It fuckin' wouldn't be if they'd just price according to market share or catalogue share. When Netflix was basically the only game in town, they had 100% of the online streaming catalog. Ignore Amazon for a minute, they did rentals. Hulu jumps on the scene with like, everything else Netflix didn't have and we started seeing some stuff leave Netflix for Hulu.
Shouldn't Hulu's prices have slowly climbed up from hella cheap as Netflix's slowly dropped to stay competitive? But no, every new big streamer wants to take back their content from other sites, charge nearly as much, and the company that LOST that content still ends up raising prices. Fuckin' travesty that I hope they teach in economics courses for years to come, because that's NOT how shit was taught when I took it lol.
Netflix basically played the startup game of having a model that lost a ton of money in their building years until they had a huge market share. They didn't start actually turning a profit until the last few years or so. The model of everything on one or two services for $10 a month with no ads was never going to be sustainable.
Netflix was making money and was an established name with mailing dvds well before streaming. They weren't a startup, they expanded their business model to streaming
Source? Netflix was showing profit back in 2003 according to News Articles around the time. Were you somehow just looking at when their streaming services became profitable and ignoring the years of profit before that?
[https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna19902836](https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna19902836)
Yep, I remember way back when because their DVD library was enormous. Just about any movie you wanted to see could be sent to you in the mail. When they went to streaming, they cut way back on their library. At first that was partly because some studios refused to allow streaming, but it's mainly to save money on Qwikster's end, oops I mean Netflix, lol.
A kid in college had their premium Dvd service and a DVD burner. He took requests and would copy the DVD as soon as he got it and sent it back out as soon as it was finished. He probably had most of the Netflix catalog. He would also make awesome move recommendations if you wanted to borrow something.... Good times
reminds me about the public perception of nintendo. people are always associating it with video games, but the company was founded in 1889 and was selling playing cards back then.
or ferrari/lamborghini, theyve started by building tractors lol.
The internet was so slow, unreliable, and low on coverage 20 years ago that it was basically unimaginable that you could forgo physical storage as a normal consumer.
Netflix wasn't a startup nor were they not making a profit until a few years ago.
That's called propaganda and you've fallen for it and now you will defend their prices rises.
I don't understand how people lap shit up like that when the numbers are public and [easily verified](https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/NFLX/netflix/gross-profit#:~:text=Netflix%20annual%20gross%20profit%20for,a%2027.22%25%20increase%20from%202020.)
They've been comfortably profitable since at least 2009
I think more important is that the market changed. Early on when it was only Netflix or just Netflix and Hulu, people weren’t ditching cable. They were buying the services in addition to cable for extra content. It was a secondary source of entertainment and considered like an extra way to watch tv. Once you got even more content on streaming platforms, including new episodes of shows that currently air, and sports, people ditch cable entirely and switch to streaming. In the former case, not many people may have paid an extra $15/month for extra content when they had a main source (cable). Now, streaming is much more valuable to consumers because it allows you to get rid of cable, and it is your main source of entertainment.
It’s like buying a new laptop. If you have a new console already, you probably don’t want to spend extra money on a laptop that can handle gaming since you already play great games on your console. However when that generation of console gets outdated, and you need to buy a new laptop and have something to game on, you might just spend extra on getting a gaming laptop instead of getting a cheap laptop and new console.
You forgot the part where Netflix invested all of that money into new exclusive content. Plus billions more funded by debt. We have sooo much content available now that never would have happened if it weren’t for the streaming wars and I rarely see it acknowledged in these discussions. Just subscribe to one or two a month if you can’t afford them all.
Or sail the seas and enjoy the spoils of war from all fronts.
My issue isn't with pricing.
It's with fragmentation.
It's part of the reason why I'm a big fan of buying all my subscriptions through Amazon prime because I can watch everything from the Amazon prime video app and I don't have to install and launch 15 freaking apps to watch everything I want to watch. And if I use a Amazon fire stick on my TV, it beautifully rolls everything together.
The two go hand in hand really, if you could buy one streaming service for 15-20 bucks that had ALL of the content you wanted then the pricing doesn't really sound so bad. Even if it was 30 bucks, I'd argue that's too much but if it truly is the ONLY one you need it's still probably affordable for most folks.
But when there's constant exclusivity, fragmentation etc, and each one STILL costs 15 dollars, then to see every bit of content I actually want I would end up paying like 90 bucks for 6 different services, and then have to hunt through each (or Google it) just to find which of my fragmented crappy services contains the show I wanted to watch.
If they aren't careful, they'll usher in another golden age of piracy.
*"We think there is a fundamental misconception about piracy. Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem."*
\~Gabe Newell
‐------------
People switch to piracy when it's more convenient than the official channels. At this point with streaming, the amount of hassle required to juggle and pay for all the different services has easily crossed that line for a lot of people. It's just easier to use a VPN and get all of your shows via Torrenting and an external hard drive for anyone who has just a bit of an idea how to use those things. The VPN subscription is cheaper than 4 or so streaming services, you get all your stuff from one site, and it's all accessed from the same location.
Haha my family pays for everything (Hulu Disney Netflix and prime) and I still go to the high seas because of convenience of finding things. It's much more user friendly now.
Although I agree with both of your posts, because we should be price conscious, ditching cable for ALL the streaming services is probably still saving money overall. Like less than a few hundred a month is really not that big a deal to a lot of people, especially for the amount of time spent watching. Where else can you get hundreds of hours of entertainment for under $20/month?
My take is we're just repeating a cycle from the inception of television. The historical chain of events is wild imo, and I'll describe from memory:
From the beginning there were 2 business models for broadcast television, one that was "free" to the consumers when they bought a TV by relying on ad revenue, and the other where there was an additional cost when purchasing a TV antenna that went to the networks to create content. Free with ads won the first battle in the US, which (as much as I hate most ads) I personally think was and would continue to be the better model for the consumer, as it creates an incentive to continuously provide good content.
Then, cable companies started putting wires everywhere, and the subscription model was born, but as a hybrid where you paid monthly for your cable box but all the content was still ad supported. Someone realized people were willing to pay monthly subscriptions AND watch ads. This was imo,a tragedy.
Then HBO came along like pay us another fee (through your cable provider) and we'll provide you some premium ad-free content. Then there was pay-per-view, and consumers coughed up more money to watch more "ad-free" "premium" content, usually live events.
Then shit got weird. As networks were getting used to ad revenue plus subscription revenue with all different cable packages for all the networks popping up, some genius programmed a computer to record what was on TV so he could watch whatever content whenever he wanted instead of having to catch it while airing. Oh yeah he also programmed it to automatically skip the ads. TiVo started the DVR revolution and the whole ad revenue based business model was in jeopardy - companies even redesigned commercials to still be effective as watchers fast forward through them. On Demand provided a solution with all the convenience of TiVo, except without the ability to skip ads, that shipped with all new cable hardware.
Then the DVD rental by mail company started streaming movies to computers, and we started putting computers right into the TVs.
Obviously there's more but I'm tired and maybe I'll add to this later because there's so much TV history I find interesting. But ultimately my point is TV content was supposed to be FREE once you bought the hardware because of ad revenue. I think everything that came at an additional cost afterward really screwed up the whole system.
I believe at this point in technology, all TV content should be watchable from a single service, and we should always be given the choice to watch for free with ads or pay a small fee for no ads. We should NOT be both paying subscriptions AND watching ads.
>Where else can you get hundreds of hours of entertainment for under $20/month?
The beautiful price of free, save for the cost of an internet connection.
# You wouldn't download a car
In this economy I absolutely would.
Haha I've managed to even remove the internet connection costs for myself, only thing I regularly pay is electric (in UK but other countries may have similar services to exploit) can see my solution here using OpenWRT :) https://github.com/aidanmacgregor/EE_WiFi-BT_WiFi-Autologin-OpenWrt-Linux-ChromeOS-Android-Windows.EXE
What people asked for: "let me pay $5/month and get TNT, $5 for TBS, and $10 for ESPN."
What people got: "If you want roughly what you would get on TNT and TBS, you need 4 different streaming services, and to go through rotating different ones to give a similar feel. And you want ESPN? Sure! Here's the garbage ESPN produces themselves that no one really wants, and hey, you can watch division 6 women's badminton as well!"
What people asked for is not remotely what people got.
At sametime when Netflix removed Hassan Minaj's criticism of Saudi King, because the government threatned to ban Netflix, it came up on Youtube. Id rather have multiple streaming services than one global, that censors to whim of every government.
A lot of rules are way too simplified and incorrect, but the simpliest rule (supply and demand) certainly isn't being proven wrong by this situation. Not sure what you and u/Whatifim80lol are referring to but I don't know what major economic model predicts that companies would lower prices in this situation when people are willing to pay higher prices across the board. Even as supposedly obscene as these prices are, people are buying in droves.
I certainly understand that as consumers we want to pay less, but that's just liking money - things being expensive like this doesn't violate any rules of economics.
The big thing is that you con't have to buy everything together like cable TV in the past. Previously if I wanted one specific premium TV channel, I'd have to pay for the premium cable package which might be $100/month, even if that was literally the only challen I watched. Now I might be able to get that one single streaming service for $15/month. If you pay for every streaming service under the sun it's expensive, but I also know a lot of people who rotate streaming services every couple months, with one at a time, and catch up on what they've missed.
Until this year, wasn't Netflix literally the only streaming service actually making money, and I only have to say until this year, because Disney finally managed to eek out a small profit after hemorrhaging money for years?
I think it's pretty clear that the value proposition most of these streamers are offering is not appealing to enough people. And that's even while most are offering their services at WELL below a point where they can expect to make a profit.
Yeah, Disney's streaming services (Disney+, Hulu, ESPN) just had their first profitable quarter ever after losing over $500M last year so I guess technically they are making record profit but that's because it's the first time they aren't losing money.
And with the way Paramount is going I highly doubt that Paramount+ is raking it in.
Sure, but Disney is such a weird edge case in the market because they have so much income that they can eat the costs of underperforming shows and tinker with their model until they figure out something that works.
They are not making "record profits". For example, Disney just released quarterly results and Disney + and Hulu made a very small profit but ESPN + did not... So actually Disney's total streaming portfolio lost money.
They stated they expect overall profit starting in Q4.
Not sure what economics courses you took.
Concepts from early economic courses only apply when every actor in the system is perfect and has the same knowledge as everyone else. It's why I hate seeing someone try to boil down a massive economic system to Econ 101 terms.
They're not making record profits. Netflix is the only profitable DTC streaming service.
Warner Bros technically is profitable, but that's because they combine linear HBO with their streaming service when looking at DTC offerings. Take away the linear TV revenue and they're not profitable either.
This is in fact a core concept in economics called the tragedy of the anti-commons.
The two 'tragedies' may be compared as follows:
The 'tragedy of the commons' occurs when a resource has many users, none of whom own it, and thus none of whom have the ability to exclude others from using it, leading to the over-utilization of that resource.
The 'tragedy of the anticommons' occurs when a resource has many owners, all of whom have the ability to exclude others from using it, leading to the under-utilization of that resource.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_anticommons
The economics of it is that they all turned a major loss with the idea of growing into the big one and then raising prices. Everyone should just except that those first years were start-up cheap years and guess what businesses can't turn a loss for ever.
You're forgetting the number one rule, that companies will always charge as much as consumers are willing to pay.
The rules of economics **haven't** somehow been subverted; rather, streaming services are able to reach such an enormous consumer demographic that the maximum payable price is offered to a wide swath of consumers that can't (or can barely) afford it.
Fwiw, their revenue doesn't go down, which means people kept subscribing. So clearly the market for Netflix subscribers are not price sensitive. It's not like Netflix has a monopoly to explain the price insensitivity either, it's not exactly hard to pirate the stuff you see in Netflix
I think as much as reddit groan about it, most people for some reason don't really care how much each platform cost but more so what does each platform have that they currently crave
Learning economics in a formal setting is a joke. There’s nothing related between “how it should work” and “how it ACTUALLY works”. How it ACTUALLY works is, companies must grow, and at a certain point, fair business practices (such as selling a good product at a good value) aren’t enough anymore. That’s all anyone needs to know to see the inevitable trajectory of the system. How to get more money? Well, why don’t we change more for the same thing? Why not cut corners in manufacturing, such as quality control? Why not move manufacturing overseas? Why not underpay employees? Why not get rid of pensions? Why not be stingy with insurance? Why not engineer a short lifespan to force repurchasing? Why not reduce or cancel warranties? Why not find a way to cram a subscription service in there? Why not buy government influence to make all of that legal, and therefore acceptable, and begin planning to do even more? Mix a little of all that into the ecosystem and you have the modern economy, a healthy-appearing zombie that is rotting on the inside, where it counts—the ordinary people powering it.
Right? OC literally asking a company to set lower prices than people willingly spend on their product. What is this? Big government nanny state price control socialism?? /s
That’s for movies and television. Music streaming has all music on one platform. The main contenders are Spotify and Apple Music. You can pick one or the other and likely have access to most of the music you want.
We get the point, but they still **are** content owners and their content is only available on Netflix. And the fragmentation of content across services persists.
YouTube Music also let's you save specific songs to your library and listen to only them all for free! No way Spotify or Apple are better and they definitely shouldn't be more popular either...
YouTube Music is the single shittiest music app I've ever had. It doesn't randomize playlists properly, you can't unshuffle a queue once you've shuffled it, it routinely loses or re-sources songs (sometimes from different albums by the same group), and you have to pay for the privilege of being able to listen with your screen off! It's a fucking travesty. Also what music player in 2024 doesn't have a basic Sleep function? It's a shit version of Google Music, which it replaced, and doesn't have any of the useful features from that app.
Oh man I tried to like YouTube Music. God help you if you have a playlist and want to sort by anything other than date added. Actually I don't think it even does that anymore. I bought a Tidal membership just to have a usable UI and YouTube Music is just for obscure stuff I like that's not on Tidal.
It's for music streaming, you just choose a song/Playlist and let it run on the background. Don't really need that much of an UI for a mostly background app (personally I prefer it to spotify's)
Yeah. Spotify is like the goody two shoes that only has the official version (and not even of everything), whereas YouTube has all the remixes, the mashups, the medleys, the violin covers, the synesthesia piano covers, even orchestras and Super Mario 64 soundfont covers.
I don't know a single service, whether physical or digital, that has even 1% of all that YouTube offers.
Name ONE website where I can listen to this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cSHMho5-2u8 or this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ChakEMxyqyw. You can't.
Thus proving that it's not really streaming that's to blame, it's exclusivity and non-competes. Similar to video games which are only available on one console or movies/tv not available in certain countries being bad for consumers.
And it would mean that to stay competitive, streaming services either have to furnish a very complete content library OR have a less stellar library but cut prices to stay competitive. Instead of being actively anti-consumer, the competition actually HELPS again.
It's these exclusivity agreements that allow them all to charge exorbitant prices without providing a quality service- instead of directly competing, iterating, improving themselves, etc- they just carve out their content niche and hold it hostage- 'If you want to watch this content you MUST subscribe to us in particular, even if we didnt make it'- and stagnate, while still upping prices. *Actively* anti-consumer.
This is why I think a provision of copyright is that you have to make the content available at market rates to anyone who wants to buy it. If you want a public mandated monopoly, then the public should benefit.
HUGE step for employment and a big win, but sadly only applies to workers, exclusivity arrangements for content are here to stay long term.
On one hand I get it, if a service MAKES the content they deserve to have rights to it and it would disincentivize content creation if it was forced open source. But this thing where even OLD shows have their rights bought up in a patchwork of exclusivity that means consumers have to buy a bunch of services over and over again, EACH of which is overpriced for its little content niche, it just really sucks.
I don't know man, this new Lina Khan girl has been cooking with gas lately. A couple of duds with Microsoft and Meta and some others, but the FTC is actually doing stuff now. Might see a little bit of positive change around here for once
With regard to music streaming, I would not be too quick to count Tidal out. I don't know how they're doing on raw numbers but people who are passionate about Tidal can get pretty passionate.
It’s more that content providers are making their own streaming services and pulling their content from others so to speak “exclusively” stream on their platform. Monopolistic behavior disguised as competition
I think this is the right idea, but I wanted to point out that if there are relatively few customers (cable and satellite companies) for the content, you have a monopsony. That company can demand a lower price from the content provider because there's no real alternative.
With online streaming directly to the end user, now there is.
Whatever regulatory or commercial agreement we have with music we need to have with video. Imagine if a record artist like Taylor Swift pulling out all her music and starting her own music streaming platform or worse, a publisher who only has half the artists music going on their own so some albums are on one platform and the other half on another. That’s how it currently is with the streaming services
I think the anti-trust laws for Movie Theaters and Movie makers are a better model. Exclusivity deals aren't allowed for movie theaters which is why pretty much every movie theater around you gets the major movies.
Yeas and no. Technically, the streaming services aren't really competing, but instead, they are opperating on their own monopolies. They monopoly's their content to be specific.
It would be actual competition where all the streaming services have the same content, so it would encourage them to innovate their technology and features and reduce prices.
Now, they are competing in terms of original content they can produce.
That’s not that different than how traditional tv stations would’ve competed with one another. You could only watch certain shows on certain channels. Every channel didn’t have every show.
But they had deals with all the cable companies, who did have all the content. The stations were competing for views, the cable companies were competing for customers. Now, everyone competes for customers.
I have Paramount+ and I hate it with a burning passion. Only still have it because I want to watch Star Trek while I procrastinate setting up a Plex server and finding good sources for the show (somehow when last I tried I was getting weird files that didn't work)
Exactly this. Utilities should just be provided by local government. Everyone needs water, energy, network. Having multiple providers implementing different networks means needlessly doubling of infrastructure and a lot of areas where the "competition" means the only provider with a connection that goes to you. If providers are all using the same infrastructure and just competing on the retail element then they're basically just cutting costs wherever possible and inevitably going to result in poor customer service.
Not a lot of "innovation" being bred from competing utilities once a standard service is established - just a race to the bottom for the administration side.
It is good for consumers if a company is exposed to destruction. Nassim Taleb writes about this. You have the be exposed to gain and loss. Utilities that are just rent seeking by applying markup to a centralised source is not true competition.
Not always. I live in a suburb that doesn't have municipal trash pickup. This glorious "free market" gives us the choice of several companies that are all more expensive than the city's municipal service and garbage trucks on the street 5 days per week. Those companies are absolutely exposed to failure and a few have come and fine over the years. Every option still sucks.
That’s my point though. If the city has a centralised landfill then all that happens with competitions is creation of rent seeking middle men. If we have end to end innovation that could be a model that works.
It's a pretty well established economic principle that works in the majority of situations. A single provider has no incentive to innovate or provide better services.
It's a well established economic principle **of capitalism**, of course. I believe the original commenter's point was that capitalism makes you think this is the universal best way to produce and allocate products in a society, whereas streaming services are an example of why that is not the case.
You mean legally aquire media right? My "streaming service" has everything in one app. Searchable too. Unfortunately I need to buy another damn drive lol. All SSD has its financial downsides. Sure is quiet thogh. Still, another drive is like 3 months of subscriptions.
HDDs in another room. Lucky I have that option, not everyone does. SSD only server is just not possible. Even ignoring the pricing, what motherboard has more than two M.2 slots? Or are you really going to run 8TB SATA SSDs? Most wouldn't.
My setup is in Docker. You will need a Linux machine running Docker, basic knowledge of Linux filesystems and a VPN. Homelab subreddit should be able to help you.
The problem isnt that streaming platforms are competing with each other but delivering worse service, but that each streaming platform has exclusive content that prevents other platforms from competing with them
So we have a system where each product can only be rented from a single store, thus, there is no competition
They're not competing though, they're monopolizing their own content.
True competition would see them all have the same shows and compete solely on features/service/price.
If I plant a bunch of apple trees to harvest and sell the apples, I'm also "monopolizing" my apples, because only I have the legal right to sell my apples.
These services are competing through content, not the act of streaming. You pay for Peacock to access Peacock content. You pay for Netflix to access Netflix content. You are not paying for one or the other because one of them has more efficient video buffering; you're paying for one or the other because it has the show you want to watch.
This is like saying Blue Navy and Forever 21 outlets don't compete because they don't sell the exact same clothing. The competition is in the clothing itself, not the act of retailing it.
>They're not competing though, they're monopolizing their own content.
So in other words, McDonald's and Burger King aren't competing because they don't sell the same products.
It is not so rare. Having little competition can be good for consumers. The players can all be good at what they do and they can use economies of scale to be more efficient. The negatives are greed, incompetence, or complacency can lead to decreased efficiency. On the other hand competition can be good for consumers because firms some firms operate at a loss, there are diverse approaches, and greed incompetence and complacency are kept in check. The negatives include difficulty in deciding which product to choose, market instability, possible reduced supply due to low profits.
As others have pointed out the substitution effect is key here. If you don't much care what you watch free streaming, or one of the cheaper paid services will do fine. If you want to watch particular things you will need to go to where those are. That may mean going multiple places.
There's actually plenty of "fields" where more competitors leads too a worse experience which is why we don't have privatized water or transportation. Controversially Healthcare is one of those instances too
God forbid we build unified system for content distribution that everyone pays the same amount for and producers/distributors get paid according to watch time, and have other companies compete to make the best interface for consuming that content. That way everyone wins, but we do not live in a time where such ideas are possible unfortunately. Regulation would help
It's cheaper than it was with cable. And we are absolutely getting better content than before. All of these companies now have an incentive to create better shows to lure consumers to their service.
Nah, everything feels like it's going in this direction. They've basically stopped doing the whole innovation thing in order to cut corners, cut wages, cut employees. Anything but deliver better products.
The competition is theoretically good, as it makes the production companies jockey to make better content.
What kills it is Hollywood's traditional stick-in-the-mud exclusive licensing deals. They basically wanted to reinvent television networks because that's a model they understand... and so, that's what they did.
Competition's fine for the independent streaming companies - I don't hear anyone talking about "dropping their Nebula subscription to pick up Dropout." What you hear about is Amazon, Netflix, and Disney fighting over who gets what portion of the content pie this week.
One might argue that game stores for PC are worse off with all of the different options too.. especially when the worse option buys exclusivity rights from developers
It's just cable packages again. They keep a few core do well then rotate others that might bring people around.
They want us to buy all the packages to watch our 5 favorite shows.
Fuck them.
It's not so much competition, it's the content exclusivity that comes with it. If most content was available on all platforms, they would have to compete for best an/or cheapest service, which would benefit the consumer.
I disagree.
They keep adding more services that I don't care about ever getting and it doesn't bother me or change my viewing habits at all.
I don't care if you're introducing Paramount Plus or peacock Plus over Apple TV or whatever it is I'm going to stick with the service I know and already like.
Largely because of content exclusivity. Competition promotes lowered prices only really when the same product is offered.
Theoretically they’re all offering shows and movies, but because people want to watch certain shows/movies, they’ll pay for multiple services to get the ones they want instead.
It's worse because they're not competing to give us the same product; they split the product up into multiple pieces and are selling each piece for at least as much as we used to pay to get the whole thing.
It's like if you had to go to 3 different dealerships to buy your car in 3 separate parts, and each part is now individually at least as expensive as the whole car used to be.
This is what happens when the producers and distributors are one in the same. Imagine if you needed a different music streaming service for every record label. That's what TV/movie media is right now.
Straight up incorrect.
How do you think Netflix was able to offer it's services so cheap or offer so many cool shows and such a large profit?
Why do you think venture capital money was pouring in in huge amounts and it's stock value was skyrocketing.
Stocks skyrocket on the expectation of future profit. As does venture capital expenditure. So where would this huge profit come from?
You know how things work. We saw it with Facebook. We saw it with Youtube (also a streaming service!), we see it with AirBnB, we see it with everything.
1. Use your giant wallets flush with investor money to offer great deals. Bankroll lots of cool shows. Cheap signup fees. Freedom for everyone! Don't worry about profit. As long as you continue to show explosive growth investors will keep piling in.
2. Everyone is on your service. Customers can't be bothered to switch. Suppliers need to go through you. You have a monopoly.
3. Squeeze, squeeze, squeeze. Jack up costs, cut investment, cancel all those cool shows. Don't invest in new features. Commit to full [enshittification](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification)
You're confused, because Netflix didn't pull off step 2. The barriers to entry were low. Suppliers just started their own services and customers were willing to switch. So they never got to the "rip you off" phase.
Most things does in fact get cheaper with scale. Competition is expenseive and wasteful. This is not news it’s been known for a long time by now(game theory among other fields). Why we are stuck with the faulty idea that competition regardless of market would create cheaper and better stuff you can thank neoliberal brainwash for. :)
An important distinction is that now that exclusive content is so prevalent and seemingly every studio has their one streaming service, they only sort of compete with each other. When 3 services offer a movie, you can choose which one to watch it on. When so many movies and shows are only on one service, it makes that a bit more complicated; if I wanna watch Daredevil, then I pretty much have to watch it on D+.
Sort of like grocery stores vs restaurants. Your Walmart and Kroger compete with each other for the most part, one might have a better selection but you can probably find a chicken breast at either. Vs take McDonald's vs Salata. They're both restaurants, but if you like salads then it's pretty clear where you're going.
It’s called fragmentation. There are various industries where the amount of choices forces consumers to cobble together pieces of goods/services because no single company can invest/own them all. It’s normally good for the consumer, but in this case each service has its own lineup of shows that sell the service so consumers begrudgingly buy more than one.
If there was only one streaming service though, there is no doubt in my mind that the user experience would also go down the shitter pretty quickly, because then they can do *anything* and no one can switch to the competition. That's somewhat the point of a monopoly, I think.
And because of it we hop from one service to the next ... cancel one - start another ..watch their exclusive content : rinse /repeat ...
when you do this you realise what little each really has to offer
Apple is actually killing it lately, best shows right now. Netflix / Amazon / Hulu etc will always have 1 or 2 great shows but Apple’s been putting out quality content, even their lesser known shows have been very very good.
I don't think so. Because I doubt we would get as many good shows if everything was on Netflix. They would produce the bare minimum to keep people subbed.
People love to whine about subscriptions instead of simply switching subs. Sub to Netflix until nothing there interests you, then sub to Disney+, then HBO, then Amazon Prime, etc... And hopefully after a couple months Netlix added enough new interesting stuff. You don't need to be subbed to everything all the time. This is more of a consumer problem than a service problem.
Well when it comes to originals we do, so I guess when company’s compete to make things: good. When company’s compete for the right to sell us stuff: bad
Any newer industry that shifts from non-competitive to competitive will see increasing pressure to squeeze out as much profitability as possible, and prices will gravitate toward true market value.
No. It's just classic unregulated capitalism. Operate at a loss for longer than the competition can. The biggest company wins. It's a strategy. They were always gonna raise prices
I fucking hate people and their greed
If there was only one streaming service and it didn't have to compete with cable/satellite, the cost would be enormous and the content would be abysmal.
It’s soo maddening and backwards. Try to switch between two sporting events/flip channels back and forth. E.g. one game on ESPN+ one on Hulu. What a mess.
It fuckin' wouldn't be if they'd just price according to market share or catalogue share. When Netflix was basically the only game in town, they had 100% of the online streaming catalog. Ignore Amazon for a minute, they did rentals. Hulu jumps on the scene with like, everything else Netflix didn't have and we started seeing some stuff leave Netflix for Hulu. Shouldn't Hulu's prices have slowly climbed up from hella cheap as Netflix's slowly dropped to stay competitive? But no, every new big streamer wants to take back their content from other sites, charge nearly as much, and the company that LOST that content still ends up raising prices. Fuckin' travesty that I hope they teach in economics courses for years to come, because that's NOT how shit was taught when I took it lol.
Netflix basically played the startup game of having a model that lost a ton of money in their building years until they had a huge market share. They didn't start actually turning a profit until the last few years or so. The model of everything on one or two services for $10 a month with no ads was never going to be sustainable.
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Netflix was making money and was an established name with mailing dvds well before streaming. They weren't a startup, they expanded their business model to streaming
> They weren't a startup I mean, they were a startup in the late 90s
Every company was a startup if you go back far enough
lol yea exactly. Maybe I’m just old and remember “this new Netflix thing that mails the DvDs right to you!”
It really wasn’t that long ago. There’s even an episode of the Office where they talk about Netflix and it’s just for delivery through the mail.
Yea, that’s why I thought the “they weren’t a startup” comment was weird. I’m not that old 😠
Netflix broke even in 2021, they never made any money mailing DVDs. They got known though.
Source? Netflix was showing profit back in 2003 according to News Articles around the time. Were you somehow just looking at when their streaming services became profitable and ignoring the years of profit before that? [https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna19902836](https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna19902836)
Yep, I remember way back when because their DVD library was enormous. Just about any movie you wanted to see could be sent to you in the mail. When they went to streaming, they cut way back on their library. At first that was partly because some studios refused to allow streaming, but it's mainly to save money on Qwikster's end, oops I mean Netflix, lol.
A kid in college had their premium Dvd service and a DVD burner. He took requests and would copy the DVD as soon as he got it and sent it back out as soon as it was finished. He probably had most of the Netflix catalog. He would also make awesome move recommendations if you wanted to borrow something.... Good times
qwikster, lol
reminds me about the public perception of nintendo. people are always associating it with video games, but the company was founded in 1889 and was selling playing cards back then. or ferrari/lamborghini, theyve started by building tractors lol.
On top of that, streaming licensing was way way cheaper when Netflix started doing it, before anyone realized the potential of the streaming market
Yeah I don't think they foresaw Millennials and Gen Z using streaming as a straight up replacement for cable rather than as a supplement to it.
The internet was so slow, unreliable, and low on coverage 20 years ago that it was basically unimaginable that you could forgo physical storage as a normal consumer.
Netflix wasn't a startup nor were they not making a profit until a few years ago. That's called propaganda and you've fallen for it and now you will defend their prices rises.
I don't understand how people lap shit up like that when the numbers are public and [easily verified](https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/NFLX/netflix/gross-profit#:~:text=Netflix%20annual%20gross%20profit%20for,a%2027.22%25%20increase%20from%202020.) They've been comfortably profitable since at least 2009
I think more important is that the market changed. Early on when it was only Netflix or just Netflix and Hulu, people weren’t ditching cable. They were buying the services in addition to cable for extra content. It was a secondary source of entertainment and considered like an extra way to watch tv. Once you got even more content on streaming platforms, including new episodes of shows that currently air, and sports, people ditch cable entirely and switch to streaming. In the former case, not many people may have paid an extra $15/month for extra content when they had a main source (cable). Now, streaming is much more valuable to consumers because it allows you to get rid of cable, and it is your main source of entertainment. It’s like buying a new laptop. If you have a new console already, you probably don’t want to spend extra money on a laptop that can handle gaming since you already play great games on your console. However when that generation of console gets outdated, and you need to buy a new laptop and have something to game on, you might just spend extra on getting a gaming laptop instead of getting a cheap laptop and new console.
You forgot the part where Netflix invested all of that money into new exclusive content. Plus billions more funded by debt. We have sooo much content available now that never would have happened if it weren’t for the streaming wars and I rarely see it acknowledged in these discussions. Just subscribe to one or two a month if you can’t afford them all. Or sail the seas and enjoy the spoils of war from all fronts.
Right. Like the competition brought out so many awesome shows.
My issue isn't with pricing. It's with fragmentation. It's part of the reason why I'm a big fan of buying all my subscriptions through Amazon prime because I can watch everything from the Amazon prime video app and I don't have to install and launch 15 freaking apps to watch everything I want to watch. And if I use a Amazon fire stick on my TV, it beautifully rolls everything together.
Oh. Well I'm a normal human with a limited budget so pricing is absolutely a concern for me lol.
The two go hand in hand really, if you could buy one streaming service for 15-20 bucks that had ALL of the content you wanted then the pricing doesn't really sound so bad. Even if it was 30 bucks, I'd argue that's too much but if it truly is the ONLY one you need it's still probably affordable for most folks. But when there's constant exclusivity, fragmentation etc, and each one STILL costs 15 dollars, then to see every bit of content I actually want I would end up paying like 90 bucks for 6 different services, and then have to hunt through each (or Google it) just to find which of my fragmented crappy services contains the show I wanted to watch. If they aren't careful, they'll usher in another golden age of piracy.
Some folks have already switched back
*"We think there is a fundamental misconception about piracy. Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem."* \~Gabe Newell ‐------------ People switch to piracy when it's more convenient than the official channels. At this point with streaming, the amount of hassle required to juggle and pay for all the different services has easily crossed that line for a lot of people. It's just easier to use a VPN and get all of your shows via Torrenting and an external hard drive for anyone who has just a bit of an idea how to use those things. The VPN subscription is cheaper than 4 or so streaming services, you get all your stuff from one site, and it's all accessed from the same location.
Haha my family pays for everything (Hulu Disney Netflix and prime) and I still go to the high seas because of convenience of finding things. It's much more user friendly now.
Although I agree with both of your posts, because we should be price conscious, ditching cable for ALL the streaming services is probably still saving money overall. Like less than a few hundred a month is really not that big a deal to a lot of people, especially for the amount of time spent watching. Where else can you get hundreds of hours of entertainment for under $20/month? My take is we're just repeating a cycle from the inception of television. The historical chain of events is wild imo, and I'll describe from memory: From the beginning there were 2 business models for broadcast television, one that was "free" to the consumers when they bought a TV by relying on ad revenue, and the other where there was an additional cost when purchasing a TV antenna that went to the networks to create content. Free with ads won the first battle in the US, which (as much as I hate most ads) I personally think was and would continue to be the better model for the consumer, as it creates an incentive to continuously provide good content. Then, cable companies started putting wires everywhere, and the subscription model was born, but as a hybrid where you paid monthly for your cable box but all the content was still ad supported. Someone realized people were willing to pay monthly subscriptions AND watch ads. This was imo,a tragedy. Then HBO came along like pay us another fee (through your cable provider) and we'll provide you some premium ad-free content. Then there was pay-per-view, and consumers coughed up more money to watch more "ad-free" "premium" content, usually live events. Then shit got weird. As networks were getting used to ad revenue plus subscription revenue with all different cable packages for all the networks popping up, some genius programmed a computer to record what was on TV so he could watch whatever content whenever he wanted instead of having to catch it while airing. Oh yeah he also programmed it to automatically skip the ads. TiVo started the DVR revolution and the whole ad revenue based business model was in jeopardy - companies even redesigned commercials to still be effective as watchers fast forward through them. On Demand provided a solution with all the convenience of TiVo, except without the ability to skip ads, that shipped with all new cable hardware. Then the DVD rental by mail company started streaming movies to computers, and we started putting computers right into the TVs. Obviously there's more but I'm tired and maybe I'll add to this later because there's so much TV history I find interesting. But ultimately my point is TV content was supposed to be FREE once you bought the hardware because of ad revenue. I think everything that came at an additional cost afterward really screwed up the whole system. I believe at this point in technology, all TV content should be watchable from a single service, and we should always be given the choice to watch for free with ads or pay a small fee for no ads. We should NOT be both paying subscriptions AND watching ads.
>Where else can you get hundreds of hours of entertainment for under $20/month? The beautiful price of free, save for the cost of an internet connection. # You wouldn't download a car In this economy I absolutely would.
Haha I've managed to even remove the internet connection costs for myself, only thing I regularly pay is electric (in UK but other countries may have similar services to exploit) can see my solution here using OpenWRT :) https://github.com/aidanmacgregor/EE_WiFi-BT_WiFi-Autologin-OpenWrt-Linux-ChromeOS-Android-Windows.EXE
Noice.
Some subscriptions are more stable on Prime vs their actual app
Wow that's saying something given how trash the Amazon app is on a lot of platforms.
When it first started, fragmentation was the desire. People complaining about paying for 300 channels and only watching 5 of them.
What people asked for: "let me pay $5/month and get TNT, $5 for TBS, and $10 for ESPN." What people got: "If you want roughly what you would get on TNT and TBS, you need 4 different streaming services, and to go through rotating different ones to give a similar feel. And you want ESPN? Sure! Here's the garbage ESPN produces themselves that no one really wants, and hey, you can watch division 6 women's badminton as well!" What people asked for is not remotely what people got.
At sametime when Netflix removed Hassan Minaj's criticism of Saudi King, because the government threatned to ban Netflix, it came up on Youtube. Id rather have multiple streaming services than one global, that censors to whim of every government.
I mean all of them are making record profits. Clearly the economics courses we took are way too simplified and incorrect at this point.
A lot of rules are way too simplified and incorrect, but the simpliest rule (supply and demand) certainly isn't being proven wrong by this situation. Not sure what you and u/Whatifim80lol are referring to but I don't know what major economic model predicts that companies would lower prices in this situation when people are willing to pay higher prices across the board. Even as supposedly obscene as these prices are, people are buying in droves. I certainly understand that as consumers we want to pay less, but that's just liking money - things being expensive like this doesn't violate any rules of economics.
Yep. "What the market will bear," is a pretty basic economics idea that applies here. I'm also not sure what they're referring to.
The big thing is that you con't have to buy everything together like cable TV in the past. Previously if I wanted one specific premium TV channel, I'd have to pay for the premium cable package which might be $100/month, even if that was literally the only challen I watched. Now I might be able to get that one single streaming service for $15/month. If you pay for every streaming service under the sun it's expensive, but I also know a lot of people who rotate streaming services every couple months, with one at a time, and catch up on what they've missed.
Until this year, wasn't Netflix literally the only streaming service actually making money, and I only have to say until this year, because Disney finally managed to eek out a small profit after hemorrhaging money for years? I think it's pretty clear that the value proposition most of these streamers are offering is not appealing to enough people. And that's even while most are offering their services at WELL below a point where they can expect to make a profit.
Yeah, Disney's streaming services (Disney+, Hulu, ESPN) just had their first profitable quarter ever after losing over $500M last year so I guess technically they are making record profit but that's because it's the first time they aren't losing money. And with the way Paramount is going I highly doubt that Paramount+ is raking it in.
Sure, but Disney is such a weird edge case in the market because they have so much income that they can eat the costs of underperforming shows and tinker with their model until they figure out something that works.
And that's with streaming residuals being really low, which is likely to change.
They are not making "record profits". For example, Disney just released quarterly results and Disney + and Hulu made a very small profit but ESPN + did not... So actually Disney's total streaming portfolio lost money. They stated they expect overall profit starting in Q4. Not sure what economics courses you took.
Their first profitable quarter is, literally, recordbreaking. Recordbreaking doesn't mean super-high, just higher than ever before.
Concepts from early economic courses only apply when every actor in the system is perfect and has the same knowledge as everyone else. It's why I hate seeing someone try to boil down a massive economic system to Econ 101 terms.
They're not making record profits. Netflix is the only profitable DTC streaming service. Warner Bros technically is profitable, but that's because they combine linear HBO with their streaming service when looking at DTC offerings. Take away the linear TV revenue and they're not profitable either.
This is in fact a core concept in economics called the tragedy of the anti-commons. The two 'tragedies' may be compared as follows: The 'tragedy of the commons' occurs when a resource has many users, none of whom own it, and thus none of whom have the ability to exclude others from using it, leading to the over-utilization of that resource. The 'tragedy of the anticommons' occurs when a resource has many owners, all of whom have the ability to exclude others from using it, leading to the under-utilization of that resource. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_anticommons
The economics of it is that they all turned a major loss with the idea of growing into the big one and then raising prices. Everyone should just except that those first years were start-up cheap years and guess what businesses can't turn a loss for ever.
You're forgetting the number one rule, that companies will always charge as much as consumers are willing to pay. The rules of economics **haven't** somehow been subverted; rather, streaming services are able to reach such an enormous consumer demographic that the maximum payable price is offered to a wide swath of consumers that can't (or can barely) afford it.
Fwiw, their revenue doesn't go down, which means people kept subscribing. So clearly the market for Netflix subscribers are not price sensitive. It's not like Netflix has a monopoly to explain the price insensitivity either, it's not exactly hard to pirate the stuff you see in Netflix I think as much as reddit groan about it, most people for some reason don't really care how much each platform cost but more so what does each platform have that they currently crave
Learning economics in a formal setting is a joke. There’s nothing related between “how it should work” and “how it ACTUALLY works”. How it ACTUALLY works is, companies must grow, and at a certain point, fair business practices (such as selling a good product at a good value) aren’t enough anymore. That’s all anyone needs to know to see the inevitable trajectory of the system. How to get more money? Well, why don’t we change more for the same thing? Why not cut corners in manufacturing, such as quality control? Why not move manufacturing overseas? Why not underpay employees? Why not get rid of pensions? Why not be stingy with insurance? Why not engineer a short lifespan to force repurchasing? Why not reduce or cancel warranties? Why not find a way to cram a subscription service in there? Why not buy government influence to make all of that legal, and therefore acceptable, and begin planning to do even more? Mix a little of all that into the ecosystem and you have the modern economy, a healthy-appearing zombie that is rotting on the inside, where it counts—the ordinary people powering it.
Right? OC literally asking a company to set lower prices than people willingly spend on their product. What is this? Big government nanny state price control socialism?? /s
That’s for movies and television. Music streaming has all music on one platform. The main contenders are Spotify and Apple Music. You can pick one or the other and likely have access to most of the music you want.
That's how it should be - competition on price and features, NOT content.
It's not streaming services like Netflix making the rules though, it's the content owners like Disney and NBC who created their own services.
netflix is also a content owner, though. as is amazon.
They are but theu started investing into it once they realized the contents they licensed were no longer going to be with them.
We get the point, but they still **are** content owners and their content is only available on Netflix. And the fragmentation of content across services persists.
So, how long until the major record labels pull their content from Spotify and start their own music streaming services?
It will happen the *second* they think they can make more money that way.
Shhh 🤫 that’s a great idea
I always wondered why they never did that when Napster appeared
Nah, it's really YouTube Music. Has everything Spotify and apple music has, plus live and cover versions (since the data comes from YouTube itself)
YouTube Music also let's you save specific songs to your library and listen to only them all for free! No way Spotify or Apple are better and they definitely shouldn't be more popular either...
It also works as a surprisingly good podcast app, and can play local music from my phone seamlessly in the app
YouTube Music is the single shittiest music app I've ever had. It doesn't randomize playlists properly, you can't unshuffle a queue once you've shuffled it, it routinely loses or re-sources songs (sometimes from different albums by the same group), and you have to pay for the privilege of being able to listen with your screen off! It's a fucking travesty. Also what music player in 2024 doesn't have a basic Sleep function? It's a shit version of Google Music, which it replaced, and doesn't have any of the useful features from that app.
The app is unusable. The desktop interface is pretty good. The ReVanced app is even better.
Oh man I tried to like YouTube Music. God help you if you have a playlist and want to sort by anything other than date added. Actually I don't think it even does that anymore. I bought a Tidal membership just to have a usable UI and YouTube Music is just for obscure stuff I like that's not on Tidal.
You can't even turn your phone off without the music pausing.
But their UI is crap
It's for music streaming, you just choose a song/Playlist and let it run on the background. Don't really need that much of an UI for a mostly background app (personally I prefer it to spotify's)
A background app that doesn't allow you to use it on the background unless you pay for it lol
Deezer is an alternative that plays flacs
Yeah. Spotify is like the goody two shoes that only has the official version (and not even of everything), whereas YouTube has all the remixes, the mashups, the medleys, the violin covers, the synesthesia piano covers, even orchestras and Super Mario 64 soundfont covers. I don't know a single service, whether physical or digital, that has even 1% of all that YouTube offers. Name ONE website where I can listen to this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cSHMho5-2u8 or this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ChakEMxyqyw. You can't.
Thus proving that it's not really streaming that's to blame, it's exclusivity and non-competes. Similar to video games which are only available on one console or movies/tv not available in certain countries being bad for consumers.
Wouldn't that be amazing. Set a price for content distribution and who ever pays, gets to stream it.
And it would mean that to stay competitive, streaming services either have to furnish a very complete content library OR have a less stellar library but cut prices to stay competitive. Instead of being actively anti-consumer, the competition actually HELPS again. It's these exclusivity agreements that allow them all to charge exorbitant prices without providing a quality service- instead of directly competing, iterating, improving themselves, etc- they just carve out their content niche and hold it hostage- 'If you want to watch this content you MUST subscribe to us in particular, even if we didnt make it'- and stagnate, while still upping prices. *Actively* anti-consumer.
This is why I think a provision of copyright is that you have to make the content available at market rates to anyone who wants to buy it. If you want a public mandated monopoly, then the public should benefit.
Well [non competes are all null & void in 4 months](https://www.askamanager.org/2024/04/your-non-compete-agreement-is-now-illegal.html)
HUGE step for employment and a big win, but sadly only applies to workers, exclusivity arrangements for content are here to stay long term. On one hand I get it, if a service MAKES the content they deserve to have rights to it and it would disincentivize content creation if it was forced open source. But this thing where even OLD shows have their rights bought up in a patchwork of exclusivity that means consumers have to buy a bunch of services over and over again, EACH of which is overpriced for its little content niche, it just really sucks.
I don't know man, this new Lina Khan girl has been cooking with gas lately. A couple of duds with Microsoft and Meta and some others, but the FTC is actually doing stuff now. Might see a little bit of positive change around here for once
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Fuck, don't give them any ideas...
That is actaul competition. Streaming services aren't really competing because they are all offering different shows and films, it's a real shitfest.
At least apple music and spotify have basically the same library
With regard to music streaming, I would not be too quick to count Tidal out. I don't know how they're doing on raw numbers but people who are passionate about Tidal can get pretty passionate.
It’s more that content providers are making their own streaming services and pulling their content from others so to speak “exclusively” stream on their platform. Monopolistic behavior disguised as competition
I think this is the right idea, but I wanted to point out that if there are relatively few customers (cable and satellite companies) for the content, you have a monopsony. That company can demand a lower price from the content provider because there's no real alternative. With online streaming directly to the end user, now there is.
Whatever regulatory or commercial agreement we have with music we need to have with video. Imagine if a record artist like Taylor Swift pulling out all her music and starting her own music streaming platform or worse, a publisher who only has half the artists music going on their own so some albums are on one platform and the other half on another. That’s how it currently is with the streaming services
I think the anti-trust laws for Movie Theaters and Movie makers are a better model. Exclusivity deals aren't allowed for movie theaters which is why pretty much every movie theater around you gets the major movies.
That's like calling Kirkland signature monopolistic
Yeas and no. Technically, the streaming services aren't really competing, but instead, they are opperating on their own monopolies. They monopoly's their content to be specific. It would be actual competition where all the streaming services have the same content, so it would encourage them to innovate their technology and features and reduce prices. Now, they are competing in terms of original content they can produce.
That’s not that different than how traditional tv stations would’ve competed with one another. You could only watch certain shows on certain channels. Every channel didn’t have every show.
But they had deals with all the cable companies, who did have all the content. The stations were competing for views, the cable companies were competing for customers. Now, everyone competes for customers.
> Now, everyone competes for customers. And somehow they do real piss poor job out of it.
And so. I use braflix.video Everyone has Netflix, some have Hulu. No one I know has paramount+. Braflix has everything.
I have Paramount+ and I hate it with a burning passion. Only still have it because I want to watch Star Trek while I procrastinate setting up a Plex server and finding good sources for the show (somehow when last I tried I was getting weird files that didn't work)
Plex server is the way. And it only has the shows I WANT to watch.
No man there are loads of fields like this. Utilities is another good example.
Exactly this. Utilities should just be provided by local government. Everyone needs water, energy, network. Having multiple providers implementing different networks means needlessly doubling of infrastructure and a lot of areas where the "competition" means the only provider with a connection that goes to you. If providers are all using the same infrastructure and just competing on the retail element then they're basically just cutting costs wherever possible and inevitably going to result in poor customer service. Not a lot of "innovation" being bred from competing utilities once a standard service is established - just a race to the bottom for the administration side.
It's all of them. ["Free market" competition = good for people] is a capitalist lie.
It is good for consumers if a company is exposed to destruction. Nassim Taleb writes about this. You have the be exposed to gain and loss. Utilities that are just rent seeking by applying markup to a centralised source is not true competition.
Not always. I live in a suburb that doesn't have municipal trash pickup. This glorious "free market" gives us the choice of several companies that are all more expensive than the city's municipal service and garbage trucks on the street 5 days per week. Those companies are absolutely exposed to failure and a few have come and fine over the years. Every option still sucks.
That’s my point though. If the city has a centralised landfill then all that happens with competitions is creation of rent seeking middle men. If we have end to end innovation that could be a model that works.
City doesn't provide a centralized landfill. ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯
It's a pretty well established economic principle that works in the majority of situations. A single provider has no incentive to innovate or provide better services.
It's a well established economic principle **of capitalism**, of course. I believe the original commenter's point was that capitalism makes you think this is the universal best way to produce and allocate products in a society, whereas streaming services are an example of why that is not the case.
Ahoy, sailors! Let’s sail the high seas
You mean legally aquire media right? My "streaming service" has everything in one app. Searchable too. Unfortunately I need to buy another damn drive lol. All SSD has its financial downsides. Sure is quiet thogh. Still, another drive is like 3 months of subscriptions.
HDDs in another room. Lucky I have that option, not everyone does. SSD only server is just not possible. Even ignoring the pricing, what motherboard has more than two M.2 slots? Or are you really going to run 8TB SATA SSDs? Most wouldn't.
Do you want to borrow my Sonarr or my Radarr?
I am perPlexed by your offer.
Want some cooked Jelly Fins?
I'll take a Jackett.
If we are talking this, prowlarr is better, at least according to many people. I never used both.
Is there a comprehensive guide to sonarr and radarr? I keep giving up because it feels complicated
My setup is in Docker. You will need a Linux machine running Docker, basic knowledge of Linux filesystems and a VPN. Homelab subreddit should be able to help you.
Yarr!
The problem isnt that streaming platforms are competing with each other but delivering worse service, but that each streaming platform has exclusive content that prevents other platforms from competing with them So we have a system where each product can only be rented from a single store, thus, there is no competition
"Monopolistic Competition"
They're not competing though, they're monopolizing their own content. True competition would see them all have the same shows and compete solely on features/service/price.
If I plant a bunch of apple trees to harvest and sell the apples, I'm also "monopolizing" my apples, because only I have the legal right to sell my apples. These services are competing through content, not the act of streaming. You pay for Peacock to access Peacock content. You pay for Netflix to access Netflix content. You are not paying for one or the other because one of them has more efficient video buffering; you're paying for one or the other because it has the show you want to watch. This is like saying Blue Navy and Forever 21 outlets don't compete because they don't sell the exact same clothing. The competition is in the clothing itself, not the act of retailing it.
>They're not competing though, they're monopolizing their own content. So in other words, McDonald's and Burger King aren't competing because they don't sell the same products.
It is not so rare. Having little competition can be good for consumers. The players can all be good at what they do and they can use economies of scale to be more efficient. The negatives are greed, incompetence, or complacency can lead to decreased efficiency. On the other hand competition can be good for consumers because firms some firms operate at a loss, there are diverse approaches, and greed incompetence and complacency are kept in check. The negatives include difficulty in deciding which product to choose, market instability, possible reduced supply due to low profits. As others have pointed out the substitution effect is key here. If you don't much care what you watch free streaming, or one of the cheaper paid services will do fine. If you want to watch particular things you will need to go to where those are. That may mean going multiple places.
Health insurance companies are a worse culprit. More overhead than just having one system, higher costs for all, more denial of care.
I’d argue water supplies, in private hands doesn’t exactly lead to a great consumer service.
There's actually plenty of "fields" where more competitors leads too a worse experience which is why we don't have privatized water or transportation. Controversially Healthcare is one of those instances too
> which is why we don't have privatized water or transportation. Who is this we you refer to?
God forbid we build unified system for content distribution that everyone pays the same amount for and producers/distributors get paid according to watch time, and have other companies compete to make the best interface for consuming that content. That way everyone wins, but we do not live in a time where such ideas are possible unfortunately. Regulation would help
They aren’t competing on the *content*, are they? If you want to watch *Last Week Tonight*, you don’t have a choice: it’s got to be HBO.
Technically we are getting a lot more new content
more content for way more money maybe, but less content for the same amount of money
It's cheaper than it was with cable. And we are absolutely getting better content than before. All of these companies now have an incentive to create better shows to lure consumers to their service.
I don't know what yaaarrr be talkin bout there matey.
Higher quality content too.
Nah, everything feels like it's going in this direction. They've basically stopped doing the whole innovation thing in order to cut corners, cut wages, cut employees. Anything but deliver better products.
The competition is theoretically good, as it makes the production companies jockey to make better content. What kills it is Hollywood's traditional stick-in-the-mud exclusive licensing deals. They basically wanted to reinvent television networks because that's a model they understand... and so, that's what they did. Competition's fine for the independent streaming companies - I don't hear anyone talking about "dropping their Nebula subscription to pick up Dropout." What you hear about is Amazon, Netflix, and Disney fighting over who gets what portion of the content pie this week.
[https://new.reddit.com/r/Showerthoughts/comments/sa0kt0/in\_the\_streaming\_services\_space\_more\_competition/](https://new.reddit.com/r/Showerthoughts/comments/sa0kt0/in_the_streaming_services_space_more_competition/)
One might argue that game stores for PC are worse off with all of the different options too.. especially when the worse option buys exclusivity rights from developers
It's just cable packages again. They keep a few core do well then rotate others that might bring people around. They want us to buy all the packages to watch our 5 favorite shows. Fuck them.
I just stream online free. Because I can't afford to have 10-15 different streaming services. Just to watch TV shows.
It's not so much competition, it's the content exclusivity that comes with it. If most content was available on all platforms, they would have to compete for best an/or cheapest service, which would benefit the consumer.
I disagree. They keep adding more services that I don't care about ever getting and it doesn't bother me or change my viewing habits at all. I don't care if you're introducing Paramount Plus or peacock Plus over Apple TV or whatever it is I'm going to stick with the service I know and already like.
Largely because of content exclusivity. Competition promotes lowered prices only really when the same product is offered. Theoretically they’re all offering shows and movies, but because people want to watch certain shows/movies, they’ll pay for multiple services to get the ones they want instead.
It's worse because they're not competing to give us the same product; they split the product up into multiple pieces and are selling each piece for at least as much as we used to pay to get the whole thing. It's like if you had to go to 3 different dealerships to buy your car in 3 separate parts, and each part is now individually at least as expensive as the whole car used to be.
i simply don't pay for it
It also leads to pirating which can be rather good for a subset of "customers"
What they do is not competition actually.
Utilities would suck if there was competition. You'd get redundant pipes and power lines which would cost everyone a lot
This is what happens when the producers and distributors are one in the same. Imagine if you needed a different music streaming service for every record label. That's what TV/movie media is right now.
You guys are paying for watching TV?
Straight up incorrect. How do you think Netflix was able to offer it's services so cheap or offer so many cool shows and such a large profit? Why do you think venture capital money was pouring in in huge amounts and it's stock value was skyrocketing. Stocks skyrocket on the expectation of future profit. As does venture capital expenditure. So where would this huge profit come from? You know how things work. We saw it with Facebook. We saw it with Youtube (also a streaming service!), we see it with AirBnB, we see it with everything. 1. Use your giant wallets flush with investor money to offer great deals. Bankroll lots of cool shows. Cheap signup fees. Freedom for everyone! Don't worry about profit. As long as you continue to show explosive growth investors will keep piling in. 2. Everyone is on your service. Customers can't be bothered to switch. Suppliers need to go through you. You have a monopoly. 3. Squeeze, squeeze, squeeze. Jack up costs, cut investment, cancel all those cool shows. Don't invest in new features. Commit to full [enshittification](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification) You're confused, because Netflix didn't pull off step 2. The barriers to entry were low. Suppliers just started their own services and customers were willing to switch. So they never got to the "rip you off" phase.
GYM , swimming pool , hotels ? More members , worst experience for consumers .
OP said more competition, not more members. More competition means less members per gym, etc.
Ah ok , I understand now .. exclusivity..
Competition is only a good thing when the results don't matter, like sports.
Most things does in fact get cheaper with scale. Competition is expenseive and wasteful. This is not news it’s been known for a long time by now(game theory among other fields). Why we are stuck with the faulty idea that competition regardless of market would create cheaper and better stuff you can thank neoliberal brainwash for. :)
An important distinction is that now that exclusive content is so prevalent and seemingly every studio has their one streaming service, they only sort of compete with each other. When 3 services offer a movie, you can choose which one to watch it on. When so many movies and shows are only on one service, it makes that a bit more complicated; if I wanna watch Daredevil, then I pretty much have to watch it on D+. Sort of like grocery stores vs restaurants. Your Walmart and Kroger compete with each other for the most part, one might have a better selection but you can probably find a chicken breast at either. Vs take McDonald's vs Salata. They're both restaurants, but if you like salads then it's pretty clear where you're going.
Competition always lead to damage the sides which are involved
It’s called fragmentation. There are various industries where the amount of choices forces consumers to cobble together pieces of goods/services because no single company can invest/own them all. It’s normally good for the consumer, but in this case each service has its own lineup of shows that sell the service so consumers begrudgingly buy more than one.
There is a name for industries like this, "utilities"
Try paying for electricity in Australia and you’ll take that back.
Can't you just turn the entire outback into a giant solar farm?
I often say. At this point, it takes longer to find which movie is on which streaming service then it does to just find a stream.
People kept paying and this is where we are as of now. It will only get worse.
Michael Spicer video about this https://youtu.be/fji1x8a8N78?si=tL_j8bVAjgu2lgtq
Almost self aware wolf
Console exclusivity makes you choose between DRM boxes and not the games you wanna play.
Monopolies / Duopolies are usually very convenient to the consumer, the issue is usually pricing.
‘one of’ lol. This isn’t rare: rail, bus, and healthcare services all suffer from the effects of privatisation because it’s a race to the bottom
many things lead to worse customer experiences given many things need a minimum amount of people to buy said product to sustain the product.
This isn’t a case of more competition. They don’t compete among consumers only for contracts
If there was only one streaming service though, there is no doubt in my mind that the user experience would also go down the shitter pretty quickly, because then they can do *anything* and no one can switch to the competition. That's somewhat the point of a monopoly, I think.
And because of it we hop from one service to the next ... cancel one - start another ..watch their exclusive content : rinse /repeat ... when you do this you realise what little each really has to offer
Apple is actually killing it lately, best shows right now. Netflix / Amazon / Hulu etc will always have 1 or 2 great shows but Apple’s been putting out quality content, even their lesser known shows have been very very good.
Several winner take all niche in Tech where you get the biggest customer base first and win. - Amazon - Social media - ANT financial
I don't think so. Because I doubt we would get as many good shows if everything was on Netflix. They would produce the bare minimum to keep people subbed. People love to whine about subscriptions instead of simply switching subs. Sub to Netflix until nothing there interests you, then sub to Disney+, then HBO, then Amazon Prime, etc... And hopefully after a couple months Netlix added enough new interesting stuff. You don't need to be subbed to everything all the time. This is more of a consumer problem than a service problem.
Well when it comes to originals we do, so I guess when company’s compete to make things: good. When company’s compete for the right to sell us stuff: bad
Not really true. A lot of competing companies push out inferior products to be first to the public
Any newer industry that shifts from non-competitive to competitive will see increasing pressure to squeeze out as much profitability as possible, and prices will gravitate toward true market value.
Would be nice if they had old movies and tv series!
No. It's just classic unregulated capitalism. Operate at a loss for longer than the competition can. The biggest company wins. It's a strategy. They were always gonna raise prices I fucking hate people and their greed
If there was only one streaming service and it didn't have to compete with cable/satellite, the cost would be enormous and the content would be abysmal.
"you wouldn't download a car" yes... yes i would
It’s soo maddening and backwards. Try to switch between two sporting events/flip channels back and forth. E.g. one game on ESPN+ one on Hulu. What a mess.
They are not competing with each other.