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.
Yarrrr, we be seein’ about that…
Yeah I don’t have the budget to subscribe to multiple streaming services, let alone cable or even one service. Thank god there’s not a lot I’d want to watch…even if sailing high seas.
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.
downshift to a cheaper service.
Yarr matey
There’s a scene in Fight Club about how auto companies approach recalls, and a similar method is applied for these price hikes. The company predicts how many people will leave or change plans or whatever with their changes and they price it out so that they end up making more money.
And for a small example let’s say you have two customers paying $10/month for a service. If the price increases by $11, and one customer leaves, you are now making $21/month from the service.
Now it’s not as simple as that in the real world, but that’s the general idea.
The issue here is that even if a vocal minority leave these streaming services, or social media there’s still a large amount of people putting up with their shit.
And as a bonus you have less customers to provide support to!
That’s literally what they teach you about basic economics at school…
The standard graph of price increasing on one side and customer demand decreasing on the other, and how companies try to find the crossover point.
Sorry mate this is not some special fight club logic. It’s not even really accounting or economics logic, it’s just kinda common sense.
What price should I sell my lemonade for? I’ll have more customers if I sell it cheaper…
The part which seems lost on most commenters is that these companies have huge and very sophisticated market research campaigns. They can predict with great accuracy how their demographics will respond.
People will cancel or downshift to a cheaper service.
Streaming platforms make more money from you if you use the cheaper ad-supported plans. The price hikes are to get you off the ad-free plans.
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.
I’ve no problem with paying for good services
Exactly. It used to be that netflix was all you needed to get most quality content, and it was a fair deal for customers: you pay a reasonable monthly amount, and you and your family gets convenient access to most streamable movies and TV series.
Now that quality content is spread out and locked out over half a dozen other streaming services, and subscribing to them all is not just a hassle but also incredibly bad value compared to the original offer.
In a healthy competitive environment, you would expect companies to counter reduced value by increasing customer value in other ways or by reducing prices, but instead we got price hikes, lots of low quality filler content, crack downs on password sharing, advertising, various unpopular UI changes and other service reductions decreasing value even further.
To solve this, I think the content producers and streaming services should be split up, because right now they’re not really competitors in a true sence but small monopolies who each clutch the keys to their own little franchises. It should be noted for example that music streaming works a lot better: there are various competitors that each hold a viable content library on their own, so you don’t need more than one music streaming service. IMO that’s because Spotify, Tidal, YT Music, etc. are merely distributors and not the actual producers.
Yeah, the music industry finally got their shit together and made something that was more convenient than just nicking it online. Took their sweet time over it, but I think they realised that it was taking like a minute to download a whole album by that point.
It’s really the model of how to do it well. Very little in the way of exclusives locked to one particular service. Occasionally an artist kicks up a fuss over something and pulls all their stuff from one of them, but it’s rare enough that I don’t care.
Being totally serious, you should copy and paste your comment and email it to your local US Representative.
I have a problem paying for DRM. I want to use open source and DRM is the opposite. I like (and buy sometimes) Creative Commons music/audio-books just because it tastes better when artist isn’t supporting restricting me. Cory Doctorow is a creative worker who lives and breaths anti-DRM, if you’ve not explored this. I recommend his old talk “The Coming War on General Computation”.
Source on better pirate streaming service?
Any of these will do. Prime is not a high bar to get over. Some may work better than others, and I think it’s down to where you are and time of day than anything else.
https://fmhy.pages.dev/videopiracyguide/#multi-server
It’s not as good as downloading yourself and running Jellyfin, but it’s convenient.
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?
Piracy isn’t easier than not bothering to cancel your subscription for most people. I’m sure they’ll lose some people, and especially the demographic here, but I don’t know about the average person.
Piracy has never been easier or safer or faster than it is now
What?! It was way easier and safer in the era of Napster, edonkey and emule. Easy discoverability and companies didn’t pay any attention yet. Since then it’s a cat and mouse game.
Yarr harr fiddle dee dee. Fuck Netflix, Hulu and Disney
Why is piracy costing you 4$ a month.
VPN?
not everyone can torrent freely
I do pay a little for Usenet and my NZB indexer, about $115 per year all said and done. And I pay for hardware and electricity, but I wouldn’t have it any other way.
I’ll give you a reason, pirating. Pirating with obfuscated networks (VPN, onion, etc) will never die. People just put it down because the convenience was worth the price. When it no longer is, ships will sail the seas again, and having everything already digital in these services will make it that much easier.
torrenting over tor would be exhaustive for the onions.
I2P
Now chart hours of content against cost across the market, and watch it go vertical. Bonus for weighting by critical rating.
Piracy is the only reasonable choice.
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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.
I’m already in the process of replacing my streaming services with cheaper alternatives.
It blows my mind that advertising could be worth more than a subscription.
Their evaluation of advertising must be tied with brand recognition and other general brain washing tactics.
I think it is possible advertising is over valued. There I’ve said it. I’m not alone in this: https://freakonomics.com/podcast/does-advertising-actually-work-part-2-digital-ep-441/
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.
Streaming services, digital services in general, should be made to compete on having the best platform, not on exclusive content.
The way to get that is to split them and say: a streaming provider can’t be a content creator as well. That way, content creating companies would be incentivized to sell their content to every streaming provider at a price that the market will bear, and streaming providers would be incentivized to compete on providing the best experience to their users.
We’re also getting more than ever from streaming. That is if you like shitty remakes and sadistic defacto porn.
Raise prices. Blame “the liberal agenda”. Profit.
Nope, because every time another one raises the price we cancel it. It’s working out quite well
I’m begging zoomers to learn how to torrent
I’m kind of amazed how my Gen Z buddies are so adamantly against pirating. They think the cops will bust down their door, literally.
A few of mine got cease and desist orders from their ISP, one got two… so that’s why they’re against it. Some now do VPN, some just hop streaming services. Some just stopped watching as much stuff because: life.
I mean i’ve met a lot of millenials like that too. I’m not exactly sure where it stems from
As a gen z kiddo, like half of the software on my pc and 90% of my movies are pirated lmao.
Why? You realize if everyone torrents there will be nothing to torrent, right?
Lol no. That’s not how an economy works. When you sell less of a thing you then have to adjust price to make it favorable again. Companies aren’t just going to say “If we can’t charge $350 a month we might as well just turn off this massive money machine.” No, they will charge $200 and accept making less money over making no money.
That’s not how an economy works.
You’re correct. Theft has nothing to do with the economy.
No, they will charge $200 and accept making less money
It doesn’t matter what they charge when everyone steals it for $0.
You’re correct. Theft has nothing to do with the economy.
Ummm theft, aka shrink, is very much a part of any business.
Hiring theft prevention is an entire field of work around this very concept. How can you say theft has nothing to do with the economy when there is an entire industry around theft prevention…
It doesn’t matter what they charge when everyone steals it for $0.
You missed the part where people stop stealing if the price is reasonable. It’s the reason why pirating went way down when Netflix first came out. People are willing to pay, not be taken advantage of. Are you not reading these comments, people saying they will pirate if there is another hike? There is clearly a line, if they cross it then they lose customers.
You missed the part where people stop stealing if the price is reasonable.
LOL “reasonable” according to whom?
God the fucking galle you must have to say “ah that’s too expensive to pay for so I’ll just steal it! And if they bring the price back down I’ll totally pay for it out of the kindness of my little heart because I’m just such an ethical person!”
Stop lying, you’re not paying for shit.
According to the market. That’s how reasonable prices are arrived at. It’s this little thing called an economy.
I’m not saying stealing is OK, I’m just being realistic. If you charge $200 a month for Netflix people will steal it. You can get upset and rant all you want, that’s reality. People refuse to be charged more and more for the same thing, there is a breaking point.
Also, it’s not stealing. This argument has been had and proved false. The large number of people who pirate content are very unlikely to have ever paid for it. It’s not stealing vs buying, it’s pirating vs never watching. The outcome of pirating or never watching is the same to the creators.
Right now I pay for Netflix, Hulu, HBO Max and Sunday pass. I’m paying for plenty. You’re just too ruled by your emotions to have an actual conversation, so you make wild assumptions and throw insults instead.
According to the market. That’s how reasonable prices are arrived at. It’s this little thing called an economy.
LOL buddy, you are bypassing the economy. You’re just stealing the content. You need to take your own advice because that is not remotely how an economy works.
Also, it’s not stealing.
My God, this is the dumbest shit and I can’t believe you morons are still peddling this.
The outcome of pirating or never watching is the same to the creators.
Except it’s not, at all. And you know it isn’t. And there wouldn’t be giant megacorporations going after pirates if it was. This is nothing but shitty mental gymnastics you use to justify being a thief.
You’re just too ruled by your emotions to have an actual conversation
There’s no conversation to be had here. You’re just off living in a fictitious reality of your own creation. Have fun with that. Bye.
