Tech’s broken promises: Streaming is now just as expensive and confusing as cable. Ubers cost as much as taxis. And the cloud is no longer cheap::Some tech is getting pricier and looking a lot like the older services it was supposed to beat. From video streaming to ride-hailing and cloud computing.
This has nothing to do with tech and EVERYTHING to do with FUCKING CAPITALISM.
What a dumb fucking post, tech didn’t promise us shit were still living in a capitalist nightmare where quarterly earnings are far and above the primary value, over any and all people.
What the fuck is this waaaa tech didn’t usher in an age of utopia!!! It’s almost like we have to solve other problems first. Fucks sake
Can we actually have a discussion on what’s at hand here instead of knee jerk reactions?
Perhaps you had to have been there for all the “building better worlds” and “bringing people together” horseshit every silicon valley company was spewing since the dot com boom in the 2000’s
It’s not an actual promise so don’t act pedantic. The point is- society was sold these concepts and ideas as solutions to existing problems, and they’ve instead become bigger and more expensive problems.
Honestly, not to blame the public, but people were sitting here for the last decade going, don’t like being censored? Don’t use Google/Facebook/whatever. Don’t like being tracked across the internet? Don’t use Google/Facebook/whatever. And everyone kept using it. As for streaming services, I mean, if you don’t want monopolistic pricing power, abolish copyright/DMCA. We complain constantly about the consequences of these big corps but society keeps religiously buying shit from them or participating in their services. Just like complaining constantly about global warming but driving your car 3 miles to the store to get a 1L bottle of water. We set up these structures and put people in these positions where they can exploit you, then act surprised when they do, and we have an excuse for why we think every individual part of it needs to stay exactly the same.
OK, maybe to blame the public a little.
abolish copyright
17 years is enough.
Cheaper has never been a promise of big tech. Better, personalized, more convenient, flexible, faster. Cheaper? I missed the promise where we’d get all these benefits for nothing, and in fact be given discounts for getting all these benefits.
Before anyone starts: yes Uber is better than a taxi. Yes, cloud computing is better than on-premises. I’m so sad for this author who can’t work their streaming services, but as bad as cable? Give me a break.
Yea cable sucked way more, atleast we aren’t locked into contracts with these services. Subscribe for a month watch the last years entire catalog and unsubscribe, rinse and repeat. You don’t need every subscription to be always active.
Yyyyep. The way they package channels is so irritating. And the advertising load you get with cable TV is intolerable to me. My parents are conditioned to it after decades but it drives me insane fast.
That’s why I just bittorrent the fuck out of everything. I’ll never play the game.
For now. Long term contracts are coming to streaming
Haha good luck with forcing people into a contract when you got like 2 shows airing at any given time. If they want a contract the content has to explode by atleast 4 fold
Yeah, but they said those things before going public or when a few people had the vast majority of shares.
If they cash out, there’s now a board in control, and the big investors want big returns. So that’s the direction companies inevitably go.
Because if capitalism.
It might be the same company, but it’s often not the same people calling the shots
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Capitalism would never allow utopia to come about, because the concept of utopia doesn’t allow for an unequal distribution of goods. The inequality is very much a feature, not a bug.
I’m not usually one for an ad hominem, but it’s business insider—that’s probably one conclusion they are incapable of arriving at
Not incapable, unwilling.
Technology has and will always be awesome…… unless it’s in a society that is structured in an inherently exploitative way.
Did you mean exploitative?
Yup thanks!
Well, you’re right that the bigger issue is people expecting tech to solve social problems created by social structure. But Yes, tech is absolutely failing at this. How could it not?
Why not instead take this show of contempt for tech as another chance for people to recognize the underlying issue, not as a threat to the future of tech developments.
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Yarrrrr…shiver me timbers. Fly the Jolly Roger high matey, there be booty ta plunder!
Main reason I’m in the works of a nas myself.
Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum!
Don’t blame tech, blame the bait-and-switch business model of loss leading products.
Uber never made money because they chose to undercut prices of all competitors and bleed them out.
I’d argue that newer streaming companies (those founded by studios, such as Disney +) did the same thing by roping in customers before jacking up prices.
It may be the “fault” of capitalism, but consider it was capitalism that birthed streaming in the first place. In the long term, the expectation would be a better solution will surface in reference to streaming… the same way streaming was a solution to cable. Thus is the business cycle.
You had me until that utterly stupid drivel at the end. You cannot give credit to the system that happened to be in charge at the time…
Then you’d have to thank Monarchy for a billion things that weren’t invented by monarchs…
You’re confusing economic systems with systems of government.
I’m interested to hear how you explain the drive to create streaming as an option to cable without including tenets of a market driven economy.
Reddit/Lemmy/Etc really has a hard-on to blame all bad things on capitalism. Capitalism is amoral. It is cold and uncaring. But not recognizing it as a driving factor for growth, innovation and societal advancement is a path of willful ignorance.
Everything has pros and cons in life.
Remember that every invention discovered and improvement made before capitalism, happened before capitalism.
Remember that even in a system in which workers own companies, those workers still want to make more money
A profit motive is not unique to nor a product of capitalism.
Those workers still want to live. The money is the means- controlled by those with the most money.
Capitalism and democracy as exclusive concepts.
None of this makes any sense, both on its face and as a response to my comment
Bold deconstruction of the argument. Capitalism didn’t invent iPhones, workers did. There are economic systems other than capitalism, that can do better, without the unilateral domination of capital.
You act like capitalism is something that was invented. Market economies have existed since the dawn of time.
Think of it more like a spectrum where free market and unregulated capitalism is on one end and economies under total state control are at the other.
There is clear evidence that one side of that spectrum favors innovation more than the other.
I guess you could argue that one end of the spectrum is more “moral” than the other, but I would counter that the opposite end is amoral rather than immoral.
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You mean capitalism is inherent in the matrix of the space-time continuum as opposed to invented?
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Market economies have not all been capitalistic.
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Innovation is not the singular motivation of mankind. Survival, comfort, stability, peace, equality are more important.
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An amoral society is no better than an immoral society.
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Also worth noting in the case of uber, even if price is equal with taxis, the experience is much better. Nicer cars, better drivers and much easier app use. Even at price parity, its a very superior product in most cases.
Uber never made money because they chose to undercut prices of all competitors and bleed them out.
I think that is only the first part of it. Uber invested a ton of money in autonomous vehicles. I think they were originally betting that they would undercut prices, bleed out competitors, and then be the only one who has the capital to deploy fleets of driverless vehicles.
We are still far from having driverless vehicles and I think investors are realizing that so Uber upped their prices and lowered their pay. There is nothing revolutionary about them. They implemented a good tracking system and the ability for drivers to more easily figure out which rides would be best. They do not have that advantage anymore since taxi companies now largely have the exact same tech but without the massive overhead that Uber has.
I always thought [dumping](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumping_(pricing_policy\)) was illegal.
FTC has been asleep at the wheel for 50 years
Is this surprising? The prices were always going to adjust to the market. Any new cheap thing that undercuts the market will eventually become the market as it becomes mainstream, and prices will be increased to what the market will bear to maximize profits.
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Sure. But torrents are for files which is different from streaming. And Kodi + Trakt is still far beyond Netflix.
The costs to you with torrents are the relatively small risk you may get sued for a lot of money and/or the cost of covering up your activity with a VPN to make it harder to sue you.
People who were always going to pirate are still always going to pirate. But companies like Netflix know that people will pay for a convenient, legal service with features they like. But if they start charging too much or make their platform suck, people will be more likely to cancel them and pirate.
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Well that’s the difference, most people will pirate when it’s more convenient to do so. And as long as prices are so exorbitant.
I pirate hockey games, because watching hockey is ridiculously inconvenient and/or expensive.
I do not pirate music anymore, or video games because Apple Music is more convenient and not very expensive and steam has all the games I’d ever want to play, and has enough sales that it’s not that expensive either.
I don’t pirate movies and tv shows because Netflix and Disney really cover anything I want to watch and anything else I share a crave subscription, like for Game of Thrones
But I do pirate hockey games.
I think the problem comes in with all the copyright and monopolization bs companies like Verizon and apple pull to remove all possible competition and allow them to jack up their prices
The prices were always going to adjust to the market
The prices will always be inflated regardless. The free market is a myth at best, a delusion at worst.
No it’s not surprising, we ALL STILL live in the same fucking capitalist nightmare.
Anyone surprised is simply naïve and/or a literal child lol
Remember when we could only watch what had recently been on TV and cable companies were trying to lock people in to specific cable boxes that couldn’t skip ads and we paid $120 per month for ad supported content and cable companies would attach random fees and everyone had to buy hundreds of channels to only watch 4?
And we’d build movie and music collections of physical media we had to keep in our homes and cars and we’d listen to the same three albums for months and if we were lucky enough to get a TV series box set, it’d set us back many hundreds of dollars and we’d have to remember which disc we were on and navigate arcane and slow menus?
And when we had questions, we had to find the answers ourselves by reading long form content and just be satisfied that there were many questions we couldn’t answer at all because the information wasn’t available?
Or when we wanted cabs, we’d not know how much a ride would cost until after we got to our destinations and they smelled like rotten farts and were covered in boogers and our only goal was to not touch anything and look out the window because what’s a smartphone?
And when we wanted to go somewhere, we had to ask for directions and use atlases to figure out how to get to the general area of the destination, then drive in circles, accidentally drive past a turn 5 times because the street we were supposed to turn onto had two different names and we had been given the wrong one?
I was there and anyone who pines for the old days can just go there. We have cable and encyclopedias and taxis and atlases. Go nuts.
Exactly right! While I think companies like Uber and Netflix did price things like Taxis and Cable out of business unethically, I don’t want to go back to those days. I remember having to try to catch a Taxi and waiting over an hour and a half in the cold. They would ask where I was going and just drive off. Cable was full of scummy tactics and slowly introduced ads until it was just basically paying to watch ads. I don’t want to go back to that shit. But Uber and the like should have been honest about what the pricing structure would have been from the get go.
The business practices of Uber and Netflix are also unethical but in a different way. Uber pays basically nothing. Netflix as well as streaming pays very little to actors/writers/film crew.
Oh, for sure! Corporate greed exceeds new levels year on year! To think they raise interest rates to curb inflation, but then banks and most other companies are posting record profits without any social return is disgusting.
The term for this is Platform Capitalism
But Uber and the like should have been honest about what the pricing structure would have been from the get go.
Pricing structure will be adjusted based on the market conditions. Applies to any company at any time.
Not the same situation. They purposely went low to price out the competition for years, accepting losses until the competition hopefully didn’t exist or had everyone semi dependent on them. This is not a supply/demand situation or increase with inflation. This is creating market dependency until you can increase your cost to what you want it to be by obliterating competition.
That’s just normal price dumping.
I remember those days. People were happier then
So now we can only what the streaming providers have licensed, and those things which we’ve “purchased” can and do disappear from our devices. And our answers are increasingly becoming hidden behind paywalls that require specific subscriptions & unskippable ads.
“Today” is only better than yesterday due to a recent huge disruption called “the internet” and companies are absolutely scrambling to restore the “bad old days” status quo that you allude to.
looks like an exaggerated strawman
Tech never promised anything. They cut the price for people to be dependent to them and then rise the price.
It’s just basic capitalism.
Right. This is how it works. The marketplace sustained a value for watching entertainment at home (cable tv). When pricing outstretched customer desire to use the product, the business changed to start selling the service connection in addition to advertising to create another revenue stream. It got so ubiquitous that people don’t even remember that OTA tv was the majority solution for decades and was completely funded by ads. Eventually, prices stabilize and the business can only make more money by acquiring a larger share of the market or innovating something new. They’ll always try to increase that price, but it is balanced by how many customers choose to give up the service.
When streaming platforms disrupted that business model, they were cheap because they had to convince the marketplace to change. As adoption got more prolific, pricing changes to recoup early losses… then to increase value to become more attractive to the customer and gain more market share… then to increase profits.
We are still at the point you can cancel the service and jump around on a monthly basis, but the days of 12 month contracts are right around the corner… and they’re coming fast.
Take video streaming. In search of better profitability, Netflix, Disney, and other providers have been raising prices
Piracy and buying/ripping physical media is back on the table bois. Been running my own personal media server secured with a VPN to access it. Costs are the symmetric gigabit connection, a simple raspberry pi for WireGuard, and old computer for media server. Plus some technical knowledge.
Any physical media I have has been ripped to digital form (4K where possible).
A 3-mile Uber ride that cost $51.69
Yet another reason why we need to have more diverse options in transportation. Public transportation is dismal in the USA due to suburban sprawl and car centric society. Alternative forms of transportation such as bikes or even walking is not accessible to a large portion of people.
Took a bus the other day and the total cost for 24 hrs was exactly $2.50. Don’t have to worry about psychos on the road driving to and from their deadass suburban home and deadend job.
Cloud promises are being broken
Fuck the “cloud”. It’s just another persons/companies server. Switched off major cloud platforms long ago.
Have off site backups take place nightly. No middleman scanning my stuff. No more upselling. Besides ISP costs, everything else is static or one time setup.
Yeah, I’m already automating my entire Plex configuration, got some friends as admins on my services to help me run it, and I’m sharing it with all my friends through secure connections with let’s encrypt. There’s no reason to keep giving massive companies our money, data, and freedom. Fuck the cloud, fuck these subscription services, fuck SaaS, fuck it all. It’s piracy all the way down from now on.
On the flip side, piracy has never been easier.
Not sure how it’s easier I can’t get near a torrent site without getting dumb letters from ISP. "get a VPN… "
OK. Well that’s not easier than ever, is it lol.
I’ve gotten dumb angry letters since from ISPs since Napster.
But I’m hard pressed to remember a time when so much content was so readily available so quickly.
And a $4/mo Proton VPN is downright trivial when the cost of a good laptop has fallen from the $1000s to the low $100s.
This is all by design. Once they have you/us/them captured again, we’re going to take another trip around the “raise prices and squeeze services until it’s unsustainable, because shareholder and CEO profit”. It has all happened before and it will all happen again.
The cloud is just someone else’s computer. The uber is just someone else’s car. Streaming is just someone else’s media library. They have you right where they want you, dependent on them.
Time to disrupt the disruptions.
I have this idea for a consolidated ISP, cable television, home security, and telephone landline company. Gotta have the landline.
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But I can binge streaming services and then cancel without multiple hundred dollar fees. And I can use the same app for Uber no matter what city I’m in.
So… I get things aren’t paradise but let’s be clear they’re still largely covering a lot of folks needs.
Moreover, not to take sides with Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Dropbox, Box, etc, but storing files costs money to maintain (there needs to be redundancy, every once in a while drives need to be replaced, they need to be cooled, etc), so we’d like it to be cheap, but doing all these things cannot be free for the hosting company.
This is not to say they are jacking up prices, but that it cannot stay super cheap forever.
Still, these services have been very handy so far, though I’m looking to see if the plan I have is still convenient compared to the competition
Seems to me like it would be more sustainable if it was super cheap for a large common library so a large userbase would maintain a continuous subscription, supporting a large continuous revenue, rather than signing-up and quitting intermittently.
The media companies are ruining it for themselves by trying to squeeze more out of the users, which leads them not to stick with any of them.
Seems to me like it would be more sustainable if it was super cheap for a large common library so a large userbase would maintain a continuous subscription, supporting a large continuous revenue, rather than signing-up and quitting intermittently.
Excuse me, but how would a tiny percentage of people profit off of this?! What is even the point if there are no shareholders to demand record profits year after year? /s
“Needs” lol
We talk about being able to stop paying things as a service in it’s own right lol.
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There was never a world in which TV companies like Disney and NBC could lose cable subscribers (yes comcast manages the subs, but they pay Disney and NBC carriage fees from subscription fees) and make streaming cheaper than cable. So if you are losing a lot of money via cord cutting, and then you have the expense of standing up your own streaming service… Yeah, it’s going to probably cost the same as fees the cable company used to kick back to Disney. The difference is that if you want all the content from everyone, you need to then to get all the app subscriptions. However, you no longer get the bundled price that provided some discount via cable.
I don’t know that there was ever a promise that streaming would be cheaper. It could be more a la carte, but the cost for the content was never going to change in the eyes of the tv companies that now have the added operation cost of maintaining an app.
it’s MY fault that there are fewer cabs because other mother fuckers stopped using them?
Yep, my entire post was about was about TimewornTraveler and no one else. Its definitely all your fault. Pay no attention to the fact that I said ‘for believing tech bros’ which would exclude anyone who didn’t believe tech bros from the statement, Instead just get upset about nothing.
maybe don’t make such a general blanket statement that anyone could take offense from, next time maybe? maybe don’t blame anyone for corporate greed except the corporates who are greeding instead of getting upset about nothing
The ‘general statement’ had a very specific qualifier that the op ignored in order to make himself upset. It had nothing to do with generality and everything to do with ignoring half a sentence so someone could make themselves mad.
You can see the absurdity of my statement but not of yours… odd
You literally ignored half of the sentence you have a problem with so you could be contrarian. Odd.
I dont know why I’m still responding to this tedious, disingenuous bullshit but here goes… You made a statement: “It’s ‘your’ [sic] fault.” Then you gave a supporting statement: “Tech bros only want money.” Cool. I agree with the latter part. But you are using it to support a conclusion that I don’t agree with. Hence I attacked the fucking conclusion instead of the supporting details.
Do you understand now? Or did you always understand but you can’t take accountability for making a shitty statement and instead you harp on meaningless bullshit?
Instead of blaming the people who use these services - and make blanket statements as if we are all using those services - how about you either A) stick to criticizing the bad actors or B) shut the fuck up.
Okay? Thanks. Talk to you later.
And yet you still omit the very same words you omitted from the beginning. I get it though, you have no arguement if you acknowledge it was in the very same sentence qualifying my statement you wanna be mad at, keep digging friend. How many times are you gonna ignore it? Also how are you gonna use quotes if you don’t copy the actual sentence and just put your own period in it before my real sentence ended? You as good at citing things as you are at logic.
Uber was never a tech proposition, it was a predatory disruptor.
The streaming fiasco is sad but inevitable as greed does what greed does.
Cloud was never primarily about price, the big cost save initially was to get rid of purchased or rented iron and locations but the main reason of the Big Switch was the scaleability and opportunities for quick deployment of new technologies and methodologies.
Cloud computing is very much like the timeshare computing of old. It’s the dream of every mainframe owner to keep the platters spinning. Ie, keep extracting computational rents for owning the big numbers boxes.
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The goal is surely to capture every human need and package them as obnoxious subscriptions.
Rentiership is the goal of every capitalist.
