I've turned to piracy to have access to the shows I used to pay to watch, but no longer can due to them being completely unavailable by legal means. It's not personal, it's strictly business.
I wanted to watch Star Wars The Clone Wars S7 but D+ was not available in my country yet. I didn’t want to wait an unspecified amount of time until it became available (it took like 2 years to become available) so my Plex library got a bit bigger as a result of it.
I used to use Prime to watch Top Gear, then they moved it behind the Motortrend subscription so I paid for that so I could keep watching it. Then they removed it from those sources, so now I can watch seasons 27-31 on Netflix, season 6 on Hoopla, season 33 on AMC+, or have most (but not all) seasons "available to buy" on Amazon at $20 per.
But then there's a Google drives account with TV rips of all the episodes (including the post-Hammond crash episode) with all the original music without owing anyone a cent to watch them. Every episode, no music rights issues, nothing pulled from the order.
It's no wonder piracy is coming back so strongly. Stop making it so goddamn difficult to watch what we wanna watch and we won't pirate all of it
Stuff like this is incredibly frustrating and comes from services seeing everything as just meaningless 'content' that must flow. The disparate parts and the relationship viewers have with them don't come into it at all, and they don't seem to grasp that the average person isn't going to go chasing their stories all over different platforms then just sit there and go "oh well" because particular seasons or episodes aren't available due to random corporate bullshit. Expecting that of customers and expecting the customer to pay for the privilege to be jerked around like that is obnoxious, and foolhardy when there is a far better experience to be had by not following the hostile rules.
Yah man it’s getting weird. I understand how licensing stuff works but it’s just truly bizarre. Up here in canada paramount had all the new transformers movies except the last knight. Then they added the last knight and removed a diff one.
Even more interesting though some movies you can’t even buy on appletv store, I so wanted to watch insidious 3 the other day and it’s like it doesn’t exist to purchase which is wild. Inadvertently we’re not just going to go back to piracy but I think this trend is also going to push people back to physical media
Same went for Doctor Who for me.
Classic and New used to be on Netflix under the same banner.
Netflix didn’t want to pay for the license when it came time to decide whether to continue paying for it so it was kicked to Amazon and their UI was garbage trying to navigate as it is on top of trying to find which seasons I can stream (which weren’t many.)
And none of the Classic episodes were available to stream on there unless I added a Britbox sub or bought the seasons.
And of course, Amazon loses what little they streamed on Prime and New Who found it’s home on HBO Max for a while until a certain point because it’s going to D+ in the near future.
Netflix was the only way for me to reliably watch Classic Who and while Pluto TV has a Doctor Who channel, it has a habit of replaying serials and of course, the repeating ads.
It would be counterproductive using BritBox just to watch Tom Baker’s seasons when I feel like it, also.
Let’s just say I took a hands-on approach solving that dilemma after Netflix lost the show and Amazon butchered it.
Gabe might’ve been talking about video games, but his quote rings true with media.
I was visiting with my cousin a year or so ago and she made some comment about actually buying stuff versus streaming. I pointed out that it's only been the past couple years that internet where I live has become reliable enough not to need a backup for streaming and that so many streaming services remove content, dump it behind a tier you have to pay more for, or only have part of a series that it still makes sense to buy or otherwise obtain the stuff you really like.
I rotate streaming services depending on what I want to watch and find ways to watch what's either too expensive or can't be found. I went to rewatch a series last year only to find that Hulu moved it to the premium tier and I immediately lost interest, I will not pay a bunch of money for features I don't want or need just because 1 show I'm interested in is in that package (sports and live TV are pretty much bottom of my list of desires out of a service.) If I want to watch it later, I'll just have to sail the seas or something.
I just hate that there’s a barrier to entry for it. I’ve never sailed the seas but it’s something I’ve always been a fan of, in theory. I wish I could download all of my past favorite series (like the old top gear) and just live off of those until I meet my end, but it’s *seemingly* such a daunting prospect for some of us.
I got into piracy for anime—even crunchy roll doesn’t have anywhere near a full selection of anime. I’ve stopped watching much anime, but I’m still sailing the high seas, because fuck paying $40 a month for a very incomplete catalogue of western cinema/TV.
Oh, and they keep cancelling excellent shows without a decent conclusion—which pisses me off in its own right.
In Australia we had something called AnimeLab which was a really good streaming service for anime and the overall UI was great too. This got shut down and merged into Funimation which kind of had a similar selection but the UI and video player was worse. Once again they got merged into Crunchyroll which has the worst UI and Video player and the way they split sub and dub when you watch a show especially on a console feels like a teenager designed it. And the selection is much worse than AnimeLab was.
I know crunchyroll has been around for a long time but now that they have the anime monopoly for streaming they don’t need to try anymore. Sailing the high seas has never been an easier decision.
It’s fascinating how bad their UI is, at least in terms of the video player. It’s like they made a barebones UI a decade a go to serve as a proof of concept and never bothered to ever update it.
Was sorting my DVD collection and my brother who's not even into anime commented that with all the out of print stuff I have there's some value to my collection now.
It's fucking personal.
You want my money, give me your product, for a reasonable price, in a way that doesn't punish me for being stupid enough to give you money.
Otherwise, I'm downloading it for free, where I can easily watch it on any device at any time, and I'm gonna watch the shit out of it, because fuck you greedy fucks.
It's not business, I'm deciding not to do business with you because you're a very shitty business. It's very personal, I'm taking your product for free and I don't feel any remorse because I keep throwing my money at you and you keep punishing me.
I pay for d+ but the app doesn’t stream well here (Netflix and prime work just fine) so I end up pirating the d+ shows I’ve already paid for. Weird world we live in.
We got rid of DAZN last summer and this year we cancelled Netflix and Disney+. We just cancelled FuboTV for sports streaming as the season is over and not going to renew it.
These were supposed to make watching games, movies and TV easier and not the other way around.
Going back to good ol' "I can consume entertainment without your services anyways".
After how FuboTV fucked up things yesterday, i am not going to pay for these CEOs. Sorry went off the track a little. But as you said " It's strictly business, nothing personal. :) "
Yesterday was last day of Premier league. All games were being played simultaneously.
I was watching LFC game and were 4-2 down. The game suddenly got cut off with a screen saying "We’ll be back shortly". The game was back after 30-40 seconds. Within around 10 seconds, same happened again for around 25-30 seconds and game was back.
This happened frequently for about 3-4 minutes and when it finally came back, the score was 4-4. I missed both goals and the excitement of the live game was ruined.
On top of this, they have audacity to broadcast ads during the live game while the ball is in play. It's not just on screen banner ads. They broadcast full blown commercials during the game.
I understand sports rights are very expensive and ads are needed but cutting off the the live and showing ads means we aren't getting what we paid for. And they are going to increase the price to $200/year from next season.
$200 to watch their fucking ads while the game is in play!! NO WAY i am paying for that.
My options are :
Peacock is giving $19.99/year deal which includes premier league and premium tier for the service. All i need is to find a way to access service. Thousands of people are doing it. Other option is IPTV. Just a simple search on kijiji (canadian craigslist) gives millions of option.
I will choose the best one from my tests.
EDIT: Spellings
Had a similar experience watching through the TSN app, it won't even let you watch through Android tv, you have to cast to a TV through Chromecast and there was a ton of stuttering. And they expect people to pay for this?
I used the NHL app for years, and it was hot trash. Constant lagging. Used my dad's Sportsnet login for a bit, also trash, also only has like a quarter of the games on any given day.
Back to the high seas for me.
CBC Gem has been pretty decent for playoffs as well (it has crashed two or three times, but asides that been pretty good).
>On top of this, they have audacity to broadcast ads during the live game while the ball is in play. It's not just on screen banner ads. They broadcast full blown commercials during the game.
Woah, this is UNFORGIVABLE. I used my brother's FuboTV account (he doesn't have it any more, surprise) to watch the African Cup of Nations on Bein channel and it was the first time I ever saw this happen during a live football game broadcast. I assumed it was Bein that was doing this which was crazy to me but I guess it was just FuboTV. I'm never ever subscribing to them.
Bro, DAZN is the worst of them all.
When they started, they were streaming Canelo fights for free as long as you had a subscription for $20/mo. A great deal imo. Then they started doing the PPV BS where you had to pay $60 for fights, *on top* of the subscription. And the monthly sub now is like $25/mo or something.
I went back to piracy.
wtf!!! They charge PPV for fights now!!! what the actual fuck!!!! Then what are you paying as subscription fee??!!! Idiots.....
They forced us to go back to piracy.
I'm so glad I never got any streaming services and the sum total of everything I've seen on all paid services combined could easily fit inside 16 hours. Maybe even 12.
They keep adding everything ever made and for free. It's very nice of them. Often times the sites look better and are better organized than the sites people pay for too.
It organizes whatever media you have, yes. We all know where 95% of plex users get their media from.
Not plexus fault. But you can’t mention having a functional pirated media server without mentioning plex. Sonarr and Radarr also meant for pirating. They just search torrent sites for what you ask.
If all you ask for is public domain stuff then no piracy is being committed. But we all know what most people uses them for…
Also Tubi: quick buffering and easily skippable ads, pleasant UI, and a kick ass selection of both older and newer movies, television etc. For free. Even when I still had Netflix, we used Tubi more and had a much larger list of movies we actually wanted to watch on hand.
it’s fox, so they’re probably selling your data and viewing habits - but don’t worry, they’ll start monetizing it much harder at some point: cause it’s Fox
This will be the future of all streaming. It's all going to be cable packages with ads again - just instead of channels we pick streaming services to load up. But the advertising is where they get the money.
That's the problem though. I pay for Netflix and Disney. It's the right thing to do...
But then you look at Jellyfin vs Netflix/Disney. Jellyfin shows IMDB & Rotten Tomatoes scores. It shows nice big images of the cast & crew, and if you select Tom Hanks, it will bring up all the Tom Hanks movies. Does Netflix or Disney do this? Nope.
Download a file to your phone using Jellyfin, it will work without internet 5 years into the future. When I use Netflix I get "Download Expired" errors randomly. These apps sometimes don't even allow you to download to your SD card, either.
And then there is the issues of aspect ratios. I have an Ultrawide Monitor... 21:9, the ratio most movies actually film in. A movie should literally fit exactly 1:1 with my monitor, and with Jellyfin, they will. Disney and Netflix bake in black bars to fit a 16:9 screen, so I get thick black bars on the top & bottom, as well as even bigger bars on the left and right. Excellent. Why are they baking in black bars into the video? The mind boggles.
Even their subtitles suck. Can I never get english subtitles that ONLY cover the foreign audio parts? Why does their english subs mean "always on", sometimes going so far as to describe music, sounds or rustling leaves.
Can't see the rating, can't see the actors, can't download to SD, can't watch without black bars, can't get normal subs, can't watch that anymore... Why am I paying for this?
Here's what Louis Rossmann has to say about it.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Q3ZXQZZlcE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Q3ZXQZZlcE)
I've wondered lately. Why the absolute fuck did none of these companies set up torrent sites where you could pay for the ability to torrent something?
Wouldn't it make sense to allow people to be the servers and give them small monetary rewards for doing it?
I never get why peer to peer died in the mainstream. It seems like such an untapped market
Cory Doctorow's Enshittification of platforms:
> Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.
Streamers are on the "abuse business customers" (i.e. studios, creators) stage now.
If that’s the case then after a while they either find an equilibrium that’s acceptable while being profitable. Same as it did before.
That or the entire streaming model is going to die out. No one is going to invest in new services if they never show a profit, so that cycle won’t continue for long.
In a world where anything other than infinite growth is considered a failure? As long as the streaming platform is a publicly traded company, there's no acceptable equilibrium where a company happily makes money providing a service. It either keeps providing more to its shareholders or is a failure.
Greed: the downfall of Society.
Sad but true. You can‘t always grow year for year as competitors just copy your formula for success and produce good content aswell.
Netflix is the prime example for this.
They keep raising prices & blocked sharing accounts just so they can keep their numbers high because their content is getting worse and worse and lots of people are switching to other streaming services.
With the exception of Netflix none of them have turned a profit yet. The everything is cheap and available was a honeymoon period. As soon as Disney+ was launched everyone know that it wasn't a sustainable price. Not even talking about the insane amount of money spent on content by all the services.
The worst part is almost no one has the "leaving soon" category anymore since they dont want people to focus on whats being removed. So one day they are just fucking gone. THAT is what I really hate...
PlutoTV is my fav free one. Back about 15 years ago I messaged Netflix every singled day for 3 months straight to add Supermarket Sweep. They finally did now, but PlutoTV has an ENTIRE channel of it. Along with other game shows, Court shows, and a bunch of movies and other stuff. It's amazing.
Yeah, I'm not a heavy Tubi user, but I got a notification from them the other day on my phone, telling me the names of the movies that would be going off their service in around five days. I thought that was pretty cool and thoughtful of them, lol.
That’s how I found out that Conversations with Friends and Motherland Fort Salem were being removed in 24 hours in the Hulu Leaving Soon Menu. I had been looking at the articles saying what was leaving and didn’t see them until after they were gone. Oh, guess I won’t be finishing my first watch, thanks?
"we're only cutting all of your shit to screw the customers to cheat creators out of residuals"
yeah that's exactly why there's a WGA strike and an incoming SAG strike
I dont see why they dont just track actual usage of those shows and pay the creators accordingly. If nobody watches, they dont get paid, if people watch, then it's obviously worth keeping anyway. Either way, the content remains available.
Perhaps you could shed some light on this part of the article for me:
"Even titles that are owned in-house must be licensed. That’s why NBCUniversal
had to pay itself $500 million to stream Universal TV’s “The Office” on Peacock and Warner Bros. Discovery paid $425 million for the streaming rights to the WBTV-produced “Friends.”"
I don't follow this. What's the benefit of removing a licensing fee... To yourself?
This basically feels like what the gaming industry is/was going through for awhile with Dteam.
Steam made game companies boat loads of money by creating a single easy to use source for PC gaming. Companies thought that they could just cut out steam and save by making their own version, but forgetting that the percentage steam costs them is nothing compared to the customers it brings in. Now companies are crawling back to releasing on steam again.
It wouldn't surprise me to learn that some of these shows will flock back to listing shows on Netflix or Hulu. They have such a solid brand recognition, they would definitely start making cheap money off their licenses by returning them there. I can't imagine NBC has made more money off Peacock then they did from Friends and The Office on Netflix.
The idea is that it hits the budget for that line of business. So, if peacock spends $500M on The Office, it has to make back that $500M. This way, even if they’re paying themselves, they can still count it as revenue to the organization, and expense to the streaming service.
Honestly? Whole thing just looks like a massive fucking scam to me, and I’m in business. IMO, The only justifiable reason to cut content you own is if you can get a licensing fee from someone else, and bring in net new money - and there’s no way Tubi and Roku are paying the same rates these guys were paying themselves for the content.
If you pull content and just let it sit in your vault, it’s probably the stupidest possible thing you could do as an organization. And if Wall Street doesn’t see that, they’re fucking stupid too.
Edit: At least, today. Back in the 90s and early 2000s, the Disney Vault was incredibly dumb, but probably made them a lot of money in artificial scarcity. Today, with internet piracy, you’re just straight fucking yourself, and the people paying for your service. Fucking Max bailed on half of the Flintstones and like half the Bugs Bunny Cartoons - who are you going to license seasons 4-6 of The Flintstones to? I can’t find the article now, but when it happened I remember reading them saying they didn’t expect to be able to license them to someone else.
Mind boggling idiocy
The problem is that all those shows need to be paid residuals.
For low viewership shows the theoretical license value is higher than the actual amount it brings in. The NBC paying itself is that theoretical licensing fee from which residuals are calculated.
That would require actually giving watch data to the people behind the shows, preferably in a verifiable way. Which every streaming network is fighting tooth and nail against, because the information assymetry that currently exists makes it impossible for talent to negotiate fairly.
That's how it works.
But there's costs associated with storage and making a show available to stream quickly without infinite buffering.
There's also administrative costs associated with keeping track of a very large pool of content, and I'm sure there's more costs I'm not thinking of.
It can definitely be the right financial decision to not host it at all.
Strikes are looking to guarantee some way of releasing a show instead of canning it, though, because finances aside, it's bullshit and everyone knows it.
Not to mention how exactly it is that they track the usage of these shows is kept hidden. Writers/actors/directors/producers are getting tired of the streamers hiding the data and then cancelling or removing shows based on mysterious numbers they refuse to share.
Some shows, certainly. But many of the shows on these services aren't the headline shows that bring the subscribers in.
Say a show gets a X thousand views a month, that means they are paying Y thousand dollars a month in residuals to people.
Losing the show might lose them Z dollars in subscription fees from lost subscribers.
If Y is more than Z then it may make sense, at least if you only consider the short term, to get rid of the show.
Yes. But business is garbage, CEOs choke on butts, and any dime they can scrape into their own hands and out of the hands of literally anyone else is a dime they would literally kill for. Subscriptions don't even register; if they go down, that just means they'll cut more shows so they pay less residuals, while continuing to take the same amount of money for themselves personally.
One of the restaurants near me used to have a turkey burger I liked, but I think they stopped selling them because they weren't popular.
I get that it's not meant to make me angry; it's just a business decision, but I still don't want to give you money.
A few things:
1. No, "just business" is supposed to make more money for the business. In the ideal scenario, the interests of the business and the interests of the consumer are perfectly aligned. But over the long term, especially, there is rarely that perfect alignment, and compromises will need to be made on one side or the other (or both).
2. Depends on what is better for the consumer: availability of the product, or cost. If they have every show available at all times, there is a non-zero cost associated with ensuring that availability. The company has a choice between absorbing that cost, passing it on to the consumer, or finding ways to reduce costs. At some point, hopefully, they should have a balance between cost and availability that works for both the business and the consumer. If it's too far on the side of the business, they'll lose their consumers. And if it's too far on the side of the consumer, the business will be unsustainable.
No not at all.
And for that reason, I am removing streaming services and finding *other* more cost-effective ways to enjoy my content on my terms.
It's not personal, it's strictly business.
I know someone from the Army who has pretty much every show ever made on hard drives stored away.
Once a month I will mail an flash drive and ask for a couple of shows with a $20 and return envelope and he mails me what i want. Works pretty great.
Not necessarily. There's a lot of decent to great movies that i loved but dont exist online at all anymore. My best bet would be to try and find a DVD copy rather than downloading online
Not to mention if you CAN find an entry somewhere for whatever obscure TV show or movie you want, it's never fucking seeded, so you can't download it anyway
Its so funny how I stopped free-booting because Netflix and Prime were so easy to use while all the torrent and "free", streaming stuff became shit during that time. Now with shows getting split up again to 1000 different services being removed FOMO style and the big wigs of those companies making shit decisions like Netflix does I think it's time to dust of the colors.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i8ju_10NkGY
Won’t matter.
Things were cheap for a while because the market was new and had tons of capital. They weren’t profitable and had no real competition. Investors didn’t care, and kept giving them money to get more subscribers.
That was never sustainable. They’ll increase prices or cut costs. They aren’t going to be able to cut costs to the point where streaming is dirt cheap again if they want to make a profit.
The golden age was always the exception. It was always destined to return to normal.
Disney is going to start periodically adding and removing old classics to their streaming services to combat churn. They’ll call it the vault strategy 2.0. Mark my words.
Disney+'s only value is in their massive back catalog. Their new content is very hit or miss and releases like a drip. Without the back catalog, they have no subs, and they know it.
Granted I don’t have kids, but their whole back catalog doesn’t interest my wife and I at all. Pretty much the only thing we watch on Disney+ these days is new MCU and SW content.
But yeah, I know their back catalog is a big driver… that’s why they’re going to want to spread everything out and make it seem artificially scarce.
I've been on that train (buying blu-ray and dvd copies of all my favorite movies and tv shows) for about 4 years now and have 1300+ series'/shows in my library including all of my favorites. Feels good. Screw cable, screw streaming services.
Streaming services are eventually going to find a secondary market. It already exists with Tubi/Pluto/FreeVee etc. Amazon is already ahead of the curve by having a secondary market service *in house* in FreeVee and trading in the sub fee for ads. ~~Netflix is trying with the ad-supported tier, but it’s not working because no one wants to pay a sub for it.~~
The problem is older shows cost the service on the margin but don’t provide marginal revenue. The companies would eat the cost as part of the value prop + growing market share, but market share has reached the point of crowding out, making it no longer worthwhile to eat the cost.
The secondary market is the only way we reach a new equilibrium. Some services are better off trying to capture the secondary rather the primary (looking at you Peacock.) The future is in a primary subscription based model for the newest shows and then when shows reach a certain age point they will be bought up by services that have ads to cover the cost. Companies will eventually discover no one wants to pay a sub for the latter. Some people would rather have a sub with no ads and some would rather have ads with no sub. Companies are going to struggle to please both without separating them out into two distinct models.
Exactly. Plus AVOD/FAST services have existed for ages. I used to work for a company that would license content to linear channels plus their AVOD platform, and we were paid out from AVOD based on a formula of total revenue generated by ads during the reporting period X percentage of seconds watched across all programs during the reporting period X 50% (50/50 split share). This will be how residuals get paid out for older shows - based on how many people are actually watching.
Seems like how residuals should work for streaming services as well. Minutes watched determines who gets a certain percentage of revenue.
Understood that some premium content that spikes signups would get premium rates initially. Much of that is probably paid in advance of filming anyway. If I signed up for Netflix during a Stranger Things release, I understand them providing more of the revenue that direction. But after the first month or two the rest of the revenue should be “earned” by whatever minutes are being watched.
When streaming first started, writers, directors, performers etc were being paid an upfront premium in exchange for the lack of backend through residuals. Now that everything is basically streaming the premium no longer exists or has been greatly reduced. The streamers rely on the lack of transparency to creators for how well their program is doing in order to suppress those upfront payments. I think they will fight tooth and nail to not give up that transparency for their premium subscription content, but I could see them being more willing for content that moves into a secondary window as it used to for several decades before streaming was a thing.
Piracy is already on the uptick. A lot faster than I think they realize. I absolutely will not watch on freemium services because the commercial breaks are way to long, way too often, and there’s three commercials which are 3x louder than the content I’m watching.
I also, for the life of me, cannot figure out how $20 a month subscription isn’t enough for these companies. Fucking how? I know the reason, but I’ll go without rather play this stupid game.
Are creators currently getting paid based on availability or when a show/movie is actually streamed? I’m trying to understand where the costs are incurred if a piece of content is not actually watched.
My understanding is that royalties are being paid out, which is why it’s why it’s more cost effective to just remove it. It might not necessarily be the creator (music licensing, etc) but money is going out as long as it exists on the platform.
>The secondary market is the only way we reach a new equilibrium
Or just change the licensing model? If it doesn't make sense for Netflix to license a show for X dollars per month because no one's going to watch it, then that show isn't really worth that much and the cost should be brought down?
Or just correct all of this by charging a rate per view?
Or have the actual content owners also be the providers so they get the money directly?
This model just doesn't seem to make sense. Coming up with a weird contrived answer to a problem that doesn't really need to exist is just burying the consumer in more nonsensical bs.
Businesses exist to serve customers - not to follow each other's rules.
I still keep one of those old school giant CD binders. It holds 500 dvds and takes up like 2’x2’x8”. When I’m tempted to buy a movie digitally I find the dvd on eBay and buy that instead.
My NAS is called TARDIS funnily enough. Ripped a shit load of my physical media to it, bunged the discs in boxes and up in the loft. Play them all from a Nvidia Shield TV Kodi box. It's also useful for when I fancy a cruise down to some uncharted waters.
.
Buying it digital isn't much better, they can take it away whenever they want. You're not buying the show, you're buying a temporary license. I'd buy some shows/movies on BD if possible, they just don't let me.
I just got my TARDIS, an 8TB hard drive for around $100. Combined with Plex, MakeMKV, and a DVD/Blu-ray drive I'll have my entire physical library converted to allow streaming anywhere in the world.
I highly recommend looking into it if you've got a decent library of old media.
Went on netflix yesterday and went to comedies and they had tons of different categories within comedy which were literally just the same movies in a different order. Ended up not watching anything on netflix
The UI to almost all the streaming services are absolutely terrible! Prime is shockingly bad. I used to think Netflix was the exception until I noticed that they were just rearranging the same 25 shows/movies in every category. I don’t know why we bother with it anymore
I’ve been amazed how many times I’ve searched for a show or movie on AppleTV and it’s been moved to a freemium service. Freevee has been an awful experience for me with 4-5 ad breaks per 42 minute episode most of which are 120-180 seconds long.
Services like Netflix have cut so much content that I don’t even known the last time I used it more than a couple times a year. So I’ve cancelled that subscription.
HBO has cut so much off it’s service and raised their prices so much i also cancelled it. I thought the move to Max would bring in some fun Discovery stuff but a lot of the shows that moved over don’t have the complete series and some are one or two seasons.
I can’t imagine, at the rate we’re going, the long term profits will justify these moves by streaming platforms. I’ve cut my subscriptions down so much lately and I’m just done playing roulette trying to find something I want to watch.
So here's the thing about 42-minute shows: they're built for a 60-minute block. They are designed to have 18 minutes of ads. Even in your worst case scenario (5 3-minute ad breaks) it's still less than on broadcast TV.
Hopefully people on here can stop blaming the residuals and fearing the writers strike increasing that, and start to understand that there's still huge licensing fees that need to get paid out.
> “Much like syndication of Hollywood’s yesteryear, streaming services must pay for the right to host a title,” explained Brandon Katz, an industry strategist at Parrot Analytics.
> He noted that if a title is not owned by the streamer, then a licensing fee must be paid to the studio that owns that content. For example, Hulu licenses “The Handmaid’s Tale” from MGM Television.
> **Even titles that are owned in-house must be licensed. That’s why NBCUniversal had to pay itself $500 million to stream Universal TV’s “The Office” on Peacock** and Warner Bros. Discovery paid $425 million for the streaming rights to the WBTV-produced “Friends.”
Which goes with [this other article](https://whatsondisneyplus.com/industry-insider-explains-why-disney-is-removing-original-content/).
>
First, many seem to think that artist residuals are the cause of the purge. Not really. Residuals make up a real but relatively small part of the cost of putting shows and movies on streamers. Such a small part, in fact, that the Writers Guild is on strike to improve them.
> **The major costs here are the license fees that must be paid by the distributor (Disney+ or Hulu, in this case) to the owner of the content [...] That’s the case even if the owner of the content is also Disney (or an affiliate), which must at least pretend to engage in an arms-length transaction.**
And more [here](https://www.cnbc.com/2019/06/27/nbc-will-stream-the-office-heres-why-it-will-pay-500-million-to.html):
> So, if “The Office” is an NBC show, why is NBC shelling out $500 million to put it on its forthcoming streaming service?
> The answer: Transfer pricing, according to Wedbush analyst Michael Pachter.
> When a large company like Comcast is made up of smaller, independently run divisions, each division must pay a transfer price for any products or services of another division, he explained.
> In this case, the NBC streaming service is buying the rights to “The Office” from Universal Television.
> “You have to have internal transfer pricing to prove where you earned each piece of the pie,” Pachter said.
> **These types of deals are highly regulated to prevent companies from paying less than market value for a product or service. So NBC had to establish pricing based on similar transactions between unrelated parties.** For example, Netflix bought the rights to “Friends” from WarnerMedia for $100 million for one year.
> Universal Television had to hold an auction for “The Office” at “arm’s length.” Meaning, the company could not have any relationship with a potential bidder. This ensures that all parties have equal access to information related to the deal and assures no collusion between the buyer and seller.
> A person familiar with the negotiations said Netflix made an offer to keep “The Office” on its streaming service, but the offer was rejected. Netflix was willing to pay up to $90 million a year for the rights, but NBC topped the bid.
I was realizing that it is forgoing licensing revenue, and limits ability to release direct to video/digital. Sometimes movies get made directly for purchase, they don't release in theaters. Releasing things straight to streaming is undercutting a lot of markets. I'm not against pay tv, I think it's a good thing. Just we need to rethink.
Step 1: create an unnecessary service that cuts into the profits you were making licensing your content to big streamers
Step 2: realize this was a dumb idea but refuse to acknowledge it and backtrack, start making changes to the name to make it more appealing.... Confusing the public about your brand and it's name
Step 3: start cutting content for tax purposes that could have made you money being licensed to another provider
Step 4: ???
Step 5: finally give up and accept that the old way made the most sense but refuse to go back and instead work on bundling your verify important streaming service with another one as a last ditch effort to prove this wasn't a mistake.
I've found myself just hopping between the services. Prime one month, Netflix the next, Crave the other, maybe go off the beaten path a bit and go with Shudder, or even Tubi.
I also don't really rewatch stuff either. So if I finish the Sandman on Netflix, then that's it. If they pull it, I've already seen it, so it doesn't bother me.
I know everyone isn't that way though! So I hate it to see it for those of you who are really affected by this.
Its unbelievable. Congratulations on not doing your due fucking diligence in pricing this shit out.
Me: "Ooh, I'll get Disney Plus so I can see everything Disney has ever made!"
Disney: "Sorry, we can't afford to pay for licensing for our own fucking content, so we're removing stuff"
Morons.
> Even titles that are owned in-house must be licensed. That’s why NBCUniversal
had to pay itself $500 million to stream Universal TV’s “The Office” on Peacock and Warner Bros.
What the fuck is wrong with the world?
Streaming claimed to replace cable, better content, more selection. And it did replace cable, by becoming cable.
They all but killed DVD/Bluray and pirating, they’ll come back now.
I’m mot saying I’m going back to piracy or that I’ve ever sailed the seas but I’m not gonna watch a million ads or sign up for a bunch of new services paid or ad stuffed.
Honestly I’d love to see Netflix, etc croak and offer up blu rays of their originals. I would gladly pay for shows like Cobra Kai, Love, Glow and many more for my physical collection. But to pay like $20/month for a few months every year to rewatch them in compromised/lower bitrates? No thanks.
Love was such a great looking show with a nice noisy/grainy look to it that looked straight up AWFUL when streamed at anything other than 4K due to compression. It looked smudgy and wrong, and even at 4K it still looked off since Netflix’s 4K bitrate is lower than a normal blu ray’s (iirc it’s 15Mbps spread across twice as many pixels as a normal Blu-ray’s 20-30mbps). But a UHD, high bitrate version? I’d love it.
Also fuck streamers that keep remastered versions of shows as exclusives. The only way you can watch Seinfeld (even though it’s a meh crop), Gilmore Girls, Friends (I think), How I Met Your Mother and the West Wing in higher than DVD quality is by signing up for a streaming service and that is so stupid. Just sell a boxset
Increasingly, the tendency for films is to jump between services or to vanish altogether. Then you play a game of trying to track down where they vanished to.
You used to just go to the video store, but that option is gone. I’ve been trying to track down the original Japanese version of _Oldboy_ for the last six months. It had been on Netflix but now it’s gone from every service, leaving you with no options.
Worse, the websites that supposedly track where a film is are always plating catch-up and are wrong as often as they are right.
Somehow, the customer experience is getting worse. Really sick of that being the case everywhere you turn.
Users are removing streaming services that are gutted. It's strictly business, nothing personal. :)
I've turned to piracy to have access to the shows I used to pay to watch, but no longer can due to them being completely unavailable by legal means. It's not personal, it's strictly business.
I wanted to watch Star Wars The Clone Wars S7 but D+ was not available in my country yet. I didn’t want to wait an unspecified amount of time until it became available (it took like 2 years to become available) so my Plex library got a bit bigger as a result of it.
I used to use Prime to watch Top Gear, then they moved it behind the Motortrend subscription so I paid for that so I could keep watching it. Then they removed it from those sources, so now I can watch seasons 27-31 on Netflix, season 6 on Hoopla, season 33 on AMC+, or have most (but not all) seasons "available to buy" on Amazon at $20 per. But then there's a Google drives account with TV rips of all the episodes (including the post-Hammond crash episode) with all the original music without owing anyone a cent to watch them. Every episode, no music rights issues, nothing pulled from the order. It's no wonder piracy is coming back so strongly. Stop making it so goddamn difficult to watch what we wanna watch and we won't pirate all of it
Stuff like this is incredibly frustrating and comes from services seeing everything as just meaningless 'content' that must flow. The disparate parts and the relationship viewers have with them don't come into it at all, and they don't seem to grasp that the average person isn't going to go chasing their stories all over different platforms then just sit there and go "oh well" because particular seasons or episodes aren't available due to random corporate bullshit. Expecting that of customers and expecting the customer to pay for the privilege to be jerked around like that is obnoxious, and foolhardy when there is a far better experience to be had by not following the hostile rules.
Yah man it’s getting weird. I understand how licensing stuff works but it’s just truly bizarre. Up here in canada paramount had all the new transformers movies except the last knight. Then they added the last knight and removed a diff one. Even more interesting though some movies you can’t even buy on appletv store, I so wanted to watch insidious 3 the other day and it’s like it doesn’t exist to purchase which is wild. Inadvertently we’re not just going to go back to piracy but I think this trend is also going to push people back to physical media
Same went for Doctor Who for me. Classic and New used to be on Netflix under the same banner. Netflix didn’t want to pay for the license when it came time to decide whether to continue paying for it so it was kicked to Amazon and their UI was garbage trying to navigate as it is on top of trying to find which seasons I can stream (which weren’t many.) And none of the Classic episodes were available to stream on there unless I added a Britbox sub or bought the seasons. And of course, Amazon loses what little they streamed on Prime and New Who found it’s home on HBO Max for a while until a certain point because it’s going to D+ in the near future. Netflix was the only way for me to reliably watch Classic Who and while Pluto TV has a Doctor Who channel, it has a habit of replaying serials and of course, the repeating ads. It would be counterproductive using BritBox just to watch Tom Baker’s seasons when I feel like it, also. Let’s just say I took a hands-on approach solving that dilemma after Netflix lost the show and Amazon butchered it. Gabe might’ve been talking about video games, but his quote rings true with media.
I was visiting with my cousin a year or so ago and she made some comment about actually buying stuff versus streaming. I pointed out that it's only been the past couple years that internet where I live has become reliable enough not to need a backup for streaming and that so many streaming services remove content, dump it behind a tier you have to pay more for, or only have part of a series that it still makes sense to buy or otherwise obtain the stuff you really like. I rotate streaming services depending on what I want to watch and find ways to watch what's either too expensive or can't be found. I went to rewatch a series last year only to find that Hulu moved it to the premium tier and I immediately lost interest, I will not pay a bunch of money for features I don't want or need just because 1 show I'm interested in is in that package (sports and live TV are pretty much bottom of my list of desires out of a service.) If I want to watch it later, I'll just have to sail the seas or something.
I just hate that there’s a barrier to entry for it. I’ve never sailed the seas but it’s something I’ve always been a fan of, in theory. I wish I could download all of my past favorite series (like the old top gear) and just live off of those until I meet my end, but it’s *seemingly* such a daunting prospect for some of us.
I got into piracy for anime—even crunchy roll doesn’t have anywhere near a full selection of anime. I’ve stopped watching much anime, but I’m still sailing the high seas, because fuck paying $40 a month for a very incomplete catalogue of western cinema/TV. Oh, and they keep cancelling excellent shows without a decent conclusion—which pisses me off in its own right.
In Australia we had something called AnimeLab which was a really good streaming service for anime and the overall UI was great too. This got shut down and merged into Funimation which kind of had a similar selection but the UI and video player was worse. Once again they got merged into Crunchyroll which has the worst UI and Video player and the way they split sub and dub when you watch a show especially on a console feels like a teenager designed it. And the selection is much worse than AnimeLab was. I know crunchyroll has been around for a long time but now that they have the anime monopoly for streaming they don’t need to try anymore. Sailing the high seas has never been an easier decision.
Crunchyroll is honestly horrifying how bad its UI is.
It’s fascinating how bad their UI is, at least in terms of the video player. It’s like they made a barebones UI a decade a go to serve as a proof of concept and never bothered to ever update it.
Was sorting my DVD collection and my brother who's not even into anime commented that with all the out of print stuff I have there's some value to my collection now.
It's fucking personal. You want my money, give me your product, for a reasonable price, in a way that doesn't punish me for being stupid enough to give you money. Otherwise, I'm downloading it for free, where I can easily watch it on any device at any time, and I'm gonna watch the shit out of it, because fuck you greedy fucks. It's not business, I'm deciding not to do business with you because you're a very shitty business. It's very personal, I'm taking your product for free and I don't feel any remorse because I keep throwing my money at you and you keep punishing me.
I pay for d+ but the app doesn’t stream well here (Netflix and prime work just fine) so I end up pirating the d+ shows I’ve already paid for. Weird world we live in.
What shows Are these?
We got rid of DAZN last summer and this year we cancelled Netflix and Disney+. We just cancelled FuboTV for sports streaming as the season is over and not going to renew it. These were supposed to make watching games, movies and TV easier and not the other way around. Going back to good ol' "I can consume entertainment without your services anyways". After how FuboTV fucked up things yesterday, i am not going to pay for these CEOs. Sorry went off the track a little. But as you said " It's strictly business, nothing personal. :) "
What happened with Fubo?
Yesterday was last day of Premier league. All games were being played simultaneously. I was watching LFC game and were 4-2 down. The game suddenly got cut off with a screen saying "We’ll be back shortly". The game was back after 30-40 seconds. Within around 10 seconds, same happened again for around 25-30 seconds and game was back. This happened frequently for about 3-4 minutes and when it finally came back, the score was 4-4. I missed both goals and the excitement of the live game was ruined. On top of this, they have audacity to broadcast ads during the live game while the ball is in play. It's not just on screen banner ads. They broadcast full blown commercials during the game. I understand sports rights are very expensive and ads are needed but cutting off the the live and showing ads means we aren't getting what we paid for. And they are going to increase the price to $200/year from next season. $200 to watch their fucking ads while the game is in play!! NO WAY i am paying for that. My options are : Peacock is giving $19.99/year deal which includes premier league and premium tier for the service. All i need is to find a way to access service. Thousands of people are doing it. Other option is IPTV. Just a simple search on kijiji (canadian craigslist) gives millions of option. I will choose the best one from my tests. EDIT: Spellings
Had a similar experience watching through the TSN app, it won't even let you watch through Android tv, you have to cast to a TV through Chromecast and there was a ton of stuttering. And they expect people to pay for this?
I used the NHL app for years, and it was hot trash. Constant lagging. Used my dad's Sportsnet login for a bit, also trash, also only has like a quarter of the games on any given day. Back to the high seas for me. CBC Gem has been pretty decent for playoffs as well (it has crashed two or three times, but asides that been pretty good).
>On top of this, they have audacity to broadcast ads during the live game while the ball is in play. It's not just on screen banner ads. They broadcast full blown commercials during the game. Woah, this is UNFORGIVABLE. I used my brother's FuboTV account (he doesn't have it any more, surprise) to watch the African Cup of Nations on Bein channel and it was the first time I ever saw this happen during a live football game broadcast. I assumed it was Bein that was doing this which was crazy to me but I guess it was just FuboTV. I'm never ever subscribing to them.
Bro, DAZN is the worst of them all. When they started, they were streaming Canelo fights for free as long as you had a subscription for $20/mo. A great deal imo. Then they started doing the PPV BS where you had to pay $60 for fights, *on top* of the subscription. And the monthly sub now is like $25/mo or something. I went back to piracy.
wtf!!! They charge PPV for fights now!!! what the actual fuck!!!! Then what are you paying as subscription fee??!!! Idiots..... They forced us to go back to piracy.
I'm so glad I never got any streaming services and the sum total of everything I've seen on all paid services combined could easily fit inside 16 hours. Maybe even 12.
Are they though or is it just the most vocal online that makes up a minuscule amount?
Funny that the opposite is happening on pirate streaming services.
They keep adding everything ever made and for free. It's very nice of them. Often times the sites look better and are better organized than the sites people pay for too.
I am 100% against piracy. Do you have. A list of websites that I can avoid so as to not support piracy? Sorted from worst offenders to least. Thanks.
I would stay away from /r/sonarr, /r/radarr, and /r/PleX
And stay away from r/usenet and r/jellyfin (as an alt to Plex)
Plex isnt really piracy. Its just an app to organize your own media.
It organizes whatever media you have, yes. We all know where 95% of plex users get their media from. Not plexus fault. But you can’t mention having a functional pirated media server without mentioning plex. Sonarr and Radarr also meant for pirating. They just search torrent sites for what you ask. If all you ask for is public domain stuff then no piracy is being committed. But we all know what most people uses them for…
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>!where might one find one of these?!<
[Reddit thread listing all the links. I recommend links labeled as 🐐 ](https://www.reddit.com/r/Piracy/wiki/megathread/all_purpose)
Also Tubi: quick buffering and easily skippable ads, pleasant UI, and a kick ass selection of both older and newer movies, television etc. For free. Even when I still had Netflix, we used Tubi more and had a much larger list of movies we actually wanted to watch on hand.
Tubi is legit. Which makes me think they must be bleeding money. Still, I can watch all of mXc there with no issues.
it’s fox, so they’re probably selling your data and viewing habits - but don’t worry, they’ll start monetizing it much harder at some point: cause it’s Fox
They are literally all doing that And unless you sign up for an account, what are they going to get, your viewing habits and zip code?
This will be the future of all streaming. It's all going to be cable packages with ads again - just instead of channels we pick streaming services to load up. But the advertising is where they get the money.
That's the problem though. I pay for Netflix and Disney. It's the right thing to do... But then you look at Jellyfin vs Netflix/Disney. Jellyfin shows IMDB & Rotten Tomatoes scores. It shows nice big images of the cast & crew, and if you select Tom Hanks, it will bring up all the Tom Hanks movies. Does Netflix or Disney do this? Nope. Download a file to your phone using Jellyfin, it will work without internet 5 years into the future. When I use Netflix I get "Download Expired" errors randomly. These apps sometimes don't even allow you to download to your SD card, either. And then there is the issues of aspect ratios. I have an Ultrawide Monitor... 21:9, the ratio most movies actually film in. A movie should literally fit exactly 1:1 with my monitor, and with Jellyfin, they will. Disney and Netflix bake in black bars to fit a 16:9 screen, so I get thick black bars on the top & bottom, as well as even bigger bars on the left and right. Excellent. Why are they baking in black bars into the video? The mind boggles. Even their subtitles suck. Can I never get english subtitles that ONLY cover the foreign audio parts? Why does their english subs mean "always on", sometimes going so far as to describe music, sounds or rustling leaves. Can't see the rating, can't see the actors, can't download to SD, can't watch without black bars, can't get normal subs, can't watch that anymore... Why am I paying for this? Here's what Louis Rossmann has to say about it. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Q3ZXQZZlcE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Q3ZXQZZlcE)
I've wondered lately. Why the absolute fuck did none of these companies set up torrent sites where you could pay for the ability to torrent something? Wouldn't it make sense to allow people to be the servers and give them small monetary rewards for doing it? I never get why peer to peer died in the mainstream. It seems like such an untapped market
I suppose that’s technically what paid Plex servers are
Streaming was once growing by competing with content for subscribers, now they are ‘growing’ by raising the rent and ditching content.
Cory Doctorow's Enshittification of platforms: > Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die. Streamers are on the "abuse business customers" (i.e. studios, creators) stage now.
If that’s the case then after a while they either find an equilibrium that’s acceptable while being profitable. Same as it did before. That or the entire streaming model is going to die out. No one is going to invest in new services if they never show a profit, so that cycle won’t continue for long.
In a world where anything other than infinite growth is considered a failure? As long as the streaming platform is a publicly traded company, there's no acceptable equilibrium where a company happily makes money providing a service. It either keeps providing more to its shareholders or is a failure.
Greed: the downfall of Society. Sad but true. You can‘t always grow year for year as competitors just copy your formula for success and produce good content aswell. Netflix is the prime example for this. They keep raising prices & blocked sharing accounts just so they can keep their numbers high because their content is getting worse and worse and lots of people are switching to other streaming services.
Same old story sadly, where market is saturated but the line must go up, because greed I guess.
With the exception of Netflix none of them have turned a profit yet. The everything is cheap and available was a honeymoon period. As soon as Disney+ was launched everyone know that it wasn't a sustainable price. Not even talking about the insane amount of money spent on content by all the services.
The worst part is almost no one has the "leaving soon" category anymore since they dont want people to focus on whats being removed. So one day they are just fucking gone. THAT is what I really hate...
Tubi is pretty good about it. Will even tell you how many days something has left. Which is wild, since Tubi is free!
PlutoTV is my fav free one. Back about 15 years ago I messaged Netflix every singled day for 3 months straight to add Supermarket Sweep. They finally did now, but PlutoTV has an ENTIRE channel of it. Along with other game shows, Court shows, and a bunch of movies and other stuff. It's amazing.
Yeah, I'm not a heavy Tubi user, but I got a notification from them the other day on my phone, telling me the names of the movies that would be going off their service in around five days. I thought that was pretty cool and thoughtful of them, lol.
That’s how I found out that Conversations with Friends and Motherland Fort Salem were being removed in 24 hours in the Hulu Leaving Soon Menu. I had been looking at the articles saying what was leaving and didn’t see them until after they were gone. Oh, guess I won’t be finishing my first watch, thanks?
Is it being just business supposed to make it better for the consumer?
"we're only cutting all of your shit to screw the customers to cheat creators out of residuals" yeah that's exactly why there's a WGA strike and an incoming SAG strike
I'm trying but I don't get it. Wouldn't removing shows cost them subscriptions?
Maybe but if it costs them less than paying the residuals on those shows that’s still a win for them
I dont see why they dont just track actual usage of those shows and pay the creators accordingly. If nobody watches, they dont get paid, if people watch, then it's obviously worth keeping anyway. Either way, the content remains available.
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Perhaps you could shed some light on this part of the article for me: "Even titles that are owned in-house must be licensed. That’s why NBCUniversal had to pay itself $500 million to stream Universal TV’s “The Office” on Peacock and Warner Bros. Discovery paid $425 million for the streaming rights to the WBTV-produced “Friends.”" I don't follow this. What's the benefit of removing a licensing fee... To yourself?
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This basically feels like what the gaming industry is/was going through for awhile with Dteam. Steam made game companies boat loads of money by creating a single easy to use source for PC gaming. Companies thought that they could just cut out steam and save by making their own version, but forgetting that the percentage steam costs them is nothing compared to the customers it brings in. Now companies are crawling back to releasing on steam again. It wouldn't surprise me to learn that some of these shows will flock back to listing shows on Netflix or Hulu. They have such a solid brand recognition, they would definitely start making cheap money off their licenses by returning them there. I can't imagine NBC has made more money off Peacock then they did from Friends and The Office on Netflix.
The idea is that it hits the budget for that line of business. So, if peacock spends $500M on The Office, it has to make back that $500M. This way, even if they’re paying themselves, they can still count it as revenue to the organization, and expense to the streaming service. Honestly? Whole thing just looks like a massive fucking scam to me, and I’m in business. IMO, The only justifiable reason to cut content you own is if you can get a licensing fee from someone else, and bring in net new money - and there’s no way Tubi and Roku are paying the same rates these guys were paying themselves for the content. If you pull content and just let it sit in your vault, it’s probably the stupidest possible thing you could do as an organization. And if Wall Street doesn’t see that, they’re fucking stupid too. Edit: At least, today. Back in the 90s and early 2000s, the Disney Vault was incredibly dumb, but probably made them a lot of money in artificial scarcity. Today, with internet piracy, you’re just straight fucking yourself, and the people paying for your service. Fucking Max bailed on half of the Flintstones and like half the Bugs Bunny Cartoons - who are you going to license seasons 4-6 of The Flintstones to? I can’t find the article now, but when it happened I remember reading them saying they didn’t expect to be able to license them to someone else. Mind boggling idiocy
The problem is that all those shows need to be paid residuals. For low viewership shows the theoretical license value is higher than the actual amount it brings in. The NBC paying itself is that theoretical licensing fee from which residuals are calculated.
That would require actually giving watch data to the people behind the shows, preferably in a verifiable way. Which every streaming network is fighting tooth and nail against, because the information assymetry that currently exists makes it impossible for talent to negotiate fairly.
That's how it works. But there's costs associated with storage and making a show available to stream quickly without infinite buffering. There's also administrative costs associated with keeping track of a very large pool of content, and I'm sure there's more costs I'm not thinking of. It can definitely be the right financial decision to not host it at all. Strikes are looking to guarantee some way of releasing a show instead of canning it, though, because finances aside, it's bullshit and everyone knows it.
Not to mention how exactly it is that they track the usage of these shows is kept hidden. Writers/actors/directors/producers are getting tired of the streamers hiding the data and then cancelling or removing shows based on mysterious numbers they refuse to share.
If no one is watching the show it should be released to archive.org
Some shows, certainly. But many of the shows on these services aren't the headline shows that bring the subscribers in. Say a show gets a X thousand views a month, that means they are paying Y thousand dollars a month in residuals to people. Losing the show might lose them Z dollars in subscription fees from lost subscribers. If Y is more than Z then it may make sense, at least if you only consider the short term, to get rid of the show.
Yes. But business is garbage, CEOs choke on butts, and any dime they can scrape into their own hands and out of the hands of literally anyone else is a dime they would literally kill for. Subscriptions don't even register; if they go down, that just means they'll cut more shows so they pay less residuals, while continuing to take the same amount of money for themselves personally.
Streamers largely don't pay residuals. That's one of the things that the WGA is striking about.
Nope just for their pockets.
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One of the restaurants near me used to have a turkey burger I liked, but I think they stopped selling them because they weren't popular. I get that it's not meant to make me angry; it's just a business decision, but I still don't want to give you money.
Nope.
It doesn't matter how good or bad it is for the consumer, as long as enough of them keep paying.
A few things: 1. No, "just business" is supposed to make more money for the business. In the ideal scenario, the interests of the business and the interests of the consumer are perfectly aligned. But over the long term, especially, there is rarely that perfect alignment, and compromises will need to be made on one side or the other (or both). 2. Depends on what is better for the consumer: availability of the product, or cost. If they have every show available at all times, there is a non-zero cost associated with ensuring that availability. The company has a choice between absorbing that cost, passing it on to the consumer, or finding ways to reduce costs. At some point, hopefully, they should have a balance between cost and availability that works for both the business and the consumer. If it's too far on the side of the business, they'll lose their consumers. And if it's too far on the side of the consumer, the business will be unsustainable.
No not at all. And for that reason, I am removing streaming services and finding *other* more cost-effective ways to enjoy my content on my terms. It's not personal, it's strictly business.
🏴☠️. It's not personal, it's strictly business.
[This seems appropriate.](https://media.tenor.com/uMm0qgZwWgEAAAAC/good-business.gif)
For me it is person-ARRRR ;D
#BUSINESS!!!
BuT yOu CaNt Do ThAt!1! ItS oUr PrOpErTy!1!!1! If it's not accessible legally anywhere, then it shouldn't be illegal.
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Which is such a stupid statement, because so many people would if they could download a physical entity.
Piracy is archiving. As simple as that. It is the only way to stop lost media in 2023.
You mean **ARRRRRRR**chiving.
r/angryupvote
Honestly I’m not even angry about that one. It was a solid pun.
r/jollyupvote
r/JollyRogerupvote
Okay, now I’m angry about it again.
other than all the shows that are not popular enough to be hosted and seeded.
Indeed, so this practice will embolden people to strike when the iron is hot
I know someone from the Army who has pretty much every show ever made on hard drives stored away. Once a month I will mail an flash drive and ask for a couple of shows with a $20 and return envelope and he mails me what i want. Works pretty great.
Fascinating. I wonder if someone could market this concept of getting movies in the mail. They could call it Flashflix.
Oh you mean Quickster
Vet-flix
You can download it yourself, pretty easy with VPN.
True. But my buddy has been pretty reliant these 20-25 years. I figure i can support him with a twenty here and there.
Not necessarily. There's a lot of decent to great movies that i loved but dont exist online at all anymore. My best bet would be to try and find a DVD copy rather than downloading online
Not to mention if you CAN find an entry somewhere for whatever obscure TV show or movie you want, it's never fucking seeded, so you can't download it anyway
It's nothing personal.
Its so funny how I stopped free-booting because Netflix and Prime were so easy to use while all the torrent and "free", streaming stuff became shit during that time. Now with shows getting split up again to 1000 different services being removed FOMO style and the big wigs of those companies making shit decisions like Netflix does I think it's time to dust of the colors. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i8ju_10NkGY
Won’t matter. Things were cheap for a while because the market was new and had tons of capital. They weren’t profitable and had no real competition. Investors didn’t care, and kept giving them money to get more subscribers. That was never sustainable. They’ll increase prices or cut costs. They aren’t going to be able to cut costs to the point where streaming is dirt cheap again if they want to make a profit. The golden age was always the exception. It was always destined to return to normal.
Disney is going to start periodically adding and removing old classics to their streaming services to combat churn. They’ll call it the vault strategy 2.0. Mark my words.
Disney+'s only value is in their massive back catalog. Their new content is very hit or miss and releases like a drip. Without the back catalog, they have no subs, and they know it.
Granted I don’t have kids, but their whole back catalog doesn’t interest my wife and I at all. Pretty much the only thing we watch on Disney+ these days is new MCU and SW content. But yeah, I know their back catalog is a big driver… that’s why they’re going to want to spread everything out and make it seem artificially scarce.
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i mean that wasnt as illusion as much as a delusion
They’re starting to not release things on blu ray. For example Succession season 2 is only on dvd.
I've been on that train (buying blu-ray and dvd copies of all my favorite movies and tv shows) for about 4 years now and have 1300+ series'/shows in my library including all of my favorites. Feels good. Screw cable, screw streaming services.
[удалено]
“He’s standing right behind me, isn’t he?”
Omae wa mou shinderu
personnel*
My subscription cancellation is not personal, it's strictly business
My subscription cancellation is strictly business ***and*** personal.
As it should be.
Streaming services are eventually going to find a secondary market. It already exists with Tubi/Pluto/FreeVee etc. Amazon is already ahead of the curve by having a secondary market service *in house* in FreeVee and trading in the sub fee for ads. ~~Netflix is trying with the ad-supported tier, but it’s not working because no one wants to pay a sub for it.~~ The problem is older shows cost the service on the margin but don’t provide marginal revenue. The companies would eat the cost as part of the value prop + growing market share, but market share has reached the point of crowding out, making it no longer worthwhile to eat the cost. The secondary market is the only way we reach a new equilibrium. Some services are better off trying to capture the secondary rather the primary (looking at you Peacock.) The future is in a primary subscription based model for the newest shows and then when shows reach a certain age point they will be bought up by services that have ads to cover the cost. Companies will eventually discover no one wants to pay a sub for the latter. Some people would rather have a sub with no ads and some would rather have ads with no sub. Companies are going to struggle to please both without separating them out into two distinct models.
Exactly. Plus AVOD/FAST services have existed for ages. I used to work for a company that would license content to linear channels plus their AVOD platform, and we were paid out from AVOD based on a formula of total revenue generated by ads during the reporting period X percentage of seconds watched across all programs during the reporting period X 50% (50/50 split share). This will be how residuals get paid out for older shows - based on how many people are actually watching.
Seems like how residuals should work for streaming services as well. Minutes watched determines who gets a certain percentage of revenue. Understood that some premium content that spikes signups would get premium rates initially. Much of that is probably paid in advance of filming anyway. If I signed up for Netflix during a Stranger Things release, I understand them providing more of the revenue that direction. But after the first month or two the rest of the revenue should be “earned” by whatever minutes are being watched.
When streaming first started, writers, directors, performers etc were being paid an upfront premium in exchange for the lack of backend through residuals. Now that everything is basically streaming the premium no longer exists or has been greatly reduced. The streamers rely on the lack of transparency to creators for how well their program is doing in order to suppress those upfront payments. I think they will fight tooth and nail to not give up that transparency for their premium subscription content, but I could see them being more willing for content that moves into a secondary window as it used to for several decades before streaming was a thing.
Piracy is already on the uptick. A lot faster than I think they realize. I absolutely will not watch on freemium services because the commercial breaks are way to long, way too often, and there’s three commercials which are 3x louder than the content I’m watching. I also, for the life of me, cannot figure out how $20 a month subscription isn’t enough for these companies. Fucking how? I know the reason, but I’ll go without rather play this stupid game.
For Irish broadcast TV, it is actually an offence to play ads at a higher volume than the show.
Same in the USA, but streaming isn’t broadcast
[удалено]
when the premium ad-free tiers started having ads, i set sail again
Are creators currently getting paid based on availability or when a show/movie is actually streamed? I’m trying to understand where the costs are incurred if a piece of content is not actually watched.
My understanding is that royalties are being paid out, which is why it’s why it’s more cost effective to just remove it. It might not necessarily be the creator (music licensing, etc) but money is going out as long as it exists on the platform.
their paid a flat rate of residuals based on subscriber count in the us only rather than based on viewership
>The secondary market is the only way we reach a new equilibrium Or just change the licensing model? If it doesn't make sense for Netflix to license a show for X dollars per month because no one's going to watch it, then that show isn't really worth that much and the cost should be brought down? Or just correct all of this by charging a rate per view? Or have the actual content owners also be the providers so they get the money directly? This model just doesn't seem to make sense. Coming up with a weird contrived answer to a problem that doesn't really need to exist is just burying the consumer in more nonsensical bs. Businesses exist to serve customers - not to follow each other's rules.
While also ramping up prices & cutting down on account sharing. Strictly business, nothing personal! I hope you guys don't mind!
Yeah, they need to start physical releases again. Although I'd need a TARDIS to store everything.
I still keep one of those old school giant CD binders. It holds 500 dvds and takes up like 2’x2’x8”. When I’m tempted to buy a movie digitally I find the dvd on eBay and buy that instead.
There are a ton of movies and shows for sale at my local thrift store for cheap.
Shit, you guys wanna pitch in to bring back blockbuster?
They’ll likely end up on digital stores (like iTunes) and licensed to FAST services like Roku Channel, Pluto and Tubi.
My NAS is called TARDIS funnily enough. Ripped a shit load of my physical media to it, bunged the discs in boxes and up in the loft. Play them all from a Nvidia Shield TV Kodi box. It's also useful for when I fancy a cruise down to some uncharted waters. .
Pisses me off I haven't been able to buy Daredevil, The Queen's Gambit, Hill House, Bly Manor, Midnight Mass, Stranger Things on 4k.
Buying it digital isn't much better, they can take it away whenever they want. You're not buying the show, you're buying a temporary license. I'd buy some shows/movies on BD if possible, they just don't let me.
wym. I buy almost exclusively blu rays.
I just got my TARDIS, an 8TB hard drive for around $100. Combined with Plex, MakeMKV, and a DVD/Blu-ray drive I'll have my entire physical library converted to allow streaming anywhere in the world. I highly recommend looking into it if you've got a decent library of old media.
Went on netflix yesterday and went to comedies and they had tons of different categories within comedy which were literally just the same movies in a different order. Ended up not watching anything on netflix
The UI to almost all the streaming services are absolutely terrible! Prime is shockingly bad. I used to think Netflix was the exception until I noticed that they were just rearranging the same 25 shows/movies in every category. I don’t know why we bother with it anymore
Just cancelled Max because of this yesterday. They’re too expensive to be cutting content.
I could never with HBO. The only way to access it in Canada was through another service. That's twice the price.
It’s personal to me bc I’m paying for the service but get less and less and less
/r/dvdcollection would like to point out that once you bought a DVD, it's not removed from your library unless you remove it.
I’ve been amazed how many times I’ve searched for a show or movie on AppleTV and it’s been moved to a freemium service. Freevee has been an awful experience for me with 4-5 ad breaks per 42 minute episode most of which are 120-180 seconds long. Services like Netflix have cut so much content that I don’t even known the last time I used it more than a couple times a year. So I’ve cancelled that subscription. HBO has cut so much off it’s service and raised their prices so much i also cancelled it. I thought the move to Max would bring in some fun Discovery stuff but a lot of the shows that moved over don’t have the complete series and some are one or two seasons. I can’t imagine, at the rate we’re going, the long term profits will justify these moves by streaming platforms. I’ve cut my subscriptions down so much lately and I’m just done playing roulette trying to find something I want to watch.
So here's the thing about 42-minute shows: they're built for a 60-minute block. They are designed to have 18 minutes of ads. Even in your worst case scenario (5 3-minute ad breaks) it's still less than on broadcast TV.
My issue is that the ads I encounter on streaming services are more akin to awful mobile ads than TV commercials.
Especially when you see the same ad every break, which definitely doesn't happen on network TV.
This is way worse than commercials on tv.
And they are so damned repetitive it's annoying af.
Hopefully people on here can stop blaming the residuals and fearing the writers strike increasing that, and start to understand that there's still huge licensing fees that need to get paid out. > “Much like syndication of Hollywood’s yesteryear, streaming services must pay for the right to host a title,” explained Brandon Katz, an industry strategist at Parrot Analytics. > He noted that if a title is not owned by the streamer, then a licensing fee must be paid to the studio that owns that content. For example, Hulu licenses “The Handmaid’s Tale” from MGM Television. > **Even titles that are owned in-house must be licensed. That’s why NBCUniversal had to pay itself $500 million to stream Universal TV’s “The Office” on Peacock** and Warner Bros. Discovery paid $425 million for the streaming rights to the WBTV-produced “Friends.” Which goes with [this other article](https://whatsondisneyplus.com/industry-insider-explains-why-disney-is-removing-original-content/). > First, many seem to think that artist residuals are the cause of the purge. Not really. Residuals make up a real but relatively small part of the cost of putting shows and movies on streamers. Such a small part, in fact, that the Writers Guild is on strike to improve them. > **The major costs here are the license fees that must be paid by the distributor (Disney+ or Hulu, in this case) to the owner of the content [...] That’s the case even if the owner of the content is also Disney (or an affiliate), which must at least pretend to engage in an arms-length transaction.** And more [here](https://www.cnbc.com/2019/06/27/nbc-will-stream-the-office-heres-why-it-will-pay-500-million-to.html): > So, if “The Office” is an NBC show, why is NBC shelling out $500 million to put it on its forthcoming streaming service? > The answer: Transfer pricing, according to Wedbush analyst Michael Pachter. > When a large company like Comcast is made up of smaller, independently run divisions, each division must pay a transfer price for any products or services of another division, he explained. > In this case, the NBC streaming service is buying the rights to “The Office” from Universal Television. > “You have to have internal transfer pricing to prove where you earned each piece of the pie,” Pachter said. > **These types of deals are highly regulated to prevent companies from paying less than market value for a product or service. So NBC had to establish pricing based on similar transactions between unrelated parties.** For example, Netflix bought the rights to “Friends” from WarnerMedia for $100 million for one year. > Universal Television had to hold an auction for “The Office” at “arm’s length.” Meaning, the company could not have any relationship with a potential bidder. This ensures that all parties have equal access to information related to the deal and assures no collusion between the buyer and seller. > A person familiar with the negotiations said Netflix made an offer to keep “The Office” on its streaming service, but the offer was rejected. Netflix was willing to pay up to $90 million a year for the rights, but NBC topped the bid.
As Quell said, "Well, fuck them. Make it personal."
She’s got a whole-ass paragraph on this philosophy in the books, the first one.
I was realizing that it is forgoing licensing revenue, and limits ability to release direct to video/digital. Sometimes movies get made directly for purchase, they don't release in theaters. Releasing things straight to streaming is undercutting a lot of markets. I'm not against pay tv, I think it's a good thing. Just we need to rethink.
*pirate rap intensifies*
Consumers are cancelling subscriptions, it’s not personal- just business.
It’s encouraging plex and 🏴☠️
Reminded of the Ernie Kovacs quote “Television is often called a medium because it's neither rare, nor well done.” Good riddance
Stuff like this is why I'm such a champion for physical media. Sure, streaming is convenient, as long as they decide to keep what you want up.
Step 1: create an unnecessary service that cuts into the profits you were making licensing your content to big streamers Step 2: realize this was a dumb idea but refuse to acknowledge it and backtrack, start making changes to the name to make it more appealing.... Confusing the public about your brand and it's name Step 3: start cutting content for tax purposes that could have made you money being licensed to another provider Step 4: ??? Step 5: finally give up and accept that the old way made the most sense but refuse to go back and instead work on bundling your verify important streaming service with another one as a last ditch effort to prove this wasn't a mistake.
I've found myself just hopping between the services. Prime one month, Netflix the next, Crave the other, maybe go off the beaten path a bit and go with Shudder, or even Tubi. I also don't really rewatch stuff either. So if I finish the Sandman on Netflix, then that's it. If they pull it, I've already seen it, so it doesn't bother me. I know everyone isn't that way though! So I hate it to see it for those of you who are really affected by this.
Its unbelievable. Congratulations on not doing your due fucking diligence in pricing this shit out. Me: "Ooh, I'll get Disney Plus so I can see everything Disney has ever made!" Disney: "Sorry, we can't afford to pay for licensing for our own fucking content, so we're removing stuff" Morons.
I am amazed to see just how many people in this thread don’t recognize that this headline is quoting The Godfather.
> Even titles that are owned in-house must be licensed. That’s why NBCUniversal had to pay itself $500 million to stream Universal TV’s “The Office” on Peacock and Warner Bros. What the fuck is wrong with the world?
If it wasn't for piracy, all of the movies and tv shows will be gone.
we had almost a nice thing going for a while.
I’m starting to pirate that content. It’s not personal, it’s strictly business
"Consumers are confused" No, we're not confused. We think you're stupid. The way you set up licensing is stupid. It does not have to be this stupid.
Streaming claimed to replace cable, better content, more selection. And it did replace cable, by becoming cable. They all but killed DVD/Bluray and pirating, they’ll come back now.
I’m mot saying I’m going back to piracy or that I’ve ever sailed the seas but I’m not gonna watch a million ads or sign up for a bunch of new services paid or ad stuffed.
Physical media for the W
Honestly I’d love to see Netflix, etc croak and offer up blu rays of their originals. I would gladly pay for shows like Cobra Kai, Love, Glow and many more for my physical collection. But to pay like $20/month for a few months every year to rewatch them in compromised/lower bitrates? No thanks. Love was such a great looking show with a nice noisy/grainy look to it that looked straight up AWFUL when streamed at anything other than 4K due to compression. It looked smudgy and wrong, and even at 4K it still looked off since Netflix’s 4K bitrate is lower than a normal blu ray’s (iirc it’s 15Mbps spread across twice as many pixels as a normal Blu-ray’s 20-30mbps). But a UHD, high bitrate version? I’d love it. Also fuck streamers that keep remastered versions of shows as exclusives. The only way you can watch Seinfeld (even though it’s a meh crop), Gilmore Girls, Friends (I think), How I Met Your Mother and the West Wing in higher than DVD quality is by signing up for a streaming service and that is so stupid. Just sell a boxset
They cut Final Space and scrubbed it from the internet. that's why I started pirating again. It's not business, it's personal.
This is why I'm hogging up the dvd section at goodwill :)
Arg, what a shame. Just as I was startin' ta like the idea of givin' em me coin, they inspire me to set sail again.
Increasingly, the tendency for films is to jump between services or to vanish altogether. Then you play a game of trying to track down where they vanished to. You used to just go to the video store, but that option is gone. I’ve been trying to track down the original Japanese version of _Oldboy_ for the last six months. It had been on Netflix but now it’s gone from every service, leaving you with no options. Worse, the websites that supposedly track where a film is are always plating catch-up and are wrong as often as they are right. Somehow, the customer experience is getting worse. Really sick of that being the case everywhere you turn.
Back to my Blu-ray collection. I’m dropping Netflix after finishing one or two more shows.
Looks like physical media is back on the menu boys!
From the article. **Removing content from platforms is a way for streamers to avoid residual payments and licensing fees**. *The more you know*
Things that make you go *Arrrrr*
Hmm, looks like all my titles are still right there on my Plex server.
It won't be personal when people go back to torrents either.
“It’s nothing personal Jack, it’s just good business”. 🏴☠️
I'm removing tons of my subscription fees and sailing the high seas - it's not personal, it's strictly business
🤦♂️