I remember when cable was cheap and as-free.
The transition looks good because it has too (to lure customers away from cable). My bet is that it’s only a matter of time till “personilized ads” are forced upon you.
Can't beat it for $7.99/month.
$0.00/month
I'm clearly not the only one who came up with such an idea:
Plus, a comment sibling to this one said YouTube Red has ads, so there's that.
YouTube Premium is ad-free, it says so in their frontpage. Are you saying that's a blatant lie?
That doesn't address my point that content producers should get paid.
From YouTube Premium ad: "Ad-free YouTube, and our new music streaming service, YouTube Music. Services: No ads, Downloads, Background play."
Anyway, now I'm putting my money where my mouth is and am happily watching ad free YouTube content (which I love dearly) on my TV. Totally worth it.
And the fact of the matter is, the ads they do have don't produce enough revenue to support most creators.
I suppose you could argue that's because Google's cut is too high, but in Youtube's case (as opposed to, say, Apple's App Store), I feel Google is providing a substantial service—hosting, encoding, and distributing a huge amount of data.
Unlike cable TV in the US currently, which is either a monopoly or duopoly, there is a decent bit of competition on streaming. Currently, there is Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu, YouTube, among others. Yes, the content is often only partially overlapping, but the point is -- there is competition. This is much more promising for customers than the current situation -- where you often have one and only once choice and they can do whatever they want.
Overall, I'd say advertisements are the least of worries for me. The greater worry is you sign up for a $90/mo plan and the bill magically becomes $120/mo. You are forced to watch TV on their schedule. You sign up for a 12 or 24mo plan which you cannot cancel, even if you lose crucial channels (e.g., Disney) And the thing is near-impossible to cancel without spending hours in call-wait hell.
I pay to watch what I want, not what other people would like me to see. If I’m paying to see what people would like me to see, then I will stop paying. It really is that simple.
With regards to your dismissal of the old school transportation companies:
The cab company I drove for dominated the market because it was basically reliable. There were problems at surge periods (rush hour and drinking holidays), but for the most part people could order a cab and expect it to arrive. The automated phone system worked fairly well to order a cab to an address your phone number had used previously.
The upstarts fixed the 12-hour shift problem: their drivers can start and stop working whenever they want, whereas most taxi companies used 12/24 hour leases or week-long leases.
The upstarts have not fixed the fact that cars are expensive and depreciate rapidly. Our little team put 100,000 miles a year on the cab we shared...
The upstarts have also not figured out how to make driving pay well for the drivers. In the old days, drivers could buy their own cab and make a little bit more every week, and lease it out to other company drivers for the times they needed to take off.
I think the transportation upstarts are going to run out of money. I’ve heard the old taxi company has reworked their business and is making more money than ever. Fewer employees (maintenance, etc) because now their drivers are using their own vehicles to take their contracted fares around.
When/if they need a fleet again (after the upstarts run out of money) I’m sure they’ll figure something out.
If you use Comcast, you could probably lower your bill by visiting https://ns.reddit.com/r/Comcast_Xfinity/
Compared with the 148 channels Spectrum provided (about 1/2 where duplicates) the quality is better on the few I watch intermittently (PBS, ABC, CBS...)
The crazy thing is my bill dropped from over $200 to $70 (for just internet).
Yea, I’m and idiot for not doing it sooner.