platforms like Twitter to discuss them — a habit that feels like it’s on the decline in the era of Elon Musk’s X.
I'm a bot and I'm open source!
20Funny thing is. If we all did things collectively we'd have a fully functional society.
We obviously don't.
So instead most people say fuck it. I don't care and do what they want. This we get fragmentation until the end of time.
If we all just said nope. Not doing that until you implement this. Someone does it and we all benefit.
Everyone on here always has excuses. It's easier it's this it's that. We therefore get stuck in a feedback loop of nothing changes. Just different variations of the same old thing.
11
Blaming the shareholders is partly disingenuous. Yes the shareholder problem is real, but yes the corporation has power to address it directly. There is no law that says short term profit must be maximized.
And good riddance to the streaming services. We just don't need them.
16Courts have often agreed with shareholders in shareholder lawsuits about such things
2There is no law that says short term profit must be maximized.
There basically is.
1
Did anyone said Stremio? No? I might have imagined it. All this time out at see and this is what you get.
11I heard torrents.
4
I know it sounds naive but honestly I just wish I could consume media and when I like it I can just send them some money without any hassle.
Perhaps a monthly preset amount that is spread out over my consumption.
I know the pirate bay guys did something like that where you have a centralized subscription and can like blog posts and the like.
However I'd prefer something like crypto, but also convenient and controlled by a Foss program running on my own hardware.
Dreams am I right.
8Minus the crypto (save for big maybe monero), I completely agree. I just don't want to primarily support the middle men and would rather support the creators. I don't mind giving them some money to distribute the media, but not even close to the lion's share they get now.
4I know it sounds naive but honestly I just wish I could consume media and when I like it I can just send them some money without any hassle.
So the artist gets a cut of every stream? Isn't that just Spotify's model, which is infamously kinda shit for the actual artists?
3The artist can run their own website in this model. As long as it's easy for me to send money in whatever way I please, using my own program.
3Spotify's model is basically how can we screw everyone, and keep the maximum for ourselves. Bandcamp is probably a better example, where artists actually get the bulk of the sales.
2
How come there can be laws about manufacturers not selling directly to consumers for cars where it makes no fucking sense but not for media where it might actually be beneficial.
8Laws regulating TV shows? I just don't see any need for it. We will all be fine without that media. Read a book or take a walk or browse free online media.
Of course simultaneous price increases suggest a possible antitrust issue, and that should be dealt with (but don't cross your fingers) along with all the other antitrust issues in other areas.
3Laws around content producers distributing their own content so we end up with every company with it's own streaming service. That way we would have 3rd party ones that have all the content and we can choose based on platform features rather than content being held hostage.
I'm sure it would be difficult and maybe impossible to do in practice but I can dream right.
5
🏴☠️
8This color scheme is jarring! Reading mode to the rescue!
3Yea after The Verge got their new "look" I now read everything on there in reading mode, its a sh!tshow, the person responsible should be shot in the face with a cream pie
5And here I was thinking my 15 year old self was a dork for doing HTML-websites with color="black" as background and color="red" as font color...
1
Doesn't Time Warner own the verge?
2No, they're owned by Vox Media
who is owned by Comcast.Edit: Comcast/NBCUniversal just has investments in Vox, they're not owners.
2I knew they had ties to a cable company
Investment is still enough to warrant a questioning look at their "journalist integrity"
1
Permanently Deleted
1When they all started touting these services back in the 00's I was like "Why are you morons falling for this shit for?!" Because that all the shit inherent to such a platform was gonna happen sooner or later. Then a few years later "QQ - my fav show got removed from the service and now I can't watch it" or "XYZ got censored!" or "These services are getting worse all the time."
The whole time, I've been sitting on my metaphorical Queen Anne's Revenge and laughing at them. And of course, now that they all want to come back, I'm gleefully throwing down the gangplank!
1We all just rent stuff now and it's super annoying since the company decides when the rent is over, not us. Despite paying for the service each month, we have no say in what stays and what disappears.
0The only winning move is not to play. To the sea my friend, TO THE SEA!
2