Enshittification Ahoy: Streaming Video Price Hikes Show No Sign Of Slowing Down
from the history-repeats-itself dept
Now that streaming subscriber growth has slowed, we’ve noted repeatedly how the streaming TV sector is falling into all of the bad habits that ultimately doomed traditional cable TV.
That has involved chasing pointless “growth for growth’s sake” megamergers, imposing bottomless price hikes and new annoying restrictions on customers, undermining labor, and cutting corners on product quality in a bid to give Wall Street that sweet, impossible, unlimited, quarterly growth it demands.
And the price hikes show absolutely no sign of slowing down. All of the major streaming companies have been raising prices like it’s going out of fashion. Techspot broke it down nicely in visual form:
Extremely innovative.
Paramount was the latest to boost streaming prices this month as the company tries to recoup debt created by its massive recent acquisition of CBS and Bari Weiss’ weird, overvalued right wing troll blog. In addition to price hikes, companies are intent on just generally being more annoying and making their services less enjoyable to use, including crackdowns on family member password sharing.
And there’s a weird, ignorant tone deafness that’s growing among media executives, as we saw back in September when Warner Brothers CEO David Zaslov complained about how modern TV often provides a “a terrible consumer experience,” while with the very next breath lamenting that there’s too much competition and his companies haven’t imposed enough new price hikes on customers.
King Trump’s destruction of whatever is left of regulatory oversight and media consolidation limits means there’s going to be another huge new wave of pointless shitty mergers across media (likely involving Comcast/NBC, Warner Brothers, and Paramount). That means more debt from pointless deals that companies try to recoup via price hikes imposed on already annoyed customers.
As we saw with traditional cable, eventually this consolidation scheme falls apart as consumers flee to alternative, cheaper (or free) entertainment options, including piracy.
At that point, executives inevitably blame absolutely everything but their own behavior (generational entitlement! inflation! a stagnant housing market!) and the cycle begins anew, with nobody in any position of power having any financial incentive to learn absolutely anything from experience.
Filed Under: cable, enshittification, price hikes, prices, streaming, tv, video
Companies: cbs, paramount, warner bros. discovery
Comments on “Enshittification Ahoy: Streaming Video Price Hikes Show No Sign Of Slowing Down”
Just imagine how high they will hike prices when no one can afford it and just pirate it anyhow.
ARRRRR MATEYS!
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In related news: Lawmakers Want to Ban VPNs (including U.S. lawmakers)
It’s ostensibly to “protect” people from pornography, but I’ll be surprised if the media companies aren’t involved behind the scenes.
Re: Re: Time to bring out this old chestnut
Dear clueless Wisconsin legislator:
Your legislation advocates a
(X) technical (X) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante
approach to “protecting” children. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won’t work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
(x) Bad actors can easily use it to harvest your online activity
(x) Online services and other legitimate web uses would be affected
(x) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
(x) It will stop legitimate VPN use for two weeks and then we’ll be stuck with it
(x) Users will not put up with it
(x) “Big Tech” will not put up with it
(x) Almost every business will not put up with it
( ) Requires too much cooperation from ISPs
(x) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
( ) Many websites cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential customers
(x) People can still get to websites they want to use
( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else’s career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
(x) Lack of centrally controlling authority for VPNs
(x) Open relays in other countries
(x) Open relays in other states
(x) Open relays in other cities
(x) Open relays in other neighborhoods
( ) The sudden rise of companies promising solutions
( ) Asshats
( ) Jurisdictional problems
( ) Unpopularity of weird new restrictions for doom-scrolling
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of the web
( ) Huge existing software investment in VPNs
(x) Susceptibility of web traffic to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install government-mandated software
( ) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
(x) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
(x) Extreme risk of relaxing security
( ) Scammers and/or identity theft
(x) Technically illiterate politicians
( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who still buy things with cheques
( ) Dishonesty on the part of app developers themselves
( ) Bandwidth unaffected by client filtering
( ) MS Teams
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
(x) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
(x) End-to-end encrypted tunnels should not be the subject of legislation
( ) Blacklists suck
( ) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
(x) Visiting websites should be free of government interference
(x) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatibility with open source or open source licenses
(x) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Submitting ID to every website you want to visit is cumbersome
(x) I don’t want the government reading my browser logs
( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
( ) Sorry dude, but I don’t think it would work.
(x) This is a stupid idea, and you’re a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) How do you manage to not accidentally hurt yourself?
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Asshats and MS Teams will have it all sorted. Trust me, bro.
Re: Re: VPNs fulfil a real technical need
Before I retired, I worked for a software support company, from home. Whenever I connected to our home office, or any of our customers, I had to use a VPN to access anything except public facing Web sites or documents.
I’m curious how these laws banning VPNs will affect organisations in these situations.
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So’s the EFF, per the linked post. Very likely they’ll be some sort of carve-out for people accessing work accounts. A ban only on selling VPN access (to U.S. customers, or to anyone via the U.S. banking system) might be roughly what the media companies want. The wording might change a few times.
Longer-term, people have pointed out that this type of network design—permissive inside, with a restrictive firewall blocking “outside” stuff—isn’t a great match to modern security threats. For example, someone logs onto coffee shop wi-fi and every other customer looks “internal” till the VPN starts; who knows what got through before then, and what happens when it gains corporate network access.
Growing? They worked against VCRs, lobbied for various other legal policies that no normal person wanted, sued their fans… and, of course, there’s always been cancelling of popular shows (notably Star Trek) and fucking with others (The Simpsons was unwatchable for years due to football pre-emption).
The 1976 film “Network” was pretty much based on network-executive tone-deafness:
In any rational world, these clowns would be prosecuted for shareholder fraud. They pay themselves outrageous salaries, which are approved by a board of directors that is also outrageously compensated, while the company’s value is destroyed.
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But the board members are generally approved by the shareholders, to such an extent that the vote is almost a formality once a company has “recommended” a new member.
This might be because of how many votes are held by “institutional investors”, such as funds, with the people in these institutions benefitting from the status quo (by all serving on each other’s boards). One encouraging trend is allowing beneficiaries to direct proportional voting power. Still, even if they manage to vote against someone, it’d be very difficult for them to actually nominate a specific person.
Is this inflation adjusted? I agree with the primary tenor of the article, but comparing the price increases to inflation would be helpful.
For example, HBO’s 23% increase since 2019 wouldn’t be that dramatic if inflation is 22%.
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Almost certainly not. If so, they’d generally say, if only via dubious language such as “real”. But note that inflation isn’t as simple as generally perceived; a person experiencing the “average inflation” is as elusive as the “average pilot“, whom the U.S. Air Force found to be mythical in 1952.
Enshittification
Two thoughts ran thru my head: 1) I am retired and on a fixed income. As prices rise I need to cut something out to stay in budget. As some point I will make the choice and drop a streaming service. 2) Where do these services think the money will come from to pay the increased prices? With all the cash in the economy moving upscale, the vast numbers of less rich people will all be making choices to cut something out too!
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Why’s that their problem? Zaslav, for example, gets 3 million dollars per year guaranteed, plus up to 12 million in bonuses, plus equity awards valued at 7.5 million—and if judged incompetent by the board, will continue to get that money for 2 full years (because that’s not “gross neglect” or one of the enumerated justifications for a “with Cause” firing). Then the next person will negotiate a similar package to tell the board what they want to hear—which I’m sure is not “let’s charge people less”—and the cycle repeats.
In other words: they don’t care. They don’t have to.
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They have to care when the economy won’t support increased profits, which is the scenario Harold K suggests, Wall Steet makes sure of it. -Of course, there’s a balance there, and as long as they have all the money when shit collapses, they don’t care either. But they all have to be on board with the timing, which is much less likely. So losing custom should drive prices down, and CEOs who don’t get that get shitcanned. Of course those CEOs still escape unscathed, with all their unearned booty.
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Sure, somewhat, and perhaps that’s why Zaslav was making about twice as much money in earlier years. But in some sense, an economic downturn can be a benefit: the people in charge can keep taking credit for all the successes, while using “the economy” to justify any failures, wage cuts, etc. As long as, like you say, no media CEO breaks form. (Remember that there’s no compulsory licensing for video, which means anyone who pisses off their competitors might find themself unable to ever license content from those competitors.)
I feel like we may have different definitions of “shitcanned”. Most people would use the term “jackpot” or “retirement” for the idea of getting paid like $50 million to not work. Where’s the “shit”?
This only happens at all if the board members “get that” and are willing to act.
You knew they were going to try and blame this on Trump
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And you just knew that some fanboy would read “Trump’s decisions means that this will continue and get worse” as “Streaming price hikes are Trump’s fault”.
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Don’t we get toblame everything on the guy in office like you do, with zero reason? Only we have reason. And it’s not just Trump – although don’t do anything he doesn’t like, or he will shit on you so hard you won’t know which way is up. No, it’s most politicians, and all Republicans who keep fucking breaking all the things that protect us and ensure proper capitalism. And fuckwits like you, who identify with their bullshit.
Have a nice day! 😀
The enshifiication continues on pirate iptv sites as well.
I now have to subscribe to 3 different sites to get all the channels I want.
One is in china, a second in Azerbaijan, and the third is in Holland
While $60 a month for all 3 is cheaper than cable in the usa it is still rather high.
Since none of those are in the usa they not subject to any American law
The one in Azerbaijan with servers in Ukraine will be not subject to Michigan’s porn ban should it be passed
Good luck to Michigan in trying to enforce that law in Ukraine or Azerbaijan on the 4400 porn channels included on that service out of about 200,000 channels
Sorry Michigan, your laws do not apply in Azerbaijan or Ukraine
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Since Azerbaijan bans serving pornography from .az domains, a simple complaint to IntraNS might be enough to take it down without all the effort of a lawsuit. Kind of like how goatse.cx got shut down.
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The offices arw in Azerbaijan bit the servers are in Ukraine
Michigan laws do not apply in Ukraine
The ip5v company i use is in Azerbaijan because my credit card statement says it and wfat is my up address told me the server is in Ukraine
Servers in Ukraine mean they only subject to Ukranianl kswshķķ I
As a result they are not subject to any American laws
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But what top-level domain are they under? If it’s any U.S.-run one, including .com, .net, .org, .us, and many of the newer ones such as .info, they can be shut down in U.S. courts. If it’s .az or .ua, the courts of Azerbaijan or Ukraine respectively can have those shut down. Accessing by I.P. address might still work, if you know the address(es).
You mentioned credit cards. Did you read about what happened to the judges of the International Criminal Court when Trump issued sanctions against them? They can’t use Paypal, Visa, Mastercard, or American Express, and can’t do any transaction in U.S. dollars, among other things. If any of these apply to your payments, then they are subject to U.S. laws, and it’ll be noticed if the U.S. takes enough of an interest.