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The TV streaming apps broke their promises, and now they’re jacking up prices

For a moment, it seemed like the streaming apps were the things that could save us from the hegemony of cable TV—a system where you had to pay for a ton of stuff you didn’t want to watch so you could see the handful of things you were actually interested in.

Archived version: archive.ph/K4EIh

AccidentalLemming , (edited )

deleted_by_author

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    Corkyskog ,

    Is Disney+ bleeding money or is that just fancy accounting realizing costs that increase the other parts of Disney’s revenue?

    AccidentalLemming , (edited )

    deleted_by_author

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    ZoopZeZoop ,

    Disney is a bit unique with their streaming, though, because their content helps foster interest in their merchandise, parks, theatre movies, etc. The more engagement with their streaming content, the more likely someone is to engage with some other part of their business. Also, if I’m watching Disney+, I’m not watch any other streaming services (at that moment). They want to be a dominant streaming service because it helps them dominate in the parts of their business.

    Netflix, Paramount+, etc. don’t really have that, at least not to the same degree. Prime is more similar, because while you’re not investing in their own merchandise as much, you might be more like to use Prime shipping or music if you have Prime for video streaming (and vice versa).

    AccidentalLemming , (edited )

    deleted_by_author

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    ZoopZeZoop ,

    I don’t think that producing content by itself is sustainable, but things that aren’t quite profitable enough might be enough to be profitable overall with the reach and market share.

    I could totally be wrong, but it feels like they’re fairly invested in D+, and I don’t think it’s because they want everyone to have access. After all, they had a “vault” for many years and only sold movies that were rotated out of the vault at the time.

    Corkyskog ,

    It wouldn’t be a lie, it would just be accounting. And honestly I don’t know the accounting practices around such large organizations.

    Basically Disney+ charges Disney studios for Disney IP. Disney studios gets $3B let’s say over x amount of time for the deal, and Disney+ spends that amount of money. Meaning Disney+ loses money, while the Disney portfolio as a whole breaks even on the trade. That’s not even to mention the value there is bringing people into the Disney ecosystem, making it more likely to visit them parks and buy more merchandise.

    I don’t think it’s fair to look at Disney+ in a vacuum to compare to other services.

    MrGerrit ,

    Cable companies: You could not live with your own failure. Where did that bring you? Back to me.

    csolisr ,

    If companies are so adamant in both raising prices to the point of unaffordability, and making alternate routes to enjoy their art illegal, then what we should collectively do is to just go without them, maybe use that free time and money for something more useful than art.

    baronvonj ,
    @baronvonj@lemmy.world avatar

    According to CNN article, in a recent earnings call Bob Iger indicated that ad-supported streaming is a better revenue stream for them than ad-free subscriptions. So they’re apparently raising prices on ad-free subscriptions to get people to drop down to ad-supported.

    neptune ,

    Smh

    baronvonj ,
    @baronvonj@lemmy.world avatar

    Yeah.

    shirro , (edited )

    Some people can’t stand advertising and will turn off rather than sit through it. I have been ad blocking and ad skipping for 20 years. I am not going to change my habits. The alternative is piracy. I don’t want to go back to piracy. It is a superior product in many ways but it isn’t sustainable and I want a fair share of my subscriptions to fund creative jobs (not that that is happening). There are a lot of shows I can’t stream or buy digitally here that are only available via the black market which is crazy in 2023 when streaming was supposed to fix this. We have companies taking shows off their services to claim tax writeoffs now at a time when the market is fragmented and overpriced.

    The super rich and powerful think we are livestock to lead to slaughter and often they aren’t wrong. The sensible thing is for consumers is to walk away (same for X, Facebook, Reddit and all the other time wasters) and let the whole thing burn down and hope that whatever replaces it learns from the mistakes and greed. Unfortunately I don’t think enough will to make a difference.

    flop_leash_973 ,

    Yep. When it comes to dealing with these types of things, if it is something that can be lived without, the only winning play is to take your ball and go home.

    If you’re not willing to go without watching tv, movies, playing new games, etc then these companies already own you.

    Personally, I won’t go back to pirating their content. That implies what they make has more value to me than it actually does. If they make it nearly impossible to legally consume their product or service then I will take that as a sign they don’t really want to sell it and move on.

    If the masses want to see change, then they should do likewise. Even if it doesn’t change the world, there is real power for a persons mental well being in always being willing to walk away.

    Techmaster ,

    I say we bring back running down the sidewalk with a stick in your neighbor’s fence.

    demonsword ,
    @demonsword@lemmy.world avatar

    I’ve never threw away my jolly roger, it’s just safely hidden away

    iMastari ,

    Since these are turning to shit, are there any good Soap2Day replacements?

    HappycamperNZ ,

    Bflicks.something

    Stinkywinks ,

    Luckily VPNs are cheaper

    feckless ,

    🎶Yar Har, fiddle-de-dee🎶

    KTVX94 ,

    As someone who watches pretty much no movies or shows, I couldn’t care less, but it’s gonna be fun watching piracy shoot back up.

    DigitalWebSlinger ,

    I will forever wonder how these companies actively choose $0/mo over a cut of $XX/mo and everyone in the decision chain thinks it’s the right decision.

    skizzles ,

    Because your 0$ per month after dropping them doesn’t hurt their bottom line.

    Corporations generally weigh the risks and the benefit often wins out and they make more money because there are enough people that either reluctantly cave into the fee increase, forgot about their subscription or just don’t care that it’s going up.

    It’s fairly seldom (but seems to be increasing over the years) to see so much backlash that a company walks back on what they were planning to do.

    Linuto ,

    My favorite example of the reverse in recent memory has been Wizards of the Coast essentially going back completely and then some on their unpopular OGL changes after a significant portion of their DnD Beyond members canceled their subscriptions.

    baronvonj ,
    @baronvonj@lemmy.world avatar

    They want you to drop your subscription to the ad-supported tier.

    Corkyskog ,

    Like 22% of Americans never check their credit card statement details.

    miketunes_ ,

    www.togetherprice.com - great site to share subscription prices, I’ve been using it for years.

    Kosta554 ,
    @Kosta554@feddit.nl avatar

    Good to know 👍🏻

    phillaholic ,

    Not that it doesn’t suck, but did everyone really think the industry was going to replace a $200/month cable subscription with $30 worth of streaming? Also consider streaming taking over theatre releases too.

    LexiconBexicon ,
    @LexiconBexicon@lemmynsfw.com avatar

    Yeah idk what people were thinking. Ads have ALWAYS been around, there were ads on radio, ads on TV and now ads on streaming. Facebook’s entire revenue came from selling digital ad space, well not entirely true, 99.999999% of it was ad revenue, the rest were shareholders. YouTube is the one outlier though for some reason, they don’t seem to care about people using adblockers, no idea where they’re getting their revenue from

    Corkyskog ,

    It’s also still only like less than 60 for five different services. And more then that is a little crazy. The average cable bill is like $83 and people who didn’t have basic were paying like $200 as you said. If you wanted to buy all paid streaming services it would be ~$102 with ads, ~140 with ads. It’s still cheaper and better than cable, that’s why people haven’t stopped paying.

    veloxy , (edited )

    Streaming was great when Netflix launched, convenient and affordable - I remember being excited when Netflix finally launched in my country. Was only a matter of time before all would turn to shit with every tv network/producer launching their own streaming services and fragmenting all that content.

    BobKerman3999 ,

    Yeah Netflix worked because you had everything there and no strings attached.

    Now Netflix is shit, hbo is meh, Disney plus is more expensive than sky etc etc

    Fuck’em

    veloxy ,

    Yeah, well I already got my boat in the water since the account sharing announcement from Netflix. I’m sure many more will do the same in the coming months.

    Jivebunny ,
    @Jivebunny@lemmy.world avatar

    I guess I never stopped. Still have subs though, but might cancel that somewhere in the future.

    veloxy ,

    I still have Netflix, but only because they still haven’t bothered me about account sharing. The moment they do, It’s going away.

    ZekeSulastin ,

    Didn’t their subscriber count go up fairly dramatically after the restrictions started?

    Redredme ,

    Hbo will be cancelled the moment they rebrand it to max and add all that bullshit content in my country.

    No dance of dragons can prevent that.

    Atm there are only 2 streaming services which still hold real value: prime video and Netflix. Disney+ just doesn’t cut it. We get 3 worthwhile serious a year. Hbo doesn’t cut it. We got 3 worthwhile series this last year (last of us, dance of dragons and the white lotus) and they removed Westworld and raised by wolves.

    In my country we also have sky/showtime about which I’m on the fence. The star trek catalog is incomplete, some series are nice but there still are technical difficulties. If/when they raise the price I will cancel that in a heartbeat too.

    Appletv has quality content just not enough to justify a year long subscription.

    CoderKat ,

    D+ is amazing in Canada (and likely most of the world outside of the US). We have most Hulu content.

    Copernican ,

    The difference back then was Netflix launched steaming was that it was free extra money for TV producers. Cable subs were strong and the TV providers were happy to take extra cash from Netflix to let them stream. Netflix income was icing on the cake. As people cut cable out, streaming is the cake. So you need to charge the price of the cake. There was never an end game where streaming would be cheaper than cable. It was a change of pipes to deliver the content, but was not intended to change the value or cost of TV.

    Jaysyn ,
    @Jaysyn@kbin.social avatar

    I gave them a chance. They collectively became more & more rapacious & greedy.

    Back to sailing the high seas.

    darkstar ,

    Arrr

    navi ,
    @navi@lemmy.tespia.org avatar

    You know after years and years of using it, the name Radarr makes way more sense now.

    octobob ,

    Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum

    Fester ,

    At this point, the best way to go (besides sailing) is to subscribe to one or two services at a time, cancelling others month-to-month based on what you want to watch.

    We need an app that lets you search for content across all platforms and easily cancel and start subscriptions - queueing them up and helping you easily limit the amount you’re paying monthly.

    But with these prices, it’s worth doing that manually.

    Semi-Hemi-Demigod , (edited )
    @Semi-Hemi-Demigod@kbin.social avatar

    Here's how that will go:

    Each streaming service will release their own aggregator app. Each of these will have a fee associated with them. Each of these will have certain services they don't work with because the lawyers are still fighting over things. Each of these will eventually reduce their search coverage and promote their own content. "You searched for Star Trek, would you like Star Wars instead?"

    Even if an open source third party wrote something that did this, companies would change their API pricing or authentication to break it so people don't leave their walled gardens.

    Companies are incapable of making a service that doesn't eventually enshittify.

    Fester ,

    A third party app can just scrape catalogues, and then direct you to the platform’s website through an integrated browser to manage each account. They can push notifications when a subscription is about to be renewed just by remembering when you subscribed, and send reminders to cancel and subscribe to the next service in your queue.

    The streaming companies won’t hide their catalogues because that’s how many people find what they want to watch through simple web searches, e.g. “Where to stream Barry” or “when does the new season of x come out?” The app could pull metadata from other sites for graphics and info like many already do.

    It wouldn’t be as convenient as flipping a switch which would require proper API and probably login info, but seeing everything and managing it from one place would still help a lot.

    I think a bigger danger would be platforms countering by requiring phone calls to cancel, or contracts, or slow-dripping content over months to keep you subscribed (some already do the latter.) IOW continuing to become more like cable.

    Yendor ,

    Apple TV and Plex both do this already.

    gsb ,

    Right now it’s smart to cycle through but I wouldn’t be surprised if that is the next thing to go.

    What I could see happening is they keep raising monthly prices until the math doesn’t work out of them. Then they’ll introduce a small discount for locking in multiple months (3,6,12mon). Both will continue to rise in price but month to month will be quicker.

    Fester ,

    Or straight-up contracts. But I think the next step will be more slow-dripping content.

    Netflix just pulled an obvious one by splitting the Witcher season 3 to the release half at the end of June and the other at the end of July. They claim it was for “an effective cliffhanger” but it’s clear they just wanted to squeeze one extra payment out of its viewers who aren’t interested in their other content. Paramount meanwhile stretches all of their Star Trek series out across the entire year.

    I imagine platforms will start slow-releasing more of their most popular originals. I wouldn’t put it past them to flood social media with spoilers to punish anyone who’s waiting. I also wouldn’t be surprised if we start seeing one episode per month someday.

    festus ,

    Disney+ (at least in Canada) gives a 15% discount if you pay for a year up-front.

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