The TV streaming apps broke their promises, and now they’re jacking up prices

arstechnica.com The TV streaming apps broke their promises, and now they’re jacking up prices

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.

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Streaming was great when Netflix launched, convenient and affordable - I remember being excited when Netflix finally launched in my country. Was only a matter of time before all would turn to shit with every tv network/producer launching their own streaming services and fragmenting all that content.
- Yeah Netflix worked because you had everything there and no strings attached.
  Now Netflix is shit, hbo is meh, Disney plus is more expensive than sky etc etc
  Fuck'em
  
  Hbo will be cancelled the moment they rebrand it to max and add all that bullshit content in my country.
  No dance of dragons can prevent that.
  Atm there are only 2 streaming services which still hold real value: prime video and Netflix. Disney+ just doesn't cut it. We get 3 worthwhile serious a year. Hbo doesn't cut it. We got 3 worthwhile series this last year (last of us, dance of dragons and the white lotus) and they removed Westworld and raised by wolves.
  In my country we also have sky/showtime about which I'm on the fence. The star trek catalog is incomplete, some series are nice but there still are technical difficulties. If/when they raise the price I will cancel that in a heartbeat too.
  Appletv has quality content just not enough to justify a year long subscription.
  
  D+ is amazing in Canada (and likely most of the world outside of the US). We have most Hulu content.
  
  Yeah, well I already got my boat in the water since the account sharing announcement from Netflix. I'm sure many more will do the same in the coming months.
  
  I guess I never stopped. Still have subs though, but might cancel that somewhere in the future.
  
  I still have Netflix, but only because they still haven't bothered me about account sharing. The moment they do, It's going away.
  
  Didn’t their subscriber count go up fairly dramatically after the restrictions started?
- The difference back then was Netflix launched steaming was that it was free extra money for TV producers. Cable subs were strong and the TV providers were happy to take extra cash from Netflix to let them stream. Netflix income was icing on the cake. As people cut cable out, streaming is the cake. So you need to charge the price of the cake. There was never an end game where streaming would be cheaper than cable. It was a change of pipes to deliver the content, but was not intended to change the value or cost of TV.

99 comments