You sound an awful lot like you started out with a particular narrative (something like, "streaming services are miserable cash grabs, every company is 100% evil, and everyone is out to hurt the poor"), and you're fitting their actions into your narrative and then attaching motivations and thoughts to their actions because they fit your narrative, not because you have any proof that they're true.
Okay? I do think that streaming services are miserable cash grabs, that most companies are primarily evil, and do tend to notice companies doing more and more to squeeze every remaining drop of value from the lower class. What proof are you expecting - an audio recording of Disney execs discussing this specifically as a means of milking just a little bit extra value out of the poor? What difference does it make if that's the stated motivation or not, or whether there's proof or not, when the end result is the same?
All your examples - student loans, doctors/health, jobs, housing, food - are effectively necessities of life (education is important, health/work/housing/food are necessities), where a streaming service is a luxury, an entertainment item, something not needed to survive. Comparing Disney+ to the things you list as if they're equivalent is somewhere between absurd and offensive.
Sure, the're not perfect comparisons. I was just pointing out that you can always say nobody's forcing anyone to do anything, just that if people to whom $5 is a lot of money (can you think of a one-word descriptor for such individuals?) want to have a little bit of entertainment in an otherwise bleak, paycheck-to-paycheck life riddled with debt, that they'll have to jump through the hoops of viewing ads. By viewing these ads, they're generating enough value for Disney to knock a few bucks off their monthly entertainment. Dance, monkeys, dance for your discount! Burn these ads into your subconscious, and buy the advertised product!
I know people who have a ton of money, who read books and watch DVDs from the public library (and they read a lot more books than they watch movies), and don't subscribe to any streaming services - not because they can't afford to pay for the streaming services, but because they'd rather read books (their kids don't get much screen time, and they're the smartest and most inventive kids I've ever met).
I sincerely think this is great. I know it's hard to tell with me, but no sarcasm intended. I'm willing to bet that their being well off is highly correlated with these behaviors if not partially or fully caused by them, and that their children will be much better off than those who have an iPad in hand from age two.
Streaming services, in particular, very much want to charge a monthly fee, not just because they have ongoing costs (servers, bandwidth, licensing rights for back catalog) but because they use that money to fund the production or acquisition of new content - being able to look at the spreadsheets and say, "we've got $X million coming in next month from subscriptions" gives them a reasonable footing for producing new content. If it were pay-per-view, that gives them much less certainty over what funds they'll have available in the future, and they'll be less likely to greenlight new productions.
This is a good point at face value, but prior to streaming services companies still produced great content. They just did it by taking some of the profits from their previously good content and investing them wisely in new content. Obviously it's more profitable to charge a bunch of people monthly that are barely using the service. That's the Planet Fitness model and it's trash, is all I'm saying. Make good content, collect profit, make more good content - don't play games with recurring charges whether a customer is using your product or not.
And if you want pay-per-view on movies, that's easily available - it's called renting (or purchasing). Go to the iTunes store and rent all sorts of movies - pay only for the ones you choose to watch, and don't rent the others.
I already vote with my wallet across all my spending, where possible. I was just posting an opinion on a public forum.
As well, there are many people who will pay for a streaming service for one month, and watch all they want to watch on that service, and then cancel. And maybe come back again and do the same thing in six months or a year (some do this cycling through the various streaming services, one at a time). You can make one single payment of $8, and have a whole month's worth of Star Wars movies, Marvel movies, and everything else Disney has to offer. It'd likely cost twice that to watch a single movie in a theater for two hours. Hell, $8 isn't much more than it costs to rent a single movie. And, again, it's for a month's worth of all-you-can-eat movies / shows. Explain to me again how that's a hardship?
It's a "hardship" as you call it because instead of just charging people based on how much they consume (a familiar concept: we go to the grocery store, and the more groceries we leave with, the more we pay), they're playing games where some users sign up for a month and watch content for 12 hours a day while others pay every month and barely use the service. It doesn't fit well with the reality of how this media is being consumed, they're playing games to juice the most out of users as possible. Yes, some users sign up for a month, watch everything they want, and cancel their subscription, but for every one of those users, many will pay their subscription while not using the service. Nobody's
forcing anyone to, it's just a super crappy business model. Absolutely disgusting, and if it's for the reason you stated (predictable profitability) I'd argue that shows zero confidence in their ability to create compelling new content, if it's about the content at all. It's probably more about shareholders, the content is incidental.
The lower-cost ad-supported versions of streaming services aren't an attack on poor people, they're an alternative for people who don't care about ads. Personally, I do care about ads, and will pay a couple dollars extra to avoid them, but many people don't care about them (witness the popularity of "free" ad-supported apps, often when a comparable paid app could be bought for a one-time charge of a couple dollars - often that isn't people forgoing the $2 because they can't afford it - they bought a phone after all - it's often because they don't care about the ads).
"People who don't care about ads" are
overwhelmingly either uneducated (don't realize that whether they pay attention to the ads or not, they're being manipulated by them), poor (need the $5 or whatever savings per month), or both. I'm not saying 100% - just that these two categories cover most "people who don't care about ads". This is squeezing just a bit of extra value out of the poor - people who couldn't afford it before can now afford it with ads, and people that could barely afford it or aren't educated enough to resist marketing will use the ad-supported tier and generate slightly more value for Disney than they did previously. I maintain that calling this an "attack on the poor" or whatever I said is fair. But it's not like the poor or uneducated will do anything about it, so who cares? Certainly not Disney - this is more profitable for them. And you and I and whoever else will pay extra for no ads still have that option, so certainly none of us care. There's not a lot left, but I wonder how corporations will squeeze even
more value from the poor next?
I probably should've done something different than replying to your wall of text with a wall of text, but you made some good points and heck, I have to say I enjoyed writing it a little bit. No hard feelings, even though we mostly disagree I made you a meme:
gamerant.com
Release date is very important for a movie. Ever hear of the term "summer blockbuster?" Do you know why the movie studios tend to release their tent pole movies during the summer? Do you know what a "tent pole" movie is? FYI, Shang Chi was released during the summer... well, late summer but still summer; The Eternals was released in the fall.
