The subscription game is out of control. The yearly SQUEEZE on the consumer is way out of line. Was talking to my wife recently, and we are strongly considering keeping the WiFi and just using the “free” channels that are available.
It’s ridiculous.
However, it’s also another firm reminder that we should spend more time reading and less time watching TV. 💯
You can also buy DVDs at the local thriftstore for a couple of dollars. Just acquired a Hitchcock collection :) Classics are terribly hard to find on streaming platforms.
This!! Stock up on physical media and good hardware to play it while you can. They can’t stop us from doing it and then they can’t own us. Great VHS/DVD combo players can be found cheaply at pawn shops.
And on top of that subscriptions to these substacks are $8 to $11 a month. Insane. Take my phone take the internet give me 3 over the air channels. Life was s much simpler
Right on time, Ted. I got that same email, and had to ask, "What has Apple done for me lately?" My conclusion was, well, they've put out the best TV shows in the recent past, so maybe I should swallow the extra $3 per month—at least for a while. But when Hulu announced a hike, I snapped. I canceled Hulu and Disney on the spot, and I'm thinking of letting go a couple more.
Meanwhile, I think Substack may have a similar problem. The better it gets, the more addictive it gets (in a good way), and the more expensive it gets. I hear this from everybody I'd like to count as a subscriber: "How can I afford even 5 or 6 subscriptions a year, much less the 10 or 15 I'd like to have?" It seems like the minimum price will have to be lowered from $5/month, or creators will have to bundle their offerings with compatible partners. What are your thoughts on this, Ted?
I agree. While I support the right of creators to charge a fair rate, I simply can't afford a $5/month fee for 20+ subscriptions (and that's usually the lowest tier available). The model seems a bit untenable if I'm being honest - if every Substack newsletter is paywalled, at a certain point most readers will be priced out entirely.
The streaming business model is like AOL dialup: get the autopay going and hope the consumer never thinks about it again. Most of us are doing streaming wrong: we should have one or two going at any given moment and be quick to cancel the others. When you want to watch a show on a different service, cancel a current one and subscribe to the other. The prices are pretty cheap if you don't let them all run simultaneously.
Yeah Disney caught me that way the second year, I was paying by the year (as I also do here and didn't notice for a couple of months. They are gone, I did not get any value with disney even at their low enter price so I was planning on canceling it anyway.
You are right about one thing, entry prices are low, it is us "set it up and let it go" people who end up being the suckers.
Some days it seems the whole word is looking for one senile boomer to scam.
Just like this Fake BS ad for Phone service I see lately. "ONLY 30 ,count it, 30 $ for Phone. LOCKED in for X amount of years". Look at the smaller print ,because they don't have the Guts to state the actual price : Its actually 2 lines required for 60$ ! They think people are so stupid they don't notice the REAL price is Double
I don't have any real-time TV and I don't miss it at all. I allow myself no more than three subscriptions at a time, so if I want to add one, another one has to go. Currently I have MHz Choice and Criterion Channel, and Amazon Prime on pause -- it's easier than re-subscribing as all my subscriber data remains in the account. Probably the most consistently entertaining stuff is on YouTube, absolutely free.
What I hate is that EVERYBODY is jumping on the subscription model. Rev.com, the subtitle and closed-caption service I use in my film work, just went subscription. You have to buy a subscription to get full use of a GoPro video camera. Pretty much everything marketed on Facebook, from beard creams to guitar strings, has some kind of subscription angle. The site I consult to get guitar chords and lyrics, they want you to subscribe. Enough, already!
My mother was from Austria and I have a host of relatives “over there” with whom I like to keep in touch. MHz has a lot of German-language shows, so I started watching to improve my recall. And I love arthouse movies, the kind that Criterion always has. I renew Prime for a month whenever there’s a new season of “Bosch” or one of the spinoffs. That’s about it.
$3.99 is the one-time rental price for good movies on Amazon prime. It is often much more. Only the worn out movies are included with. That is on top of the yearly price to be AP members: used to be $65 now $139 or so. And you don’t need AP to get your products to house earlier: carefully choose one day later delivery and they are free.
I am very well aware of licensing fees from music publishers. Duh. They have slit their own throats with greed. Most of us are tired of having modern music slammed into our ears in every space or hallway.
It’s the “own nothing and be happy” model for all of life. I don’t think anybody paying attention is happy about how this type of lifestyle is being pushed.
I have a professional interest in media as a former newspaper reporter and teacher with a Ph.D. in media studies, so I feel obligated to follow the general outlines of what's going on in media. But it's become an expensive habit. And forget being able to access and follow academic journals in my field, you're looking at $60, $70 or more just to get a PDF copy of something. Knowledge and culture are being walled off from ordinary folk.
I don't work for a university, but I am still actively researching and writing. If you work for a university you get access through the library; if you live near a large university you can even go read them in the library. But if you don't, and you try to access journal articles online, they charge an arm and a leg for them. Sarah Kendzior has written about this a lot, the walling off of information from ordinary people.
Oh no! I meant to write Smart Chord. ChordAI is useful if you don't know a song, very useful, actually. But it's Smart Chord that I'm learning the new voicings from. Sorry.
Yes. I don't like anything AI, but I've found ChordAI to be a remarkable exception. I'm trying to teach myself different chord voicings for guitar. As you probably know, once you learn the piano keyboard, you may not be able to play the thing, but you can generally find the chords, which is at least a start. Guitar is a lot more complex.
Here's a triumph of artificial intelligence which may make you laugh: on YouTube yesterday there was a video about Charlie Kirk in my feed. Instead of there being a photo of Charlie Kirk in the thumbnail, there was one of Norm MacDonald.
I'm sorry. I meant to type Smart Chord, not ChordAI. ChordAI is good for learning songs you don't know and are having trouble figuring out, but Smart Chord gives you the alternate voicings.
I just want basic chord references and the ability to transpose keys. Almost anything works for me. I always end up putting my own twist on songs, I don’t do exact covers.
I was watching a Youtube video on the weird art of Grand Theft Auto 3. The narrator interjected an ad for an app, and its big selling point was that it tracked your subscriptions and could help you cancel before recurring fees. (It also did some other budgeting stuff. I think it was called Rocket something.) I'm not sure what this app cost, but for some people it might be worth it. Also, GTA 3 did have some charmingly weird stuff in it.
A factor often ignored when discussing corporate decisions like this is the USA's fundamental shift from profit-driven capitalism to valuation-driven wealth.
Profit is the success measurement of traditional capitalism. Businesses compete for customers, and those that translate customers into profit through some combination of pricing, efficiency, marketing, etc., are considered successful.
In modern American capitalism, valuation is the measurement of success. Businesses compete for investors, and those that increase their valuation through pricing, efficiency, marketing, etc., are considered successful.
This happens at all business levels. At the startup/innovation level, venture capitalists push portfolio companies to scale as fast as possible because scale drives valuations, and valuation creates more wealth than profit.
This is how the founders and investors of companies like WeWork and Uber earned billions of dollars before these companies ever made a profit. They grew their user base as fast as possible, constantly raising more investment at higher valuations to keep growing while continually losing money. Then the founders and early investors cashed out for billions, leaving late-stage investors holding the bag, forcing layoffs, cutting service, and increasing prices to keep the company out of bankruptcy.
C-level executives and the Board focus myopically on stock price at the public corporation level, where serving customers is a minor consideration. Why are all the tech companies pushing AI on users, even though users hate it? Because investors demand that these companies "compete" by being at the forefront of this new technology. Why do they keep raising streaming prices? Because investors want to hear CEOs say that.
The natural progression of this approach is the private equity firm, which cares nothing for the customers of the companies it buys. Its only objective is to increase the valuation of the company, by any means available, then sell it to the next firm to start the process over again until the business is gutted and finally sold off for parts.
Not to mention Microsoft Word that has raised their subscription rate by almost 45%. Having used it since its inception, I have already paid for this software several times already. 🤬
It's been a mystery to me for decades why ordinary people and companies — especially nonprofits — still use Microsoft Office and did not long ago switch over to the free alternatives, such as LibreOffice or its predecessor OpenOffice. There is nothing in Microsoft Office that the average user needs that is not also in those other apps. Yet everybody continues to allow themselves to be gouged by Microsoft. I feel the same way about some Adobe applications. Heck, entire Hollywood films are made in Blender, which is free.
I still prefer Microsoft Office on my desktop, but refuse to pay a subscription. I use the desktop version that I pay for only when no longer updatable, but it’s years between updates. No internet needed to use this version of Office.
I had the same thing; I just go to the file in Finder, double click it and select Open With... and I nominate Pages. Works with Excel into Numbers, and I imagine it would be the same withe PowerPoint into Keynote, though I've never tried that one.
They all import and export Word .doc and .docx files. If the layouts are extremely complicated, you might have some formatting issues, but generally speaking, the imported documents look fine.
It's why I gave my Microsoft subscription away at the start of this year. It didn't help that they thought that I'd see a bucket of AI being thrown in, as an incentive to cough up.
To be clear, nobody "forced a price increase on viewers." Don't subscribe. I have zero streaming subscriptions. I have 1 cable bill, and just negotiated that down $30 / mo. by threatening to quit.
Well, for those of us who have gone all-in on cord-cutting, streaming is all we do, so it's either pay one gouger or shift platforms and pay another one. So far, best deal is YouTube TV, and we'll see how often price rises occur.
Not when, as the author points out, you start adding up all the streaming services to get the same breadth of programming. Plus, via cable, I get my Internet service for almost nothing.
PBS has great stuff still, but I think it’s less able to compete, especially now losing its federal funding. Long live PBS and NPR. They are important and should be treated as such. If our kids today all watched PBS programming on the regular we’d be so much better off and advanced and educated. Same for adults.
Idk, i also wonder why in the hell someone would eat at mcds, but with this logic i totally get it. Just so long as we dont have to *do* anything(except cycle through those paychecks ofc), right?
You got me wrong e.c., i do see cable as foolish. But i put the streaming services right there next to cable on the list of overpriced shit that people dont need but think they "need" and mostly makes their lives harder and less fulfilling by hijacking our tendency to be lazy.
Thus my likening it(cable or streaming) to mcds, which is basically eating trash but its cheap, easy, and "tastes good"(meaning it hits those fat/salt/sugar receptors.
In both cases the products exploit our biology by appealing to our base instincts, convincing us that we like these things even though theyre detrimental to our wellbeing(much like scrolling sm bs). In fact we're so convinced we trade our very lives for them(money, which we trade time and effort for, so we can then be lazy and "enjoy" our tv shows and big macs).
And its all trash, the tv shows, the shit food, the phone addiction.
And ofc this is nothing new, but what is new is the extreme levels these things are reaching, and how hopelessly trapped people act about it. But its still our choice, and if ones going to choose to indulge in streaming, one is at the whims of the platforms. This isnt food or water, its tv man. Its a nothing people piss their lives away doing for no good reason other than its easy and allows us to escape ourselves for a time. If the streaming platforms want to fleece their customers, and the customers continue to allow that, i got no pity for that. We got real problems in this world, tv doesnt even count.
Its more than that though. All these things, they start out nice and fun and harmless enough, so we choose them. Watching tv is enjoyable. So is getting likes, etc.
But it doesnt stay that way. Bc of the way our brains are wired, we essentially become addicted. Meanwhile the dealers start turning the screws. Each capitulation on our part leads us deeper into their clutches, until we end up here, needing something.
Any addict of anything goes through this, until they reach a point where using no longer feels like a choice, yet choice is the only way out. Idt its too strong of a statement to say people are addicted to tv, phones, sugar, "ease", and so on. It wont ever get better. So the real choice is quit or shut up and take it.
When the charade of "normal" finally fades away, when the cards are on the table, when we stop lying to ourselves about our choices and we can finally see whats really going on, then perhaps we can improve on the situation. Until then, we'll have to accept(choose) the screw and the shears.
And its hard for me not to see this as a cultural problem, and not just a personal choice problem. Society practically demands we partake, and as i can tell you, choosing not to can feel alot like choosing ostracism. But ill take that over this walking dead bs
My issue with financially supporting YouTube is they now admit what I think many of us knew all along, that they were blocking / deleting videos at the request of the White House. (And Google, YouTube's parent, went even further and deleted FILES of medical researchers who were questioning official government policy on things like the rate of spread, the origins of the pandemic, etc. Deleted. Their. Files. So I have as little to do with Google as I can as I simply do not trust them.)
So you didn’t cut the chord, you just changed your cable provider to you tube tv, a streaming cable service. All you did was add a seperate cost for internet access, that’s lines are maintained by your local provider, unless you have starlink, and the cable company is off the hook for any outages or maintenance issues in the network, pretty sweet deal for them.
Circling back to my original post and "cutting the cord"...cord here is a metonym for coax cable, and by extension the regional monopolists like Comcast who provide content and ISP functions. For years we've been nickled and dimed by CC, having continually lowering and lowering our TV package quality to keep monthly charges only just affordable...same is true of Internet speed tiers - the slower the cheaper.
But once T-Mobile introduced 5G Internet within our service area — you know, "competition", that old capitalist virtue — we tried it, and in two weeks we dropped Comcast 100%, and not looking back.
I stand by my original post, as we now getting superior (streaming) TV, and equal to better Internet upload/download speeds comparable to our last service tier with CC, and it can only get better given T-Mobile's huge commitment to content-over-wireless services.
Bottom line: we are seniors who really enjoy quality programing via streaming, and find the expense well worth it.
Oh, and our monthly bill dropped by over 45%, so there's that.
I think it varies widely by region. Yes, when AT&T came around with their broadband, Cox got more affordable. We tried streaming for awhile, but came back to cable last year
It wasn't meant as such - I was trying to point out, in response to Ted's post, that we are all free to walk away from any product or service that is overpriced.
The cable / Internet package deal combined is like $150 - and that's for half a gigabit speed.
I mostly watch live sports - college basketball, plus baseball. Get most of what I'm interested in in one place. Wife and kids find that most of what they're interested in is on broadcast still.
And the streaming services are beginning to add commercials to the mix as well - NFL Sunday Ticket is trying it out this year to see how much pushback they get ... Amazon Prime has ads now. Pretty soon they all will ...
The “Millennial Lifestyle Subsidy” is gone, and has now gone negative. These monopolies used to subsidize life in the 2010’s (cheap Amazon, Uber, trading in cable TV for cheap streaming) and now they’ve become a tax on top of unaffordable healthcare, housing and education.
And the analogy about it being difficult to get customers back once they're gone is spot on. We've had a generation of viewers who've never bothered to pirate anything - good TV was cheap enough that the hassle of doing it wasn't worth it. But as streaming gets fragmented and expensive, people will start doing it again, and once they've got in the habit it'll be very difficult to get them back.
Surprise! The assholes that have taken over your lives are fleecing you!
No, that shouldnt be a surprise(unless you believe in american myths). Wealth extraction has always been the name of the game. Theyll juice this for all they can and then, maybe finally when an exodus occurs, theyll just drop it and move on to the next "we'll make your life better if you *pay* us to" bullshit.
Is your life better bc of streaming? Or is it just easier to be even lazier?
We're still in the allowing them to fleece us stage, so enjoy it. It wont always be so "fun". We are a resource to these people, NOTHING more. Wake up people.
And yes *ofc* read a book. A real one, silly digital junkies
And of course, there are all the Substack subscriptions, including this one, that are way overpriced. To pay $6 or $8 a month for these things is ridiculous, which is why I pay for none. There should be some form of aggregate pricing, where you pay $5 for, say, 5. Substack, too, is a poor model. With Apple, while I don't like the price hike, I do understand that Apple TV has considerable production costs and they are losing a lot of money (on TV, not in general, obviously. They were essentially subsidizing their TV project with the vast sums generated by iPhones and other products.
It's money draining. You want to support your favourite writers, but I can't afford $100 a month just on substack. I wish it would be more like a magazine, you pay $5 for a copy and your favourite writers appear that month.
I hate price increases too...but a subscription to this (very wonderful) Substack is $6/month. For the writing of ONE (very insightful) person. $12.99 / month for the universe of Apple TV's content does not seem out of line in comparison.
That taste and personal preference dont come completely out of the blue Taste and preference have a big social component. Around the world taste andvpreference is regional. There's also framing. What we've come to accept as adequate. Haven't we recognized that pop music has declined?
And the pay-per-month for advertising free is another gimmick these platforms are gleefully offering. Gee, thanks for my reward as a loyal subscriber. On the plus side for fairness, the problem these companies will all confront shortly is facing up to stage four of the ‘Enshitification’ process, which for them will turn into an existential crisis. I cannot wait. Fuck em’ all.
Part of the problem is that the prices for streaming were artificially low in order to attract subscribers. The streamers—other than Netflix—were losing money every month hoping to grow big enough to one day turn a profit. Wall Street demanded they stop the bleeding, so they had to cut back on new shows and raise prices. No one should expect the industry to turn a profit on an all-you-can-eat plan that costs less per month than the price of one movie ticket. I'm not sure why the industry itself thought they could.
The subscription game is out of control. The yearly SQUEEZE on the consumer is way out of line. Was talking to my wife recently, and we are strongly considering keeping the WiFi and just using the “free” channels that are available.
It’s ridiculous.
However, it’s also another firm reminder that we should spend more time reading and less time watching TV. 💯
Keep writing. Nice piece.
Agreed am really tired of the subscription game.
I agree.
Speaking of libraries, Kanopy is a great (and free!) app for movies and shows. Libby is good for magazines as well.
You can also buy DVDs at the local thriftstore for a couple of dollars. Just acquired a Hitchcock collection :) Classics are terribly hard to find on streaming platforms.
Rear Window and Strangers on a Train are so good!
This!! Stock up on physical media and good hardware to play it while you can. They can’t stop us from doing it and then they can’t own us. Great VHS/DVD combo players can be found cheaply at pawn shops.
Cool!
And on top of that subscriptions to these substacks are $8 to $11 a month. Insane. Take my phone take the internet give me 3 over the air channels. Life was s much simpler
Thank you for saying this out loud.
Agreed. My stack though is 6$ for a full year's subscription.
Right on time, Ted. I got that same email, and had to ask, "What has Apple done for me lately?" My conclusion was, well, they've put out the best TV shows in the recent past, so maybe I should swallow the extra $3 per month—at least for a while. But when Hulu announced a hike, I snapped. I canceled Hulu and Disney on the spot, and I'm thinking of letting go a couple more.
Meanwhile, I think Substack may have a similar problem. The better it gets, the more addictive it gets (in a good way), and the more expensive it gets. I hear this from everybody I'd like to count as a subscriber: "How can I afford even 5 or 6 subscriptions a year, much less the 10 or 15 I'd like to have?" It seems like the minimum price will have to be lowered from $5/month, or creators will have to bundle their offerings with compatible partners. What are your thoughts on this, Ted?
I agree. While I support the right of creators to charge a fair rate, I simply can't afford a $5/month fee for 20+ subscriptions (and that's usually the lowest tier available). The model seems a bit untenable if I'm being honest - if every Substack newsletter is paywalled, at a certain point most readers will be priced out entirely.
The streaming business model is like AOL dialup: get the autopay going and hope the consumer never thinks about it again. Most of us are doing streaming wrong: we should have one or two going at any given moment and be quick to cancel the others. When you want to watch a show on a different service, cancel a current one and subscribe to the other. The prices are pretty cheap if you don't let them all run simultaneously.
Yeah Disney caught me that way the second year, I was paying by the year (as I also do here and didn't notice for a couple of months. They are gone, I did not get any value with disney even at their low enter price so I was planning on canceling it anyway.
You are right about one thing, entry prices are low, it is us "set it up and let it go" people who end up being the suckers.
Some days it seems the whole word is looking for one senile boomer to scam.
Just like this Fake BS ad for Phone service I see lately. "ONLY 30 ,count it, 30 $ for Phone. LOCKED in for X amount of years". Look at the smaller print ,because they don't have the Guts to state the actual price : Its actually 2 lines required for 60$ ! They think people are so stupid they don't notice the REAL price is Double
Exactly! Like any other resource, it needs active management.
I don't have any real-time TV and I don't miss it at all. I allow myself no more than three subscriptions at a time, so if I want to add one, another one has to go. Currently I have MHz Choice and Criterion Channel, and Amazon Prime on pause -- it's easier than re-subscribing as all my subscriber data remains in the account. Probably the most consistently entertaining stuff is on YouTube, absolutely free.
What I hate is that EVERYBODY is jumping on the subscription model. Rev.com, the subtitle and closed-caption service I use in my film work, just went subscription. You have to buy a subscription to get full use of a GoPro video camera. Pretty much everything marketed on Facebook, from beard creams to guitar strings, has some kind of subscription angle. The site I consult to get guitar chords and lyrics, they want you to subscribe. Enough, already!
Amazon Prime is worst offender. Costs too much per year and still they charge $3.99 for any good movie. Try Tubi: all free and many good tv series.
My mother was from Austria and I have a host of relatives “over there” with whom I like to keep in touch. MHz has a lot of German-language shows, so I started watching to improve my recall. And I love arthouse movies, the kind that Criterion always has. I renew Prime for a month whenever there’s a new season of “Bosch” or one of the spinoffs. That’s about it.
I love TUBI! So many choices and lots of great foreign and classic stuff.
Or maybe we don’t want the tv in every restaurant and bar…
Yes, and this is one of the important income sources for composers.
$3.99 is the one-time rental price for good movies on Amazon prime. It is often much more. Only the worn out movies are included with. That is on top of the yearly price to be AP members: used to be $65 now $139 or so. And you don’t need AP to get your products to house earlier: carefully choose one day later delivery and they are free.
I am very well aware of licensing fees from music publishers. Duh. They have slit their own throats with greed. Most of us are tired of having modern music slammed into our ears in every space or hallway.
It’s the “own nothing and be happy” model for all of life. I don’t think anybody paying attention is happy about how this type of lifestyle is being pushed.
I have a professional interest in media as a former newspaper reporter and teacher with a Ph.D. in media studies, so I feel obligated to follow the general outlines of what's going on in media. But it's become an expensive habit. And forget being able to access and follow academic journals in my field, you're looking at $60, $70 or more just to get a PDF copy of something. Knowledge and culture are being walled off from ordinary folk.
Wow. I had no idea academia was using the same model to squeeze more cash out of professionals. Ridiculous!
There’s a lot they wish to wall off from ordinary folk.
I don't work for a university, but I am still actively researching and writing. If you work for a university you get access through the library; if you live near a large university you can even go read them in the library. But if you don't, and you try to access journal articles online, they charge an arm and a leg for them. Sarah Kendzior has written about this a lot, the walling off of information from ordinary people.
For guitar chords, I think you can get everything you need for free on ChordAI.
Have you used this? Not sure I like the AI part.
Oh no! I meant to write Smart Chord. ChordAI is useful if you don't know a song, very useful, actually. But it's Smart Chord that I'm learning the new voicings from. Sorry.
Yes. I don't like anything AI, but I've found ChordAI to be a remarkable exception. I'm trying to teach myself different chord voicings for guitar. As you probably know, once you learn the piano keyboard, you may not be able to play the thing, but you can generally find the chords, which is at least a start. Guitar is a lot more complex.
Here's a triumph of artificial intelligence which may make you laugh: on YouTube yesterday there was a video about Charlie Kirk in my feed. Instead of there being a photo of Charlie Kirk in the thumbnail, there was one of Norm MacDonald.
I'm sorry. I meant to type Smart Chord, not ChordAI. ChordAI is good for learning songs you don't know and are having trouble figuring out, but Smart Chord gives you the alternate voicings.
I just want basic chord references and the ability to transpose keys. Almost anything works for me. I always end up putting my own twist on songs, I don’t do exact covers.
I was watching a Youtube video on the weird art of Grand Theft Auto 3. The narrator interjected an ad for an app, and its big selling point was that it tracked your subscriptions and could help you cancel before recurring fees. (It also did some other budgeting stuff. I think it was called Rocket something.) I'm not sure what this app cost, but for some people it might be worth it. Also, GTA 3 did have some charmingly weird stuff in it.
Yep. Autopay and auto renew means out of sight out of mind
A factor often ignored when discussing corporate decisions like this is the USA's fundamental shift from profit-driven capitalism to valuation-driven wealth.
Profit is the success measurement of traditional capitalism. Businesses compete for customers, and those that translate customers into profit through some combination of pricing, efficiency, marketing, etc., are considered successful.
In modern American capitalism, valuation is the measurement of success. Businesses compete for investors, and those that increase their valuation through pricing, efficiency, marketing, etc., are considered successful.
This happens at all business levels. At the startup/innovation level, venture capitalists push portfolio companies to scale as fast as possible because scale drives valuations, and valuation creates more wealth than profit.
This is how the founders and investors of companies like WeWork and Uber earned billions of dollars before these companies ever made a profit. They grew their user base as fast as possible, constantly raising more investment at higher valuations to keep growing while continually losing money. Then the founders and early investors cashed out for billions, leaving late-stage investors holding the bag, forcing layoffs, cutting service, and increasing prices to keep the company out of bankruptcy.
C-level executives and the Board focus myopically on stock price at the public corporation level, where serving customers is a minor consideration. Why are all the tech companies pushing AI on users, even though users hate it? Because investors demand that these companies "compete" by being at the forefront of this new technology. Why do they keep raising streaming prices? Because investors want to hear CEOs say that.
The natural progression of this approach is the private equity firm, which cares nothing for the customers of the companies it buys. Its only objective is to increase the valuation of the company, by any means available, then sell it to the next firm to start the process over again until the business is gutted and finally sold off for parts.
This sounds like a ponzi scheme fraud.
Thanks so much for explaining this.
Not to mention Microsoft Word that has raised their subscription rate by almost 45%. Having used it since its inception, I have already paid for this software several times already. 🤬
Apple apps are free.
It's been a mystery to me for decades why ordinary people and companies — especially nonprofits — still use Microsoft Office and did not long ago switch over to the free alternatives, such as LibreOffice or its predecessor OpenOffice. There is nothing in Microsoft Office that the average user needs that is not also in those other apps. Yet everybody continues to allow themselves to be gouged by Microsoft. I feel the same way about some Adobe applications. Heck, entire Hollywood films are made in Blender, which is free.
I still prefer Microsoft Office on my desktop, but refuse to pay a subscription. I use the desktop version that I pay for only when no longer updatable, but it’s years between updates. No internet needed to use this version of Office.
I have so many important WORD doc files. Can I convert them to one of these other free options?
I had the same thing; I just go to the file in Finder, double click it and select Open With... and I nominate Pages. Works with Excel into Numbers, and I imagine it would be the same withe PowerPoint into Keynote, though I've never tried that one.
Of course, this works with a Mac, not sure about other things
They all import and export Word .doc and .docx files. If the layouts are extremely complicated, you might have some formatting issues, but generally speaking, the imported documents look fine.
It's why I gave my Microsoft subscription away at the start of this year. It didn't help that they thought that I'd see a bucket of AI being thrown in, as an incentive to cough up.
I use LibreOffice but not as much anymore.
Just tried Libreoffice. A few bugs in spreadsheet, but adjustment to UI is very similar. Thank you.
If you opened an Excel spreadsheet, that is common. It’s one reason I switched to Numbers on MacOS as it opens Excel mostly
flawlessly.
To be clear, nobody "forced a price increase on viewers." Don't subscribe. I have zero streaming subscriptions. I have 1 cable bill, and just negotiated that down $30 / mo. by threatening to quit.
Well, for those of us who have gone all-in on cord-cutting, streaming is all we do, so it's either pay one gouger or shift platforms and pay another one. So far, best deal is YouTube TV, and we'll see how often price rises occur.
A fool and his money..
Cheaper than cable, FOOL.
Not when, as the author points out, you start adding up all the streaming services to get the same breadth of programming. Plus, via cable, I get my Internet service for almost nothing.
PBS has great stuff still, but I think it’s less able to compete, especially now losing its federal funding. Long live PBS and NPR. They are important and should be treated as such. If our kids today all watched PBS programming on the regular we’d be so much better off and advanced and educated. Same for adults.
Cheap shit for cheap, come and get it!
Idk, i also wonder why in the hell someone would eat at mcds, but with this logic i totally get it. Just so long as we dont have to *do* anything(except cycle through those paychecks ofc), right?
You got me wrong e.c., i do see cable as foolish. But i put the streaming services right there next to cable on the list of overpriced shit that people dont need but think they "need" and mostly makes their lives harder and less fulfilling by hijacking our tendency to be lazy.
Thus my likening it(cable or streaming) to mcds, which is basically eating trash but its cheap, easy, and "tastes good"(meaning it hits those fat/salt/sugar receptors.
In both cases the products exploit our biology by appealing to our base instincts, convincing us that we like these things even though theyre detrimental to our wellbeing(much like scrolling sm bs). In fact we're so convinced we trade our very lives for them(money, which we trade time and effort for, so we can then be lazy and "enjoy" our tv shows and big macs).
And its all trash, the tv shows, the shit food, the phone addiction.
And ofc this is nothing new, but what is new is the extreme levels these things are reaching, and how hopelessly trapped people act about it. But its still our choice, and if ones going to choose to indulge in streaming, one is at the whims of the platforms. This isnt food or water, its tv man. Its a nothing people piss their lives away doing for no good reason other than its easy and allows us to escape ourselves for a time. If the streaming platforms want to fleece their customers, and the customers continue to allow that, i got no pity for that. We got real problems in this world, tv doesnt even count.
Its more than that though. All these things, they start out nice and fun and harmless enough, so we choose them. Watching tv is enjoyable. So is getting likes, etc.
But it doesnt stay that way. Bc of the way our brains are wired, we essentially become addicted. Meanwhile the dealers start turning the screws. Each capitulation on our part leads us deeper into their clutches, until we end up here, needing something.
Any addict of anything goes through this, until they reach a point where using no longer feels like a choice, yet choice is the only way out. Idt its too strong of a statement to say people are addicted to tv, phones, sugar, "ease", and so on. It wont ever get better. So the real choice is quit or shut up and take it.
When the charade of "normal" finally fades away, when the cards are on the table, when we stop lying to ourselves about our choices and we can finally see whats really going on, then perhaps we can improve on the situation. Until then, we'll have to accept(choose) the screw and the shears.
And its hard for me not to see this as a cultural problem, and not just a personal choice problem. Society practically demands we partake, and as i can tell you, choosing not to can feel alot like choosing ostracism. But ill take that over this walking dead bs
Library card a much better deal than any streaming service, or cable.
My issue with financially supporting YouTube is they now admit what I think many of us knew all along, that they were blocking / deleting videos at the request of the White House. (And Google, YouTube's parent, went even further and deleted FILES of medical researchers who were questioning official government policy on things like the rate of spread, the origins of the pandemic, etc. Deleted. Their. Files. So I have as little to do with Google as I can as I simply do not trust them.)
What is the source of this information?
So you didn’t cut the chord, you just changed your cable provider to you tube tv, a streaming cable service. All you did was add a seperate cost for internet access, that’s lines are maintained by your local provider, unless you have starlink, and the cable company is off the hook for any outages or maintenance issues in the network, pretty sweet deal for them.
Circling back to my original post and "cutting the cord"...cord here is a metonym for coax cable, and by extension the regional monopolists like Comcast who provide content and ISP functions. For years we've been nickled and dimed by CC, having continually lowering and lowering our TV package quality to keep monthly charges only just affordable...same is true of Internet speed tiers - the slower the cheaper.
But once T-Mobile introduced 5G Internet within our service area — you know, "competition", that old capitalist virtue — we tried it, and in two weeks we dropped Comcast 100%, and not looking back.
I stand by my original post, as we now getting superior (streaming) TV, and equal to better Internet upload/download speeds comparable to our last service tier with CC, and it can only get better given T-Mobile's huge commitment to content-over-wireless services.
Bottom line: we are seniors who really enjoy quality programing via streaming, and find the expense well worth it.
Oh, and our monthly bill dropped by over 45%, so there's that.
I think it varies widely by region. Yes, when AT&T came around with their broadband, Cox got more affordable. We tried streaming for awhile, but came back to cable last year
Frankly, I considered your original response rather dismissive and condescending, but you have taken a couple of my points to heart.
It wasn't meant as such - I was trying to point out, in response to Ted's post, that we are all free to walk away from any product or service that is overpriced.
The cable / Internet package deal combined is like $150 - and that's for half a gigabit speed.
I mostly watch live sports - college basketball, plus baseball. Get most of what I'm interested in in one place. Wife and kids find that most of what they're interested in is on broadcast still.
So for us, it works.
And the streaming services are beginning to add commercials to the mix as well - NFL Sunday Ticket is trying it out this year to see how much pushback they get ... Amazon Prime has ads now. Pretty soon they all will ...
The “Millennial Lifestyle Subsidy” is gone, and has now gone negative. These monopolies used to subsidize life in the 2010’s (cheap Amazon, Uber, trading in cable TV for cheap streaming) and now they’ve become a tax on top of unaffordable healthcare, housing and education.
And the analogy about it being difficult to get customers back once they're gone is spot on. We've had a generation of viewers who've never bothered to pirate anything - good TV was cheap enough that the hassle of doing it wasn't worth it. But as streaming gets fragmented and expensive, people will start doing it again, and once they've got in the habit it'll be very difficult to get them back.
Surprise! The assholes that have taken over your lives are fleecing you!
No, that shouldnt be a surprise(unless you believe in american myths). Wealth extraction has always been the name of the game. Theyll juice this for all they can and then, maybe finally when an exodus occurs, theyll just drop it and move on to the next "we'll make your life better if you *pay* us to" bullshit.
Is your life better bc of streaming? Or is it just easier to be even lazier?
We're still in the allowing them to fleece us stage, so enjoy it. It wont always be so "fun". We are a resource to these people, NOTHING more. Wake up people.
And yes *ofc* read a book. A real one, silly digital junkies
Similar to politicians
And of course, there are all the Substack subscriptions, including this one, that are way overpriced. To pay $6 or $8 a month for these things is ridiculous, which is why I pay for none. There should be some form of aggregate pricing, where you pay $5 for, say, 5. Substack, too, is a poor model. With Apple, while I don't like the price hike, I do understand that Apple TV has considerable production costs and they are losing a lot of money (on TV, not in general, obviously. They were essentially subsidizing their TV project with the vast sums generated by iPhones and other products.
It's money draining. You want to support your favourite writers, but I can't afford $100 a month just on substack. I wish it would be more like a magazine, you pay $5 for a copy and your favourite writers appear that month.
I hate price increases too...but a subscription to this (very wonderful) Substack is $6/month. For the writing of ONE (very insightful) person. $12.99 / month for the universe of Apple TV's content does not seem out of line in comparison.
I wonder if it was charged $1 or $2 per month would receive more total revenue ?
I have no idea what apple tv's content is. I guess I'm lucky that way.
I find most of it boring and predictable.
That taste and personal preference dont come completely out of the blue Taste and preference have a big social component. Around the world taste andvpreference is regional. There's also framing. What we've come to accept as adequate. Haven't we recognized that pop music has declined?
I subscribe to one platform for a month, watch what I want to see, drop it and then go to another one for the next month.
And the pay-per-month for advertising free is another gimmick these platforms are gleefully offering. Gee, thanks for my reward as a loyal subscriber. On the plus side for fairness, the problem these companies will all confront shortly is facing up to stage four of the ‘Enshitification’ process, which for them will turn into an existential crisis. I cannot wait. Fuck em’ all.
Part of the problem is that the prices for streaming were artificially low in order to attract subscribers. The streamers—other than Netflix—were losing money every month hoping to grow big enough to one day turn a profit. Wall Street demanded they stop the bleeding, so they had to cut back on new shows and raise prices. No one should expect the industry to turn a profit on an all-you-can-eat plan that costs less per month than the price of one movie ticket. I'm not sure why the industry itself thought they could.
This is true. I used to spend at least 100 AUD per month on CDs.... back in 2001
That's probably the equivalent of $200 now