Netflix Is Doing Great, So It’s Killing Off Its Cheapest Ad-Free Plan for Good::The company made gains in ad-based subscribers, but the $12 Basic subscription is being put out to pasture later in 2024 starting in Canada and the U.K.

  • @[email protected]
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    845 months ago

    You either die a hero, or live long enough to become another shitty cable company.

    I ditched Netflix years ago when the content got worse by the week. Good shows were taken off by rights holders so they could put it on other platforms and what remained sucked. Not to mention Netflix’s proclivity for killing its own shows.

    It got to a point where all the new stuff were shitty movies and Scandinavian crime dramas. Hard pass.

    With the way other streaming services are going, it wouldn’t surprise me if people jumped back to piracy. I honestly don’t mind paying something reasonable, but all these subscriptions and price hikes do add up.

    • @[email protected]
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      175 months ago

      You know all this is fuelled by the desire for eternal growth, which at the end is unsustainable but human greed has no boundaries I guess. And all the SaaS and in general the subscription model so many companies are trying to promote has exactly the same goal.

      I do remember the early days of mobile phones and apps when you were actually able to buy a lifetime license for different apps and get meaningful updates. Now everything turned into a giant SaaS garbage and data collection pile of shit.

    • Ech
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      15 months ago

      Are we gonna pretend Netflix was ever a “hero”? They were revolutionary for sure, but they were always profit driven. I don’t think it’s particularly wise to see any company as “the good one”. Not to say companies can’t be beneficial/useful, but it’s always good to remember their singular goal.

      • @[email protected]
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        15 months ago

        I don’t think heroes have to be non-profit.

        I’d say back when Netflix was fighting Blockbuster, They may have been wearing capes. Going to Blockbuster picking out two or three titles and getting out of there with a bag of popcorn was an expensive proposition. Mailing you DVDs as fast as you could mail them back to them was a pretty damn impressive feat.

        When they started streaming, The catalog was worse than useless, but they sorted out the technology and the partnerships and the delivery. They got funded and they ate the R&D costs. What did we have back then DLNA and tversity?

        I won’t say Plex and jellyfin wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for them but I think they inspired a hell of a lot of software we have now. They wet our appetite for unlimited on demand media consumption, which ended up paving the way for the thetvdb and co.

        Once they started becoming a production company… honestly once they all started becoming production companies things went to hell in a handbasket. They’re not even competing anymore they’re just trying to see how much they can raise prices and drop catalogs.