Tech's broken promises: Streaming is now just as expensive and confusing as cable. Ubers cost as much as taxis. And the cloud is no longer cheap

You say "broken promises" I say "the plan all along" and "bait and switch".

This has nothing to do with tech and EVERYTHING to do with FUCKING CAPITALISM.

What a dumb fucking post, tech didn’t promise us shit were still living in a capitalist nightmare where quarterly earnings are far and above the primary value, over any and all people.

What the fuck is this waaaa tech didn’t usher in an age of utopia!!! It’s almost like we have to solve other problems first. Fucks sake

Yarrrrr...shiver me timbers. Fly the Jolly Roger high matey, there be booty ta plunder!

Don’t blame tech, blame the bait-and-switch business model of loss leading products.

Uber never made money because they chose to undercut prices of all competitors and bleed them out.

I’d argue that newer streaming companies (those founded by studios, such as Disney +) did the same thing by roping in customers before jacking up prices.

It may be the “fault” of capitalism, but consider it was capitalism that birthed streaming in the first place. In the long term, the expectation would be a better solution will surface in reference to streaming.. the same way streaming was a solution to cable. Thus is the business cycle.

Is this surprising? The prices were always going to adjust to the market. Any new cheap thing that undercuts the market will eventually become the market as it becomes mainstream, and prices will be increased to what the market will bear to maximize profits.

Remember when we could only watch what had recently been on TV and cable companies were trying to lock people in to specific cable boxes that couldn't skip ads and we paid $120 per month for ad supported content and cable companies would attach random fees and everyone had to buy hundreds of channels to only watch 4?

And we'd build movie and music collections of physical media we had to keep in our homes and cars and we'd listen to the same three albums for months and if we were lucky enough to get a TV series box set, it'd set us back many hundreds of dollars and we'd have to remember which disc we were on and navigate arcane and slow menus?

And when we had questions, we had to find the answers ourselves by reading long form content and just be satisfied that there were many questions we couldn't answer at all because the information wasn't available?

Or when we wanted cabs, we'd not know how much a ride would cost until after we got to our destinations and they smelled like rotten farts and were covered in boogers and our only goal was to not touch anything and look out the window because what's a smartphone?

And when we wanted to go somewhere, we had to ask for directions and use atlases to figure out how to get to the general area of the destination, then drive in circles, accidentally drive past a turn 5 times because the street we were supposed to turn onto had two different names and we had been given the wrong one?

I was there and anyone who pines for the old days can just go there. We have cable and encyclopedias and taxis and atlases. Go nuts.

Take video streaming. In search of better profitability, Netflix, Disney, and other providers have been raising prices

Piracy and buying/ripping physical media is back on the table bois. Been running my own personal media server secured with a VPN to access it. Costs are the symmetric gigabit connection, a simple raspberry pi for WireGuard, and old computer for media server. Plus some technical knowledge.

Any physical media I have has been ripped to digital form (4K where possible).

A 3-mile Uber ride that cost $51.69

Yet another reason why we need to have more diverse options in transportation. Public transportation is dismal in the USA due to suburban sprawl and car centric society. Alternative forms of transportation such as bikes or even walking is not accessible to a large portion of people.

Took a bus the other day and the total cost for 24 hrs was exactly $2.50. Don’t have to worry about psychos on the road driving to and from their deadass suburban home and deadend job.

Cloud promises are being broken

Fuck the “cloud”. It’s just another persons/companies server. Switched off major cloud platforms long ago.

Have off site backups take place nightly. No middleman scanning my stuff. No more upselling. Besides ISP costs, everything else is static or one time setup.

Tech never promised anything. They cut the price for people to be dependent to them and then rise the price.

It's just basic capitalism.

On the flip side, piracy has never been easier.

We should have seen this coming. I remember the early 80s when cable was the new hotness, and it was cheap, with no ads unlike broadcast television. That was its major selling point.

Then over the next decade the ads crept in, and we were all paying for cable with ads, even though the whole point had been no ads. Then the price skyrocketed and the ads remained.

Steaming was always going to follow the same path. Cheap with no ads at first, then adding ads, then skyrocketing prices, then crazy prices with ads too.

They know as long as all of them raise their prices, where are we gonna go? They have exclusives. We can’t just take our money elsewhere.

Time to disrupt the disruptions.

But I can binge streaming services and then cancel without multiple hundred dollar fees. And I can use the same app for Uber no matter what city I’m in.

So… I get things aren’t paradise but let’s be clear they’re still largely covering a lot of folks needs.

This is all by design. Once they have you/us/them captured again, we're going to take another trip around the "raise prices and squeeze services until it's unsustainable, because shareholder and CEO profit". It has all happened before and it will all happen again.

The cloud is just someone else's computer. The uber is just someone else's car. Streaming is just someone else's media library. They have you right where they want you, dependent on them.

The thing about unregulated capitalism is it will always fuck over society in favour of sociopaths. Unregulated capitalism rewards sociopaths because it focusses on profits above all else – shareholders get stupidly rich only if they don’t care about the damage done to workers and the public, sociopaths who don’t care about such damage can promise the highest profits, and that’s rewarded by a hyper-focus on the bottom line.

Unregulated capitalism rewards ruthless cost-cutting, treating people like robotic assets, slash-and-burn corporate policies, and a culture of near-slavery.

Adding new tech only makes inhumane policies easier to implement. It’s why people like Musk have more money than they could spend in a thousand lifetimes. When the goal is to maximise profits at all costs, of course the consumer will get fucked. That’s rather the point.

E: in short, prices will continue to increase as these people try to find the ceiling. Ps: there is no real ceiling.

Uber was never a tech proposition, it was a predatory disruptor.

The streaming fiasco is sad but inevitable as greed does what greed does.

Cloud was never primarily about price, the big cost save initially was to get rid of purchased or rented iron and locations but the main reason of the Big Switch was the scaleability and opportunities for quick deployment of new technologies and methodologies.

It's your fault for believing the promises of a salesman. Tech bros are just industrial middlemen who pedel new technological solutions for problems that may or may not benefit from it, but that doesn't matter to them, they're just here to sell the tech. Thats how they get paid.

The enshitification of capitalism? Color me shocked!

So stop using that shit, problem solved

LONG LIVE PIRACY!!!🏴‍☠️🏴

The cloud was never cheap.

Where did you get such a weird idea?

The pattern is: Offer something really cool for cheap or even free, then once people are hooked slowly reduce service while increasing price. It's a giant bait and switch.

I'm I the only person who goes to the library for movies?

The goal is surely to capture every human need and package them as obnoxious subscriptions.

I don't use Uber because it is cheaper, I use it because I know the fare ahead of time, I don't need to dial a dozen different cab companies, and the vehicles are generally nicer. I don't use streaming because it is cheaper, I use it because I don't need to worry about time shifting, and can access much higher quality content than on cable. As for the cloud? You can pry my big iron from my cold, dead hands.

At first the internet was like the wild west. Free, wide open spaces, with lots of exploring (minus the slaughter of indigenous people).

Then the capitalists got hold of all the land and made it like everywhere else. Restricted, controlled, expensive.

Streaming is still cheaper unless you get absolutely everything. It is also straightforward billing. The advertised price is the price you pay. I checked Comcast a week ago and they quote $70 with no contract. And then if you read the fine print, there is also a $25 broadcasting fee and a $10 sports fee. I am going to guess you also have a fee to rent the cable box for $10-15/month. They can still fuck themselves.

Agreed on Uber and Lyft.

Cloud was never cheaper.

Has "cloud computing" ever been cheaper for most kinds of established businesses? Other than for some specific workflows, or very unpredictable workloads, the only cost-saving I've ever seen is avoiding the initial costs and avoiding the need for a real ops/obs team.

Remember that all that “disrupting the market” ever meant was undercutting competitors. Everything else was window dressing.

Hotels >>>>> Airb&Bs

I think we've started to discover what the ???? steps before profit were.

The model was:

• Start streaming service
• ????
• Profit

It's now:

• Start streaming service
• Subsidise it heavily creating premium content whilst undercutting competition.
• keep doing it until competitors go broke
• Raise prices to an actually sustainable level
• Profit (although we've lost a ton of capital)

This is a form of market manipulation which is outright illegal in some countries (e.g. Australia) and can be illegal in the US and EU if it meets certain criteria. It falls under anti-trust and monopoly prevention laws.

Basically our regulators aren't doing their job well enough, but what's new?

Enshittification!

Yea, it’s “tech’s fault.” Not the self-imploding economic system known as capitalism. It’s definitely not the fault of giant tech corporations that have a hand in the government. It’s the streaming, Uber, and the cloud that’s bad.

Bullshit this is the fault of “Tech”. Every last greedy tech company, every last penny pinching pig that seeks to maximize profit without any concern for anything, literally anything else. Every last piece of shit corpo pig in govt too

Fuck Ajit Pai , I hope his stupid mug sucks ass

I don't know Google Drive options are pretty fucking cheap.

It was the free hit to get you hooked and dump your cable subscriptions. Now they have you and they're going to increase costs every year from here on out and then start with advertisements because fuck you you're going to pay it anyways.

You are paying money for streaming movies? Why?

🏴‍☠️🏴‍☠️🏴‍☠️🏴‍☠️🏴‍☠️

Cloud was never really cheap. People just didn't understand the total cost involved, and companies are finally beginning to realize that on prem wasn't actually a problem.

Airbnb is worse than hotels

I spent a week on vacation and finally saw ads again. It did give me a very small list of TV shows that I will download from the internet. It also made me realize that the US has way too many ads for drugs and lawyers willing to sue anyone and anything for you.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

Paramount+ with Showtime costs $12 a month and the live TV part has commercials and a few other shows include "brief promotional interruptions," according to the company.

The Financial Times recently reported that a basket of the top US streaming services will cost $87 this fall, compared with $73 a year ago.

Some companies, such as Dropbox, have even repatriated most of their IT workloads from the public cloud, saving millions of dollars, the VC firm noted.

Last month, Google, the third-largest cloud provider, started a pilot program where thousands of its employees are limited to using work computers that are not connected to the internet, according to CNBC.

If staff have computers disconnected from the internet, hackers can't compromise these devices and gain access to sensitive user data and software code, CNBC reported.

Disclosure: Mathias Döpfner, CEO of Business Insider's parent company, Axel Springer, is a Netflix board member.

The original article contains 877 words, the summary contains 150 words. Saved 83%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

As far as Ubers, I'm happy to pay them as much as taxis in tips at least — the people driving them are hard working people who could use it.

But dang, there's lots of streaming services. The new rise of piracy is not surprising.

No matter what new technology we come up with .... it will always be bottle necked, manipulated, and limited by human greed.

Streaming is now just as expensive and confusing as cable.

Being a little bit melodramatic there. Streaming is nowhere near as expensive, confusing or hostile to consumers as cable was, unless you want access to every single service and show all at once. Anybody with a modicum of intelligence would only subscribe to one or two services at a time based on what they were watching in that period and still pay several times less than cable.

It has become more pricey but that's mainly because shows are fractured across many services now. Everybody and their fucking mother are now working to build their own streaming service after looking at Netflix's meteoric success with dollar signs in their eyes and while it's worse for the consumer, it's also led to a lot of failure. Disney have hemorrhaged their profits due in large part to how much they're diluting their brands with shitty DIsney+ spinoff series.

When Disney, HBO, Netflix, Amazon, Paramount and all the other major players start locking you into lengthy multi-year contracts, hiding every single 'cancel subscription' button, forcing ads upon everybody (not just those on the cheaper ad-supported tier) and training entire call centres of outsourced wage slaves to make it as difficult as possible for you to unsubscribe, then we can talk.

Ubers cost as much as taxis.

What many forget is that Uber (and other gig-economy apps) skirted past loads of employment and safety laws to undercut their competition by doing shady shit like classing their drivers as 'independent contractors' to avoid even paying them the minimum wage. Earning potential as an Uber driver was basically nonexistent before the law caught up.

AWS is set to start charging customers for an IPv4 address, a crucial internet protocol. Even before this decision, AWS costs had become a major issue in corporate boardrooms.

Perhaps this is because IPv4 addresses are in limited supply and we're very close to exhausting this supply, hence why IPv6 was introduced?

Capitalism destroys everything.

I wonder how much price increases stem from a lack of creativity in finding more nicer ways to be profitable, and overall inefficiency of their operations

wondering if i should say this but at one point i pirated so much that i have to use will power to stop watching stuff.

Capitalism being capitalism.

And we still don't have flying cars!

Let's be real: Uber/Lyft is actually better than calling a cab. Even for the same price, it's more convenient. When you actually share the cab, it's more efficient too, you get a price cut while it optimizes the route automatically to pick up and drop off people.

Ye ol bait and switch. I need to go back to cabs

Cloud hosting does not fit in that. The service they offer is datacenters. Nobody was running an equivalent datacenter before in their server closets at the office. Taxis and television are modestly changed but datacenters for running technical operations are on a different planet than the on-prem infrastructures they replaced.

So tired of this trope.

Streaming is like HBO in the old days — you buy a channel for a few months, watch what you want, cancel it. Rotating channels costs $20 a month. Cable costs $80-100.

Canceling a streaming channel is easy. Canceling cable requires calling the cable company and arguing with them. Then you have to return the set top boxes. Then you get a bill for the set top boxes anyway, and you have to argue some more and show them your receipt.

Also free streaming channels are a thing. Plenty to watch for free (unlike cable).

Uber always cost as much as a taxi, it's a private hire taxi company exactly like any other private hire taxi company, their rates are controlled just the same. In the UK, anyway.

Obviously I'm not talking about black cabs, those bastards are ripoff merchants that only tourists use. I'm talking about normal taxis.

Time to download or stuff in Minecraft of course.

Streaming is still much cheaper than cable.

Assuming netflix vs cable in my xountry... Yeah I know which one has better value.

Streaming is not as expensive as cable. And Uber is a better experience.

Oh look, technology under capitalism cares about profit, not purpose

Shocked pikachu

If the FTC wasn’t such a limp dick for the past 2 decades, things may have turned out differently. All of these problems are the result of too much consolidation and not enough competition.

That’s why I’m excited about Khan’s FTC since she is actually doing her job. Despite a couple of high profile losses, they’re winning more than they’re losing and, most importantly, they’re deterring anticompetitive mergers since companies now have to think twice or risk a lawsuit.

Streaming has become remarkably easy, all in one place and free. No need to even sail any seas these days.

I wonder if all the companies considered that as they raised prices and divided the user base.....

I can still pick and choose my streaming. If I don't want Netflix I can cancel it, I don't have to keep it just so I can also watch Hulu.

Yes, if you get everything, it's about the same or more than cable.

Capitalism: It just works™℠®©

Torrents, Bicycles and Self Hosting. Stop complaining about the soup at the soup kitchen and make yourself some dinner.

most open source devs have other jobs

Streaming has gone up in price, and ads are sure to come as many streaming services are already complaining about financial strain, but for now it's still ad free and cheaper than cable in my country, by a long shot. Even if I pay for 3 streaming services.

I honestly hope that some of them go under, and have to revert to renting IP to Netflix again.

I never expected ride hailing apps to save money. Where from? Taxis were never a high margin business with some superfluous middleman.

Could there be some decentralized ride hailing platform?

Permanently Deleted

Permanently Deleted

I'd love a distro for raspi etc that made onroading to pirating really easy. like LibreElec for Raspberry Pi is great, but you have to manually verify the debrid and trakt in settings, i need something boomer-friendly. Like, first run, it gives a debrid verification url prompt, waits for it, then trakt, waits for it, then asks like "which of these popular shows do you like" and offers suggestions to start

Was Uber ever cheaper than a cab? I knew about them fairly early on, and even then the prices were way more than a taxi. The only benefit it really offered was that you may not even have access to a taxi service where you are, but Uber drivers could be your next door neighbor.

No way who could have guess

Good thing I've been getting my media from the high seas for years, never used an uber, and I don't give a shit about the cloud.

Techno feudalism is the keyword.

Either way, 2 years ago, an Uber from the airport to the strip was $12-15.

I miss dc++ hay day of piracy.

yes. https://www.nngroup.com/articles/the-need-for-speed/

i.e. touching grass is more attractive by the day

I wonder how much of the inability to be profitable is driven by their licensing costs.

I have a solution for everyone having problems.

Private Internet Access (specifically for port forwarding) in docker container networked with the below container QBitTorrent in a docker container

prowlarr to connect to private torrent websites

watch the community open signups for invites or just buy one, a good start is iptorrents or torrentday (same people).

attached the private torrent login to prowlarr

add sonarr or radarr to prowlarr and start downloading shows for free to your plex or whatever you wanna use. Use google or CHATGPT to figure out how to do all this shit. But honestly if they don't want to play fair, why should we. PIRACY FOR THE WIN!

The cloud is still pretty cheap. Getting cheaper if anything.

Webtorrent has been serving wonders combined with a usb stick or even a NAS

That makes sense, thanks for the insight!

Hello L4S!

Permanently Deleted

reminds me of when when banks introduced ATMs as a method to "reduce costs for the consumer" but it became a profit center, paid for by those same consumers. no consumers saved a dime

Streaming is now just as expensive and confusing as cable.

Umm, are people coming over from an alternate universe? Cable was much more expensive and limited, streaming forced it to reform.

Ubers cost as much as taxis.

This shitty claim sounds false, specially with the antics taxis perform to make trips longer. If it does have any ring of truth, I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of it comes from having to acquiesce to the taxi sector, because they really cannot compete otherwise.

cloud is no longer cheap.

No shit, renting is more expensive in the longterm than owning something yourself? Tell me more.

That reminds me of the gymnastics people have to do in the UK. There they have the BBC, which is technically public television but anyone that partakes on it needs to pay a heavy fee per year - and the devices legally deemed to be subject to that fee is ever increasing. In order to avoid paying that fee, people now need to have no television sets, no computers, no smartphones, no nothing.