5 ms·

Streaming also had no ads which is now gated behind even more pricey plans.

by jerjerjer 3y ago

DoughnutHole 3y ago
Even an “ad-free” Netflix plan is infested with promotion of their in-house productions.
- worthless-trash 3y ago
  Yeah, this grinds my gears too. If i wanted to watch the other productions, i'd be watching the other production. I can see what is available on the 'trending now' list on the exact screen just before starting this video.
cocoa19 3y ago
Low price and no ads were two of the main selling points to ditch cable (along with stream whenever you want). We reached the point were price is almost as high as cable was (with the standard 4-5 subscriptions), and we have ads. This is not a surprise to most though, the question has always been when would it happen.
- api 3y ago
  We are no longer under zero interest rates. Things have to actually be profitable.
  - gchamonlive 3y ago
    Isn't online streaming profitable? Does it absolutely need ads and granular channel subscriptions to be profitable?
    - boring-alterego 3y ago
      They have to be continually profitable every quarter, and they have to show growth quarter over quarter or the value of the company will take a major hit, which will impact how much capital they can loan for future projects.
      - helf 3y ago
        Which us fucking asinine. You can thank shareholders and the stock market in general with their lunatic "perpetual growth" bullshit for the enshittification of everything.
    - relyks 3y ago
      Netflix is the only streamer (out of the major ones) that is currently profitable
    - ta_1138 3y ago
      It's far less profitable than you'd think. Many of the competitors in the industry lose money. Licensing fees/production costs/royalties eat a bunch of the money, but the infrastructure to run a streaming service isn't cheap. I know at least one of the competitors that people would call the most successful is paying a 9 figure AWS bill, plus whatever the costs are for all the caching setup that makes most popular content live in ISPs. Add the typical army of developers building apps for the mobile devices, the billing team, people doing recommendation engines, fraud detection/security team, tagging all content, and translating every blurb in a bunch of languages, possibly pay for creating subtitles for all of those languages... it's not cheap. What is so frustrating about this is that so many of the costs would go down with consolidation. Every company has to handle the fact that age verification and privacy legislation in South Korea has to work in a just-so way, but every streaming service has to duplicate the logic. While the Netflix recommendation system probably can use some tweaks to take on all of D+'s content, I bet it'd be easier to tweak their system than to have every company have their own ML team handling recommendations. A lot of relatively low quality content wouldn't have to be made if we didn't need to make 'filler' to keep people spending sufficient time on a given streaming service while the next top quality release comes out. In a happy world, competition brings more better content at a cheaper price for consumers, but when I look at the state of streaming, what we have is many competitors that aren't breaking even, in exchange for a streaming experience that keeps getting worse. And there's little chance it's going to get better until at least half of the worst competitors give up and go back to licensing their content to whatever the big 3 end up being. And yes, we'd all be better off if we moved to the music model, where any subscription has 90% of the content, but do you really see, say, Apple, Netflix and Disney doing worldwide, full catalog cross-licensing deals?
      - throwaway2037 3y ago
        > I know at least one of the competitors that people would call the most successful is paying a 9 figure AWS bill (1) Netflix? (2) "9 figure". Just say 1B or 5B? There is a big difference.
      - api 3y ago
        9-figure cloud bills? What are they doing? Streaming from AWS? Are they mad? Even with what I'm sure is bulk negotiated bandwidth pricing there is no way this is an economical way to serve bulk content. For those prices you could build out a whole physical IT operation to rack stuff up in data centers and maintain it for a lot less and your bandwidth costs will be a minute fraction of AWS. There's also tons of CDNs that specialize in blasting out bandwidth. Putting command and control, accounting, signup / signin, etc. on AWS may make a lot of sense. Those are both more complex to run and lower bandwidth work loads.
  - ihsw 3y ago
    No subscriber told streaming services that they needed to drop literal billions of dollars on content production. I do not want to subsidize their poor decision making. This is why streaming is so expensive.
    - fragmede 3y ago
      They did say that, when they decided that what is playing is actually important to them, so if I can't get my Star Trek on my Netflix, I'm not going to pay for Netflix, it means that everyone has to make their own, exclusive content.
      - drucik 3y ago
        The thing is, if I want my Star Trek, I want my Star Trek, not some substitute…
  - vonjuice 3y ago
    No they don't?
  - blitzar 3y ago
    We are no longer under zero interest rates and I need fuel for my Jet(s) and my Yacht(s).
  - Moldoteck 3y ago
    businesses don't need to be just profitable, they need growth and it can be achieved by increasing nr of users, or prices, or some sort of upselling. As result prices will always increase as much as possible to keep most users but grow the profit
    - int_19h 3y ago
      They want growth. They don't need growth.
- TeMPOraL 3y ago
  No ads used to be the main selling point of cable, decades ago, which goes to show that advertising is a cancer and will thoroughly corrupt and consume every communication medium over time.
  - edmundsauto 3y ago
    As far back as I can remember (mid 80s) cable always had ads. The premium channels like HBO did not, but most channels did. Did you mean premium channels, or was there a time in the early 80s when >50% of channels carried by your provider didn't have ads?
    - int_19h 3y ago
      Mid-80s is exactly when that became to change. https://www.nytimes.com/1981/07/26/arts/will-cable-tv-be-invaded-by-commercials.html https://www.nytimes.com/1981/07/26/arts/will-cable-tv-be-inv...
- offices 3y ago
  But how we lived like kings during those few years of the venture-capital, antitrust, low-interest rate phenomena.
- godshatter 3y ago
  > We reached the point were price is almost as high as cable was (with the standard 4-5 subscriptions), and we have ads. I wonder if entertainment brand loyalty is going to be affected by the diversification of streaming services. I only have Netflix and Amazon Prime (only because I already pay for Prime) and I have no desire to add another streaming service for another show or franchise. I'm happy to just consume what I can find on those two services and call it good. At what point does the desire to watch a specific TV series or movie franchise stop being worth the cost of yet another service? But then I'm an atypical customer since I only watch maybe 4 hours of content a week on average, at most.

Streaming also had no ads which is now gated behind even more pricey plans.

DoughnutHole 3y ago

Even an “ad-free” Netflix plan is infested with promotion of their in-house productions.

worthless-trash 3y ago
Yeah, this grinds my gears too. If i wanted to watch the other productions, i'd be watching the other production. I can see what is available on the 'trending now' list on the exact screen just before starting this video.

cocoa19 3y ago

Low price and no ads were two of the main selling points to ditch cable (along with stream whenever you want). We reached the point were price is almost as high as cable was (with the standard 4-5 subscriptions), and we have ads. This is not a surprise to most though, the question has always been when would it happen.

api 3y ago
We are no longer under zero interest rates. Things have to actually be profitable.
- gchamonlive 3y ago
  Isn't online streaming profitable? Does it absolutely need ads and granular channel subscriptions to be profitable?
  - boring-alterego 3y ago
    They have to be continually profitable every quarter, and they have to show growth quarter over quarter or the value of the company will take a major hit, which will impact how much capital they can loan for future projects.
    - helf 3y ago
      Which us fucking asinine. You can thank shareholders and the stock market in general with their lunatic "perpetual growth" bullshit for the enshittification of everything.
  - relyks 3y ago
    Netflix is the only streamer (out of the major ones) that is currently profitable
  - ta_1138 3y ago
    It's far less profitable than you'd think. Many of the competitors in the industry lose money. Licensing fees/production costs/royalties eat a bunch of the money, but the infrastructure to run a streaming service isn't cheap. I know at least one of the competitors that people would call the most successful is paying a 9 figure AWS bill, plus whatever the costs are for all the caching setup that makes most popular content live in ISPs. Add the typical army of developers building apps for the mobile devices, the billing team, people doing recommendation engines, fraud detection/security team, tagging all content, and translating every blurb in a bunch of languages, possibly pay for creating subtitles for all of those languages... it's not cheap. What is so frustrating about this is that so many of the costs would go down with consolidation. Every company has to handle the fact that age verification and privacy legislation in South Korea has to work in a just-so way, but every streaming service has to duplicate the logic. While the Netflix recommendation system probably can use some tweaks to take on all of D+'s content, I bet it'd be easier to tweak their system than to have every company have their own ML team handling recommendations. A lot of relatively low quality content wouldn't have to be made if we didn't need to make 'filler' to keep people spending sufficient time on a given streaming service while the next top quality release comes out. In a happy world, competition brings more better content at a cheaper price for consumers, but when I look at the state of streaming, what we have is many competitors that aren't breaking even, in exchange for a streaming experience that keeps getting worse. And there's little chance it's going to get better until at least half of the worst competitors give up and go back to licensing their content to whatever the big 3 end up being. And yes, we'd all be better off if we moved to the music model, where any subscription has 90% of the content, but do you really see, say, Apple, Netflix and Disney doing worldwide, full catalog cross-licensing deals?
    - throwaway2037 3y ago
      > I know at least one of the competitors that people would call the most successful is paying a 9 figure AWS bill (1) Netflix? (2) "9 figure". Just say 1B or 5B? There is a big difference.
    - api 3y ago
      9-figure cloud bills? What are they doing? Streaming from AWS? Are they mad? Even with what I'm sure is bulk negotiated bandwidth pricing there is no way this is an economical way to serve bulk content. For those prices you could build out a whole physical IT operation to rack stuff up in data centers and maintain it for a lot less and your bandwidth costs will be a minute fraction of AWS. There's also tons of CDNs that specialize in blasting out bandwidth. Putting command and control, accounting, signup / signin, etc. on AWS may make a lot of sense. Those are both more complex to run and lower bandwidth work loads.
- ihsw 3y ago
  No subscriber told streaming services that they needed to drop literal billions of dollars on content production. I do not want to subsidize their poor decision making. This is why streaming is so expensive.
  - fragmede 3y ago
    They did say that, when they decided that what is playing is actually important to them, so if I can't get my Star Trek on my Netflix, I'm not going to pay for Netflix, it means that everyone has to make their own, exclusive content.
    - drucik 3y ago
      The thing is, if I want my Star Trek, I want my Star Trek, not some substitute…
- vonjuice 3y ago
  No they don't?
- blitzar 3y ago
  We are no longer under zero interest rates and I need fuel for my Jet(s) and my Yacht(s).
- Moldoteck 3y ago
  businesses don't need to be just profitable, they need growth and it can be achieved by increasing nr of users, or prices, or some sort of upselling. As result prices will always increase as much as possible to keep most users but grow the profit
  - int_19h 3y ago
    They want growth. They don't need growth.
TeMPOraL 3y ago
No ads used to be the main selling point of cable, decades ago, which goes to show that advertising is a cancer and will thoroughly corrupt and consume every communication medium over time.
- edmundsauto 3y ago
  As far back as I can remember (mid 80s) cable always had ads. The premium channels like HBO did not, but most channels did. Did you mean premium channels, or was there a time in the early 80s when >50% of channels carried by your provider didn't have ads?
  - int_19h 3y ago
    Mid-80s is exactly when that became to change. https://www.nytimes.com/1981/07/26/arts/will-cable-tv-be-invaded-by-commercials.html https://www.nytimes.com/1981/07/26/arts/will-cable-tv-be-inv...
offices 3y ago
But how we lived like kings during those few years of the venture-capital, antitrust, low-interest rate phenomena.
godshatter 3y ago
> We reached the point were price is almost as high as cable was (with the standard 4-5 subscriptions), and we have ads. I wonder if entertainment brand loyalty is going to be affected by the diversification of streaming services. I only have Netflix and Amazon Prime (only because I already pay for Prime) and I have no desire to add another streaming service for another show or franchise. I'm happy to just consume what I can find on those two services and call it good. At what point does the desire to watch a specific TV series or movie franchise stop being worth the cost of yet another service? But then I'm an atypical customer since I only watch maybe 4 hours of content a week on average, at most.