Aka ensh*ttification. Streaming is the one industry where I wish there was a monopoly. I miss my old "one and done" Netflix subscription.
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Peacock Streaming Service Gets $3 Price Hike
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Aka ensh*ttification. Streaming is the one industry where I wish there was a monopoly. I miss my old "one and done" Netflix subscription.
Piracy has been around for a long LONG time and studious thrived! Their downfall is lazy, unimaginative, rehashed nonsense with old or worn out IP that people fell out of love with a long long time ago. But they're stuck chasing that magic movie that can make $1B and lead to a franchise rather than making 10 movies with original content that makes less but is actually worth watching. Piracy is so niche despite what you think that it's effect is negligible in the grand scheme of things. Executives just love to blame piracy to make up for their shortsighted vision.
No, that’s not why. It certainly doesn’t help, but people stopped spending money on content long before this current economic situation. With piracy people gradually stopped buying movies and shows (neither on disc nor digital download). A desperate industry responded by pivoting to streaming at unsustainably low prices to try to entice pirates with convenience to try to recoup some losses. The streaming wars plus the pandemic created a bubble where there was a lot of content creation in the industry, but as studios were operating at major losses, after a few years that bubble burst as expected. That’s why studios are downsizing and have been. This is almost entirely independent of the wider economic climate.
Streaming has only now become barely profitable for studios. But as they continue searching for more sustainable profit, they’ll keep raising prices and downsizing projects and jobs.
This situation is a result of piracy.
And you can be sure, after the economy rebounds from this dip, people won’t all of a sudden pay as much money as they once did for content. Content has been devalued as a direct result of piracy and there may be no going back. The damage is done. Hopefully in the way future things can reverse, but not any time soon.
Analog piracy has been around forever, yes. But analog only has a very local influence. Digital piracy on the other hand along with internet delivery has global effect, and that was a slow ramp up over the past couple decades which “coincided” with the subsequent fall(ing) of the film and TV industry.
Pretty convenient to sweep the established effects of piracy under the rug, and instead blame the fall on something as unverifiable as bad content, but the truth is there’s always been good and bad content and there still is. The trend toward “bad” you perceive is likely due to the phenomenon of every generation believing that the content they grew up with was the best, and everything new is junk.
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I’m an indie filmmaker. My first film in 2012 had a piracy ratio of 50 to every 1 real rental (streaming wasn’t as big a thing then). We spent years of our lives working on it and got checks here and there for a few hundred dollars. Considered one of the best movie / cult classic in its genre and most years I make $100.
I’ve still never received a royalty on my last movie released 5 years ago. I was paid $10,000 up front and worked on it for one full year, going into debt in the process. It premiered at Tribeca Film Festival and was initially bought as an AMC+ exclusive (the network, not theaters).
Last year I filed bankruptcy and have no plans to make future movies.
Both piracy AND the streaming service’s low pay for licensing almost guarantee you won’t make your money back now.
I’ve still never received a royalty on my last movie released 5 years ago. I was paid $10,000 up front and worked on it for one full year, going into debt in the process. It premiered at Tribeca Film Festival and was initially bought as an AMC+ exclusive (the network, not theaters).
Last year I filed bankruptcy and have no plans to make future movies.
Both piracy AND the streaming service’s low pay for licensing almost guarantee you won’t make your money back now.
How is this one still alive, let alone with the courage to increase its price. I never hear about this particular streaming service and they left Germany after about a year of trying as a SKY add on
You don't have to subscribe to 15 different streaming services... not all at once anyway. You have choice. You have control. You can pick and choose which $11/month service you want at any given time. Don't like Disney or Marvel? Then don't subscribe to Disney+
But with cable... you did have to subscribe to the 200 channel ultra mega package. There was no choice. Grandma was paying for ESPN and BET even if she never watched those channels.
Don't you remember the biggest complaint about cable TV back in the day?
"I'm paying for 200 channels even though I only watch 5 or 6 channels!"
And that's when people created this fantasy of the cable operators offering "a la carte" channels... meaning you could only pay for the few channels you want. The theory was your cable TV bill could be a fraction of the price since you were only paying for a fraction of the channels.
But that's not how cable channels work. A la carte was never gonna happen. 🤣
So yeah... streaming can get expensive if you subscribe to 15(!) streaming services.
But cable was always expensive... especially since you were forced to pay for things you didn't want.
P.S... are you thinking of going back to cable TV? Back to scheduled shows? Or having to remember to "Set your DVR" if you want to watch something that's on when you're not at home? And the 15 minutes of pharmaceutical and insurance commercials every hour? For $100/month?!?!?
That's not something I could ever do again... but that's just me. 🙂
My previous cable bill was around $250/month for Spectrum 300mbps high-speed cable internet and cable TV. And that was the "bundled" price!!! Each of those services would be even more expensive if purchased separately! 😱
I've now switched to Windstream Kinetic fiber internet. Gigabit! Up and down. 1,000mbps. For only $80/month!
And no TV package. I have an antenna to pick up plenty of local channels. I use many of the free "FAST" streaming services. And, yes, I subscribe to a few premium streaming services as well... despite their price increases.
But that's still waaay cheaper than my old $250/month cable internet and TV "bundle" !!!
I said goodbye to cable TV... and 20 million other people have done the same over the last decade.
😎
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That’s really rough. Sorry to hear that.
Maybe it’s best you got out. The industry is in a very tough spot right now with no one wanting to pay for content, and probably only going to get worse. I was talking with an industry friend who thinks studios in the not too distant future are basically going to have no choice but to get rid of almost all jobs and just have a handful of skeleton crews making movies only with AI. AI trained on copyrighted content to put the creators of that content out of work. What a time we live in.
Yep. We've just binned Netflix. We have prime on one of their never ending introductory offers.
I can see Netflix being reactivated in November for stranger things and then turned off again.
I can see the seas to pirate bay getting busier with all these service hikes.
Or just buy a good Android based TV device like Xiaomi TV or whatever, you then have Apple TV+ app, Airplay, Chromecast and you can install STREMIO and get all your movies and TV shows free... And forget about subscriptions.
Well sadly unless you have a trust fund there’s no way you can survive as an “indie filmmaker”. It’s a luxury job or side hustle at best.
Price hike after price hike after price hike. It's the same thing with every single streaming service, which is part of the reason I canceled all of my subscriptions (Disney+, Paramount+, and Netflix). The other big reason was the IP locking or password sharing "crackdown". Ridiculous to sell multiple streams then try to dictate from where you can stream. The only streaming service I still have is Max because AT&T still gives it to me for free. I now have a Plex server setup and will likely never go back.
It's pretty laughable that people are putting a lot of the blame on piracy for these continued price hikes. I'm not saying it doesn't play into it at all, but it is not the largest contributing factor. Most people can't even use their phones let alone their computers properly. The majority of people are not going to piracy. People like me who used to sail the high seas, stopped because of the convenience and reasonable pricing of streaming, and now are fed up with all of the BS are the ones going back. The people who have the largest part of the blame are the greedy execs that each wanted their own piece of the pie and decided to completely fragment the market. They didn't realize how expensive and difficult it is to launch and maintain a streaming service. They also green lit a lot of mediocre to crap content to fill up their services. They also trained their viewers/customers to wait to stream or binge it in one sitting. A lot more people pay for a month, watch what they want, then cancel than pirate content. I suspect contracts will be coming for those people down the line, but that will be dicier for them than the price hikes and policy changes. The execs and the whole streaming model are the ones that made people devalue content, not piracy.
It's pretty laughable that people are putting a lot of the blame on piracy for these continued price hikes. I'm not saying it doesn't play into it at all, but it is not the largest contributing factor. Most people can't even use their phones let alone their computers properly. The majority of people are not going to piracy. People like me who used to sail the high seas, stopped because of the convenience and reasonable pricing of streaming, and now are fed up with all of the BS are the ones going back. The people who have the largest part of the blame are the greedy execs that each wanted their own piece of the pie and decided to completely fragment the market. They didn't realize how expensive and difficult it is to launch and maintain a streaming service. They also green lit a lot of mediocre to crap content to fill up their services. They also trained their viewers/customers to wait to stream or binge it in one sitting. A lot more people pay for a month, watch what they want, then cancel than pirate content. I suspect contracts will be coming for those people down the line, but that will be dicier for them than the price hikes and policy changes. The execs and the whole streaming model are the ones that made people devalue content, not piracy.
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Did I just take a time machine back to 1999? There are arguments against piracy, 'wHaT iF sOmEoNe sToLe uR cAr?!?" isn't one of them. When someone pirates a movie, they're making a copy of it. The original movie still exists. If someone takes your car, they don't make a copy of it- your car is actually gone.
Be careful coming down off the high horse.
Every time I see another streaming service increase their prices, I am even more thankful I have the best deal in streaming and have had it since 2016 (minus the first 6 months where it was a bit of a rough start for the new platform). I pay $43 a month with taxes and fees for DirecTV Stream. I get over 110+ HD channels (including local channels), 3 simultaneous streams from anywhere, and 20 hours of DVR which I honestly never fill up. I got locked in at $35 a month for life, plus $5 for one extra stream. This cannot be beat. The price today for a similar package to what I have would cost me over $100 more each month than what I've been paying. Every time I get an email about a price increase I laugh, because it will never happen. 
- Cord cutters: I don't want to pay $100 per month for TV 😡😡😡
- OK, so you will pay 20 x $10 per month instead ! You lucky winners 🥰
- OK, so you will pay 20 x $10 per month instead ! You lucky winners 🥰
In my opinion, that’s a lot of money to pay for a minor convenience. I dropped Prime back when it crossed the $100 mark. I can still choose to get things delivered in two days (or less) for about $7 in shipping but I usually opt for free shipping to get it in 5-7 days (order minimum $35). Besides, Prime’s “two day shipping” was rarely the reality.
Again for me, I never found much of interest in their streaming platform. Or really any cost-justified benefit from their other services in Prime. The added benefit of unsubscribing is that I buy way less stuff now.
I would just suggest to people that they try living without subscriptions for a little while. I think people get sucked into things without reassessing what’s important for them. These are choices we all have to make for ourselves.
With the exception of EPL and NFL games exclusively on Peacock, I don’t bother subscribing. And if I do, it’s for a month or two and then I cancel. I’ll also look out for emails from them for discounts.
Netflix/HBO Max/Hulu/D+ is really all my family needs (+YTTV for live sports).
Netflix/HBO Max/Hulu/D+ is really all my family needs (+YTTV for live sports).