chat

You'll understand it when you realise that capitalism doesn't just encourage pursuing profit, it encourages pursuing growth.

The "profit" being pursued under capitalism is not the profit of the company itself but instead the profit of the capital-owners with a stake in the company. These people make their profit not from the company being in the black but by the company GROWING. Thus meaning it increases its overall value on the capital markets.

Companies eventually reach a saturation point at which their growth in terms of customers hits a peak, they have acquired all of the customers and aren't likely to acquire more. When this growth avenue closes they must turn to others to continue "growing" the value of the business for the investor class. This is achieved through measures like cost cutting, reducing staff, and installing incredibly bullshit monetisation schemes that either succeed or kill entire businesses in their attempt to continue their growth.

It has nothing to do with "expensive market to maintain". They aren't doing it because they need more money. They do it because they need more growth.

This is also the reason every game you play and liked once upon a time is progressively going more and more to shit.

It's capitalist rent-seeking as usual. Fiduciary responsibility to keep the stock price high requires growth in revenue. For these subscriptions services, that comes in the form of increasing the number of subscribers. In the business press, subscriber numbers are reported above all. When that growth begins to fail due to market saturation and increased competition, the only thing left is to increase prices.

the price increases and crackdown on sharing got me back into piracy.

and it's fan-tastic.

I used to pay for 4 services. now I'm down to 2. the less convenient and cheap they make it, the more I cut.

eventually I'll probably get rid of everything and get one of the cheapo bundles, like PBS Masterpiece Theater, and be a high culture benefactor who pirates all slop.

I just leave the first time I hear about a price jack-up, frankly, and go right back to sailing the seas whatever I was looking for before that streaming service approached a price point I was willing to pay. These ratfuckers don't get to pull with a parabola ploy; if they got their price point to a place where I'd buy in only to hook me and draw the price up for no good increase in quality of content, I'm ghost.

Barbados and Nassau are real nice this time of year; and I def don't have an issue with buying up more SSDs to store that hypothetical plunder now that storage space per dollar's on the rise.

amazon prime has gotten 75% more expensive since I first paid for it as a teenager

I'm so goddamn sick of everything in this world being a fucking subscription. I want to buy software once and be done with it. Anything these neolib sickos can apply a monthly fee to, they will.

I've started building a 100+Tb media server project and been pirating things in 4k. Also, just discovered repack games. Haven't been enjoying starfield tbh, so I'm pretty happy I didn't buy it.

People consume slop and become too lazy to explore alternatives. The only subscription I have is to a gym and some orgs as monthly donations. I cannot imagine being the rube who's paying $50 a month for 6 different streaming services.

Remembering how gilded age monopolies had their prices absurdly low to corner the market only to jack them up as much as possible once they had no competition afterwards

Anyway I just hope that cable plans don’t get completely phased out anytime soon

Cannot imagine using TV subscriptions in 2023. It's the easiest thing in the world to pirate and none of what you would be paying is actually going to the people who made it

There was an interesting development on this front with Disney, who’s also jacking up prices. They had a package dispute with Spectrum, one of the largest cable providers in America. Basically, Disney wants to protect their walled garden of Disney+ so they were asking a ridiculous cut from Spectrum, who didn’t want to pay up that match.

The compromise they came to was that Spectrum customers would only get the basic Holy Rodent Empire channels (Disney Channel, ESPN, maybe a couple others), but Spectrum customers then get access to a discounted rate on a Disney+ subscription. The specifics aren’t out yet, but it looks like it will apply to the ad tier of Disney+.

Which says to me, the trajectory is for these services to become a sort of adjunct to cable, a replacement for on demand. Wouldn’t surprise me if the log-ins and interfaces start getting bundled into the cable boxes or router/modem boxes. Of course, it also wouldn’t surprise me if the net cost ends up being greater for consumers.

I canceled Netflix when their model shifted to “focus on original tv shows that we cancel after two seasons. I canceled HBO when they became Max. I guess I get Apple TV for free but I hate their programming so idk. Right now I get Disney and Hulu through my phone plan and pay for a Prime membership because Amazon and COVID basically killed B&M shopping where I live.

I only see my subscriptions decreasing in the future and I plan to focus more on reading and physical media.

My fundamental problem with Netflix isn't that it's $20/mo for streaming TV/movies. Its that Netflix has gone from the single bulk distributor of streaming content to one of at least half a dozen "good(ish)" services that also all want to charge $20/mo. When they had the full Disney/Marvel list plus a bunch of self-published anime plus indie dramas plus a huge back catalog, I was fine with it. But now I'm just going to pirate, because over half of what I use Netflix for is gone.

What's really got me in a lather is streaming sports, which has functionally become all subscription services that are even more expensive than Netflix. Fuck you, YouTube. I'm not paying $60/mo for sports. It's practically cheaper to get tickets to the actual games.

And with sports, at least, its much harder to find live streams that aren't scams or walls of ads or abysmally low grade streams. That's the one thing I can't pirate, so I've fallen off watching entirely.

Which really sucks, when your team is in the playoffs.

Edit: Seriously, fuck this shit.

Soon, if this isn't the case already, the cost of a subscription service plus an internet connection will be as high as a cable package was twenty years ago. At that point they will calculate that they can't increase the price any further - and they will increase the commercials instead.

I only ever watch things on live.hexbear.net, lovingly referred to as hextube.

I don't think people feel good about it. It does seem like people put up with it, though, which is pretty confusing.

I'm honestly surprised with people paying the extra fee for sharing a Netflix account more than anything.

Sorry who feels good about this exactly?

How to get content without breaking the bank and without needing to become more tech literate:

1. Open your relationship or otherwise change to ethical non-monogamy
2. Collect dates/partners
3. Keep going until one or more of them knows how to acquire content and share it with you for free

Joking because it takes a lot of work/learning/research to do the ethical part of ethical non-monogamy. Learning to sail the seas would be easier.