>>because no one has to buy all those services and in fact few do
I don't know if it's strictly the case. I think it depends on how we slice and dice.
I cannot pay for Marvel movies without paying for Alladin and Little Mermaid (Disney+)
I cannot just pay for Star Trek Strange New Worlds without paying for... I don't even know what, honestly, CBS All Access / Paramount + / whatever it's called these days holds no other interest to me.
I get Prime, but increasing amount of movies I want are behind complex channel bundles. wtf is STARZ?
If you are a family with parents, children, and perhaps even a grandparent, you will have an increasingly comparable number of subscriptions, monthly outlay, and hassle ("I want to watch X; is it on any services I subscribe or do I have to commit my life to yet another" is a privileged but unnecessary problem I do not desire to have and it's solely on industry's shoulders)
Netflix had promise. Netflix was the Spotify of visual content. My one place with simple good interface that I can find all the content available, or at least good 80-90% of the middle of bell curve. The one monopoly I wholeheartedly desired to remain a monopoly.
Here's a statement of personal perspective: "For me and anybody I know (friends & family), we are 100% moving toward Cable days in any and every way that matters to us". While we may be able to find a lens through which that is not technically the case, I personally find that immaterial. The immense prolifieration and fractalization of streaming providers benefits them, and is absolutely 100% against my convenience, budget, preference and best interest.
> I cannot pay for Marvel movies without paying for Alladin and Little Mermaid (Disney+)
> I cannot just pay for Star Trek Strange New Worlds without paying for... I don't even know what, honestly, CBS All Access / Paramount + / whatever it's called these days holds no other interest to me.
Do Blu-rays and VODs just not exist anymore? You can absolutely pay for just what you want. I mean honestly how much does a collection of all the MCU movies through Endgame cost if you were to buy them discretely? $20 per in iTunes/TV, and what was it something like 20-25 movies? So $400-500 if you wanted every single one, and you can get at least some of them for cheaper if you get the Blu-rays off Amazon and Renting is an option if you only want to watch a particular movie once.
Or $80/year if you don’t mind subsidizing Walt Disney Animations and Pixar. Honestly I think it’s a toss up whether renting, buying or streaming is more economical because it comes down to your habits, and streaming is only the clear winner if you binge a lot.
Yes. My mom watched an episode of Ted Lasso on a flight recently, and was interested in watching more. It is straight up Apple TV+ only. No physical media release or VOD. Subscription only.
Same with a bunch of animated shows that HBOmax axed recently. They were streaming only with no other releases, and it is now impossible to watch any of the past episodes legally.
For me, a few streaming services make sense even without binging. But people do seem to forget there's a la carte streaming and DVD rental/purchase. In fact, if you want to watch a lot of films, you may be better off with something like Netflix DVDs by mail than another streaming option.
For sure. I think streaming is still the winner—but more debatably so—under certain other circumstances (international access, availability after air date, exclusivity, etc.) but only the clear winner versus the other options if you binge a lot.
Sure, but Blue rays or DVD or VHS existed in time of cable too, so either they're irrelevant go conversation / comparison, or we've moved the goalposts.
I really don’t understand the issue — you’re not forced to pay for more than a month at a time. Pay for a month of Paramount+ and then cancel once you’re done watching Strange New Worlds. You just paid $10 for 10 episodes of Trek. Seems fair.
Disney+ is an even better deal — _all_ of the Marvel movies you can watch at their monthly price.
> I cannot pay for Marvel movies without paying for Alladin and Little Mermaid (Disney+)
Lol yes you can.
> Netflix had promise. Netflix was the Spotify of visual content. My one place with simple good interface that I can find all the content available, or at least good 80-90% of the middle of bell curve. The one monopoly I wholeheartedly desired to remain a monopoly.
No, it didn't. Netflix never had anything like this. Netflix never had even a tenth of modern, mainsteam content. Not even close. Never in it's entire history. It just used to be aimed more at Hacker News typical audience demographically.
Or to put it another way - myself and everybody we know would prefer if Spotify for video content existed. The proliferation of services that are removing content from Netflix so they could host it on their own crappy system and app is purely bad for me with no benefit. Just like I don't want Spotify to suddenly become Columbia+ and bmg all access and whatever million music publishers there are each with their own crappy service.
There was no promise, no sign of this ever happening, and no chance of it ever doing so.
There is no economic model that makes sense for it - music is licensed collectively because the economic cost of producing music doesn't vary that dramatically (and the difference has shrunk dramatically since the advent of Spotify et al). That's not true for AV, nor would it ever become so.
And did you ever actually use cable? Top end packages can be $200 a month, and you generally don’t get to choose what to actually watch when you want to watch it. And most of it is unwatchable trash.
The cable days bordered on a dystopian nightmare. Channel flipping, appointment viewing, endless ads. Most content was inaccessible most of the time. Miss an episode? Tough shit. We were watching what someone else wanted us to watch, when they wanted us to watch it, and we payed for the privilege. The only people that ever seemed to like that grotesque relationship with TV were the Boomers.
I don't know if it's strictly the case. I think it depends on how we slice and dice.
I cannot pay for Marvel movies without paying for Alladin and Little Mermaid (Disney+)
I cannot just pay for Star Trek Strange New Worlds without paying for... I don't even know what, honestly, CBS All Access / Paramount + / whatever it's called these days holds no other interest to me.
I get Prime, but increasing amount of movies I want are behind complex channel bundles. wtf is STARZ?
If you are a family with parents, children, and perhaps even a grandparent, you will have an increasingly comparable number of subscriptions, monthly outlay, and hassle ("I want to watch X; is it on any services I subscribe or do I have to commit my life to yet another" is a privileged but unnecessary problem I do not desire to have and it's solely on industry's shoulders)
Netflix had promise. Netflix was the Spotify of visual content. My one place with simple good interface that I can find all the content available, or at least good 80-90% of the middle of bell curve. The one monopoly I wholeheartedly desired to remain a monopoly.
Here's a statement of personal perspective: "For me and anybody I know (friends & family), we are 100% moving toward Cable days in any and every way that matters to us". While we may be able to find a lens through which that is not technically the case, I personally find that immaterial. The immense prolifieration and fractalization of streaming providers benefits them, and is absolutely 100% against my convenience, budget, preference and best interest.