A decade and a half on from the Pirate Bay trial, the winds have begun to shift. On an unusually warm summer’s day, I sit with fellow film critics by the old city harbour, once a haven for merchants and, rumour has it, smugglers. Cold bigstrongs in hand (that’s what they call pints up here), they start venting about the “enshittification” of streaming – enshittification being the process by which platforms degrade their services and ultimately die in the pursuit of profit. Netflix now costs upwards of 199 SEK (£15), and you need more and more subscriptions to watch the same shows you used to find in one place. Most platforms now offer plans that, despite the fee, force advertisements on subscribers. Regional restrictions often compel users to use VPNs to access the full selection of available content. The average European household now spends close to €700 (£600) a year on three or more VOD subscriptions. People pay more and get less.
According to London‑based piracy monitoring and content‑protection firm MUSO, unlicensed streaming is the predominant source of TV and film piracy, accounting for 96% in 2023. Piracy reached a low in 2020, with 130bn website visits. But by 2024 that number had risen to 216bn. In Sweden, 25% of people surveyed reported pirating in 2024, a trend mostly driven by those aged 15 to 24. Piracy is back, just sailing under a different flag.
IMO the biggest thing is in the fracturing they had the ability to do what everyone thought cable should do.
IE cable packages could have been made to work, if say they were actually split by genre or similar. But instead if you want a package for X, you pay for 500 channels you don’t want.
IE if the streaming services split up by genre. Like off the top of my head discovery + was the only one that IMO did a cool thing, IE focused on purely giving a solid theme where if you like educational type programs, that’s the one to get.
If there were like a sci fi focused streaming, or comedy etc… but rather than going focused, we’ve got 20 generalists. As a result if say you only like one type of show, you need to buy 6 streaming services, for the 6 good shows in that genre.
You definitely articulated the problem with the current streaming paradigm: not split in a way that is useful to consumers (e.g. by genre).
We’ve gone full circle. Not only with needing a bunch of packages (or separate services, as it is now) because of how things have been split up, but also ads getting pushed back in. That’s going to keep getting worse too.
I think the YouTube model is more of the high tech future of entertainment that was promised to us. It’s one subscription to a massive service that has entire channels dedicated to whatever niche subject you are after.
Unfortunately, that great idea of a project got purchased by Google a very long time ago, and it is well into the user-hostile enshittification phase.
Hey, so, I’m old as shit and sti remember utopian scifi. Hi. No.
We were promised art without the need for patronage. Plenty. Post-scarcity. Was the dream. Was what even both sides of the fucking cold war at least had to claim, one maybe even kind of believed in¹. No subscription. No pay. And if you want to pull the ‘well yes but we aren’t all the way there yet’ card, then explain to me how anyone can afford to eat off what YouTube or spotify pays them, then find me someone dumb enough that they still believe that’s where any of this is aiming or heading.
¹while executing an unspeakably bloody purge over a bad font choice. Not, like, ‘american primary school’ bloody, but certainly well past the bounds of good taste.
I mean if you are talking pre-google youtube, I don’t believe it had a subscription model… or any real plan to profit or pay it’s creators. It was both hemorrhaging money itself, and giving it’s creators nothing.
Post google youtube, I guess yeah it is, but worth noting mostly it isn’t exactly a high production values system, with the exception of like mr beast etc… which make a boatload of money by still following the same traps as regular TV, catering to the lowest common denominators, microanalyzing maximum views on every aspect.
The cable bundles made sense because there was never going to be enough interest for many of the smaller channels to stay viable, even if they had dedicated fans who loved their content. Bundling something like Logo with E! TV and ESPN meant that cable companies could offer you Logo at a loss while collecting big bucks from the industry giants. People DON’T want to pay for loads of small channels, they want to pay someone once and get everything they want.
That’s why Netflix was so popular 12 years ago. They had just about everything you wanted to watch all under ine tent for a fraction of a cable package. Now the content people want is scattered across various companies so people opt out
That varries a bit, yes they want to pay someone once for everything they want. But they really hate seeing their bill go up more and more each year, while getting less of what they want every year. When their bill goes up from 120 to 150, and all they see happen is adding a bunch of channels they don’t want, they start feeling like the bulk of their money is going into things they don’t want.
I agree, the 2 options are a fairly low price that includes EVERYTHING including what they want… or extremely low prices but at least some confirmation that what they are paying for is actually what they want.
Agreed netflix as it was when streaming picked up but before everyone and their grandmother started their own streaming channel was pretty ideal, low cost and had just about everything.
but yeah once everything was evenly distributed among Netflix, Hulu, Apple, paramount, amazon etc… those days are gone. But the concept still applies that the real pet peve for users that want to get their own, is they’d want to pay one low cost to get the shows that they want. But no matter what your tastes are… odds are what you want is perfectly evenly spaced among the competing channels, and would easily cost well over 100 a month to actually get it.