this post was submitted on 29 Aug 2023
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Didn't the analysis of europe and the US show an increase in subscriptions?
Also:
Is almost definitely what it was. I know I cancelled my netflix a few years back because the price of everything kept going up. Now I get a month when there is sufficient new content to watch and then cancel it again.
Which also aligns with
I'd be willing to allocate $100 a month for life, if I could watch all content I want instantly. Instead they all scrambled to create multiple competing services with different UI's, and often none of them even host the shit I want to watch, completely remove, or replace originals with modified "rewritten history" versions anyway.
Instead they get nothing from me and I sail the high seas, paying the same amount of money to computer hardware manufacturers and other internet services. If the majority did the same, they'd change their business models, but consumers are idiots.
I mean, what you are asking for is:
Having everything you want in one place isn't a monopoly unless everything you want is only in one place.
Streaming is on-demand TV sans ads, I'm not sure what point you're trying to make there.
Unless we are specifically saying that everything YOU want needs to be on a service and the moment there is an episode of yu-gi-oh that isn't uploaded yet it is trash: Yeah, you basically do need media monopolies.
Which... gets back to cable. A decade or so ago? Pretty much everything WAS in one spot for about a hundred bucks a month. Get premium cable to get most channels and then spend extra for HBO or sports or whatever. And comcast and verizon both had a lot of VODs available too. Many of which didn't even have ads. And the rest? you DVR it and then fast forward through the ads when they show up (... which is better than hulu). REALLY like movies? Get cinemax too.
And, barring "obscure" anime (which actually had a couple networks too), everything was there. Same with (actual) B-movie horror and the like.
But people realized they could pay less for most of what they want with stuff like netflix. Which made it viable for smaller production companies to get widespread distribution.
But... 100 bucks a month for the vast majority of media is cable TV.
You're projecting an American perspective, but I suspect you're talking to an Australian.
Cable in Australia has always been considerably more expensive than in the USA, and includes considerably less content. Except for movies, it was also never available adfree. It was changing in the last 5 years when I left the country, but it wasn't even close to competing with the likes of Netflix on price or service and I don't think there was any ad free option (despite the dramatically higher cost to consumer) - there was a whole media oligarch conspiracy to sink the national broadband upgrade because they knew they had the market cornered with their monopoly and streaming would disrupt that.
You might have had that in the US, but in my country there has always been protections against monopolies in the TV industry and therefore we had (still have) several competing networks, some paid, some free with ads, all about the same size, and 99% of content was exclusive to one network. A few shows would be available on two but not many.
It wasn't too bad, because there was enough free/ad supported content that paying to get a little bit more was a luxury which could easily be avoided. And it was closer to $50/month (US) to have everything here
With the new generation more content than ever is locked behind a paywall there are so many services if you wanted everything you'd pay far more than $100. I think I have 20+ streaming services on my TV. Nearly all of them (including Netflix) don't have an active subscription.
No - what they're asking for is how it already works with music streaming services. Where there's no monopoly.
You can choose basically any streaming service and you get basically every recording ever published.
Music streaming services largely "work" because of how centralized all the record labels are. It is not a true monopoly but it has almost all of the same downsides. Independent artists/"smaller labels" more or less have to work tooth and nail to get themselves added to the various catalogs... often with considerably worse royalties.
Spend some time researching "spotify alternatives". Spotify, Apple, and Youtube all basically have the same catalog because they are the big three. There are slight differences, but none that most people care about. But once you start looking at that french service people like or other smaller services, you have MASSIVE gaps in the catalog.
Which... is not too dissimilar from netflix/hulu/whatever. Those have more "exclusives" but you still have those bread and butter shows and movies that everyone has in their catalog. Or even in the video game space where gamepass/playstation plus are pretty similar.
The ad supported bullshit: isn't this the majority of new subs for netflix and those companies who have ad supported tiers?