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As 'Subscription Fatigue' Sets In, the OTT Reckoning May Be Upon Us (adweek.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Deciding which streaming outlet you want to subscribe to can be just as hard as finding a show itself. With options from big players like Netflix, HBO Now, Hulu, Showtime, Amazon and YouTube Premium -- and looming new platforms from the likes of Disney, Apple, AT&T and NBCUniversal -- consumers are already starting to grow frustrated with the crowded streaming marketplace as "subscription fatigue" sets in, according to Deloitte's 13th edition of its Digital Media Trends survey.
Viewers are taking advantage of these options: the average video consumer subscribes to three video streaming services, said Deloitte. But they're growing frustrated over just how many options they have. Nearly half of those surveyed, at 47 percent, said they are frustrated by the growing number of subscriptions and services to watch their shows. And this audience grows attached to the content: 57 percent of consumers said it frustrates them when shows and movies disappear from their streaming libraries.
Viewers are taking advantage of these options: the average video consumer subscribes to three video streaming services, said Deloitte. But they're growing frustrated over just how many options they have. Nearly half of those surveyed, at 47 percent, said they are frustrated by the growing number of subscriptions and services to watch their shows. And this audience grows attached to the content: 57 percent of consumers said it frustrates them when shows and movies disappear from their streaming libraries.
I would get YouTube Premium if it was 2 bucks a month. The current price, higher than Netflix, isn't worth it.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Apple knows this. Maybe it is the secret sauce in its soon-to-be-announced offering.
I for one agree. I don't want to sign up with a bunch of different places and have to maintain multiple accounts, deal with multiple renewal periods/expirations, have my credit card info scattered all over the place, etc.
What I want an "Amazon of on-line media consumption". One place, one bill. I add to my account the stuff I want, I deal with one entity, and leave it up to that entity to pay off the content providers under whatever arrangement they may have. I can pick up or drop services as desired, and just maintain it all at one place.
time to give those 12TB disk a shot and upgrade to gigabit internet!
57 percent of consumers said it frustrates them when shows and movies disappear from their streaming libraries.
No kidding; Amazon has taken to moving off a lot of both shows and movies to linked providers so now one would need to pony up extra $$ for five or six other services to get the same old selections.
What we need is a subscription service, that manages your subscription services.
For a small monthly fee, you can pay for small monthly fees, and have an easy way to manage all those subscriptions, for just a small monthly fee.
I don't see where frustration is coming from, as these days it's so easy to start and stop subscriptions.
I have Netflix regularly, and Amazon Prime mostly for shipping but do use video also. Beyond that though, I just join in and then drop different services depending on what I want to see - so I subscribe to HBO when Game of Thrones is on, dropping it after (and also catching up on a few other shows they have while I'm there). I subscribed to CBS fo ra little while to watch Star Trek Discovery, then dropped it when I had seen enough.
This is the golden age of subscription. I don't care how many different streaming options there are, as long as I can take them or leave them when I see fit - so much better than cable ever was.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Rememeber when every website wanted to be a "portal"? Well, everyone wants to be a "platform" now. Gotta sign up and pay, too. For all of them. So this is just stupid and they coulda seen that one coming right from the start. Back in the napster times.
In fact, that race was more or less won when apple strongarmed the idiot entertainment mafia to give in and open up the music for streaming. One thing for tracks, another for streaming. Cool. Ten different things for streaming? No go. They had their chance, they'd been told time and again, and they didn't want to listen. No sympathy from me, idiots.
It's the ever changing offer. Today you have Series A on Streaming Service A. Tomorrow, on Service B. Then it vanishes entirely. Only to resurface on C next week. Maybe. And heaven forbid you want to see more than one show. Because one thing you can be almost certain of: It is on another streaming service. Or will be. Or will no longer be once you subscribed to that other service for exactly this one show, but now you're tied to it for a year.
Especially that last bit gets people pissed. Streaming services could be a killer for torrents if, and only if, they become at least halfway reliable. Else, torrents are simply less hassle.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
For some reason in the last few decades, businesses have lost touch with reality in terms of business models -- they think they can grow at 10% forever, or that we will just keep spending more and more money.
When I got Netflix, it wasn't long before I decided that I wasn't using cable TV anymore, and that it wasn't really value for money.
But I'm not prepared to get a bunch of streaming services because I want specific shows -- it shows up on Netflix, or it doesn't ... and if it's a movie I may buy it on BluRay, or I won't.
If it doesn't show up on Netflix, or I'm not willing to buy the film on disc ... it simply doesn't exist to me.
I'm not spending additional money to watch Game of Survivor Brother Thrones season 76.
The problem is these companies don't seem to grasp that if we need subscriptions for everything we want to watch, eventually we have more subscriptions than we can manage or afford.
At this point, any new streaming subscription service holds no interest, because I don't care about any specific entertainment enough to pay for another subscription.
At a certain point, people will just decide on the minimum they can live with ... and if they're not watching that hot new show everyone is watching, then tough. This might be a shock to the system for people who feel entitled to every bit of content, but unless you're willing to pay for a half a dozen subscriptions, you pretty much have to decide what you're willing to spend.
The Pirate Bay and friends are still the way to go.
(I would pay for HBO if I could a la carte.)
Because copyright fascists are too cucked to do it themselves. See also epic store.
captcha:Rectify
Was there ever a time when people were likely to subscribe to more than a handful of streaming services? My wife and I were just talking about this this morning. We would love to watch Cobra Kai but have no interest in signing up for anything, not even a free trial. Same with Star Trek Discovery.
It might be easier for us to avoid FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out) because we are not cord-cutters.
We never had cable to begin with.
The Daddy casts sleep on the Baby. The Baby resists!
Once someone sniffs "profit", everyone has to try to cash in, completely destroying the things that made the original profitable in the first place. Might as well get cable again.
I've found that Prime & my dvd/bluray collection is all I need.
Now, back to The Waterboy.
Jesus Christ, people, quit watching videos and do something with your lives. If you don't have enough time to watch everything, then the problem isn't what you think it is. Put down the fucking phone/tablet/computer and do something useful. It's much more satisfying.
I don't respond to AC's.
Subscription and login free since 2001
If you try to recreate a cable package through multiple streaming services it will end up costing just as much
As recent cord-cutters
We already had Amazon Prime for free delivery etc. and will keep it
We have a Netflix subscription which we will keep.
We have an antenna and DVR for over the air broadcasts (Networks/PBS/Spanish stations for soccer games with Spanish commentary)
Then we will probably just have one other active service at a time.
At the moment it is HBO through Amazon (we are binge watching Game of Thrones and Veep to catchup) and we will probably get rid of it and switch to something else.
eg we might go with Hulu and binge watch a few series from them and then move on to something else
An area where this falls down a little is if there are multiple shows on different providers that are still producing new shows and which you "must" watch as they are first aired, at the moment that is not an issue for us.
Also a lot of live sport is spread over multiple different cable stations so attempting to get them all would be expensive.
... of how many corporate hands they want in their bank accounts every month.
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
... to watch that brainwashing propaganda bullshit that they call movies/TV series these days. Was always the case, but much less retarded back in the day. Now they are really in permanent Full Retard mode.
But without the "Dark Lord" and "in the darkness bind them" bits.
One service. One flat monthly fee. No ads. Watch whatever the hell you want whenever you want. Not the increasingly fractured streaming mess that things have turned into.
After what they end up teaching children at the end of season 2 of The Dragon Prince, I'm so glad I can switch to Disney+
This is the last thing that should be made into a government utility. Would you rather watch Netflix or the BBC?
...but commerce is natural across humans. If governments (or in this case the stupid companies themselves) try to constrain commerce in unnatural ways, a black market is a certainty.
In re all the flippin streaming services specifically?
If you decide to leave the commons and hide your products in pay-to-enter walled gardens, we're going to find out two things:
1) how good your security is, because ultimate someone's just going to break in and steal it, or
2) your shit isn't worth the trouble.
-Styopa
Same as the told cable-TV.
You need to subscribe to multiple providers(packages) to get the few of shows you really want to watch, and the remainder is like the old cable cliche of "500 channels and nothing good is on." How many mediocre shows that take place in some dystopian future do we need?
Smart money will bet that in a year or two, these providers will begin to divide their offerings into basic & premium content.
So, when cable companies bundled up a bunch of channels and services, consumers got peeved about it and demanded "a-la-carte" services, so they could pick and choose the channel(s) they want.
Now, we have all these individualized channels and services to pick from, you'd figured it would be a consumer's dream-come-true? No! Now we are getting arguments to go back to bundling and "one-stop-service".
Make up your minds people! /rant
I am personally adamantly against the subscription model. You are basically a renter of content, and the amount of content you are renting is completely at the discretion of the content provider. It incentivizes the gradual splitting up of content into ever smaller "bundles," each with its own access fee, which can, will, and does increase over time. Meanwhile in exchange for your monthly fee all you get is "access." Transitory, intangible, worthless. And as this article points out, now you already have to subscribe to three or four to get the shows you actually want, which gets expensive. They are gradually tipping the ROI scale as far in their direction as they can. I'd much rather stick with paying a flat fee to purchase media which I then own outright and can watch whenever I choose from then on. Of course, I'm a project guy; when I watch ANYTHING, it's usually a how-to video on Youtube in the middle of building or fixing something, so I could care less about media anyway.
But they're growing frustrated over just how many options they have.
No, what these people are complaining about is that nobody has been able to deliver on a reasonably priced one- or two-stop a la carte experience for viewing content they care about. And they're placing the blame squarely where it belongs - on subscription services basing their model on producing "you can only find this show on this service" content to try to lock in their piece of the pie.
I don't have to subscribe to a video game service if I want to play the newest video game. I can just buy whatever game interests me.
I don't have to subscribe to a musical venue service if I want to go to the newest concert. I can just buy a ticket to the concert that interests me.
I don't have to subscribe to a movie ticket service if I want to go to the newest movie. I can just buy a ticket for whatever movie interests me.
What is so special about TV shows that intrinsically requires a subscription to a service offering many different shows when all I wanted was to follow the newest episodes of one or a few?
Keep in mind that after having said all that, streaming is still an improvement over cable.
we got what we wished for.
No we didn't. What we wanted was to have one bill, not ten.
And before you try to claim otherwise, that is not an argument about pricing, which is why I omitted the "You can make good arguments about pricing" part of your post. An argument about pricing would be "I am paying too much". "I am paying too many entities" is not an argument about pricing.
Sure, but you still need a cable bill worth of streaming services to get most of the content out there.
http://progressquest.com/spoltog.php?name=Son+Of+Son+Of+DarkRookie
Am I the only person here who has no idea what OTT means?
Ala carte 'channels' maybe sort-of but I'll move the goal post and say it's not true ala carte of selecting only the set of shows I might find interesting in one location. Right now it's like going to a cafeteria craving mashed potatoes and gravy but it's only offered with overcooked brussels sprouts pre-mixed into the mashed potatoes.
All options are full of crap. Tons of crap. Sure there are a couple semi-recent movies, but that is about it. Most of it is not worth watching, which is exactly why they can buy tons of hours of stuff for dirt cheap.
Very frustrating is that there is no good indexing service I have found to tell which of our 3 subscriptions might have it. WTF?
Want to go back and watch a good show again after giving up finding anything new in despair? Too bad, it disappeared.
... a resurgence of torrenting.
I do this: Each month, try a new subscription and cancel an old one.
After a year, pick one to have permanently, and try the others again.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
Sure, but you still need a cable bill worth of streaming services to get most of the content out there.
No, you don't. I keep Hulu, Netflix, and Prime (and that's more for shipping than video) year round. If a show I want to watch comes on HBO, Shotime, Starz, CBS, whatever, I'll sub for a month, watch the show, and un-sub. Most people don't need every service every month of the year.
I browse on +1 so AC's need not respond, I won't see it.
For years, people screamed they wanted cable ala carte, they wanted to pick and choose what channels they get and now that future is here. This is the future we wanted. You can make good arguments about pricing but we got what we wished for.
No we bloody did not. What we got was a bill for each channel form a different company with different policies, terms, and conditions, with each and every one trying to gobble up as much of our public and private information as possible to sell off at a profit.
What we wanted was one bill from one company and to not pay for what we do not use. Now we have many bills and pay to be used!
Which is a term for direct to internet content services. Had to look it up. If it's not a widely known acronym, it should be spelled out in the title or summary.
Touché maybe if they sold and priced the different dishes separately they'd make more money and have happier customers. Now just do something about the cold food and the constant push to sign up for the cafeteria payment card.
I buy one or two new DVDs/Blu-Rays a month and used ones whenever my fancy is struck. They are my physical disc and shall remain mine. Last year went through the trouble of registering them all through Ultraviolet and all the other streaming services, only to receive an email from Ultraviolet that they're shutting down and all that is going away.
One of these days I'll buy a little storage network and rip my library, but I'll keep the discs - gotta figure out a backup strategy. Meanwhile, I'll keep my Amazon Prime and Netflix subscriptions and pay for HBO when John Oliver is in-season. But Disney and CBS and all these boutique streaming services will never get a dime from me. I found just how shallow the streaming pool was when I went looking for certain obscure movies (The Return of the Tall Blonde Man With One Black Shoe anyone? Bueller?) and with the death of Criterion's service, that's it. Amazon and Netflix plus HBO occasionally does me quite well - I don't need more TV viewing.
When you sympathize with stupidity, you start thinking like an idiot.
This is not à la carte. À la carte would be still using the cable provider, but picking and choosing what channels you get from that provider rather than having to pay for bundles of channels of shit you don't want. Instead, what we've ended up with as an alternative to the "cable co" is having to subscribe to umteen different streaming services and pay umteen different bills every month. This is neither what we wanted nor asked for.
And the blame falls on the content owners. It's the content owners that force the cable co to bundle a bunch of shit channels with 1 good channel. It's the content owners that are popping up their own subscription streaming services and muddying the stream. It's the content owners - Discovery, Disney, CBS, etc. - that are fucking us all the same, whether it's via bundled channels through the cable co or by forcing us to subscribe to multiple streaming services to get the things we want.
This is completely true, but it calls to mind the old saying about the grass being greener on the other side. This makes me think that there's a more ideal solution somewhere out there, but until then we'll just repeat the cycle between consolidation and segmentation of service.
And these content providers wonder why piracy still exists. I'm sorry, but a person shouldn't have to subscribe to more than one or two streaming services to get the content they want. Any more than that is a market failure. It's far too easy to just toss the wanted series or movie into Sonarr or Radarr, and magically have it appear in your library. The best part of this is that it will never disappear from your library when a licensing deal expires.
What we need in the video world is mandatory, non-discriminatory licensing for content, similar to what exists in music. Netflix should be able to provide whatever they want, and just pay the same licensing fee as everyone else. Same thing goes for Netflix produced content.
...si hoc legere nimium eruditionis habes...
A big problem I have with streaming service silos is they each present their own (bad) UI and search space. So if there's a show I want to watch, it's quite difficult to figure out which of the services will have it other than to go to each Roku app, find its search screen, type in the query one letter at a time into the on-screen keyboard, find out the show isn't there, and repeat until I've exhausted all my options and, maybe, resort to just finding a torrent and having it in less time than that just took.
You can search the web but "which streaming service is show X on" is a surprisingly difficult query. At one point I investigated starting a website that automatically cataloged this information. Turns out these services tend not to have a usable API, and also tend to go out of their way to make screen scraping difficult as well.
Starts to make possessing your own digital media library more appealing, not just to avoid the silos, but to have a sane user experience.
Expect to incur "cancellation penalties".
Want to watch the newest episode?, you need to back-date your subscription to ep 1.
just like the "disney vault", the streaming vault, will have more content for people who stay longer.
For most of the TV channels, if you subscribe to a service which offers the channel, you can login directly to that channel's site and stream their content. The movie studios need to set up a similar system, where if a service you subscribe to carries a movie, then they will stream it to you after confirming your subscription.
What we need now is some master app which coordinates all this. Right now if you try to stream like this directly from all the channels, you'll have to go through a login procedure for each channel, where they redirect you to your subscription service and you have to login. You have to repeat this every few months. What's needed is something which automates this step, automatically verifying your subscription whenever you try to access a channel's stream. That would make the entire procedure seamless and transparent.
The only remaining troublesome feature would then be compiling a list of which channels each subscription service gives you, so you can compare them and decide which ones to subscribe to. For some reason they don't make it easy to compare channel offerings. I've had to get channel lists from news websites, and those lists rapidly go out of date as channels are added or removed. If each service would just offer their current channel list in xml format on their website, it'd be trivial to create a website which automatically compares them. You could pre-select which channels were must-have, might-watch, and never-watch, and the website could figure out which single service was best for you, or which multiple services gave you what you wanted with fewest subscriptions, or for lowest subscription price.
I would hate to think that the real OTT were to come to an end.
https://app.box.com/WitthoftResume Code: https://github.com/cellocgw
"...57 percent of consumers said it frustrates them when shows and movies disappear from their streaming libraries."
All too true. Netflix dropped the stuff I really wanted to watch. So I dropped them.
You all thought 'cutting the cord' was going to save you money and get you what you want and only what you want? Look again: how many of you have to now get multiple subscriptions to multiple 'streaming services' to get all the entertainment you want? How close is that to what your cable bill was? Oh and don't forget to factor in how much your internet costs, too, counting your wireless bill if you use that as well. Is it now equal to or over what your cable bill was? If so then congratulations, you fell for it all hook line and sinker. Sucker!
I have no streaming services. I go outside and hike, go to bars and meet people, and other forms of entertainment that give me far more bang per buck than Hollywood tripe.
Consumers are willing to pay for a streaming service and we don't mind there being 10-20 streaming services but all of them need to have all the premium content included and for it to stay. Nobody cares about the non-premium content at all. So content makers, stop splitting off your own streaming services and stop selling exclusive access. Let consumers have their cake and eat it to and race these guys to the bottom and make up the difference by making them all pay for content all the time instead of one at a time.
Instead of charging per piece of content charge by first view and second view from a given unique household. Second view carries the highest premium because that means something was worth watching again. Beyond second view who cares? That or charge for simultaneous streams but it is harder to spread the royalties out that way. As for advertising subsidized movies and tv, let that go the way of dodo.
Expect to incur "cancellation penalties".
Why should I expect that , when absolutely zero streaming services do that today.
Want to watch the newest episode?, you need to back-date your subscription to ep 1.
Again I refer you to my previous statement regarding absolutely no streaming services working like that.
just like the "disney vault", the streaming vault, will have more content for people who stay longer.
No services work like that and at this point any one that tried would go down in flames.
Now what I CAN see Disney doing, is saying some movies are only available at some time during the year... but that would be for everyone.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I don't want to sign up with a bunch of different places and have to maintain multiple accounts, deal with multiple renewal periods/expirations, have my credit card info scattered all over the place, etc.
That's the beauty of using an AppleTV for this, today.
A few services (notably Amazon and Netflix) you still need to sign up for separately.
But pretty much everything else, you can subscribe to content in an app using in-app purchase on AppleTV.
That means none of those companies have any info on you beyond account creation. They do not have your credit card. They do not manage subscriptions - you do through the Apple subscriptions management screen on the AppleTV. You can even subscribe, cancel any time in the month and still keep using the service until the expiration of the month subscription, so you don't forget to unsubscribe.
I have no idea what the Apple video service will offer beyond that but I am pretty dubious about signing up, because the way it works is already pretty good just subscribing and unsubscribing from apps. Its the ala-carte dream I always had about video content, and I'll be dammed if anyone can pull me out of this new video paradise.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Thanks for the NEWSFLASH Grandpa!
No, you don't. I keep Hulu, Netflix, and Prime (and that's more for shipping than video) year round.
That's all I have, and honeslty it's more than I need. Prime we have because of the shipping otherwise wouldn't bother with it- it has the worst UI and worst selection. It's not worth getting Prime just for TV.
That leaves Hulu and Netflix. The wife can't live without Netflix and the kids can't live without Hulu. I watch a few shows from both but could do without either. So both Hulu and Netflix stay for now to keep the family happy.
Three streaming services is enough and where I'm stopping. I want to watch a couple of shows on CBS but I'm not going to pay extra for it- so screw All Access. I'd like to watch GOT but not paying extra for it- so screw HBO. Nothing I want to watch on Disney- it's just going to be a bunch of comic book crap and kids programs. Even if they get something I want- screw it, not paying extra.
Streaming service fatigue- I don't need or want more- I'm certainly not going to pay for more.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
For years, people screamed they wanted cable ala carte, they wanted to pick and choose what channels they get and now that future is here. This is the future we wanted. You can make good arguments about pricing but we got what we wished for.
It's kinda like a la carte but instead of picking "the history channel" and "discovery channel" you get to pick between:
"variety package 1", "variety package 2", and "variety package 3".
If you just want documentaries, or history stuff, there's no way to pick just the type of shows you want- you can only pick from variety packages of which only 2 or 3 shows you're interested in in each bucket.
No one wanted what we have now.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
or just torrent for free, no one really cares if these cocksuckers go out of business
I pay $60 a year to my local PBS station to have access to the archives on demand. I use iTunes to rent higher quality (foreign and independent; not Hollywood crap) films, I watch all the Colbert/Oliver/Meyer/Maher stuff on youtube for free, and I rent DVDs and Bluray discs from my local video shop! None of the streaming services can top this, really.
The future is ad supported services like Pluto and premium services like HBO. If you agree with me on this point, then you will invest in TTD like I did.
I don't see where frustration is coming from, as these days it's so easy to start and stop subscriptions.
Yeah I know. Just yesterday I was thinking I wanted to a movie so I sat down at the TV, browsed through the library, fired up the website, cancelled my Netflix subscription, jumped on HBO subscribed, downloaded the app to the TV, made some popcorn and ... well at that point it was bed time. But it's okay in the morning I ... wasn't in the mood for a horror film so I opened up the website, cancelled my HBO subscription, jumped on the Netflix website ...
Easy as pie. What a golden age we live in.
I don't see where frustration is coming from, as these days it's so easy to start and stop subscriptions.
I have Netflix regularly, and Amazon Prime mostly for shipping but do use video also. Beyond that though, I just join in and then drop different services depending on what I want to see - so I subscribe to HBO when Game of Thrones is on, dropping it after (and also catching up on a few other shows they have while I'm there). I subscribed to CBS fo ra little while to watch Star Trek Discovery, then dropped it when I had seen enough.
Sorry, my torrent finished downloading halfway through reading that. I'm just not interested in the question of "which damn service hosts this thing I want to watch". Netflix used to have a lot of value to me, as I could browse it when I was bored and actually find something. That's fading. I was happy to pay one subscription, and let Netflix sort out the money between all the IP owners but that's the service I was paying for.
There's just no way I'm going to try to figure out what's on a dozen different services and hope to stumble over something interesting. That' never going to be easier than torrents, or just finding something better to d than watch TV.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
No services work like that and at this point any one that tried would go down in flames.
Disney. This sort of shit exactly fits their monetization mindset. Once they pull in all the Marvel movies, Star Wars, and Disney and Pixar movies into their own streaming service, expect them to work like that. It's the business model they've had for decades, after all.
Whatever works to extract the most money from people (and especially from parents), that's what they'll do, no matter how annoying.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Perhaps the bigger issue here is "content fatigue". We live in a day & age when the production model for all digital media (movies, music, video games, etc.) is quantity over quality. With streaming services now producing their own content (Netflix exclusives, Amazon Prime exclusives.... you get the picture), there is now this silent race to constantly push out as much exclusive media as possible. Give the new Disney streaming service a couple of months- I guarantee you that they too will have their own Disney exclusives that require a subscription to access (if they don't have these already...).
Personally, I would rather consume quality content once in while than consume a constant flow of bullshit. Modern-day movies and TV shows use special effects to fill the gaps in their half-assed productions. I am a millennial, yet I still find myself enjoying classic movies from the 1970-2000 era more than the mass quantities of exclusive content that I get through Netflix and Amazon Prime.
How about creating a streaming service that only offers top-rated productions, both modern and classic, as well as the occasional, well-directed exclusive movie? I would definitely subscribe to that.
"The cause of fear is ignorance."
Expect to incur "cancellation penalties".
Why should I expect that , when absolutely zero streaming services do that today.
Amazon Prime gives a discount for annual billing compared to monthly billing.
I choose....none of them. Rather, there are plenty of free options out there instead. I'll watch a few fucking ads in exchange for 'free'. Fuck the subscription model...its not like the content is that great regardless.
Whenever I have had Netflix or Hulu I still end up endlessly searching for something decent to watch after a week. Now its Tubi and Vudu mostly. Pluto is good for regular TV. Crackle still sucks....what a shitty fucking app lol.
The article about subscription fatigue is locked behind a subscription:
I tried to register, giving my email, a random 16-character string as a password, first name, last name, and country. But because I left the following fields blank, the "JOIN" button was grayed out.
Maybe I'm over reading the emotion (though certainly there are others here who show it), but why get so angry about it?
Do people feel left out of society because they can't access content that others are experiencing? I truly don't understand the direct vitriol of "having" to subscribe to multiple services.
Personally, I hated bundled cable, and I like the choices of services now.
I wish I had mod points now.
I don't see where frustration is coming from,
Enjoy being dumb
I have no subscription fatigue, because I don't have any subscriptions. Instead, I try to do valuable things with my life.
Here are ten great things to do as alternatives to wasting your life online:
Volunteer at a Homeless Shelter / Soup Kitchen / Animal Shelter / Fire Dept / EMS Dept - they all are desperate for help
Take senior citizens grocery shopping and help them with their doctors appointments
Take your family on a hike / to the park / be outside (without phones)
Volunteer at your local Awana Clubs
Spend time getting to know your neighbors
Deliver meals to the homebound
Visit random people in the hospital
Become a Guardian ad Litem
Put a plant where the TV used to be .....
Make Humanity Great Again
I don't understand either. My $0 subscription to youporn relieves my frustration, and they never delete my faves.
I have a tolerance for 3:
1. Netflix : always
2. Amazon - since it comes with Prime
3. Crunchyroll - since it's cheap
Now:
Disney: only subscribe for when the newest stuff is out, else, possible see it in the cinema, at matinee prices
Hulu: Nope
CBS: Possibly watch a season of Star Trek, cancel after
HBO: Possibly watch a season of something, cancel after
Roku: Nope - you already got my money, just shut up and aggregate the content.
Youtube: It's free
Netflix always gets money, the rest get the scraps, and will sugger from a growing/shrinking problem.
They wanted stable revenues, they will not get it, in fact, the reverse.
New Content: lots of subscribers
1 Month In: Lots of people cancel
rinse, repeat
the revenue will start to look like a sine wave. somewhat predictable.
It's called BitTorrent
... now instead of having to buy a super expensive cable package to get the channels/shows you want, now you need to subscribe to multiple different services to get the 1 or 2 things you want on each one.... was better when Netflix had almost everything and you didn't need multiple subs....
That is a risk with Disney, since they have become rather money grubbing of late. I plan on subscribing to their service, but if they play the vault game, I will not continue.
I don't know, but it works for me.
I'd actually pay a little extra, say 1-2EUR on my Netflix account if it allowed me to view shows from some other network. Pay a little extra to Netflix and get 3h of viewing of another providers content, delivered through the same account/subscription I already have.
I'm sure they could work out a deal if they only wanted to.
But alas, Popcorntime is still a better experience. Or so I'm told.
You are not entitled to your opinion. You are entitled to your informed opinion. -- Harlan Ellison
You only need 3 subscriptions: 1. Netflix 2. Amazon 3. Bittorrent (for everything else) 4. Maybe a 4th for those who enjoy sports (that's extra)
I don't see where frustration is coming from, as these days it's so easy to start and stop subscriptions.
I don't know, bittorrent 'subscriptions' have been working fine for over a decade...
Non-Linux Penguins ?
I already pay for the internet, what's this about needing to pay other bills to watch stuff? Weird.
> as these days it's so easy to start and stop subscriptions.
It is, but it's also easy to forget when your subscription month end is, and as a result you'll miss cancelling in time. It's also a hassle. I have Netflix, and I get Prime Video through my Prime membership. I may entertain buying a couple of other services for a month here and there, but that's it, and when I do that I'll do it at a time when I can binge what I wanted and then drop it. I won't be subscribing to anything else on an ongoing basis. And I feel that my sentiment is somewhat common, so all these other streaming services that are getting ready to jump in, dreaming of massive ongoing recurring revenues will be quite disappointed, I think.
suppose.tv is the Swiss pocket knife of streaming choices. Any time I get frustrated with my current service I hop over to see if I can get my must have's anywhere else. And just when I think I've got a solution I see they don't support my chosen client (Nvidia Shield TV). It's nice to see at a glance instead of rooting around the fine print of each site.
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
+1 this.
I keep Directvnow and Netflix year round. I don't include Prime because it's 99% used for shopping only.
Hulu is free from Sprint (wouldn't the merger be cool if we get Netflix & Hulu both free? yea won't happen).
I sub HBO and Starz for one month on Directvnow when we want to watch a full season of something (GOT/American God's/etc) only then turn it off. Even with the $10 increase DTVN is still cheaper for us original grandfathers for the amount of channels vs anything else.
I sub DC Universe for a month when they have a complete season of something new.
It's not bundling or true one stop ala-carte but it's not hard.
That's a dumb comment (yea I know AC).
That won't happen as it would break the well established subscription model that Netflix created. The blow back would be above the level of MoviePass bad. Netflix can't screw with there own model much as it's about as profit streamlined as the McDonald's menu - anything more and you get outrage and less purchases.
As for the Disney Vault comment, only an idiot would sign up right away. Wait for everything to finally trickle in, probably takes a year and then sign up for a month or two.
That's called Cable grampa, your welcome to it.
So you enjoy juggling all those subscriptions. Good for you.
Some people want to just sit down and watch something without first having to figure out which service is active today and what is actually on that service.
That's where torrenting comes in.
It's sad, really. Netflix was THIS CLOSE to winning over piracy because people don't inherently WANT to be criminals ... but then everyone got greedy and wanted their own cake instead of a slice of the cake and here we are, torrents are once again becoming the optimal solution because they're hassle-free. For most people, avoiding hassle is the goal.
-=This sig has nothing to do with my comment. Move along now=-
FOMO, or fear of missing out, is a big part of it. I actually didn't start watching GOT until like season 5 started as I wasn't willing to pay for it. Then my friend let me borrow the first season on dvd and I was instantly hooked. HBO became suddenly worth it for a while.
Now I'll definitely be watching it because I'll want to be able to talk with my coworkers who also love the show. If I don't see the show right away, how can I participate in the conversation?
That is a risk with Disney, since they have become rather money grubbing of late.
If by "of late" you mean "for the past 100 years or so". The line used to be "if a kid in America gets a dime, Walt gets a nickle".
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
I was a fan of Netflix a few years ago, but we cancelled it recently when we realised we were rarely watching it anymore. We have Amazon Prime because we frequently purchase goods from Amazon, but have only ever watched a couple of shows on the associated streaming service.
Most of the video content I watch today is on YouTube. I have subscribed to a few users on it that regularly post well-composed and high quality long form (for YouTube) videos that I like to watch when I have the time. (Essential Craftsman and My Self Reliance are my current favourites)
Other than that, as I'm now approaching middle-age, I don't have hours of time to waste away on the couch anymore what with having a house and garden, wife and children, career, hobbies and community commitments. We don't use TV to babysit our children - they get a limited amount of screen time per day and we encourage them to play inside and outside, even though I find myself needing to drink more and more coffee each year to be able to keep up with them.
When I have time to waste, I want to watch high quality TV or movies. I can wait to hear through word-of-mouth what the best shows are and then add them to my list. (Currently working through McMafia)
That's why we've gone back to just buying/renting shows and movies from iTunes. If it's not on iTunes or YouTube, it's not worth worrying about. Can barely be bothered to look for torrents anymore.
We'll probably make an exception for re-subscribing to Netflix though when the new episodes of our favourite shows on it are out: Mindhunter, Stranger Things, Ozark and The Crown.
As simulated in Gattica, fake identities perhaps an opportunity.
Just wait until they change the terms to add one of the following:
1) Intro offer at standard price for XX years. Monthly contract at XXXXX.
2) Anyone with 3 or more cancellations and reactivation within a year are banned from the service
Right now they probably don't care. But once service jumping becomes popular, they'll start stopping it. Just like credit cards and banks are starting to block people who sign up every couple months to get all those starting bonuses. If you aren't careful you can suddenly find yourself blacklisted from all the primary companies. Luckily in the banking industry there are thousands of banks. In the media industry, there are only a few players and when you get banned from their services you may also get banned from their other services. Want to risk getting banned from all Amazon services for some video abuse?
This is what everyone wanted, right? Right?
Be careful what you wish for.
After iTunes became wildly successful, everyone around tried to cash in by opening their own online music stores. One company even spent millions developing a competing music player called Zune. None of those other online music stores was as successful as iTunes, and most of them shut down especially after streaming music services started to gain in popularity.
Subscription streaming TV services will be just like online music stores. Some, like Netflix, will survive and prosper. Others will fail spectacularly (Disney). And others will stay in business but never be anywhere nearly as successful as the one or two leaders that remain.
pick one and watch whatever is on there, there is probably already too much content on to watch it all (and new stuff is being added the whole time).
On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.
The perfect solution to all of this, is have one box that sits under your TV, which aggregates many different sources into one subscription plan, With different tiers and plans available based off of what you want. Oh wait.....
Not that things can't change but currently the CEO of Disney plans for the Vault to go away with the launch of Disney+.
https://www.theverge.com/2019/...