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> Honest question, why won't competition come to the rescue? Why hasn't competition come to our rescue in any other product category or industry. There will a

> Honest question, why won't competition come to the rescue? Why hasn't competition come to our rescue in any other product category or industry. There will always be more money in selling out your customer base at every opportunity and as long "everyone" is already doing it "everyone else" will be at a disadvantage if they don't. Since shareholders demand endless growth and won't tolerate huge piles of cash being left on the table they'll eventually insist on it. A company starting out looking to attract a userbase might be able to hold off for a while, but inevitably enshittification will start and then accelerate until we're all worse off than we were. As just one example: when I first signed up for netflix it was $5.00 a month and there were zero ads. There isn't a single competitor that offers anything close to that today. I can't even think of one without ads.

sunrunner 1y ago
> There isn't a single competitor that offers anything close to that today In terms of price versus content/quality (subjective of course) ratio or just price? Dropout is relatively cheap compared to others and completely ad-free. The most interesting thing is perhaps that they recently announced a very small price increase to keep up with inflation, but it was implemented in a way that would a) only affect new subscribers and b) only after a date a few months ahead, so current subscribers _and_ people subscribing within the next month or so would keep the current price. It's interesting to see the number of people threatening to cancel their subscription just so they could re-subscribe at a higher price and then buy more merchandise just so they can give their favourite streaming service more money. That kind of genuine goodwill seems out-of-reach for the larger streaming services, however Dropout is also pretty niche content-wise and even with their back catalogue it's nowhere near the seemingly infinite amount of video on the major platforms.

sunrunner 1y ago

> There isn't a single competitor that offers anything close to that today In terms of price versus content/quality (subjective of course) ratio or just price? Dropout is relatively cheap compared to others and completely ad-free. The most interesting thing is perhaps that they recently announced a very small price increase to keep up with inflation, but it was implemented in a way that would a) only affect new subscribers and b) only after a date a few months ahead, so current subscribers _and_ people subscribing within the next month or so would keep the current price. It's interesting to see the number of people threatening to cancel their subscription just so they could re-subscribe at a higher price and then buy more merchandise just so they can give their favourite streaming service more money. That kind of genuine goodwill seems out-of-reach for the larger streaming services, however Dropout is also pretty niche content-wise and even with their back catalogue it's nowhere near the seemingly infinite amount of video on the major platforms.