It was inevitable…
What’s so ironic is that this proved that piracy is not simply something consumers just do. The main driving force is companies trying to extract the maximum amount of profit for less and less product.
Yet, you can bet that causes of piracy will be put on those “evil” consumers once again.
It’s the same with ads. I wouldn’t mind seeing ads if it was reasonable, and not whatever the fuck the internet without ad-blocker is.
This was my exact journey.
Welcome back.
Some friends and I have a list of movies we want to watch (stuff set in NYC in the 50s-70s). It was a pain in the ass trying to find where they were available to stream. I didn’t really want to pay $4 to rent when we were already paying monthly fees.
Also, things should enter the public domain after like 14 years.
I have a lot of shows and movies on my watchlist that I can’t stream anywhere (including rental) and there’s no physical place to rent them either.
To name a few: Counterpart, Star Trek Discovery, Star Trek Lower Decks, Dr Who, Farscape, Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, and The Abyss.
I’m not going to buy a movie or show to watch it once, but other than that I’m here with the money in my hand ready to give it to the license owners. Apparently they don’t want it.
I wouldn’t mind all the platforms if they sticked to the initial $5/Mo, but now all of them want +$10/Mo and they include ads
The CEO of Disney recently said that they’re actively trying to price people out of the ad-free subscriptions. Once they introduced ads to a paid service, it was game over for the consumers. Kind of reminds me of what happened with cable TV back in the day.
I’m not sure they’ll be as successful. Media can be pirates from their platforms, so just by making or posting the content they are supplying the pirate market with good quality copies.
Viewers just aren’t the same type of captive audience that they were with cable many years ago. Price it too high, and and a few years subscribers will drop, but people will still have access to the content
We’ll see how it goes though. I could be wrong, normies can be pretty weak willed.
