this post was submitted on 15 Nov 2023
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Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ
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I think the problem is the idea of subscription services themselves which has caused companies to become adversaries to the customers rather than partners.
When you pay a one-time fee for an item or service, it's in that business's interest to make you feel valued as a customer, to bring you good so that you are likely to pay one-time fees again in the future.
With a recurring fee model, it's in the business's interest to make you use their service less while still paying, because if you use it too much they lose money, and if they price it according to how the power users use it then it won't be a competitive deal.
Example: when you get flights costing $200 per domestic trip, the airline wants to make you feel not terrible for choosing them. But if instead of that you paid $1000 a month to fly domestically "as often as you want", they will degrade the experience so that you wouldn't even want to fly more than 5 times per month, like duct tape you to your seat if they were allowed to, or put restrictions like "only to these cities" or "only on our 3am flights" or "only on trips less than x days or longer than y days".
No matter the industry, the whole premise of the RR model is to trick you into pretending you still have whatever original value of service, while screwing you in every possible way just short of the point that causes you to cancel. That makes them the most money.
I used to pirate because I was a broke kid. Now I have money (not as much as Rossman and no money for these subscriptions) but I too need to find value when I give this money I earned to someone who makes a thing. As Rossman said, if you're tinkering to get the thing you paid for, at that point you might as well tinker and not pay for it.
P.S.: Rossman is aware his whole shtick is "angry man yells at cloud while sometimes petting cat". I get many people don't like it. Don't watch it then. Odysee is just Rossman's spare platform in case YouTube doesn't like him anymore for whatever reason. Yes it's full of loonies (and you can call Rossman one too if you want) but just don't give them your attention.
You know I never thought of streaming services this way, but you're absolutely right. Any service running on a regular subscription model falls into the "gym business model" where the ideal customer is one who is paying but never showing up. That way, their operational costs stay constant while revenue goes up.
The dynamic applies to anything where you are expected to make regular payments.
Renting an apartment? Landlord wants to see you and fix your shit as little as possible.
Renting a car? They want you to drive it as little as possible so they can keep renting it for as long as possible. Maybe they're charging you by the mile, too, just to cover that base completely.
Now think about the US healthcare industry.
Except its a LOT easier to get people to not go to the gym than it is to stop them watching TV and movies.
I think this is why Netflix keeps canceling shows. People stay subscribed for new things, but since their catalog is shit they aren't streaming much else.
Netflix's model makes the individual business case for a specific show really complicated to make. What's the marginal return on investment for a moderately successful show? If it's not quite popular enough to get people to subscribe just for that show, then it's basically a total loss (existing customers only are watching it, who were paying anyways). Looking at the financials of that one show in isolation, all they've got are costs with no revenue gain.
There is the broader argument to be made about how a show contributes to the overall catalog quality and how that ultimately drives subscriber growth, but this is a far more roundabout way of talking about value.
Just by coincidence i'm watching a gameranx video about the 10 worst AAA games, and Falcon says the same thing about games as a service (subscriptions, micro-transactions, etc.): "it seems like they're playing a game of chicken with the consumer to see what they can get away with".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E8jDgkikylY
(start at 19:45)
Precisely. And the game franchises that do this the most successfully are the ones with pre-existing brand recognition to ride off of. When you start with a forgettable story and characters, then no one (outside of a small few who like being disappointed I guess) will engage with it.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://www.piped.video/watch?v=E8jDgkikylY
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
I think you're spot on. It fits right in to the whole "enshittification" topic that Doctorow wrote about. Everyone started using streaming services like Netflix because it offered such a great user experience; now that they have the user base, unfortunately we are now at the point where Netflix has every motivation to make the platform as shitty as possible to milk as much money from their users as they can.
This is why I think FUP should be a thing on unlimited offers. I have missed out on being able to utilise great services because people abuse it. I was so happy when Pixels came with unlimited photo/video backup but because people were uploading DSLR pics and pirated movies and shows, it stopped existing.