• zifnab25 [he/him, any]@hexbear.net
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    8 months ago

    Old enough to remember when The Disney Channel had a bunch of high quality original content and the HBO Network was where you’d go for all the cool new movies.

  • invo_rt [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    8 months ago

    tl;dr capitalism

    It’s rent-seeking through and through. Market segregation happened because Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) made it much easier to spin up a streaming platform and every company with an IP catalog wanted their piece of the pie.

    Simultaneously, companies that created their own service discovered there is a hard limit on their profits based on the number of active subscribers and that profit is the same whether they watch one hour a month or a thousand. That’s why there has been a rise in ad supported subscriptions. Cheaper per month for the end user? Yes, but they are potentially much more profitable for the streaming company as their income will scale based on the number of times ads can be served.

  • farting_weedman [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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    8 months ago

    It’s because the thing that pays for television is advertising. All the shows we loved were created to get eyes on the tube for advertisers. Cable was something we paid for and the content got worse and cost increased as more people got on board.

    The thing that pays for streaming is still advertising, but not as straightforwardly as with cable where you make money by getting Johnson and Johnson to pay you for putting two million eyes on front of a 30 second spot for Colgate. Streaming advertising is all analytics and being able to say “household 836492a47f024b has someone about to hit their cycle, someone pregnant, someone who wants a full size pickup truck and someone who wants legos. Here’s their ip and browser identifiers.”

    So when even the most targeted, in your head advertising is seeing reduced returns because of lowered income and higher prices, the content gotta get more broadly appealing and smooth edged. The monthly prices gotta come up.

    The internet is, speaking in terms of money and power, tv 2.0.

  • MaoTheLawn [any, any]@hexbear.net
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    8 months ago

    So what’s the next thing that knocks streaming off it’s platform?

    YouTube’s already pretty dominant and it’s turning more and more into cable TV too. Loads of shit British TV shows have their entire backlog uploaded with ad breaks built in that are almost as long as TV ones.

    Where’s the next ship to jump to as a early adopter? I find VR as a possibility hard to imagine taking over any time soon. Is there hope for alternate platforms - the same format but without all the shite and a genuine focus on good content like MEANS.TV?