I’ve been unmotivated in the past but i think it’s time to sort out an alternative.
Because netflix tested it and it was worth it for them. The increased revenue from ads more than made up the subscription fees of users lost.
They’re banking on their service still being better. In the short term they assume their particular selection of content will provide some inertia to your decision to move, and long term they expect all of the other options are going to do the same thing. Eventually, you’ll only be able to stream with commercials, and they’ll be back to the balance of their content being the only deciding factor.
I have zero commercials on my Jellyfin instance.
🏴☠️
If they increase prices by 20% and lose 15% of their customer base, that’s an increase in profit.
If they increase their ad duration by 50% and lose 15% of their customer base, that’s a huge increase in profit.
You’re one person
Because they think you’ll be too addicted to their content and offerings to quit
Streaming services have a catastrophic problem they didn’t see coming.
As they massively expanded the viewing market, they also gave very accurate viewing metrics compared to broadcast TV.
Also, the many, MANY offerings cut the viewing pie into smaller pieces.
And this is the expectation, mostly because while you might stay with a super hit like GoT, they’re super expensive, and huge risks if they don’t take off (see acolyte). Cost sensitive people are likely to subscribe for the season then cancel, or just subscribe the month the season finishes.
The alternative is to try to hook you on a bunch of shows, which means having a ton of them and hoping they nail your niche. People are less willing to do this, but it works if you have more disposable income, or value streaming more.
In any case, they can’t afford all the shows they have to put on, it’s all or nothing now, before they might watch lost on ABC one night, then CBS walker Texas ranger might let the kid fall on the ground the next, but now you have to keep them entertained most days, that’s a shit-ton of content. HBO has it worse, they’re losing their old cable revenue, and their productions are stupid expensive, and they’re one of the winners. Disney has it even worse because disney+ cannibalizes both their cinema sales and they have to put up their crown jewels, star wars and the mcu, all on the same service, devaluing both. Fortunately focusing on kids programming helps because parents basically have to have Disney+ just as a matter of course.
This barely worked on broadcast because the different channels could share the load and cut the ad pie into larger pieces,
If they could count on must-watch blockbusters (ie GoT, which really hurt them when they screwed the landing and killed rewatchability), they could pull it off, but that’s so risky, it’s betting everything on one spin of the roulette wheel.
I liked reading your response. Wish I had a meaningful response other than there is no way I’m going to feel bad for media companies. If they’ve painted themselves in a corner I’m sure it was greed that got them there.
Don’t feel bad at all for them.
They celebrated like crazy when things were good, now the economics is hitting them like it should.
They, like everyone else in life, will have to figure out how to manage, or not.
Eh, the cycle of collapse and consolidation will hit the streaming system exactly the same as it would any other industry. I feel like the system will stabilize around 3-5 big services - maybe amazon, hbo, and disney, with youtube premium and apple TV as the “also rans” - which will all have premium price points and ads, and the average person who subscribes to them will be paying about as much (after inflation) as they used to pay for cable.
That’s exactly what will happen.
There will just be a lot more fuckery involved, a super-premium tier that doesn’t cycle out content but costs 3x as much and such.
If you even started using streaming services, I’ve got bad news for you.
If you started using steaming services on the other hand, you might be a god danged genius
Because they know most people are too lazy, too addicted, too lacking in tech for any other solution, so they’ll take the abuse.
already ditched them most of them and moved to self hosting movies, TV shows and music. I’m still paying for music but the latest drama of losing tons of classics on YouTube music due to SESAC licensing has me rethinking what I’m even paying for.
Because for every one person like you and me with zero ad tolerance, there’s hundreds, thousands of plebs who can’t be bothered to drop the service. It’s the inverse of the whale (re. microtransactions) problem.
I know a few people that actually claim to like watching ads. They have made consumerism part of their identity and they are proud of it.
Not having commercials has really only been a thing for, at best, like 15 years. Broadcast and cable TV has always had commercials with the exception of specialty channels like HBO and Showtime and a few others.
Streaming only overtook cable TV in viewership in 2020. Even in 2022, cable and broadcast TV still made up 56% of viewership.
Cable TV started out as “pay for your access and you won’t get ads”. It enshitified into its current state, and streaming is literally a rerun. Give it a few more years and you will have price bundles for streaming services where you have to pay for peacock to get Disney. They might even bundle it with ISP services.
Cos you haven’t already. You’re a par boiled frog and didn’t even notice.
But they haven’t added unskippable unavoidable ads yet.
When/if they do, that’ll tell a story.
You’re paying for a service AND you get ads? Sounds great.
The issue is by the time they do, they control the market and not much alternatives.
Thank god old mates kept sailing for rest of us were funding our future enemies because it was convenient
Amazon prime video has iirc
Remember Netflix’s password sharing ban outrage? It didn’t work, they gained more subscribers. People stay because they don’t know how to sail the high seas or are too lazy to do it.
I think shoving ads in everything is a bit different then the purging leeches but ok.
What alternative? Every other service who does the same shit? Or even worse, setup jellyfin with sonarr server to completely automate everything and watch everything for absolutely free and continue to do so forever?? The shit some of these pirates do is disgusting.
Or even worse, setup jellyfin with sonarr server to completely automate everything and watch everything for absolutely free and continue to do so forever??
Oh no?..
Still using Plex because I didn’t like the way jelyfin worked.
Heard Plex has gone downhill quite a bit. Any important features you are looking for in jellyfin? Never tried or checked Plex myself so don’t know much about it.
The real issue is that bitchibg pinging mothership all the fucking time but most of it can be blocked.
ESP “analytics”
I’ve been using plex for a while and it works great.
