If you're saying that people will just watch other variants of video slop posted on youtube or other free sites instead of paying for some sort of curated entertainment service, history indicates otherwise.
BTW here's the Disney 1937-2008 megatorrent, including lots of movies they "hold in the vault" (aka wont republish)
https: SLASH SLASH thepiratebay DOT org SLASH description.php?id=5657801
They don't care about pushing SOME people to piracy as long as line goes up.
We are back to cable pricing, but shows and movies are all over the place and now we need multiple apps to track us.
People expecting that the content companies were going to just accept lower revenue forever and not eventually get back to cable pricing were fooling themselves
In fact, the content companies are planning on making more money than they did under cable because since they're selling direct to the consumer, there's no DirecTV/Comcast/Charter middleman taking a slice anymore
Of course they'll sell through those intermediaries and take a cut but it will be much less than the cable companies were getting before, and will just go into the marketing cost bucket
I wouldn't be surprised if they end up basically exactly like cable, where the only people who hang around end up being the older generations in the decade to come.
It's absurd that piracy is the _best_ user experience. 1 app, 1 place for your content, no licensing deals to worry about, no outrage pulling old episodes, local streaming, the list goes on.
You literally cannot pay (legally) for a better experience, and that makes me sad.
These streaming services learned nothing from cable are just pushing people back to pirating
Not what everyone wants to hear, but I think there’s more headroom for price increases than the HN crowd likes to admit. Compared to how much people spent on cable or satellite TV, these prices feel like peanuts.
Hulu is not long for this world anyway, as Disney has been trying to merge them for years, if you believe investor calls. They'll probably be just one streaming service within the year.
It's not only the price hikes and the atomization/fragmentation of content, what made me cut the wire was that I couldn't get high quality in my computer unless I used X browser for Y service.
I have access to a well-seeded 20+ year old private tracker but usually use the above method to stream content for free these days.
In a way I feel today's environment is less conducive to pirating than it used to be. So many fewer people have any kind of "always on" computer these days, they're using phones and tablets instead. Not to mention locked down App Stores, etc.
In slovenia, one of the media houses demanded from telcos (iptv providers) to disable skipping ads when timehshifting shows (for the first 3 days), so even if you're watching a show that was on yesterday, you can skip forwards/backwards all over the show, but you can't skip over the ads (currently you can skip forwards over the ads only "a lot" (like 10 minutes), then slowly skip backwards until you reach the end of the ads, but it's a pain).
So yeah... cameras tracking your eyes (that you're not turning away or going to pee during ads) are next, and then the "drink the verification cam".
( https://siol-net.translate.goog/novice/slovenija/nova-pravil... )
java-man•57m ago
At some point the customer base is going to shrink, especially when the AI slop hits the market, right?