this post was submitted on 16 May 2024
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Memes

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Post memes here.

A meme is an idea, behavior, or style that spreads by means of imitation from person to person within a culture and often carries symbolic meaning representing a particular phenomenon or theme.

An Internet meme or meme, is a cultural item that is spread via the Internet, often through social media platforms. The name is by the concept of memes proposed by Richard Dawkins in 1972. Internet memes can take various forms, such as images, videos, GIFs, and various other viral sensations.


Laittakaa meemejä tänne.

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[–] [email protected] 22 points 7 months ago (2 children)

Yea these memes are dumb and I feel made by children who never paid for cable.

[–] [email protected] 52 points 7 months ago (5 children)

But the direction is certainly heading towards the realm of cable prices...

  • Netflix: $15.49
  • Amazon Prime Video: $14.99
  • Apple TV+: $6.99
  • HBO Max: $15.99
  • Disney+: $10.99
  • Hulu: $14.99

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+.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 7 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 7 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 7 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago (1 children)

You combine 6 streaming services, each of them alone already better than cable, and it is still just as expensive.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 7 months ago

And if you don't like the content on one streaming service, you don't pay for it.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Prime is like 5/month here.

It used to be 3 though. Is it triple as expensive where you live? (Us?)

[–] [email protected] 4 points 7 months ago (2 children)

I have never seen Prime sell for $5 a month, not even in the beginning.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

9/month in Germany

5/month in NL

3/month in Belgium

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago

Seems like we're getting ripped off in the States, it's $13.99 a month here or like $120 yearly.

[–] sbv 2 points 7 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago (1 children)

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

[–] sbv 1 points 7 months ago

It's a great time to have a conversation about cost, value, and delayed gratification.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 7 months ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 18 points 7 months ago

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