Who the fuck pays for more than one at a time anyway, I don’t mind fragmentation because I have no loyalty to one service and will move to one to watch it’s stuff, then move when i get bored of what it has to offer. Competition is always good. We shouldn’t have monopolies in any industry, including streaming
Most people don’t know where to look for to get started on that. Some people don’t even know that pirating that show they watch is even an option in the first place.
No, but as a current non-pirate, seeing the UX of some of the newer tools is mindblowing. “You mean, I just type in any show, it looks it up and to find episode info, then gets me the episodes so I can watch it, without me having to split between services or even THINK?”
The legal show world should have that, but every one of those services are locked-down so you can’t have a solution like that in front of them. Heaven forbid we could just license shows like retail locations license radio.
I mean, I suck-it-up and sub to all of them. I hate the experience and my wife bitches at me at least weekly because it’s so much work to find and start a show (to the extent she ends up NOT watching the show she wanted, and leaves some stupid channel on at random). We are so close to cancelling all of them, not for the money but because the experience is complete ass.
Guess what I’ll be doing to watch my TV if we do that?
It’s only going to be a matter of time before they start requiring contracts, forcing you to stick with a service for long periods or face fees for dropping them.
They are capitalists, and so they must always profit more and more, never ending, for all of time. One of the things they will eventually do to hit that unsustainable proift motive is contracts. It’s what the cable companies did, and it’s only a matter of time.
This is exactly where it’s heading, not just for streaming but for anything and everything that can be packaged and sold “as a service” whether it’s actually a service or anything that’s undergoing the enshittification process of being converted from a product into a service.
Anything that can be converted into a service will be, and anything that can be so converted will, eventually, become a subscription, and from there, into a contract service model.
Honestly it wouldn’t surprise me a bit to even see literal standalone products converted into contract based subscriptions over time, given the IoT trend.
So beyond just your streaming service, your TV will have its proprietary OS converted to a subscription and then to a contract, so that you need to sign a 2 year deal with your TV manufacturer to keep it “powered”. Don’t sign a contract? They brick your TV.
With more and more smart appliances, expect to see companies try this to also force you into contracts to keep your fridge, toaster, smart lighting, microwave, door locks and cameras, etc. functional.
Naturally, baked into your contract will be language that forces you to share any and all data they can collect from said devices as a condition of the contract.
Canceling cable used to be, at the very least, a long, phone call that alternated between stretches of hold music dulling the senses and combative sales technique verbal jousting. Canceling a streaming service… I don’t think that has ever taken me more than four minutes of finding a webpage and clicking. The collective consciousness is in danger of forgetting/underplaying just how far we have come on this.
If pirating ever takes less than four minutes every other month, I guess it will have reached convenience parity. But it certainly wasn’t that back when I was in that game. And I really, really doubt it is now.
It may be but until other options are available on a PlayStation, I doubt I’ll move. I don’t even watch stuff but the people I serve to need functionally on the PS… maybe they’ll get smart TVs soon
Honestly most of my problems in life have much to do with the fact that rich Southerners halted the Reconstruction in order to maintain dominance over the poor
I’m usually baffled whenever companies do a long term face-plant for the sake of short term profit. Really goes to show that what academics like to theorize about capitalism isn’t reflected in reality. Sure the system might work with people interested in long term gains but it very obviously is run by people that want short term gratification and in general just more of whatever they already have. Mostly that means money, because swimming in money still is not enough for these people.
Loot boxes and streaming are the best examples, the companies could have had a thing where they just print money. All they had to do was to moderate themselves a bit and not extort the customer for the last cent. But no, insane amounts of cash flow/profit are not enough, it needs to be ludicrously insane amounts. And after that some more.
Way too accurate. Netflix, when it was the sole main provider, was super good. Then the other companies realised the big bucks they could get from streaming/peddling their own shit.
Thanks to this meme, I killed my netflix account. Nicotine is fine :D
It is good, if the competing products/services are interchangeable and they need to compete on factors such as price, convenience, or reliability. For example, competing grocery stores, all of which offer by and large the same products. Or competing mechanics, all of which can perform service on your car.
Streaming services don’t do this. They have carved up the market and “compete” by making you choose which products you want more.
Imagine two grocery stores, one of which had all the ice cream, and the other had all the chocolate, and neither could carry things that the other stocked. That is what streaming services are doing.
Competition on price sounds nice because it prevents excessive prices, but it’s also a root cause of poverty and environmental abuse. Cooperating is much better.
Modern copyright law is essentially a state sanctioned monopoly.
Rights holders should be forced to license the content to anyone that wishes to distribute it. As it stands now, they can lock it in a vault for generations if they wanted.
You mean like Disney still does… they just purged 500 million dollars worth of content from Disney plus and there is no other legel way to view most of that content now untill Disney decides to wheel it back out again (content that got a physical release is obviously still available)
They didn’t explicitly say they are back vaulting things again but I wouldn’t be surprised if they put out some of the content they took down back on disney plus or home releases at some point
Case law states that if media is no longer available, it’s consumption is considered preservation and is thus completely legal. Nobody can argue lost profits for something that literally isn’t even on the market. Fun fact: this is the reason why Nintendo releases their old games on the E shop for way more than what they’re worth. Once it’s up there they get to do takedown requests of every ROM on the internet.
this is the reason why Nintendo releases their old games on the E shop for way more than what they’re worth. Once it’s up there they get to do takedown requests of every ROM on the internet.
I want to be astonished and ask in disbelief if that’s really the case. But with how Nintendo treats not only piracy but content derived from their games in general (mods, tournaments and stuff), I can’t be surprised.
Do you mayhaps know why Nintendo is so hard on that front? I’ve heard that it’s “just the mentality in Japan”, but I can’t remember Sony cracking down on people like that.
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