I’ve been unmotivated in the past but i think it’s time to sort out an alternative.
Wait till they drop you as a customer by cancelling your payment tier,then send you countless begging letters over the next month begging you to return. If you wanted my money that badly, why did you cancel me NETFLIX???
Because the “you wouldn’t steal a car” nonsense scares a lot of people off
Because some people want to support the creators of content but digital downloads from iTunes or whatever are more expensive than getting a month of a streaming service
Because there is a level of convenience of having thousands of hours of content at your fingertips without having to store content locally or finding it on a “dodgy” website. Setting up torrents / usenet is more work than giving someone your credit card number
Because a lot of people don’t know where to find content and if they did they don’t know the difference between a 480p avi vs a 2160p HDR DV MKV and get confused with torrents and file formats and how to get them on their TV.
Because - at the moment - the ads aren’t that bad, I got one ad at the start and one episode in the middle of an episode of Gen V - obviously they’ll add more until it’s as bad as cable but they’re not there yet.
The “you wouldn’t steal a car” thing actually backfired majorly for the parties involved. It actually did two things. It highlighted that downloading movies was possible and easy to do when it was new and not many people knew about it. And it made people curious. This led to it having the exact opposite effect of what was intended.
https://knowledgesource.com.au/no-bs-how-those-video-ads-spectacularly-back-fired/
Now do DARE or whatever that shot was 🤣
Drugs
Are
Really
Expensive
Didn’t they also not license (aka pirate lol) the music in that ad?
You might ditch, but they have enough data that says enough other people aren’t going to.
Just remember whenever you’re annoyed by something and think “why is this a thing? This annoys me so it shouldn’t happen”, there’s thousands of other people who can live with it or just don’t give a shit.
A: they’re betting most people will accept it, and they’re right. The same thing happened in the early 80s when cable television advertised themselves as the pay-for-ad-free service, then started sneaking ads in. People complained, sure, but we all saw the outcome. They got away with it.
B: Greed, capitalism, and fuck you.
A: they’re betting most people will accept it, and they’re right.
Yes. Remember when Netflix put a stop to password sharing and the internet went aflame with people declaring that Netflix had shot itself in the foot? Netflix subscriber counts went up.
The average person will put up with so much more of this nonsense than techie people will.
I already wasn’t using them by then. I couldn’t stop harder.
It’s why I highly recommend Fmovies, sudo-lol, and others. The barrier to entry is literally a browser and ublock origin and you can watch just about anything.
You can send someone a link to an episode and they can watch it. No sign ups, no ads (with ad block), and pretty decent service. No explaining what a torrent is. No VPN (though I recommend it of course).
Just pure content.
Subscriber counts went down in the affected areas.
It’s time to start shaming people who think like this
Hey now, I don’t think like this, but sometimes it’s just not worth the effort to think unlike this.
i haven’t had cable, or even a tv, in many years. stayed at a hotel the other day and flicked on the tv because the internet was out (helene), and was flabbergasted that for every 2 minutes of programming, there was at least 5 minutes of the same commercials over and over. people fucking watch this shit? on purpose?
When my wife and I stay at a hotel we watch cable and put on like QVC shopping channels.
It’s fun to overreact and be like “this is 100 genuine silver painted lead.” Some of the channels will have like changing infographics that flash and explode every second as the price keeps dropping so we make wooshing sounds as it keeps falling to a new low.
Cable television never advertised that. Cable TV started as a “community antenna” system that served people in valleys with existing off-the-air broadcast channels (which had ads); the existence of those systems created a market for satellite-fed channels like HBO (which was always a separate subscription and ad-free) and TBS/CNN (which always carried ads). Other than the premium channels like HBO/Showtime/Cinemax, cable channels have had ads from the beginning.
Once the small cable systems and the media publishers both got consolidated, we started seeing content licensing deals and higher costs to the subscriber to pay for it - but the channels (MTV, Nickelodeon, etc) always carried ads.
It definitely did. I remember it vividly (I was alive back then). And I’m talking about the premium services, specifically (e: which was the point of my comparison: the premium paid services back then advertised no-ad service, then included ads, just like the premium streaming services are doing today).
Here’s an article from the NYT in 1981 on the topic:
WILL CABLE TV BE INVADED BY COMMERCIALS?
e: a quote:
Indeed, even pay television, once assumed to be secure from commercial interests, is attracting some attention as a potential vehicle for advertising. Admittedly, such leading pay cable services as Home Box Office and Showtime, whose programming consists primarily of theatrically released films, staunchly maintain that they will never accept advertising.
Yes and no. Networks had ads but cable began inserting their own ads in addition to the network ads. When I ran a company I did large media buys with cable companies. I would buy ads from the regional cable company which would air in between the national ads of Comedy Central, Discovery, etc.
Ye ol bait and switch
Because companies want more money and people get used to it.
The answer is apathy.
You have to remember that most users simply don’t care. The majority of consumers are some combination of either not technologically savvy or just outright intimidated by technology, are not very well educated, are incredibly reluctant to read, are not particularly observant, will not leave their routines or comfort zones without very significant motivation, and have spent their entire lives being the very frog in that gradually boiling pot of ever more numerous and intrusive advertising to the point that they just accept this as “normal.” They’re busy. They don’t read tech headlines. They don’t understand what’s going on under the hood, and nor do they want to.
Normal people don’t see the world like us nerds do. I am positive that these streaming services (and many other businesses) have studied this and understand it very well. If they lose 1% of their business which was made up by vocal nerds, but whatever odious change the just rolled out results in an increase in profit that is greater than the revenue from those subscriptions lost, they’ll go ahead and do it anyway.
They think they have a captive audience because by and large they functionally do have a captive audience. This stuff works, and people keep paying for it en masse.
I mean, look at Reddit. Huge uproar last year, nothing happened really.
Pretty much every service, platform, app has become worse over the last two or three years. But people keep using them. And not for a lack of alternatives. They are actively hostile against change and many really don’t care. They are so used to being fucked over, squeezed for pennies and bombarded with bullshit ads, that they gave up.
The same thing happens in politics, btw. People just vote whatever - if at all, because they already expected to be fucked over. All those activists you see on TV or online are a tiny minority.
Which is functionally a captive audience.
Their entire survival hinges on keeping investment money flowing, which means they essentially have to lie and over-promise.
A chronic issue plaguing the entire tech and media sector right now. Line must go up no matter the costs.
Statistics. You’re still there and only complaining. I purged all subscription parasites from my life in 2019.
I live by the abstraction, “you can’t fix stupid in anyone else but yourself.” All you can do is tell others what you did with your one wallet vote and hope that others do the same at some critical mass.
They do it because you’re still there, and you care while they do not. You want to think you’re human. You’re not. You’re a new deck chair on a yacht if you’re lucky. Most likely, you’re no more than a liter or few of diesel.
They don’t care about you. They don’t even want you as a subscriber, you’re a pain in the ass. Most people are too tired and not tech savvy enough to pirate. A lot of those will eventually do something else, too, but they can cram ads into the streams faster than those people can find the wherewithal to leave.
In short, this is profitable, and no amount of raging will make it less so. Take care of yourself, but don’t pretend you’re making line go down.
I’m not saying I’m going to start a revolution. I’m only saying it’s time to break the chain, again.
Pirates life for me
The only way we’re going to do anything about this is by actively avoiding buying or using products we see advertised on streaming sites. I already do this with Amazon Prime but I doubt they even notice. It’d be great if this became a thing at Christmas, it could completely destroy the revenue stream for these massive cunts.
Remember when Netflix was totally dead and doomed when they cracked down on password sharing? And then it turned out people just upgraded to the new plan and kept on consuming.
Which new plan?
Consumers do be fickle
Already lots of great answers, but I’ll add a note about intentional barriers to exit.
Many services tend to make it easy to sign up and comparably more difficult to quit. So while people always can leave and take their business elsewhere, they might not have the motivation to do it. I imagine each additional click in a form deters more and more people. OP mentioned being unmotivated, and these barriers play into that.
It’s like wandering around in Ikea. You could use a map and chart out the fastest route to find what you need and get out. But it’s so much easier to follow the little path they draw out on the floor and look at everything, which makes you way more likely to impulsively buy something extra.
They’re sure you will, or some will, but the number of customers they lose will be offset by the revenue gained.
Since that’s the only metric they really care about at the end of the day it makes “sense” to them to do it.
Because of the people they loose due to the price hike, more will stay for the new price.
