One thing I want to debate about this is I remember how expensive cable used to be. It was like 120 bucks. Maybe you got like a $70 package or $80 package where you had barely any channels. I ain’t spending that much on streaming services!! I don’t know if I’m an outlier but I got Three and that’s about it. I pay around 40 bucks a month.
Yea these memes are dumb and I feel made by children who never paid for cable.
But the direction is certainly heading towards the realm of cable prices…
- Netflix: $15.49
- Amazon Prime Video: $14.99
- Apple TV+: $6.99
- HBO Max: $15.99
- Disney+: $10.99
- Hulu: $14.99
Total: $79.44 per month
So maybe when you account for inflation it is still only half of what cable costs,.perhaps. but those are the cheaper plans. For HDR support for Netflix it’s like $25, and it’s the reason I cancelled Netflix.
I don’t think the meme is dumb, just ahead of it’s time, but it’s calling out what is certainly happening.
Most streaming services now include ads in the paid subscription.
Inch the ad ratio and prices up another 40% and we are getting pretty close to cable experience/cost. And that’s only a few years away when we look at how much costs have raised over the last 10 yrs.
If each service raises price $1/month every year and you have 6 services, then in 5 yrs you’re paying $30 more per month, prob around $100+.
And the six you listed are the big ones, but there’s plenty of others that have exclusive content. There’s also Criterion if you like classics/arthouse, Crunchyroll if you like anime. Paramount, AMC, Showtime, Peacock, etc etc, etc.
Don’t forget you can usually bundle cable with Internet. Right now if I had all of those services plus my Internet it’d be $200/mo.
You combine 6 streaming services, each of them alone already better than cable, and it is still just as expensive.
So cancel some of them and rotate. You probably aren’t watching them all, and they only come out with (good) new content a couple of times a year.
With cable packages you would miss stuff. With each streaming service owning their own content, it’s there whenever you want it.
Prime is like 5/month here.
It used to be 3 though. Is it triple as expensive where you live? (Us?)
Or watched cable ADs apparently, cable TV ads were like…5 minutes or maybe even longer. Just commercial after commercial, so long that it was viable to use them to go-to the bathroom when you didn’t have DVR lmao
You know how some shows are 23 minutes long and some are 42? The reason for those odd times is because the shows had half an hour or an hour timeslots and the rest of it would be ads, so in an hour show you would get nearly 20 minutes of ads
What’s worse is with long running shows like mythbusters you can see the shows runtime slowly being chipped away in favor of more ads, the 2003 season’s episodes had runtimes of 50 minutes, by 2016 it was down to 42
Exactly. Cable had contracts for X months, and everything was packaged so you couldn’t just get one channel you liked.
Now streaming is splitting off into a bunch of services. That’s not great but on the other hand I’m not on a contract. I can stop and start whenever i want. I spend anywhere from $12-25 a month. All i ever wanted was for cable services to be unbundled. If I’m wanting to be subscribed to every service all of the time then yeah that’s going to get expensive. But if i just want to watch 1-2 shows at a time then I’m still much better off streaming than i would’ve been with cable 10+ years ago.
Edit: and when i cut the cord in 2010 my cable bill was $120/mo for basic cable + 1 package iirc.
It sucks that Netflix doesn’t have as much as they used to because stuff has been pulled for other services but the value proposition for streaming still blows cable out of the water, even with price increases. Adding free or low cost commercial tiers for more price sensitive people doesn’t give me commercials.
With all the premium channels and three HD-DVR boxes I used to pay over $200, before internet, more than a decade ago with much of that going to a shitty middle man company. And that’s for commercial, appointment TV. Even with the premium stations you had to DVR shit to watch later. I subscribe to a ton of services, even some fringe ones, so I almost never come across something that I can’t watch immediately with no commercials on any device I have access to anywhere in the world. And with annual rates, discounts from my phone company, and kickbacks from credit cards I’m still under $100. And now the money goes to companies that actually produce content, even if some of them suck for other reasons.
With what I’m getting I would pay double what I used to for cable, but as it is I’m paying half. It seems like a lot of people complaining never paid for cable with all the packages/premium stations themselves and don’t remember how much appointment TV sucked.
Adding free or low cost commercial tiers for more price sensitive people doesn’t give me commercials.
The thing is they didn’t add a new, cheaper or free “ad supported” option. They added ads to the current price, and then told us to pay more if we wanted to keep the same experience. This is one of the 7 dread turd pillars of enshittifi ation.
I don’t recall that happening to any of the many services I subscribe to. I’ve always paid for no commercials and I’ve never had commercials without having to change plans, although I think the name has changed sometimes. Maybe my price went up and they added a new commercial tier near the price I used to pay? Could you give an example?
People keep using this term enshitification but my experience has only gotten better and better since I cut the cord and now more companies offer streaming increasing what is available to me. My total price has gone up as more things become available but it’s still less than half of what I paid for cable.
Edit: I just remembered prime video did that. They started charging $3/month for no commercials, but that’s the only one I can think of.
I pay around 40 bucks a month.
that’s still more than pirating it, even if you pay for a vpn
My mom’s is the most basic she can get in her area, and it costs 218 dollars a month.
Wow, that’s a lot! Is it at least bundled with internet? I haven’t bought cable tv in over a decade, so I’ve no idea what the real price of it is after the intro prices they try to lure me in with.
People always forget inflation in these discussions too. Inflation has been about 50% since 2007 around when Netflix started to become popular. So multiply those prices by 1.5 and you’ll have a more accurate comparison to today’s prices. Not only that, but the cable bundles that have all the best high definition and spirts packages were well over $200 at the time ($300 in today’s currency).
Streaming not only has better features, better resolution, less hassle, but is 100% still cheaper than cable. And don’t forget that about 50% of airtime on cable was ads. Those cable companies were milking us for every cent and all of our patience they possibly could. People were sick of it for decades by that point and that’s why Netflix was so successful in the first place.
There is yet one more alternative to pirating, and that is to simply not play the game. I’ve been so much happier since i stopped consuming mass media. No cable, no streaming.
Right? Like what do you even get for paying all that money? The next generic marvel movie? Cashgrab nostalgia-bait sequels like fucking happy gilmore 2?? Disney’s next culturally diverse not-quite-princess movie???
Learn to paint. Plant some flowers or vegetables. Build something. Create instead of consume.
I’m luckily young enough i haven’t finished my list of actually good “old” media, so yeah, seven seas all the way
Yes. Play old console games with emulators. No ads, no micro-transactions, entirely free.
Fascinating! My taste for it has kinda gone away as I’ve got older, to the point I can’t imagine how I could sit my ass down for over an hour. Instead of doing literally anything else.
I do still watch some streaming stuff for video essayists, music, and tutorial/instruction videos (work or personal project related)
I pirate things I could stream legally. It’s often a better experience.
My only issue with piracy is it doesn’t add to the number of streams. So it might cause some studios to cancel shows they don’t think are performing well.
Well thats why i wait untill they are done. Too many canceled shows burned me.
Netflix baited me into a “new” sci-fi horror show. When it got to the end I looked up when the next season would be out.
Not only was it cancelled, it was cancelled without conclusion ten years ago.
Apparently it was only “new” to Netflix, but that didn’t stop them pushing it as new content.
https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/c/piracy
or
!piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com
for your convenience~
Hi there! Looks like you linked to a Lemmy community using a URL instead of its name, which doesn’t work well for people on different instances. Try fixing it like this: !piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com
I get a 404 here… I’m using Boost and I’m on lemmy.world. Would either of those be blocking?
lemmy.world might be blocking it. Just visit lemmy.dbzer0.com
It’s blocked by a lot of instances because they don’t want to deal with potential legal issues from providing pirated content. A lot of lemmy instances are based in places where it’s illegal to share pirated content, such as the United States.
If you give me what I want to watch and no ad’s then I’ll pay a fairly high amount for it. The moment there are ad’s I’m out. I’m so sick of ad’s that are forced on me. Slightly unrelated, but billboards should be banned outright.
Isn’t this effectively the same as asking for the higher-tier ad-free subscription? Not that I inherently disagree with you, but I feel like they already offer (part of) your solution.
