this post was submitted on 16 May 2024
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One thing I want to debate about this is I remember how expensive cable used to be. It was like 120 bucks. Maybe you got like a $70 package or $80 package where you had barely any channels. I ain't spending that much on streaming services!! I don't know if I'm an outlier but I got Three and that's about it. I pay around 40 bucks a month.
Yea these memes are dumb and I feel made by children who never paid for cable.
But the direction is certainly heading towards the realm of cable prices...
Total: $79.44 per month
So maybe when you account for inflation it is still only half of what cable costs,.perhaps. but those are the cheaper plans. For HDR support for Netflix it's like $25, and it's the reason I cancelled Netflix.
I don't think the meme is dumb, just ahead of it's time, but it's calling out what is certainly happening.
Most streaming services now include ads in the paid subscription.
Inch the ad ratio and prices up another 40% and we are getting pretty close to cable experience/cost. And that's only a few years away when we look at how much costs have raised over the last 10 yrs.
If each service raises price $1/month every year and you have 6 services, then in 5 yrs you're paying $30 more per month, prob around $100+.
And the six you listed are the big ones, but there's plenty of others that have exclusive content. There's also Criterion if you like classics/arthouse, Crunchyroll if you like anime. Paramount, AMC, Showtime, Peacock, etc etc, etc.
Exactly. I was trying to be conservative by choosing only 6 and sticking to the cheaper plans.
But it is entirely conceivable today that, if someone has literally all the subscriptions, they could be paying more than cable costs.
Another factor I ignored for brevity is, at least when I was a kid, the price of cable was often bundled with Internet and telephone services. I can't speak to how accurate the numbers would be, but I'm pretty sure my dad was paying $100+ for cable and everything else, meaning the cable likely wasn't the entire cost of the bill. But I digress....
Streaming has gotten out of hand, and anyone who disagrees with me today will eventually agree within a decade.
Don't forget you can usually bundle cable with Internet. Right now if I had all of those services plus my Internet it'd be $200/mo.
Yes, but if you're comparing all prices you'd need to add the cost of your internet (only) to the price of a cable subscription to get apples-to-apples comparison.
You combine 6 streaming services, each of them alone already better than cable, and it is still just as expensive.
And if you don't like the content on one streaming service, you don't pay for it.
So cancel some of them and rotate. You probably aren't watching them all, and they only come out with (good) new content a couple of times a year.
With cable packages you would miss stuff. With each streaming service owning their own content, it's there whenever you want it.
Quite often it's a family or household using these services. It's hard to cancel Netflix/Disney if your kids or partner are using them
It's a great time to have a conversation about cost, value, and delayed gratification.
Prime is like 5/month here.
It used to be 3 though. Is it triple as expensive where you live? (Us?)
I have never seen Prime sell for $5 a month, not even in the beginning.
9/month in Germany
5/month in NL
3/month in Belgium
https://www.amazon.es/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=G34EUPKVMYFW8N2U#:~:text=24%2C95%20EUR%20al%20a%C3%B1o
4.99€ a month, 45€ a year. I used to pay 36€ a year back when it didn't give twitch prime.
Seems like we're getting ripped off in the States, it's $13.99 a month here or like $120 yearly.
Or watched cable ADs apparently, cable TV ads were like...5 minutes or maybe even longer. Just commercial after commercial, so long that it was viable to use them to go-to the bathroom when you didn't have DVR lmao
You know how some shows are 23 minutes long and some are 42? The reason for those odd times is because the shows had half an hour or an hour timeslots and the rest of it would be ads, so in an hour show you would get nearly 20 minutes of ads
What's worse is with long running shows like mythbusters you can see the shows runtime slowly being chipped away in favor of more ads, the 2003 season's episodes had runtimes of 50 minutes, by 2016 it was down to 42
Exactly. Cable had contracts for X months, and everything was packaged so you couldn't just get one channel you liked.
Now streaming is splitting off into a bunch of services. That's not great but on the other hand I'm not on a contract. I can stop and start whenever i want. I spend anywhere from $12-25 a month. All i ever wanted was for cable services to be unbundled. If I'm wanting to be subscribed to every service all of the time then yeah that's going to get expensive. But if i just want to watch 1-2 shows at a time then I'm still much better off streaming than i would've been with cable 10+ years ago.
Edit: and when i cut the cord in 2010 my cable bill was $120/mo for basic cable + 1 package iirc.
I brought that up too and was downvoted....this platform is ridiculous.
It sucks that Netflix doesn't have as much as they used to because stuff has been pulled for other services but the value proposition for streaming still blows cable out of the water, even with price increases. Adding free or low cost commercial tiers for more price sensitive people doesn't give me commercials.
With all the premium channels and three HD-DVR boxes I used to pay over $200, before internet, more than a decade ago with much of that going to a shitty middle man company. And that's for commercial, appointment TV. Even with the premium stations you had to DVR shit to watch later. I subscribe to a ton of services, even some fringe ones, so I almost never come across something that I can't watch immediately with no commercials on any device I have access to anywhere in the world. And with annual rates, discounts from my phone company, and kickbacks from credit cards I'm still under $100. And now the money goes to companies that actually produce content, even if some of them suck for other reasons.
With what I'm getting I would pay double what I used to for cable, but as it is I'm paying half. It seems like a lot of people complaining never paid for cable with all the packages/premium stations themselves and don't remember how much appointment TV sucked.
The thing is they didn't add a new, cheaper or free "ad supported" option. They added ads to the current price, and then told us to pay more if we wanted to keep the same experience. This is one of the 7 dread turd pillars of enshittifi ation.
I don't recall that happening to any of the many services I subscribe to. I've always paid for no commercials and I've never had commercials without having to change plans, although I think the name has changed sometimes. Maybe my price went up and they added a new commercial tier near the price I used to pay? Could you give an example?
People keep using this term enshitification but my experience has only gotten better and better since I cut the cord and now more companies offer streaming increasing what is available to me. My total price has gone up as more things become available but it's still less than half of what I paid for cable.
Edit: I just remembered prime video did that. They started charging $3/month for no commercials, but that's the only one I can think of.
Yeah I was thinking of Amazon, but Netflix briefly demoed it then backed off. At this point most of the providers have at least three ability to stream interstitial content, and we know that advertisers must be banging on their doors waving money at them. I have very little trust in the providers not to mess this up
My mom's is the most basic she can get in her area, and it costs 218 dollars a month.
Wow, that's a lot! Is it at least bundled with internet? I haven't bought cable tv in over a decade, so I've no idea what the real price of it is after the intro prices they try to lure me in with.
it is, without the package, it is $30 a month though. She gets phone service from someone else.
Cable didn't start out that fucked. People switched from cable because they were tired of it getting more and more packages and more and more pricey. We are seeing the exact same thing with streaming.
that's still more than pirating it, even if you pay for a vpn
It's also a lot more than a metal coat hanger shoved in the top of your crt
People always forget inflation in these discussions too. Inflation has been about 50% since 2007 around when Netflix started to become popular. So multiply those prices by 1.5 and you'll have a more accurate comparison to today's prices. Not only that, but the cable bundles that have all the best high definition and spirts packages were well over $200 at the time ($300 in today's currency).
Streaming not only has better features, better resolution, less hassle, but is 100% still cheaper than cable. And don't forget that about 50% of airtime on cable was ads. Those cable companies were milking us for every cent and all of our patience they possibly could. People were sick of it for decades by that point and that's why Netflix was so successful in the first place.
Me and my parents certainly never had the super fancy cable packages until way into the first death knells of cable services, where they were practically giving the channels away as a rider for internet packages