this post was submitted on 10 Aug 2024
4 points (100.0% liked)

No Stupid Questions

34964 readers
530 users here now

No such thing. Ask away!

!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.

The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:

Rules (interactive)


Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.

All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.



Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.

Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.



Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.

Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.



Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.

That's it.



Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.

Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.



Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.

Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.

On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.

If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.



Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.

If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.

Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.



Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.



Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.

Let everyone have their own content.



Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.



Credits

Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!

The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

People (including me) complain about monopolies all the time for various reasons. At the same time, I've noticed a ton of complaints about the existence of multiple streaming platforms. But isn't that a good thing at the end of the day? If streaming platforms consolidated into 2-3 companies, there wouldn't be much stopping them from raising prices even more.

top 13 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

I dont think multiple streaming platforms is a problem. The problem is exclusivity. I dont want to pay for every subscription service to watch popular things. I want to watch any show I want on one platform that I choose. Much like I do for music. But no, with TV shows everyone has their own walled garden of exclusives. Fuck that.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago

I could only imagine if each record label had their own streaming service. People would go nuts.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago

People went from paying for cable and addon channels, to having a consolidated service, to having that service split and paid for addon channels again.

Not to mention keeping track of when they pay, since they're all different dates unless you do it on specific days all at once.

Then there's self hosting and having everything in one spot. Phew, nothing like it.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago

As others have pointed out, the rules of competition don't apply since there's exclusive content at play.

As a metaphor, It's not like one restaurant serving a popular type of food vs multiple restaurants doing so. It's having one Italian, one Thai, one Chinese and one American restaurant being the only ones in 100 miles. Look! There's competition, 4 restaurants! Unless you only want some pad Thai.

So now instead of fixing cables issue of $60-100/month, they made it more complicated by paying $60-100/month to 3-5 different companies instead of one.

As a real life example. If you have kids, or are a big Star wars/marvel fan, 9/10 you need Disney+. It may as well be a Monopoly now so they can raise their prices as much as they want. Parents and nerds will pay through the nose for it.

Source: am a parent and a nerd (but I pirate all my stuff anyway)

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago

Because what people really want is an iTunes like service that just has everything for a single price rather than 14 streaming apps that have content overlap but also exclusives and rotating temporary content licenses costing $20+ each with ads.

There was a period of time when I gave up pirating because Netflix+prime was good enough to watch just about everything, and on-device search easily searched both platforms and provided a unified search/watch experience. It wasn’t worth the effort of finding and storing content yourself.

Fast forward to today, you search for something, it belongs to some fucking random service you don’t currently pay $17.99 a month for and then halfway though a season, it drops from the platform and goes to another streaming service you also don’t pay for. It’s just endless bullshit and nickel&diming now.

I’d happily pay $60 a month for a single service that just had everything and saved me from all this bullshit, instead I’d be forced to spend $300 a month for 23 services I barely use just to have access to the catalog of content I want.

Another example of this done well is steam- I just want my whole library in one place, I don’t want 5 different game libraries each with their own crap. Consequently I’ve spent thousands of dollars on steam over the years because of the unified experience.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago

I don't know man, it was awesome when you had pretty much what you wanted in Netflix then when they started to focus in their "original stuff" and losing content (and the competition rising) I stopped to bother with this trend and downloaded all my stuff with Softwarr

Nowadays all my streaming needs are very well covered with a single subscription, Real Debrid, which is cheaper than any streaming service and surely has more content than all of them, even combined... I use it along with Stremio and Kodi, which both offer a better UI than most streaming apps lol.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago

Because the service is worse with multiple streaming services?

Everything is not in the same place, it's more expensive, and it's less convenient.

It used to be cheaper with one. It's more expensive with multiple.

Piracy has become more convenient than streaming platforms. As least all the media can be consolidated to one place, one frontend.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago

It's probably because they can remember how convenient and cheaper it was to see any movie or show that could be streamed. Streaming was supposed to disrupt TV by eliminating ads and allowing you to choose whatever you want to watch. Nowadays, in order to get the same amount of choices, you need to spend about as much as you did for a TV subscription and now many platforms have ads.

I think it's more a frustration at what we lost than anything else.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 month ago (1 children)

If there was an aggregator of sorts that would charge let's say even $25 to watch whatever I'd pay happily. That's what Netflix kinda was before other streaming services started popping up and each asking for a hefty fee.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago

Id even settle for a "master" app that just lets me log all my accounts into it and lets me search for whatever I want and if it isnt on something I have tells me what service its on.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I literally torrent everything like a normal person

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago

If the studios were smart they would put out there own high quality torrents and just charge a couple bucks a movie and send people a bill. I bet a lot of people would pay it. I would.

[–] [email protected] -2 points 1 month ago

Because people are idiots and will complain about everything.

They'd hate one single central screamer site even more