this post was submitted on 09 Feb 2024
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Streaming services are paid and they are enshittifying just as fast as anything else, if not faster. No, it's not that we aren't paying enough and this is a desperate measure to make up for our neglect. This is corporate greed. Even when they have sustainable business models, that isn't enough.
Also, I worry how societal inequality might increase if the whole internet becomes subscription based, if people can't get informed or communicate without paying (more than their internet service, even)
Streaming services were charging way under what they needed to to be sustainable when everyone is on them. Netflix for $10 a month with all the content is not sustainable. Think about how much mom and dad paid every month for cable. The media industry costs money to run.
But yes, a portion of it is corporate greed.
That said, yo ho yo ho, 🏴☠️
I straight up do not believe that a company can provide a service for over a decade and not be charging enough to be sustainable. The CEO can come and say this to my face and I'll call them a LIAR. One or a couple years I could buy the idea of investors holding it up for the sake of establishing the business, but why would they be accepting losses for such a long time? This is funky accounting. I'm more inclined to think "it was not sustainable, we need to charge more" is just something they say when they think they can get away with squeezing more money from customers.
I didn’t say they were operating at a loss, I said they were unsustainable. They’ve been profitable since 2003, but their profit relies on content. With everyone else pulling their content, their cash flow needs to be huge to produce content they can use to attract customers. $10 per subscriber isn’t enough income to sustain the cash flow needed to produce that much content, so they raise their prices to become sustainable. When they relied on licensing content from rights holders, their expenses were smaller, but they have been losing the ability to rely on that.