But Wednesday’s move to significantly bump prices, marked an acknowledgment by Iger of the media giant’s intent to squeeze more revenue out of streaming by pushing consumers to the advertising-supported plans, which have proven to be more profitable.
“The advertising marketplace for streaming is picking up,” Iger told investors on the quarterly earnings call. “It’s more healthy than the advertising marketplace for linear television. We believe in the future of advertising on our streaming platforms, both Disney+ and Hulu.”
This is extremely important for them. Netflix’s excellent deal for most of its streaming existence was obviously a thorn in the side of many other businesses. Even if streaming services can get you to pay an exorbitant amount of money on an ad-free tier, advertisers are frothing for the chance to advertise to you regardless. They want you to see their ads so badly. And let’s not forget all the big tech companies, Netflix included, were riding high during the free money days of 0% interest loans. Those days are over, and the bill is due. Wall Street wants its money. And we are all the ones who have to pay up. Cheap streaming is officially over.
This is why these companies, including Netflix, have all introduced ad tiers. Not only is it a great way for them to juice their revenue streams, but also every other company wants a permanent residence in your brain, and then some. Given the way things have been going since duo-eras of the COVID pandemic and corporate profit-based inflation, they don’t even need to collude on prices. All the execs need to do is look at the business press and say, “Hey, they’re getting away with increased prices and password sharing crackdowns. We can do the same thing. The pay pigs keep paying!”
Might fuck around and start invoicing companies for attention time, comprehension time, storage capacity, and of course the 500$ per instance recall fee.
You know it’s coming. Why would a streaming company want a consumer buying one month, binging a single show they’re interested in, then immediately cancelling the subscription after, when you could guarantee a 6- or 12-month revenue stream for them?
Is it really unclear? If you had never heard of a product, you would much less likely purchase it. If Coke stopped advertising today, they’d start a very slow but real loss of market to it’s competiton, be it Pepsi or whatever. Note that a LOT of advertising is not for you. It’s for the corporate buyer at name your favorite restaurant so that they think that they’ll get more consumers in the door because they have Coke products, as opposed to some other brand.
I suppose it’s not that unclear if you compare the revenue of all other industries combined to the revenue of the advertising industry. The ratio is pretty large and every type of industry buys ads, so it trickles down from everywhere.
Big advertising budgets that are funded from the value alienated from exploited workers and consumers. Information asymmetry in the marketplace means that even if you make a superior product at a lower price, you could still be outcompeted by an expensive inferior product if more people know about that worse product and don’t know about your product.
That’s for most basic products anyway. Luxury products like bags and clothes are almost all marketing since the cost to create them is so low compared to their sales price. People buy them because of perceptions created by marketing and not any inherent value in the product itself.
As far as I know internet advertising is an economy destroying sunk cost fallacy. No one makes money off of it, but if they stop basically everything collapses catastrophically, so they just keep pouring more money in to it in hopes that someone will find a way to make it profitable before the bill comes due.
Ehhh, not really. If showing 10,000 people an ad costs you $10 and even one person made a purchase off that, you’ve paid for the ad buy. Internet ad conversions are considered unbelievably excellent if 1% of viewers click on the ad and 1% of those people make a purchase.
Also, if you don’t advertise, then your competition that do advertise are going to eat your lunch.
This makes me wonder what else I can do with my free time. Besides saving money, if I stopped paying for all of these services, I would probably be more active and healthier. A part of me hopes that they increase prices again, and motivate people to be more active.
When I dropped Amazon Prime, I found myself ordering less crap, reusing more, and buying higher quality from different vendors. I also watched Twitch less because I no longer had a free sub (though I still use an ad blocker, it just feels more wrong so I just watch less).
Sometimes we just need to give ourselves a little push.
Write your own stories. I have an entire canon that I can draw from and more ideas for novels than I can publish in a lifetime. It’s one of the few practices I’ve ever engaged in that I’m proud of.
The disruptive streaming model birthed by Netflix that dangled all-you-can-eat menus of films, shows, and endless entertainment without pesky advertisements for extraordinarily low prices came to an official close on Wednesday.
Disney boss Bob Iger announced during the company’s quarterly earnings report that the Magic Kingdom will once again hike Disney+ prices for the second time in less than a year, increasing the monthly cost of its ad-free plan $3 to $13.99 in October.
But Wednesday’s move to significantly bump prices, marked an acknowledgment by Iger of the media giant’s intent to squeeze more revenue out of streaming by pushing consumers to the advertising-supported plans, which have proven to be more profitable.
When Netflix first offered its pioneering service for only $8 a month, millions of people signed up, eager to have access to the company’s expansive catalog for just a fraction of the cost of the traditional cable bundle.
That served as the genesis of the streaming era, with legacy entertainment companies such as Disney racing to launch their own direct-to-consumer products at unsustainably low costs.
Couple that reality with the introduction of ads into streaming and the end product eerily resembles on-demand cable.
Honestly people should probably be thinking about future-proofing things and putting as much media as physically possible on to drives in anticipation of whatever the next wave of bullshit. At some point Samizdat2.0 will probably be the only way to preserve and share media under the capitalist censorship regime. They’re just going to keep cracking down and cracking down and cracking down until no one can move without bleeding for the privilege.
As they said in the bad old days: Keep circulating the tapes.
Until we can pull this whole bullshit edifice down, kick it in the kidneys a few times, and set it on fire the only way to protect media from the companies that “own” it is going to be little people with really big RAID arrays.
It certainly feels like we’re on the precipice of something breaking what with computers rapidly getting more locked down, these secure enclaves and/or TPM chips verifying that you’re watching on an approved OS and web browser before allowing you to stream, and then the video is encrypted until it gets to your actual TV. Crazy what they’re getting away with.
In the near future I foresee pirates pointing cameras at TV screens then using AI to clean up the video, then media companies responding by creating randomized slightly different versions of videos so they can trace them back to the account holder who shared it (move some tree branches around, slightly different colored hat on background actors, etc) and perhaps getting legislation passed to stop cameras from being allowed to record IP protected material, and so on.
Is that true? Most of the best public trackers got shut down. Anything left has bots recording your IP and you’re getting a letter from your ISP.
If you’re not on a private ratio tracker or paid tracker it’s basically a non starter. So I’m not sure about unaffected era the last 10 years have been brutal for pirates via torrent.
What’s the situation with usenet these days ? I preferred nzbs over torrents for several years but it just became impossible at around the time nzbmatrix chucked it in.
Indexers like NZBGeek, Drunkenslug, and NZBFinder have resulted in me getting almost anything I want, short of some obscure Australia series from the 80s. Providers are doing 2000+ days retention and I’m only using 1 myself, never even needed to get a backup on a different backbone.
What an unusually comedic yet depressing final comments in the article:
It’s an ironic end to the streaming wars. After pouring billions and billions of dollars into constructing supposedly revolutionary streaming platforms, and decimating the business models that had offered the industry stability for decades, the ultimate product looks awfully similar to what companies and consumers were trying to break free from in the first place.
Im just gonna parrot what the other person remarked because what they said is pretty on point: I mean this is basically inevitable. We know that capitalism doesn’t actually seek the lowest price as its evangelists usually preach, but the highest - and so there is no way that streaming will not balloon over time to a price comparable to the cable TV plans of the past.
I use emby too and love it. All content played though emby was downloaded. Is this how you are using emby or so you subscribe to some service for streaming?
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Private internet access is fantastic.
Mullvad.
Mullvad is good
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Popcorn time :D
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Frear and the illusion of convenience is what makes them pay.
Ya’har me matey!
The internet is much faster now too
yaaaaarrr tis cheaper than eva matey
Not on my Emby server
Same but jellyfin
This is extremely important for them. Netflix’s excellent deal for most of its streaming existence was obviously a thorn in the side of many other businesses. Even if streaming services can get you to pay an exorbitant amount of money on an ad-free tier, advertisers are frothing for the chance to advertise to you regardless. They want you to see their ads so badly. And let’s not forget all the big tech companies, Netflix included, were riding high during the free money days of 0% interest loans. Those days are over, and the bill is due. Wall Street wants its money. And we are all the ones who have to pay up. Cheap streaming is officially over.
This is why these companies, including Netflix, have all introduced ad tiers. Not only is it a great way for them to juice their revenue streams, but also every other company wants a permanent residence in your brain, and then some. Given the way things have been going since duo-eras of the COVID pandemic and corporate profit-based inflation, they don’t even need to collude on prices. All the execs need to do is look at the business press and say, “Hey, they’re getting away with increased prices and password sharing crackdowns. We can do the same thing. The pay pigs keep paying!”
Might fuck around and start invoicing companies for attention time, comprehension time, storage capacity, and of course the 500$ per instance recall fee.
I’ll be completely unsurprised when streaming companies start enticing or forcing us into term agreements.
You know it’s coming. Why would a streaming company want a consumer buying one month, binging a single show they’re interested in, then immediately cancelling the subscription after, when you could guarantee a 6- or 12-month revenue stream for them?
Rents work this way; it wouldn’t be a surprise if the same playbook was adopted by these neo-feudalists.
I really cannot understand why advertising is such a huge business. Where does all the money spent on advertising really come from?
Is it really unclear? If you had never heard of a product, you would much less likely purchase it. If Coke stopped advertising today, they’d start a very slow but real loss of market to it’s competiton, be it Pepsi or whatever. Note that a LOT of advertising is not for you. It’s for the corporate buyer at name your favorite restaurant so that they think that they’ll get more consumers in the door because they have Coke products, as opposed to some other brand.
I suppose it’s not that unclear if you compare the revenue of all other industries combined to the revenue of the advertising industry. The ratio is pretty large and every type of industry buys ads, so it trickles down from everywhere.
Big advertising budgets that are funded from the value alienated from exploited workers and consumers. Information asymmetry in the marketplace means that even if you make a superior product at a lower price, you could still be outcompeted by an expensive inferior product if more people know about that worse product and don’t know about your product.
That’s for most basic products anyway. Luxury products like bags and clothes are almost all marketing since the cost to create them is so low compared to their sales price. People buy them because of perceptions created by marketing and not any inherent value in the product itself.
As far as I know internet advertising is an economy destroying sunk cost fallacy. No one makes money off of it, but if they stop basically everything collapses catastrophically, so they just keep pouring more money in to it in hopes that someone will find a way to make it profitable before the bill comes due.
Ehhh, not really. If showing 10,000 people an ad costs you $10 and even one person made a purchase off that, you’ve paid for the ad buy. Internet ad conversions are considered unbelievably excellent if 1% of viewers click on the ad and 1% of those people make a purchase.
Also, if you don’t advertise, then your competition that do advertise are going to eat your lunch.
Good too know. I guess i need to do more reading.
This makes me wonder what else I can do with my free time. Besides saving money, if I stopped paying for all of these services, I would probably be more active and healthier. A part of me hopes that they increase prices again, and motivate people to be more active.
Yup, you probably will be.
When I dropped Amazon Prime, I found myself ordering less crap, reusing more, and buying higher quality from different vendors. I also watched Twitch less because I no longer had a free sub (though I still use an ad blocker, it just feels more wrong so I just watch less).
Sometimes we just need to give ourselves a little push.
Write your own stories. I have an entire canon that I can draw from and more ideas for novels than I can publish in a lifetime. It’s one of the few practices I’ve ever engaged in that I’m proud of.
Looks around. You guys are still streaming?
finishes downloading latest movie. Naw, what about you?
This is the best summary I could come up with:
The disruptive streaming model birthed by Netflix that dangled all-you-can-eat menus of films, shows, and endless entertainment without pesky advertisements for extraordinarily low prices came to an official close on Wednesday.
Disney boss Bob Iger announced during the company’s quarterly earnings report that the Magic Kingdom will once again hike Disney+ prices for the second time in less than a year, increasing the monthly cost of its ad-free plan $3 to $13.99 in October.
But Wednesday’s move to significantly bump prices, marked an acknowledgment by Iger of the media giant’s intent to squeeze more revenue out of streaming by pushing consumers to the advertising-supported plans, which have proven to be more profitable.
When Netflix first offered its pioneering service for only $8 a month, millions of people signed up, eager to have access to the company’s expansive catalog for just a fraction of the cost of the traditional cable bundle.
That served as the genesis of the streaming era, with legacy entertainment companies such as Disney racing to launch their own direct-to-consumer products at unsustainably low costs.
Couple that reality with the introduction of ads into streaming and the end product eerily resembles on-demand cable.
I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Good bot
era of torrenting unaffected
Honestly people should probably be thinking about future-proofing things and putting as much media as physically possible on to drives in anticipation of whatever the next wave of bullshit. At some point Samizdat2.0 will probably be the only way to preserve and share media under the capitalist censorship regime. They’re just going to keep cracking down and cracking down and cracking down until no one can move without bleeding for the privilege.
As they said in the bad old days: Keep circulating the tapes.
Until we can pull this whole bullshit edifice down, kick it in the kidneys a few times, and set it on fire the only way to protect media from the companies that “own” it is going to be little people with really big RAID arrays.
It certainly feels like we’re on the precipice of something breaking what with computers rapidly getting more locked down, these secure enclaves and/or TPM chips verifying that you’re watching on an approved OS and web browser before allowing you to stream, and then the video is encrypted until it gets to your actual TV. Crazy what they’re getting away with.
In the near future I foresee pirates pointing cameras at TV screens then using AI to clean up the video, then media companies responding by creating randomized slightly different versions of videos so they can trace them back to the account holder who shared it (move some tree branches around, slightly different colored hat on background actors, etc) and perhaps getting legislation passed to stop cameras from being allowed to record IP protected material, and so on.
Is that true? Most of the best public trackers got shut down. Anything left has bots recording your IP and you’re getting a letter from your ISP.
If you’re not on a private ratio tracker or paid tracker it’s basically a non starter. So I’m not sure about unaffected era the last 10 years have been brutal for pirates via torrent.
You just need a VPN. Public trackers are generally fine.
If you’re torrenting without a VPN you’re doing it wrong. Also you should look at Usenet instead.
And Soulseek.
What’s the situation with usenet these days ? I preferred nzbs over torrents for several years but it just became impossible at around the time nzbmatrix chucked it in.
Better than ever! Seriously.
Indexers like NZBGeek, Drunkenslug, and NZBFinder have resulted in me getting almost anything I want, short of some obscure Australia series from the 80s. Providers are doing 2000+ days retention and I’m only using 1 myself, never even needed to get a backup on a different backbone.
Well that’s good to hear. Tormenting sucks in Australia.
VPN has been necessary for pirating for a long time. And fortunately a VPN is cheaper then any streaming service, and has other benefits besides.
But hey, at least we also get connection issues when compared to cable.
Yeah, you used to have to get satellite for that to be an issue.
What an unusually comedic yet depressing final comments in the article:
It’s an ironic end to the streaming wars. After pouring billions and billions of dollars into constructing supposedly revolutionary streaming platforms, and decimating the business models that had offered the industry stability for decades, the ultimate product looks awfully similar to what companies and consumers were trying to break free from in the first place.Im just gonna parrot what the other person remarked because what they said is pretty on point: I mean this is basically inevitable. We know that capitalism doesn’t actually seek the lowest price as its evangelists usually preach, but the highest - and so there is no way that streaming will not balloon over time to a price comparable to the cable TV plans of the past.
Yarrr
To be fair, capitalism seeks the lowest market clearance price. Until price hikes start showing a lower net return, prices will go up.
Not that I care, me cap’n’s hat never left the boat.
It’s incredible to watch them kill their own golden goose
Apparently it wasn’t so much a “golden” goose.
They were all happy to let them run at below cost just gathering up market share.
Now they’re trying to re-position to be profitable. Their subscriber numbers will definitely take a hit but they will have done the math.
Do you have any stats/resources that show that these streaming services are inherently unprofitable?
Sure, it’s a fundamental concept of strategic management.
Paid Plex shares are the way to go
Plex shares (I actually use an Emby share) are what streaming should have been after cable.
It’s the perfect service, everything all in one spot for a reasonable fee.
I’d pay up to $100 a month for that legally, but instead the studios want to bleed me dry.
So they get nothing.
I use emby too and love it. All content played though emby was downloaded. Is this how you are using emby or so you subscribe to some service for streaming?
With streaming services you have to pay and you don’t own it, with torrents you only have to pay for internet fee and you’ll own it forever.
With the small caveat that you’re breaking the law, of course.