Yar har har matey.<p>I imagine we will be hearing about the rise of piracy again in the next 6-12 months.<p>I’m definitely not interested in paying 20/mo per service as is the direction we are heading.<p>It will be interesting to see which streamers win and which fail then get bought up. In 5 years, we could see consolidation get us back to a reasonable number of services rather than the current situation.<p>In reality, ad free streaming will likely be the first casualty. And we will be back to cable tv.
The only argument needed is the one by The Oatmeal[1]. This is the exact reason I pirate for all my media needs (except for games, because, Steam figured this out 2 decades ago).<p>[1]<a href="https://theoatmeal.com/comics/game_of_thrones" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://theoatmeal.com/comics/game_of_thrones</a>
It's interesting that Spotify is accused of underpaying artists but provides an all you can eat across a seemingly limitless catalogue, whereas video streamers struggle to make it work. My guess is that the 'artists', in this case big companies, feel they can demand fees for content which are unsupportable. In the end they will suffer with no outlet for their back catalogue.
It was a fool's errand to think that we were going to have 10-20x more content for 1/5th the price forever<p>Streaming's original premise was cheap content in Netflix. People were fine waiting 2-3 years to watch a show when it came to Netflix (Breaking Bad, anyone?)<p>But when Netflix became more than just reruns with a good interface and became original content, and then a race to have more original content among all the players, it was obvious that we'd eventually be back to paying the same overall as we did for cable<p>Cable companies and traditional media companies could've easily prevented all of this by not getting so greedy on pricing and actually caring about the customer experience. Shitty cable boxes and $250 a month broke the system.<p>In many ways streaming is actually worse (broadcast of high def video is way more efficient than point-to-point individual streams, aggregation of all content into one UI was better than now having to bounce between apps) but in many ways it's better (Rokus and Apple TVs are lightyears better than 15 year old recycled cable set tops, and even if the total of all streaming ends up not being that much cheaper at least you can pick and choose what you get instead of a bundle)
They've been running streaming at a loss to get market share, but now they're all freaking out about the losses and trying to make it so they make just as much from streaming as they did before when you had to bundle everything and they locked most of the content in a vault to divvy out when they felt like remarketing it to make more money. Things are going to keep getting worse because making less money overall is not allowed, neither is making the same amount of money. Only more money.
I wonder if we get to a point where studios go back into the theater business but show there larger blockbuster TV shows to help offset the production costs.