Consumers are paying more than ever for streaming TV each month and analysts say there’s no reason for the companies to stop raising prices::Finding new subscribers in a saturated streaming video market isn’t easy. And with legacy media companies desperate to recoup revenue declines in their linear TV businesses, the cost of your monthly plan is likely to keep rising.
Yarrrr, we be seein’ about that…
Yeah I don’t have the budget to subscribe to multiple streaming services, let alone cable or even one service. Thank god there’s not a lot I’d want to watch…even if sailing high seas.
No reason to stop raising prices for any business, except for the fact that demand goes down as price goes up. People will cancel or downshift to a cheaper service.
There’s a scene in Fight Club about how auto companies approach recalls, and a similar method is applied for these price hikes. The company predicts how many people will leave or change plans or whatever with their changes and they price it out so that they end up making more money.
And for a small example let’s say you have two customers paying $10/month for a service. If the price increases by $11, and one customer leaves, you are now making $21/month from the service.
Now it’s not as simple as that in the real world, but that’s the general idea.
The issue here is that even if a vocal minority leave these streaming services, or social media there’s still a large amount of people putting up with their shit.
And as a bonus you have less customers to provide support to!
That’s literally what they teach you about basic economics at school…
The standard graph of price increasing on one side and customer demand decreasing on the other, and how companies try to find the crossover point.
Sorry mate this is not some special fight club logic. It’s not even really accounting or economics logic, it’s just kinda common sense.
What price should I sell my lemonade for? I’ll have more customers if I sell it cheaper…
The part which seems lost on most commenters is that these companies have huge and very sophisticated market research campaigns. They can predict with great accuracy how their demographics will respond.
downshift to a cheaper service.
Yarr matey
People will cancel or downshift to a cheaper service.
Streaming platforms make more money from you if you use the cheaper ad-supported plans. The price hikes are to get you off the ad-free plans.
Yarr harr fiddle dee dee. Fuck Netflix, Hulu and Disney
I’ll have you know I watched two fucking vrbo commercials just to watch that 240p video!
Arrrrr
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I am slowly cancelling services with each price increase. I uave cancelled Netflix and HBO. Will continue until morale improves.
I’m begging zoomers to learn how to torrent
I’m kind of amazed how my Gen Z buddies are so adamantly against pirating. They think the cops will bust down their door, literally.
As a gen z kiddo, like half of the software on my pc and 90% of my movies are pirated lmao.
I mean i’ve met a lot of millenials like that too. I’m not exactly sure where it stems from
Noobs using public trackers then getting scary letters from their ISP.
A few of mine got cease and desist orders from their ISP, one got two… so that’s why they’re against it. Some now do VPN, some just hop streaming services. Some just stopped watching as much stuff because: life.
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Everyone torrented in the 00’s, and Netflix was born from that.
No way they’ll let the whole market crash before trying to get some customers back.
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Lol no. That’s not how an economy works. When you sell less of a thing you then have to adjust price to make it favorable again. Companies aren’t just going to say “If we can’t charge $350 a month we might as well just turn off this massive money machine.” No, they will charge $200 and accept making less money over making no money.
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You’re correct. Theft has nothing to do with the economy.
Ummm theft, aka shrink, is very much a part of any business.
Hiring theft prevention is an entire field of work around this very concept. How can you say theft has nothing to do with the economy when there is an entire industry around theft prevention…
It doesn’t matter what they charge when everyone steals it for $0.
You missed the part where people stop stealing if the price is reasonable. It’s the reason why pirating went way down when Netflix first came out. People are willing to pay, not be taken advantage of. Are you not reading these comments, people saying they will pirate if there is another hike? There is clearly a line, if they cross it then they lose customers.
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According to the market. That’s how reasonable prices are arrived at. It’s this little thing called an economy.
I’m not saying stealing is OK, I’m just being realistic. If you charge $200 a month for Netflix people will steal it. You can get upset and rant all you want, that’s reality. People refuse to be charged more and more for the same thing, there is a breaking point.
Also, it’s not stealing. This argument has been had and proved false. The large number of people who pirate content are very unlikely to have ever paid for it. It’s not stealing vs buying, it’s pirating vs never watching. The outcome of pirating or never watching is the same to the creators.
Right now I pay for Netflix, Hulu, HBO Max and Sunday pass. I’m paying for plenty. You’re just too ruled by your emotions to have an actual conversation, so you make wild assumptions and throw insults instead.
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With prices going up and likely subscribers going way down the next logical move for the Streaming Companies is to start cracking down on Piracy again as they already had a go at password sharing.
Now I am not saying they will be successful in prosecuting those that are careful, just that there will be a few high profile cases against groups of people who aren’t using the best hygiene when it comes to piracy. Fear is their best weapon against piracy that they actually want to deploy, just make sure you do enough research to make sure you aren’t in that harvest of low hanging fruit.
I’ve no problem with paying for good services, but when I get a better service from a random pirate streaming site than I do from Amazon Prime, why would I continue paying for that?
I’m just sick of things either being exclusive to one service even though they’re decades old, or just plain not available.
Oh, and if I’m paying, I don’t want ads. Not ever.
I’ve no problem with paying for good services
Exactly. It used to be that netflix was all you needed to get most quality content, and it was a fair deal for customers: you pay a reasonable monthly amount, and you and your family gets convenient access to most streamable movies and TV series.
Now that quality content is spread out and locked out over half a dozen other streaming services, and subscribing to them all is not just a hassle but also incredibly bad value compared to the original offer.
In a healthy competitive environment, you would expect companies to counter reduced value by increasing customer value in other ways or by reducing prices, but instead we got price hikes, lots of low quality filler content, crack downs on password sharing, advertising, various unpopular UI changes and other service reductions decreasing value even further.
To solve this, I think the content producers and streaming services should be split up, because right now they’re not really competitors in a true sence but small monopolies who each clutch the keys to their own little franchises. It should be noted for example that music streaming works a lot better: there are various competitors that each hold a viable content library on their own, so you don’t need more than one music streaming service. IMO that’s because Spotify, Tidal, YT Music, etc. are merely distributors and not the actual producers.
Yeah, the music industry finally got their shit together and made something that was more convenient than just nicking it online. Took their sweet time over it, but I think they realised that it was taking like a minute to download a whole album by that point.
It’s really the model of how to do it well. Very little in the way of exclusives locked to one particular service. Occasionally an artist kicks up a fuss over something and pulls all their stuff from one of them, but it’s rare enough that I don’t care.
Being totally serious, you should copy and paste your comment and email it to your local US Representative.
Source on better pirate streaming service?
Any of these will do. Prime is not a high bar to get over. Some may work better than others, and I think it’s down to where you are and time of day than anything else.
https://fmhy.pages.dev/videopiracyguide/#multi-server
It’s not as good as downloading yourself and running Jellyfin, but it’s convenient.
Many thanks kind stranger!
Yeah some of the arr software is pretty fucking cool for being entirely free.
I have a problem paying for DRM. I want to use open source and DRM is the opposite. I like (and buy sometimes) Creative Commons music/audio-books just because it tastes better when artist isn’t supporting restricting me. Cory Doctorow is a creative worker who lives and breaths anti-DRM, if you’ve not explored this. I recommend his old talk “The Coming War on General Computation”.
Weird… why is piracy growing then? Every reasonable person should pay $300 to watch the shows they want on the weekend… and then pay a couple more hundreds in the theater.
every dollar you raise, the fewer customers you get. the point is that you should want to raise the price whenever the relative drop in customers is less than the relative increase in price to maximise profits (where marginal cost is marginal benefit :) )
This is why I Plex/Jellyfin.
Yup, came to say they should move to Plex/Jellyfish to get away from the streaming shitshow.
Exactly. It’s funny because if one streaming company were more like Valve, they could have all of the content on one platform like Steam has with Valve. Piracy is a convenience problem, after all, not a pricing problem, and it sure as hell isn’t convenient to have to be subscribed to 5 or more different platforms just to get all the content I’d want to watch.
Really? No reason to stop raising prices? My Jolly Roger got something to say about that.
Piracy has never been easier or safer or faster than it is now, and these platforms think driving people away with overpriced subscriptions for shitty content is beneficial for them?
Piracy isn’t easier than not bothering to cancel your subscription for most people. I’m sure they’ll lose some people, and especially the demographic here, but I don’t know about the average person.
And yet I see all sorts of articles saying these platforms complain that piracy is now even higher than before Netflix became a streaming service.
Piracy has never been easier or safer or faster than it is now
What?! It was way easier and safer in the era of Napster, edonkey and emule. Easy discoverability and companies didn’t pay any attention yet. Since then it’s a cat and mouse game.
Get a good VPN and you’re set.
That’s not easier than not needing a VPN in the first place.
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Why is piracy costing you 4$ a month.
VPN?
not everyone can torrent freely
I’d say piracy is not even free, if done right. I mean, you may want to support JDownloader, MediaFire, Mega, your VPN, and whatnot.
I’m not into piracy (wink), but if I did, I’d pay my monthly Plex subscription, MediaFire account, and tip JDownloader monthly for their effort.
I do pay a little for Usenet and my NZB indexer, about $115 per year all said and done. And I pay for hardware and electricity, but I wouldn’t have it any other way.
Any recommendations for usenet provider?
I use Eweka.
Now chart hours of content against cost across the market, and watch it go vertical. Bonus for weighting by critical rating.
Piracy is the only reasonable choice.
Remind me if this is still valid a year from now
I am actually curious. We like to laugh at the obviously anti-consumer practices these streaming services are pushing, saying they’ll end up losing their customers to piracy, but the point of the article is to illustrate that just isn’t happening and most people will suck it up and pay more for less. Look at how much Netflix gained by killing off password sharing.
True, but the point is that at each level of abuse they impose to their customers, more and more will leave for piracy, and you don’t need to go far. A jailbroken firestick with plex installed and a friend who is technically savy and has his own plex server when one can see a bunch of movies (not to mention the free ones on plex)
Thanks for the reminder to cancel Disney+ and HBO Max - I almost forgot! ;)
Still have Peacock, because that’s comped through my mobile provider.
My wife does Amazon Prime, Netflix, and Hulu. I had Prime but realized I only ever used it for free shipping, which I can get anyway by bundling my orders and setting ship dates.
Bundling orders and set ship dates - what? This is something I don’t know about.
Even without Prime, you can get free shipping if you spend over a certain amount.
So instead of placing multiple small orders and paying shipping, I’ll wait until the combined dollar value qualifies for free shipping.
Also on check out, you can specify a delivery date with free shipping.
And then everything comes in separate packages with different parcel services anyway… Amazon really has become shit.
