Op-ed: Apps promised to free us from ad-supported subscription bundles. Oops!

For a moment, it seemed like the streaming apps were the things that could save us from the hegemony of cable TV—a system where you had to pay for a ton of stuff you didn’t want to watch so you could see the handful of things you were actually interested in.

Archived version: https://archive.ph/K4EIh

  • blazera@kbin.social
    1·
    1 year ago

    If stream had everything in one single service, who cares that it also has stuff that you don’t have any interest in?

    Im gonna quote this post criticizing cable tv to answer this, “you had to pay for a ton of stuff you didn’t want to watch”

    • TwilightVulpine@kbin.social
      2·
      1 year ago

      I literally just responded to this. The comment you are responding to is about what’s the difference and why this is not the issue with streaming.

      The difference is that in cable TV you are beholden to their schedule. You might subscribe to a channel that has exactly what you want and still be unable to watch it because you are not free at that time.

      Netflix used to be priced affordably and have nearly everything. We are seeing now with services being split and prices rising that it doesn’t cost more because it has more shows, just on the contrary. It costs more because they think they can charge more and get us to subscribe to multiple services that offer less.

      It’s like you picked the single sentence that doesn’t address that exact point to quote.

      • blazera@kbin.social
        1·
        1 year ago

        I came in to call out the hypocrisy of this post. Who cares that it has stuff that you don’t have any interest in? This post does that Im directly quoting. If you’re here to argue that having irrelevant shows doesnt affect the price, I don’t think you’re agreeing with this post anymore. Because then why care that cable has irrelevant shows?

        • TwilightVulpine@kbin.social
          1·
          1 year ago

          Oh my fucking god!

          The difference is that in cable TV you are beholden to their schedule. You might subscribe to a channel that has exactly what you want and still be unable to watch it because you are not free at that time.

          How many times are you going to try to bring it back around the same thing that I already responded to.

          Streaming services are a worse deal by losing shows and movies that they already had and splitting off into several services. They didn’t use to be like cable, and having a lot of stuff was their advantage, because there is no schedule limitations. A service that had everything has a bunch of stuff each person won’t care about, and it still would have everything everyone would ever want. Priced reasonably, it wouldn’t be an issue specifically as streaming.

          I dunno what’s your deal with cable that you want to insist in calling out hypocrisy that doesn’t even apply? If you love cable, keep your cable.

            • TwilightVulpine@kbin.social
              1·
              1 year ago

              Not at all. The number of movies in Netflix has shrunk over the years. You could technically argue that it’s trending up again, but it’s not even close to how many they had in the early 2010s, and it’s not even debatable that many movies and series were taken away so that studios would put it in their own streaming services. There was a lot of Disney and Marvel stuff on Netflix that was taken away, as an example.