1y ago

Streaming costs are rising, and there are more platforms than ever to choose between. Some people are going back to piracy

www.abc.net.au Streaming costs are rising, and there are more platforms than ever to choose between. Some people are going back to piracy

Continual price hikes and fragmentation of services have seen some Australians ditch their streaming services in favour of film and TV piracy.

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More competition... =Prices increase.
This is not the outcome I was told would happen.
Wait, what else was I told that never came correct.?
Student loans Housing Pay raises Protect and serve Self driving cars Pot/Gateway Equal opportunity Meritocracy
... I'm beginning to think all of society, in it's entirety, is just one big grift.
- No matter what they say capitalists do not actually like, or benefit, from competition.
  
  They actively kill competition for a reason.
  
  I mean, what is competition? The entire point of a competition is that someone wins, and someone loses. When the entire structure is a competition, then if enough time passes most participants will have lost, and only one will stand victorious. The concept of free market competition will always end in monopoly, and every anti-trust mechanism is just a way to slow this down, not an actual solution. Capitalism will never create a solution to this either, as monopoly is the logical goal of capitalism. When monopoly exists, the capitalists have the most power. Of course capitalism will benefit the capitalists. It would be weird if it didn't.
- It's not competition if everyone has exclusivity contracts on all the content. Take Spotify vs Netflix for example. Spotify will have mostly the same base content as Apple Music, Deezer, what have you. With Netflix... You don't get any Disney movies, no game of thrones, you have to buy all of the services to get access to even just the content you want.
  I've never felt I was missing out on anything with Spotify, as I likely wouldn't with YouTube music either. Maybe some have less but it's at least a very comparable catalogue across the board.
  
  Weird thing about music streaming in comparison to video streaming is that music streaming services are all third parties. There's little to no exclusivity in that market because the streaming services all license from the same sources. The big music publishers haven't gone and created their own streaming services, but are (more or less) happily working with Spotify, Apple Music etc.
  That's simply not happening in the video streaming market.
- More competition == price increase
  Less competition == price increase
  
  This is the way
- You're forgetting the effect demand has on prices. Studios all pulled their content from Netflix and said "fuck you, pay us". People paid, so here we are. Had people said "No, fuck you! Put the content back on Netflix" then we'd still have $15 for everything on one platform. There was enough demand for companies to sell their products. It's not competition when each service has different offerings.
- Is it really competition when for example Disney has a monopoly on Disney Streaming Content?
  
  What do you mean, there are other streaming services aren't there?
  
  Yes there is competition for streaming but not for the specific content of the services. With music I can choose Spotify or Deezer or whatever, but for Disney content I can only use Disney+ or for Paramount Content only Paramount+, so they have a monopoly for their respective content if I want to stream it.
  
  That's most industries though. That's like saying Toyota has a monopoly on Toyotas but, I can just buy a Ford that does the same exact thing. That's not what monopoly means.
  
  That's not a very good analogy, but even if we run with a cars one... then it's more like one dealership being the only one allowed to sell Toyotas. You aren't allowed to buy any Toyota, even a used rusty one, from any other dealership. If the dealership decides it costs too much in storage to keep a certain car, like a Prius c, in stock...well they just get rid of the Prius C altogether. (HBO and Westworld being the dealership and Prius c for example)
  
  Isn't it though?
  
  Not really. That's a different media and format. (But before you say that you can technically stream it on DirectTV too, that's owned by AT&T, who also owns HBO)
  But sure, I'll accept that Westworld wasn't a great example for my analogy since I was only considering streaming. A better example might be Final Space Season 3. The third season never got a physical media release (any you find are homemade copies) and the entire series is unstreamable (save for s2e1 on Amazon prime for purchase....for some reason).
  This is going to be a growing trend. If they ever decide to pull streaming rights for Barry s2-4 or Stranger Things S3-4, they also don't have physical media available currently.
  
  I agree that what you're saying is a problem but, that still doesn't qualify it as a monopoly. If one company owned every TV series that's a monopoly, what you're saying isn't.
  
  I see what you mean, I think you're right.
- That possibly would've worked if the platforms all had an agreement to share the same content and not monopolize exclusives. If that were the case you'd choose the one with the best price and the best features.0

76 comments