The core selling point of streaming movies and shows is the "on demand" part. It removes an entire dimension from the problem of planning movie nights or your personal entertainment. If a show is available on the service you're subscribing to, you can watch it any time you want. With enough shows available, this boiled down to "any time I want to watch something, there's something interesting to me available".
Now with the balkanization of streaming space and people already doing provider rotation manually, the experience becomes more like this: "sorry hon, we won't be watching X tonight because it's on HBO, and we're switching to it next month, and Y we wanted to check out just got pulled from Netflix and is on CBS now, which is not worth paying for, and Z is geolocked everywhere, so I guess we have to find something else...".
... which can be quickly followed by: "you know what, I saw a streaming site that's not exactly official, but it costs like $4/month for ad-free experience, has every show you can name available - even ones nobody streams anymore - and guess what, it's perfectly legal to use; so screw the official platforms, and let's watch X tonight".
It's greed that's dooming the streaming services.
This already happens now if you're only subbed to Netflix.
They are constantly removing titles.
It definitely starts to feel like a schedule because now it's like "I have to watch this before October 1st otherwise it'll be pulled".
The worst is when you deal with series too. Like casually watching a 6 season series and you get to the end of season 1, give it a break for a bit but then when you want to resume it a month or 2 later the entire thing is gone.
Combined with a horrible browsing ability for your watch list and you end up adding these great shows to your list but then 2 months later you have no idea how many of them are gone since you can only browse like 6 titles at a time on your watch list that might have hundreds of titles.
Once you feel pressured into watching things due to a fear of missing out you've entered a dangerous place and this is when people will begin looking for alternatives.
Edit: I don't think this is a positive thing for Netflix. And trying to keep up with it probably would just give customers anxiety. But it's a constant reminder that you don't really get to watch what you want with Netflix, which I think is useful to be reminded of now and then.
If you can barely remember what you ate for dinner 6 nights ago, how are you going to remember the ~50 titles they are removing at varying days in September?
Plus, sites and patterns like this just further fuel the "better watch what Netflix says to watch" motto. Your viewing selections are shaped by what's coming and going instead of what you want to watch.
Yeah until they spread out releases of a program over long periods to force you to keep a subscription. Eg Hulu and Disney (1).
The reason people pirate is they want to watch WHAT they want, WHEN they want, in the REGION they want and on the DEVICE they want. The content makers want to control all those things.
https://thestreamable.com/news/disney-is-saying-no-to-binge-...
I will stop short of saying they will "fail" because we all know they won't, they have too much money, but I think they will certainly discourage people from giving them money if they try to enforce some drip-feed delivery model just to squeeze more money out of their customers.
I mean they could just host their stuff on Netflix/iTunes/Amazon but no let's build an entire new server farm doing the exact same work, likely on the exact same hardware and the exact same software, because some executive somewhere got a bug in his ass about Apple taking 30% for providing merely a marketplace, userbase, advertising, delivery model, customer support...
Idk. From a non-industry person this seems like common sense, but I also don't understand how VC backed companies burning billions of dollars to schedule McDonalds deliveries is a long-term business model so maybe this is just some galaxy brain business head stuff.
IMO I prefer to buy a game from the developer and get it cheaper or give the money to the creator but this days most games are on stores and not on the dev website, a good example is Minecraft ,it would probably be more expensive if it would have been on Steam and I would have to install the Steam client to play the game, and I could not play game A on my PC and my son to play game B on his PC, I am forced to use the trick of getting into offline mode.
My point is that in some cases Steam or Apple taking 30% is too much, now that Steam has some competition they made some deals with big publisher but this big percentage are to large for some products.
In this debate though many people ignore the creators and feel entitled that the app,game or movie be on his preferred store and using his preferred payment method.
I am sure there are cases where the store works great too.
There is a version of Minecraft on the Microsoft Store but it's not nearly as popular.
The user would go to a central place where all streaming options are available to be browsed and watched. The point of differentiation would be at payment, as the cost to the user, for whatever they just selected, would go to those who own the rights. No walled gardens, everyone wins. The user pays one monthly price, or within a fixed range. How to figure that all out, well, that's where complexities arise.
My personal soltuion, thus far, is to pay for the service I'm using the most (currently, MhZ Choice), then find other solutions for that which I don't pay for.
I'm from the Netherlands. I live in Sweden. In both countries the banks have been able to set up a shared service to make digital payments easy for consumers, despite them being competitors[0][1]. In the Netherlands we also have one national transport chip-card used by all public transport providers[2].
Based on that I would say that what this may need is just the right amount of (and type of) government regulation to force the different competitors to play nice enough to create a better end-product for consumers and to compete healthily with each other. I won't pretend to know what that regulation would look like though.
The problem is with the exclusive deals, with the IP holders ruining the space for everyone in an attempt to maximize short-term revenue (it will kill their long-term revenue), perhaps thinking this is battle royale, and they obviously will be a platform that wins in the end.
I don't think it's the Highlander end-game they are envisioning, rather there seems to be a drive towards a new (imagined) equilibrium with specific streaming services servicing specific demographics — like Disney is aiming straight for the 'wholesome and family-friendly'-niche.
Of course we all lose as consumers (until you hoist the Jolly Roger in despair).
You know that hip, edgy Vice News, the one with stories about doing drugs in war torn Africa? Yeah Disney owns like ~16-20% of that.
Disney is EVERYWHERE; be afraid of The Mouse.
All the edgier material goes on Hulu apparently.
Or at least I did, until they put the price up and I noticed they had bundled in another service without me realising and I was actually paying 3 times more than I thought. Had been meaning to cancel for a while, but that made me pull the trigger
Considering the actual compression quality of HBO is much worse than Netflix or Amazon and the app sucks to use, it seems like they don't have the resources at HBO to actually do streaming well.
Overall, it doesn't really seem like an efficient way to buy content for either them or me. It's like if a studio made their own DVD player.
1) Create virtual card
2) Switch payment method to new card
3) Delete virtual card
4) Cha ching !
It's a hassle, but this makes companies not willing to go after the debt.
Alternatively, they can do the same as the ISPs around here: jack up the sticker price, then give a large discount - conditional on your permanence as a client for X months. If you decide to cancel, you have to pay them back the discount accrued.
Then the model simply shifts: 1. Get credit card numbers illegally 2. Create Netflix accounts with those credit cards 3. Sell those accounts on EBay, even after the user reports the card as stolen it will continue to work.
If you never again plan on taking part in the economy, it may be a convenient solution, though.
That’s not going to happen with a virtual card you canceled.
Just change provider every 3 months to a different one, then binge it all.
Maybe a service that automatically deactivates your account at the best point in the billing-cycle? If you could do it without too much overlap you could actually do it on a monthly basis:
Jan - Netflix
Feb - Disney+
.
.