Ask Lemmy

I think about this a lot. In the 2000s, there would be all these music services that hype themselves up. The Downloadable Music Wars. We all used Napster or whatever pirating tool and it was just easier than paying. In the end, they were all smoke and mirrors and the services died out, while Apple and their iPods won.

In the late 2010s was the PC gaming Wars, Steam was really getting some heat. Not just other e-commerce stores like Epic, but also game streaming services like onLive and PC Game Pass. Again, all these wack ass companies (wtf Origin) and most of them have either folded or are on life support and migrated to Steam.

We're currently in the Streaming Wars. Probably the second or third version of this war, since the first war killed Blockbuster. I honestly don't believe many of them will survive past 2030. For sure Netflix and Hulu. Maybe half of them die, and six more will crop up. Who knows.

But what I do know is that whenever these "wars" occur, you see a lot of the shittier companies get worse and worse. And if you never picked a side and did your own thing (ignore them or sail the open seas), you get to look back and laugh at these clowns.

Because they're also going after piracy as hard as they can

You might ditch, but they have enough data that says enough other people aren't going to.

Just remember whenever you're annoyed by something and think "why is this a thing? This annoys me so it shouldn't happen", there's thousands of other people who can live with it or just don't give a shit.

Wait till they drop you as a customer by cancelling your payment tier,then send you countless begging letters over the next month begging you to return. If you wanted my money that badly, why did you cancel me NETFLIX?????

Because the “you wouldn’t steal a car” nonsense scares a lot of people off

Because some people want to support the creators of content but digital downloads from iTunes or whatever are more expensive than getting a month of a streaming service

Because there is a level of convenience of having thousands of hours of content at your fingertips without having to store content locally or finding it on a “dodgy” website. Setting up torrents / usenet is more work than giving someone your credit card number

Because a lot of people don’t know where to find content and if they did they don’t know the difference between a 480p avi vs a 2160p HDR DV MKV and get confused with torrents and file formats and how to get them on their TV.

Because - at the moment - the ads aren’t that bad, I got one ad at the start and one episode in the middle of an episode of Gen V - obviously they’ll add more until it’s as bad as cable but they’re not there yet.

A: they’re betting most people will accept it, and they’re right. The same thing happened in the early 80s when cable television advertised themselves as the pay-for-ad-free service, then started sneaking ads in. People complained, sure, but we all saw the outcome. They got away with it.

B: Greed, capitalism, and fuck you.

The answer is apathy.

You have to remember that most users simply don't care. The majority of consumers are some combination of either not technologically savvy or just outright intimidated by technology, are not very well educated, are incredibly reluctant to read, are not particularly observant, will not leave their routines or comfort zones without very significant motivation, and have spent their entire lives being the very frog in that gradually boiling pot of ever more numerous and intrusive advertising to the point that they just accept this as "normal." They're busy. They don't read tech headlines. They don't understand what's going on under the hood, and nor do they want to.

Normal people don't see the world like us nerds do. I am positive that these streaming services (and many other businesses) have studied this and understand it very well. If they lose 1% of their business which was made up by vocal nerds, but whatever odious change the just rolled out results in an increase in profit that is greater than the revenue from those subscriptions lost, they'll go ahead and do it anyway.

They think they have a captive audience because by and large they functionally do have a captive audience. This stuff works, and people keep paying for it en masse.

Because companies want more money and people get used to it.

Statistics. You're still there and only complaining. I purged all subscription parasites from my life in 2019.

I live by the abstraction, "you can't fix stupid in anyone else but yourself." All you can do is tell others what you did with your one wallet vote and hope that others do the same at some critical mass.

They do it because you're still there, and you care while they do not. You want to think you're human. You're not. You're a new deck chair on a yacht if you're lucky. Most likely, you're no more than a liter or few of diesel.

Their entire survival hinges on keeping investment money flowing, which means they essentially have to lie and over-promise.

A chronic issue plaguing the entire tech and media sector right now. Line must go up no matter the costs.

Remember when Netflix was totally dead and doomed when they cracked down on password sharing? And then it turned out people just upgraded to the new plan and kept on consuming.

They don't care about you. They don't even want you as a subscriber, you're a pain in the ass. Most people are too tired and not tech savvy enough to pirate. A lot of those will eventually do something else, too, but they can cram ads into the streams faster than those people can find the wherewithal to leave.

In short, this is profitable, and no amount of raging will make it less so. Take care of yourself, but don't pretend you're making line go down.

Pirates life for me

Already lots of great answers, but I'll add a note about intentional barriers to exit.

Many services tend to make it easy to sign up and comparably more difficult to quit. So while people always can leave and take their business elsewhere, they might not have the motivation to do it. I imagine each additional click in a form deters more and more people. OP mentioned being unmotivated, and these barriers play into that.

It's like wandering around in Ikea. You could use a map and chart out the fastest route to find what you need and get out. But it's so much easier to follow the little path they draw out on the floor and look at everything, which makes you way more likely to impulsively buy something extra.

Because of the people they loose due to the price hike, more will stay for the new price.

The only way we’re going to do anything about this is by actively avoiding buying or using products we see advertised on streaming sites. I already do this with Amazon Prime but I doubt they even notice. It’d be great if this became a thing at Christmas, it could completely destroy the revenue stream for these massive cunts.

It’s always about the 💰💰💰they’re getting.

They’re sure you will, or some will, but the number of customers they lose will be offset by the revenue gained.

Since that’s the only metric they really care about at the end of the day it makes “sense” to them to do it.

The economy is in a weird spot where data looks alright (employment and gdp) but the covid economy hit everyone including your friendly neighborhood corporation. Ads are a simple and reliable way to turn up profits in a soft economy and declining global situation and inflation. Since companies have effectively stolen wages for so many years they can't cope with modest wage spike on their bottom line or really any disruption anywhere in their business they use ads to print money. Maybe as time goes on business will benefit from slowing wage growth and increasing automation we will see ad growth scale back. Regulation would be nice but what are you going to do?

https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/fandd/2021/03/COVID-inequality-and-automation-acemoglu.htm

https://www.atlantafed.org/blogs/macroblog/2024/06/27/are-real-wages-catching-up