Sooner or later, everything old is new again.
We may be at this point in tech, where supposedly revolutionary products are becoming eerily similar to the previous offerings they were supposed to beat.
Take video streaming. In search of better profitability, Netflix, Disney, and other providers have been raising prices. The various bundles are now as annoyingly confusing as cable, and cost basically the same. Somehow, we’re also paying to watch ads. How did that happen?
Amazon Prime Video costs $9 a month and there are no ads. Oh, except when Thursday Night Football is on. Then there are loads of ads. And Amazon is discussing an ad-supported version of the Prime Video service, according to The Wall Street Journal. That won’t be free, I can assure you.
Paramount+ with Showtime costs $12 a month and the live TV part has commercials and a few other shows include “brief promotional interruptions,” according to the company. Translation: ads.
Streaming was supposed to be better and cheaper. I’m not sure that’s the case anymore. This NFL season, like previous years, I will record games on OTA linear TV using a TiVo box from about 2014. I’ll watch hours of action every weekend for free and I’ll watch no ads. Streaming can’t match that.
You can still stream without ads, but the cost of this is getting so high, and the bundling is so complex, that it’s getting as bad as cable — the technology that streaming was supposed to radically improve upon.
The Financial Times recently reported that a basket of the top US streaming services will cost $87 this fall, compared with $73 a year ago. The average cable TV package costs $83 a month, it noted. A 3-mile Uber ride that cost $51.69
A similar shift is happening in ride-hailing. Uber has been on a quest to become profitable, and it achieved that, based on one measure, in the most-recent quarter. Lyft is desperately trying to keep up. How are they doing this? Raising prices is one way.
Wired’s editor at large, Steven Levy, recently took a 2.95-mile Uber ride from downtown New York City to the West Side to meet Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi. When asked to estimate the cost of the ride, Khosrowshahi put it at $20. That turned out to be less than half the actual price of $51.69, including a tip for the driver.
“Oh my God. Wow,” the CEO said upon learning the cost.
I recently took a Lyft from Seattle-Tacoma International airport to a home in the city. It cost $66.69 with driver tip. As a test, I ordered a taxi for the return journey. Exact same distance, and the cab was stuck in traffic longer. The cost was $70 with a tip. So basically the same.
And the cab can be ordered with an app now that shows its location, just like Uber and Lyft. So what’s the revolutionary benefit here? The original vision was car sharing where anyone could pick anyone else up. Those disruptive benefits have steadily ebbed away through regulation, disputes with drivers over pay, and the recent push for profitability. Cloud promises are being broken
Finally, there’s the cloud, which promised cheaper and more secure computing for companies. There are massive benefits from flexibility here: You can switch your rented computing power on and off quickly depending on your needs. That’s a real advance.
The other main benefits — price and security — are looking shakier lately.
Salesforce, the leading provider of cloud marketing software, is increasing prices this month. The cost of the Microsoft 365 cloud productivity suite is rising, too, along with some Slack and Adobe cloud offerings, according to CIO magazine.
AWS is going to start charging customers for an IPv4 address, a crucial internet protocol. Even before this decision, AWS costs had become a major issue in corporate board rooms.
As a fast-growing startup, Snap bought into the cloud and decided not to build it’s own infrastructure. In the roughly five years since going public, the company has spent about $3 billion on cloud services from Google and AWS. These costs have been the second-biggest expense at Snap, behind employees.
“While cloud clearly delivers on its promise early on in a company’s journey, the pressure it puts on margins can start to outweigh the benefits, as a company scales and growth slows,” VC firm Andreessen Horowitz wrote in a blog. “There is a growing awareness of the long-term cost implications of cloud.”
Some companies, such as Dropbox, have even repatriated most of their IT workloads from the public cloud, saving millions of dollars, the VC firm noted.
What about security? Last month, Google, the third-largest cloud provider, started a pilot program where thousands of its employees are limited to using work computers that are not connected to the internet, according to CNBC.
The reason: Google is trying to reduce the risk of cyberattacks. If staff have computers disconnected from the internet, hackers can’t compromise these devices and gain access to sensitive user data and software code, CNBC reported.
So, cloud services connected to the internet are great for everyone, except Google? Not a great cloud sales pitch.
Back to pirating 🏴☠️ Arrrr!
Like we ever left the open sea… Ahoy, weigh anchor and keep it steady!
I legitimately did, I stopped pirating except for old obscure stuff that I couldn’t find anywhere.
On a serious note, I stopped pirating games because I have not reason now… but all the streaming services war never gave me at no point a better option than torrent…
Great point. I greatly* prefer the convenience of having my steam library.
On the flip side I pirated most of the old nes/SNES games that are harder to emulate well.
Like we ever left the open sea… Ahoy, weigh anchor and keep it steady!
If you subscribe to all the services, it can be expensive. But it’s still FAR more flexible than traditional cable, since you can pick and choose which services you want on any given month, and cancel when you’ve binged all the shows. The shows that don’t shove ads down your throat every 5 minutes, BTW.
This just reads like an ad for cable companies. “Please stay with the worst customer service in the country, the competition is just as expensive if you ignore how people actually use it!”
Cable not offering a la carte services doomed it. But most of the networks just put their IP on a streaming service so it’s the same thing except they still get to milk the boomers.
I mean I certainly get it though. Streaming has gone down hill with more and more studios packing up to launch their own service and take all their content with them. It feels a LOT like cable. The difference is no ads. $80 spread out to all the streaming services they only get your money. $80 for cable they make that plus ads. I think it hurts more cause Netflix keeps raising and the quality doesn’t match. Promising shows don’t get the time. They spend the money on big stars or something?
In my opinion the real problems are that the streaming services are now starting to follow Netflix’s lead and look into cracking down on password sharing. My other issue is it seems it can be arbitrary what gets renewed and idk other services but netflix certainly seems unfair and a horrible way to track when you literally have all the data possible. When something releases they only look at views of the first week or something! And for some reason a really small amount of time watching counts? None of it makes sense to me. What about how many people “add to list” or watch the full preview?
As a fan of animation, I have to subscribe to a good few services to get what I want. Netflix for Nimona and Castlevania, Max for what’s left of cartoon network (RIP Summer Camp Island), Paramount for nick stuff, Amazon Prime for Vox Machina, Disney for Gravity Falls, and Crunchyroll for anime. (obviously these aren’t an exhaustive list, just some examples of stuff I’ve wanted to watch recently).
And yeah, I could try to juggle all of these by subbing and unsubbing each month, but I don’t want to spend that much effort on something I’m trying to do in my downtime. And even if I did, their selection is still limited to relatively recent stuff and region locked to hell, and as a cherry on top, they might decide to nuke entire series with no way to access them (again, looking at you, Max). And every year they get more strict about password sharing, are more expensive, and include more ads.
So yeah, still not as bad as cable, but it’s been a shitshow in the past 5 years and doesn’t show signs of getting any better.
Yup, not sure if the OP is a cable astro-turf account or just a useful idiot. Yes, if you subscribe to every streaming service under the sun, you might manage to reach the cost of the average cable subscriber. If you want a real apples to apples comparison through, cable tended to be a lot more expensive, once you had premium channels and made the mistake of wanting that one channel what was only available in their top, hand us your wallet and bend over a barrel tier.
Back before I cut the cord, I was paying ~$200 a month to my local cable company. Why, I wanted HBO, FX and Discovery (before Discovery went to shit). The only way to get that mix was in “fuck your wallet” package and also paying for HBO as an add-on. Fortunately, Discovery went to shit and we realized that we could go OTA and streaming and get everything we wanted for way less.
Sure, prices have creeped up over the years. Netflix is getting really expensive, and we’ve added other services. We’re still well under $100 a month. Also, we can pick and choose what services we subscribe to. We regularly purge services we’re not using and pick them back up when something interesting comes along. This is way, way better than the cable company’s “fuck you, pay us” system.
Last month, Google, the third-largest cloud provider, started a pilot program where thousands of its employees are limited to using work computers that are not connected to the internet, according to CNBC.
That’s not even close to accurate reporting.
They removed internet access from engineers’ build machines, not from peoples’ workstations.
Builds at Google are reproducible and do not require external network access. See Bazel.
There’s so much wrong with the cloud side of this post that I don’t even want to read the non cloud ones, I’m sure that it’s all manipulated bullshit with half truths lmao.
I’ve ditched both and have gone mostly back to physical media. Even standard 1080p Blu-ray from 2007 look better than any streaming app as the bitrate is significantly higher, and you can find used Blu Ray for super cheap right now. New releases are a little expensive but there are still rental options
I was in the middle of watching Avatar The Last Airbender series for the first time (I somehow missed it all this time, crazy right?) on a Netflix shared accout when they did their dumb lockout.
So I went to The Exchange (gamestop but better) and got that and Legend of Korra on DVD. The special features and commentary are there too, which Netflix doesn’t give you at all.
Also I don’t know who needs to hear this but libraries have all kinds of movies and shows on Blu Ray and DVD that you can take home! It’s one of my favourite things to check out there
You are right! People often forget about libraries, torrents of the past.
Rental is bad unless it’s for free. Or unless you rent to rip.
All the technology we need for ultimate entertainment is already here. Profits for the “big boys” is the only.piece that they think is missing. The truth is, everything works perfect before you have to inject a way to make money with it.
The ultimate entertainment was always available in each other’s bodies tbh.
You’re on main my guy
Not a guy, and that shouldn’t be news imo.
i have an inconsistent internet connection. it’s fine, but i refuse to ruin a movie by trying to stream it. since netflix and others don’t give you a way to pre-download the movie, they can completely suck my balls. 0/10. 🚽🪠
Well, you can pre-download. Sometimes it’s called torrent))
yes this is the way
Many of them do give you a way to pre-download a movie, at least on mobile and windows apps. It’s not every service, or every movie, though.
The point on the cloud is quite arbitrary to be honest. Yeah aws is coming to charge for extra unused ipv4 addresses, because there’s a damn shortage of them and it’s literally impossible to “produce more”. The solution is ipv6 but the infrastructure is not ready yet, which is embarrassing by now.
The point about security seems so god damn stupid. If you can work with limited outside access, it’s going to be more secure, the point of cloud being more secure is not to compare to your personal pc, it’s to compare to pcs that you expose to the exterior. In fact, Internet access and cloud servers don’t necessarily need to be the same thing, when people talks about Internet access they usually mean the web, and servers talk with each other with a myriad of other protocols that are not https.
I’m amazed I even read half of that, and even more that it was such uninformed bullshit.
What’s even the point of this post, I’m clearly not it’s target audience.
Yeah, cloud is unicorn thing that automagically fixes all bugs and vulns in software that company runs on it
That’s not true either? I never said that. Please don’t phrase your sentence implying I said thing I haven’t.
Cloud has its uses, and price and security are two big ones if you know what you are doing. And even if you don’t, if your use case is big enough that cloud’s expensive aspects arise, you really should hire extra engineers to manage those resources efficiently, wtf.
In any case, if the use case is big enough that managing it without proper planning on the cloud will be expensive, I assure you that doing it on premise will be more expensive the moment you need to expand your resources.
Don’t forget plastic money, when we’re promised to use “free” debit cards. There is always a fee, and one way or another we have to pay it. Problem I see is that there is more and more difficult to use cash. All except one cash machines were removed from where I live. The one’s left behind 80% of time doesn’t work. We’re in tech “utopia” trap.
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There is a fee (UK), just you don’t pay it, the shop pays it. That’s what hits the small businesses - they either have to raise the price of the product to cover the cost of the card machine or pay that from their own pocket. Obviously they will not ask customers to cover the difference.
This is why, these days, I pay for just for Tidal as my only streaming service. Sill decently priced and convenient. I gave up my movie/shows streaming services because it just got too costly and fragmented, and using one for a month and then canceling to swap to another the next month is just annoying and not something most people would be willing to do.
So I stream my movies and shows through 3rd parties, such as movie-webb.app, himovies and fmovies. I still torrent anime though.
I suspect more and more people will search for illegal streams first before resorting to torrents. Or, like my parents, go back to cable. 🤷
Plus there is Subscription fatigue. I’ve gotten tired of all the damn subscriptions. Might go back to buying 4K blu-rays though for my favorites; physical media does always win.
I tried Streamio before and couldn’t figure out how to add my own streams (like himovies and fmovies).
Sports is where they know they’ve got everyone by the balls. Tivo-ing games is great, but you’re always just watching old games. You still need some kind of service that provides the games live. Pirate streams are getting chopped.
When I saw word streaming I thought about Twitch. Well, I guess in America every video hosting is called streaming.
Also “including a tip for a driver”.
Twitch is livestreaming
Not the same. Live stream is the correct term.
