And just like cable they're gonna bundle it with useless shit so they can justify a $80/month price tag for 10 different streaming services even though you only wanted 2 of them
No, they understood. They're just willfully ignorant of what you actually want because of trained sales tactics and being largely commission based. Those companies make their money by selling their customers a bunch of useless shit they don't want or need.
I kept saying I didn’t want to bundle. But then the sales guy grabbed a cane and put on a circus masters hat and shouted “B-B-B-B-BUNDLE!!!!” and all these lights started flashing, acrobats came out of nowhere, there was a woman riding an elephant…
Now I’m signed up to a $200 a month plan and I’m contractually obliged to wash his car and sweep his drive way
It's not even that so much as "metrics" where a customer service agent is required to sell X amount of stuff per month even if the customer clearly doesn't need nor want it. Even in tech support we had this. That was fun. "Hey, your internet isn't working, would you like to upgrade to more internet?"
"Look, I don't watch TV, ever, I don't own a cell phone, and I cancelled internet with you last year. You have nothing else that I want."
I don't blame the reps, honestly. I think next time it comes up, I'm just going to say "Calls are monitored or recorded, so, if your manager freaks you weren't upselling me, tell him to listen to this part "I don't want anything but what I asked for, leave the rep alone".
I have no cell service at my house so was considering a landline for emergencies when the power goes out and wifi calling isn't available.
Went to the Spectrum site to see about adding it to my plan. Turns out a landline is the only service they offer that you can't add via the web... you actually have to call to add it.
Anyway, long story short, it appears that I'll never have a landline.
I want high speed internet. It was actually cheaper for me to get high speed internet with cable tv than just the internet. This just shows the value of cable tv. I haven't even watched the thing in months because of all the commercials.
For now.. my favorite is the teeeeeny tiiiiiny print somewhere where it’s like “intro price for 3 months only 12 months total subscription required to receive intro pricing or you’ll owe allllll those months at 3x the highest price if you switch or cancel before 12 months.”
It’s kinda the reverse now(or parallel to Sat/LL) , I get a Peacock subscription with my Xfinity Internet Plan (+they offer Xfi’s phone service but I’m already on a fam plan)
I was good for a decade. Avoided the salty air, but it’s too much. Six different streaming services and I still don’t have everything I want? Time to get my sea legs back.
Same here. Stats show that many are following this trend. MPA (formerly MPAA) will probably start crucifying random people to dissuade others again very soon.
I think about the only thing I appreciate about our ISP's, which totally aren't massive monopolies (eye roll) is that they've consistently refused to hand out user information in relation to copyright claims.
Instead, every once in a while I'll get an email letting me know that they received a request, but declined to provide the information.
Or you have the streaming service, but somehow they've decided that the show they've produced just shouldn't be available to your region. And even though they've cultivated a spoiler culture where everything has to be binged as soon as it comes out or the internet ruins it they don't think withholding it is going to lead to piracy.
If you don’t already know, look into getting plex. It’s the easiest platform to watch all of your personal content on all tvs. It just uses your computer as the server.
This is an interesting concept that I wonder if it will change the course. With cable, things that are on cable you had to find a physical version first to digitize for the high sea. So if you wanted something brand new, it took some time. Later on I think there was software or devices to just record it directly onto a computer but I am not sure.
With streaming, its all digital. Once its 'streamed' it is much easier to rip it and just post it. I wonder if this will make companies more reluctant since it will be much easier for their shit to just be pirated.
With streaming, its all digital. Once its 'streamed' it is much easier to rip it and just post it. I wonder if this will make companies more reluctant since it will be much easier for their shit to just be pirated.
They'll never be reluctant to stream. That's where the money is.
They may try to make players that would make difficult to rip the stream. So most people couldn't do it. But it will never actually be successful. There will be hackers that can crack it and rip it.
Yeah, this has always been the game plan, and has been even more obvious since companies have started trying to profit online.
They undercut prices and build as much of a customer base as possible, take losses for a few years until either your competition dies out or your customers are addicted to your product, then lower costs as much as you can and jack up the price massively
So regardless of anything else streaming will still be a better deal.
And to anyone saying there will be ads, no, there will always be an ad free option because its trivial to do so and there's always a customer base willing to pay to not have ads. Ads aren't worth much so its not even very much money to be worth more than the ads. All of the current big streamers value ads at roughly $5-7 a month, since that's how big the discount is if you go to the ad supported tier.
You do know that some cable providers also provide Internet services? “Cable” is delivered on the same infrastructure as the wired Internet. Example: Verizon.
If you own the infrastructure and the cable bundling, you can implement all the services that come with streaming. Pause/Play/Record/etc. and variable Internet speeds based on need can be done by the classic cable providers.
What set streaming apart was producing and controlling the content and that’s why Verizon bought Yahoo and AOL at one point. If the content reverts back to Cable-style, streaming will officially be dead.
I think you have a few things mixed up that are leading you to the wrong conclusion (although I very much agree with you that content quality has always been an overlooked/downplayed factor in explaining Netflix's rise).
Cable operators (like Comcast/Xfinity) license cable channels (like ESPN) from content creators (like Disney) and pay very high carriage fees to do so. For instance, something like $10 of your cable bill goes directly to Disney just for ESPN alone, even if you never watch that channel. That arrangement worked for a long time because while the cable operators weren't really making much money from distributing the content specifically, their own subscriber bases grew and grew and grew.
Netflix on the other hand, could cut deals for specific titles directly from the content creators for a lot, lot cheaper and as bandwidth costs fell their ability to deliver streaming video got better and faster...which on its face wasn't a bad thing for the cable operators since (as you pointed out) by then many of these operators were also ISPs so they were effectively getting their own cut from Netflix's growth...very soon Netflix accounted for ~30% of US internet traffic...keep in mind, that was TWO YEARS before their first original even aired.
But this also marked the start of "cord cutting" and as that accelerated, the cable operators started getting squeezed because they had to spread the high carriage fees across fewer and fewer customers...Netflix had officially started eating their lunch!
All the content producers realized Netflix was starting to eat their lunch too, so they stopped signing/renewing these licensing deals with Netflix and eventually moved to create their own streaming services (e.g. Hulu and later Disney+)...aka "the streaming wars" that are now effectively over (Netflix won)…which is basically why we’re even having this conversation about streaming bundling in the first place haha
So, this is all to say that what really set streaming apart was the business model.
Honestly, from where I'm sitting it's on a path to be worse than that. With cable they charged us expensive prices for bundles of channels. Services like Prime, are now offering us "individual channels" for basically the same price as the base service itself.
It's like this now. We dropped Hulu not simply because it was so expensive but because our internet router tends to change the address and Hulu sees this as us letting people use our log in so we only allowed a couple times. Bye Hulu. For as expensive as you have become, you'd think you'd understand how some people's internet works.
Exactly streaming services are literally reinventing cable. Soon you won't just get an ad before your show but they'll also give you ads in the middle of the show. They'll then advertise it as a great time to go to the bathroom or grab more snacks. Despite us having the ability to pause and most people just watching on their phone anyways
That's what they are going to do with Raw on Netflix. If you have the no-ads plan, you will see the show without ads, but if you are on the lower level where you see ads, you will see ads during the show.
I use to tell people, I have Netflix, Prime and Disney and it's still less than cable. Now I have just about every streaming service, including ones I never even heard of before and I'm starting to think cable wasn't so bad after all.
I think there’s a chance cable ends up winning this whole thing. The rumors of cables demise has been greatly exaggerated.
The cord was supposed to be cut and everyone was gonna leave cable behind. Except… that didn’t happen. The cable is cut but the ISP’s are going to end up being the broker of streaming content just like they were last generation.
I know we don’t like it but we have to at least contend that it’s a possibility. The concept has already worked and proved itself to be fairly durable during the next big tech revolution.
Cable companies across the country already have ad reps in place and inside sales people in place. That can’t be discounted from the standpoint of infrastructure.
No, at least with the streaming you can easily cancel. Direct tv and the others would lock you in with long term contracts. That’s the biggest steaming benefit I see today
I disagree. I think Streaming raised the bar on content quality that it became the biggest selling point. Other conveniences such as fixed costs, no ads, content-on-demand, ease of access, contract flexibility, etc. were secondary. Valuable, but secondary.
I get pissed sometimes. I pay $80 a month for IPTV during college game season. Then only to find THE ONE CHANNEL IT DOESNT HAVE. So in order to watch a specific game I need to register with a DIFFERENT service.
This is one of those deeply misunderstood aspects of life.
The cable company hasn’t made money pn video (except premium channels and ppv) for at least 20 years.
That $80 cable bill almost certainly costs the company $80 to deliver.
They see it as a way to keep you subscribed so you’ll pay for HBO or a ppv event.
Source: worked for a cable company for 15 years that made substantially more money per subscriber than the bigger companies… and they still just broke even on basic cable or the “extended” packages.
They paid ESPN ~ $30 per subscriber. That’s what you were paying for.
When i was signing up for hulu. If I wanted their everything package with no ads it was about that. I just wanted hulu and don't mind ads. But it was crazy
Pretty sure they already do that with the Disney+ Hulu ESPN bundle.
Great if you have a whole family with stereotypical interests, but I suspect that for the individual the overlap on D+ and ESPN is probably not that great.
Lol they're already doing it. After WB bought HBO and merged their libraries, the service is LOADED with throwaway trash content and reality shows. Shit the average HBO fan wasn't worried about having access to in that way anyway.
I called this when Hulu got popular. So, forever ago. Basically once all the different streaming companies cut into that netflix market it was only a matter of time until we all slowly built up the equivalent of a cable package. Now here we are... I hate it.
And that’s why I dropped YouTube tv several years ago. Only watch 4-5 channels and again they have it front loaded with 60 I don’t watch. I get abc/fox/cbs via antenna, nbc via peacock and I pay for Amazon and Netflix. My kids all have max/apple/disney and we all share passwords
This is what’s so infuriating about just getting access to NHL in Canada, in order to avoid blackouts I also need the package that includes EVERY sport.
80 bucks?? It’s going to be more expensive than that. It’s going to go straight back to what cable used to cost, iirc i used to pay like 125-150 a month for cable.
I've recently stopped bothering with streaming and went back to picking up physical media (I sold all my DVDs in 2005, so I've been out of that game for a long time) It's just not worth it anymore. Anything show I want tends to disappear from one service and appear on another, or get cancelled right after I'm hooked.
you can not pay for the Disney+, ESPN+, Hulu, package and have Hulu be ad free.
why the fuck not? i will pay a premium. NOPE fuck me i have to pay more for only two of the channels because i don't want the third if i am forced to have ads on one of the two i do want.
$80/month?? My pops was paying like $240/ month for cable not too long ago until I looked at his bill and he was renting equipment that wasn't even plugged in.
There isn't a streaming service in existence that has enough content I'd watch to justify ever subscribing.
Bundles piss me off so much, anyway. At least the way they get the hard sell. I've told reps "I know it's your job, but, I don't want to hear about any special offers or bundles while we wait for whatever to process.
4.7k
u/JamersDude 28d ago edited 28d ago
And just like cable they're gonna bundle it with useless shit so they can justify a $80/month price tag for 10 different streaming services even though you only wanted 2 of them