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[–] 212 points 2 years ago (13 children)

Streaming went to shit when everyone made their own. It was good and worth the money when it was one portal with everything available.

Now i am back navigating the stormy high seas, to avoid the treacherous shores of bankruptcy

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  • [–] 120 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    And the funny thing is, rather than competition driving down prices, they only seem to be competing for who can charge the most while showing more ads.

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  • [–] 24 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    Streaming infrastructure is expensive, and all these smaller networks that decided to spin up their own didn't seem to realise that. Prices go up, ad tiers get added because none of them are actually making any money. It's just quarter after quarter of loss even with substantial revenue due to the fact that producing content, hosting and then scaling globally to make it available to a wide variety of geographic locations just isn't cost effective. Even Amazon, the lord of cloud compute itself, hasn't been able to maintain this.

    So in this case, competition limits the only way they make money: people subscribing. Greedy bastards.

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  • [–] 16 points 2 years ago

    The fucked thing is that it wouldn’t be such a huge deal but they all want to make money on the current number of customers instead of their potential. People are poorer and poorer and have to choose maybe one or two services at a time at the prices they are.

    They would rather get one customer for $15/mo than 4 or 5 customers for $5/mo. And they together created an environment where it’s hard for any one of them to make the first move. Healthy competition only really works when people act in good faith and none of these people are capable of that even when it benefits them.

    Business people are truly dumbest creatures on this planet. “What if we make them poor and then charge them a bunch of money? That makes sense, right? And if they get upset we tell them it’s their fault.”

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  • [–] 38 points 2 years ago

    Yeah, this definitely was not a case of "competition makes everything better." More a case of every greedy motherfucker wanting to have their own private walled fiefdom making everything worse. Who's going to be the first to bring up the GabeN quote?

    I'm with you, I am proud to say I subscribe to precisely zero streaming services. There's very little on any of them I actually want anyway, and anything I might actually want to see is readily available... elsewhere.

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  • [–] 24 points 2 years ago

    Yep, and everyone having their own exclusives. I'm neither paying hundreds of bucks for a gazillion streaming services per month, nor am I juggling subscriptions between them like some sort of puzzle game.

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  • [–] 6 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    Hold on. The fact that it became worse doesn't mean that the monopoly was a good thing. Remember that those companies start new businesses usually at loss amd giving a lot to the users, just to grow their market share, but then will slowly take everything back, and more, with time.

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  • [–] 10 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    Well, yeah, that's why we're here. Streaming went to shit

    While I agree that the monopoly netflix once had doesn't belong in private hands, a public funded central media archive where all studios release their content would be preferable.

    But still, for the user those were golden times. Whatever you wanted to watch, chances were Netflix had it in good quality and any language you wanted on any device with internet.

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  • [–] 6 points 2 years ago

    Multiple streaming services existing isn't the issue - content exclusivity to certain platforms makes it so. If content was on all platforms then it would just be a choice based on price and service features.

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    [–] 138 points 2 years ago (3 children)

    Getting out of hand? They've been out of hand for a while.

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  • [–] 4 points 2 years ago

    Yeah, but they still were below what the market would bear price wise. Until the very last price increases, if you counted up all of the biggest service fees, it was still lower than the average cable bill like almost a decade before.

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    [–] 82 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    I have nothing to contribute to this conversation. Just wanted to say that was a horribly written article.

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  • [–] 42 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    It's llm regurgitated garbage. Welcome to the new and worse internet.

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  • [–] 9 points 2 years ago*

    All that I see being "new" with LLM regurgitated garbage is that they call the system doing it an AI and not just a spam bot. Even back in the day, randomly entering words and adding ".com" to the end would result in either: a legitimate website, a porn site, a 404 error, or a page filled with random text like an AI generated article that wasn't hard to determine was made by a computer and not a real human either there to popup when searching literally any words and trying to generate traffic for ads, or as a placeholder for the domain name.

    Now that it's harder to tell it's randomly generated vs human generated, even the "legitimate" websites are using it.

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  • [–] 77 points 2 years ago

    I switched away from piracy to streaming because they offered a legitimately good value proposition that benefited both the consumer and the producer.

    Currently switching back to piracy because these greedy fucks just don't know when to stop.

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  • [–] 25 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    It's cable with extra steps.

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    [–] 18 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    My NAS and the *arr apps aren't getting out of hand.

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  • [+] 16 points 2 years ago (8 children)
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    [–] 14 points 2 years ago

    Only just now? Really?

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  • [–] 14 points 2 years ago* (3 children)

    The quality also went downhill. In my region Disney+ removed HDR support from all titles and dropped the bitrate to very low on top of that there are so many ads. Video quality is shit now. Even with subscription I'm watching PSA encodes.

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    [–] 11 points 2 years ago

    "Now" Not when the license rights to shows get chopped 15 different ways and you need 15 different streaming services to finish a series? Or when it costs $100 CDN to have 5 streaming services...

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  • [–] 10 points 2 years ago

    This is getting out of hand, now there are two sixteen of them!

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  • [–] 9 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    JUST LET US TURN OFF THE LOUD AND OBNOXIOUS BOOTUP SOUNDS IN EVERY APP!!!!!!!!

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  • [–] 5 points 2 years ago

    Peacock disabled auto play previews for a while and it was great. But that was only because the whole screen would go black for a couple seconds as it tried to load the preview. They fixed that issue and now the previews are back. Mute button is doing a lot of great work these days.

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  • [–] 8 points 2 years ago (4 children)

    I can't afford all these streaming services. I'm basically back to one at a time, churning through them until I run out of things to watch.

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  • [–] 21 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    I absolutely can afford them, but I'm canceling them purely on principle at this point.

    My final straw was watching Fallout, when Amazon said "this program is ad-free thanks to this sponsor" and then not only showed an ad, but didn't even acknowledge that it was me paying them for the service, like I should be grateful to some stupid company for shoving their advertising in my face when I'm the one giving them my hard-earned money.

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    [–] 8 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    fuck them. I built my own streaming service on my NAS and pirate everything. If there is a consumer friendly service where I can watch everything, I am willing to pay for content again.

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    [–] 5 points 2 years ago

    I'm still waiting for this shit to come full circle back to how it was with Cable, where someone links the various streaming services together in one convenient app and they tell you you can switch and save!

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  • [–] 4 points 2 years ago

    Just buy blurays

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