this post was submitted on 03 Oct 2023
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Who the fuck pays for more than one at a time anyway, I don't mind fragmentation because I have no loyalty to one service and will move to one to watch it's stuff, then move when i get bored of what it has to offer. Competition is always good. We shouldn't have monopolies in any industry, including streaming
Competition in a streaming service is an illusion that makes the overall service worse and more expensive. And it's probably not viable long term. Why? Because there is no competition for any one show. If the platform were all streaming the same shows, that would be competition. Instead they simply share the service with each platform having its monopoly on the shows it streams.
You saying that shows don't compete with each other?
They do not. You can watch and appreciate different shows. You may want to watch many of them. And watching one show will never replace watching another.
In other words, you've not seen farscape as long as you've not seen it, and the expanse or any other show ever will not change that fact. Hence no show is ever competing with it.
What they're trying to do is to make a competition for your time and attention. But humans don't work like that. Culture is a shared thing. Good shows will be shared and watched while bad ones will be forgeted. If you make more shows than people can watch and share, you're simply wasting money. Which is why it's not sustainable.
Competition for one show is another show. What else?
It's only going to be a matter of time before they start requiring contracts, forcing you to stick with a service for long periods or face fees for dropping them.
They are capitalists, and so they must always profit more and more, never ending, for all of time. One of the things they will eventually do to hit that unsustainable proift motive is contracts. It's what the cable companies did, and it's only a matter of time.
This is exactly where it's heading, not just for streaming but for anything and everything that can be packaged and sold "as a service" whether it's actually a service or anything that's undergoing the enshittification process of being converted from a product into a service.
Anything that can be converted into a service will be, and anything that can be so converted will, eventually, become a subscription, and from there, into a contract service model.
Honestly it wouldn't surprise me a bit to even see literal standalone products converted into contract based subscriptions over time, given the IoT trend.
So beyond just your streaming service, your TV will have its proprietary OS converted to a subscription and then to a contract, so that you need to sign a 2 year deal with your TV manufacturer to keep it "powered". Don't sign a contract? They brick your TV.
With more and more smart appliances, expect to see companies try this to also force you into contracts to keep your fridge, toaster, smart lighting, microwave, door locks and cameras, etc. functional.
Naturally, baked into your contract will be language that forces you to share any and all data they can collect from said devices as a condition of the contract.
Food as a service
Water as a service
Get your pitchforks as a service ready
Pirating is just so much less hassle.
There is more competition in piracy with who you trust to download from, what codec you find is best and what page / travkers you use. These fragmented streaming services don't have any of that choice to offer
I disagree for the most part but if you already have a system for watching your pirated stuff sure, or if you just watch things at your computer desk.
Ditto.
Canceling cable used to be, at the very least, a long, phone call that alternated between stretches of hold music dulling the senses and combative sales technique verbal jousting. Canceling a streaming service... I don't think that has ever taken me more than four minutes of finding a webpage and clicking. The collective consciousness is in danger of forgetting/underplaying just how far we have come on this.
If pirating ever takes less than four minutes every other month, I guess it will have reached convenience parity. But it certainly wasn't that back when I was in that game. And I really, really doubt it is now.
After you get it set up pirating is basically zero time. There's some up front time costs learning how to automate everything but after that? Yar har
People are too lazy to manage when to subscribe where based on what's on offer at any given time.
That's it, that's all there is to it.
But pirating is just better, I can see what's new across all services in seconds and get whatever I want at basically streaming speed with xdcc
Most people don't know where to look for to get started on that. Some people don't even know that pirating that show they watch is even an option in the first place.
No, but as a current non-pirate, seeing the UX of some of the newer tools is mindblowing. "You mean, I just type in any show, it looks it up and to find episode info, then gets me the episodes so I can watch it, without me having to split between services or even THINK?"
The legal show world should have that, but every one of those services are locked-down so you can't have a solution like that in front of them. Heaven forbid we could just license shows like retail locations license radio.
I mean, I suck-it-up and sub to all of them. I hate the experience and my wife bitches at me at least weekly because it's so much work to find and start a show (to the extent she ends up NOT watching the show she wanted, and leaves some stupid channel on at random). We are so close to cancelling all of them, not for the money but because the experience is complete ass.
Guess what I'll be doing to watch my TV if we do that?