- Orders of magnitude more choice in what to watch
- Writers have a lot more flexibility. They don't have to be advertiser friendly.
- Writers don't have to write cliffhangers every N minutes so you come back after the ad break.
- Writers don't have to worry about sequence like they did with TV/Cable, because they know you'll be able to watch the show in order. Meaning that their worlds and characters can change and have real consequence.
Just pick your favorite 2 or 3 services. You don't have watch everything.
No ads is not always true, but otherwise I agree with you.
Another benefit is less shitty pricing models, none of this first year pricing after which it goes up 50% that Comcast loves to do, and no year-long contracts.
The first two are already worth it alone. No ads double the monetary value in my mind, and on demand is by far the most important part. Sure you can sorta fix that with a DVR but not even really.
Say what you want, but ten streaming services aren’t the same as a cable subscription nor obviously better. Different things are different. Sure I can dial up what I want to watch of the provided content on demand with streaming services. But that’s not the same as turning on the tv and switching between curated content.
I cancelled my cable back in 2008 and while I agree with some of your points, the industry didn't evolve into the thing I envisioned when I did it.
> - No ads
Not really, Hulu still has ads for the TV stuff, even if you're on Hulu plus. But yeah, overall, way WAY less ads. For now. But I foresee this is more of a capture strategy. After most of us cancel cable, I think we're gonna see a lot of ads on streaming services. Greed is good. In the meantime, product placement galore. Stranger Things was IMO disgusting from this perspective. Ads just moved from interrupting you to basically taking over the shows.
> - You can watch on demand
I agree, this is indeed a good thing
> - Orders of magnitude more choice in what to watch
Yes, but no. Most streaming services have a lot of filler. A lot of garbage is counted against the 'we have a 10k catalog of movies' but in the end, you have a lot of choice, between a douche and a whole bunch of turds.
> - Writers have a lot more flexibility. They don't have to be advertiser friendly.
Nope, nope, nope. Yes from the show's structure perspective, but in general, It's the exact opposite. Now, they have to write in way more product placement pieces.
> - Writers don't have to write cliffhangers every N minutes so you come back after the ad break.
- Writers don't have to worry about sequence like they did with TV/Cable, because they know you'll be able to watch the show in order. Meaning that their worlds and characters can change and have real consequence.
While it's true writers don't have the same problems, they have different problems. Now they have to pander to specific user-research needs, they need to create season-wide cliffhangers and because they know you'll watch the show in order, there's way less shit they can get away with.
It's more likely that I turn back to pirating. I'll lazily buy 1-3 services and whatever else I really want, I'll just rip those from the interwebs.
Streaming is only convenient when products aren't siloed. If I need to keep track of more than n services (different n for different people), piracy just becomes the more convenient option.
I'd like to pay the hard working people that produce shows I really like. The middleman is just making it really difficult to do.
Anyone imagining they were gonna get all their favorite shows for less money was likely delusional. Especially if that includes sports.
It costs a certain amount of money to make these programs, if everyone is paying 50% less to get channels/services 'a la carte', then there's not enough money to make all those shows anymore.
How do you know 50% of this money isn't going to executives,shareholders, and bloated corporate hierarchy...and the actual budget for the shows is the same no matter the pricing.
Streaming services charge way way less than cable with much better content.
> then there's not enough money to make all those shows anymore
But now that you have a more complete picture of the lifetime value of a show you know which top 50% (or top XX%) of shows to keep producing in which to cancel.
The hidden point here is that with cable, you didn't really have the option but to get a 100$ package, and especially with the lack of on-demand, it made it much harder to watch all the shows you wanted.
Here, you can pick and choose much better, and even if you have shows you want on every single service, you can very easily rotate with on-demand.
For myself, I would stretch to even get to 2 services, although it's not hard to imagine. The part I have difficulty with in this scenario is that this hypothetical family of five is all watching completely disjoint shows, and none of them even happen to be on the same service. Birthday-paradox-type calculations would show that's pretty unlikely. Not to mention this family sounds... very isolated.
>The part I have difficulty with in this scenario is that this hypothetical family of five is all watching completely disjoint shows, and none of them even happen to be on the same service.
I am trying to understand what you mean by this. Why cannot the shows you all watch overlap? Pretty much every streaming service allows for sharing accounts by allowing multiple user profiles.
Across me and my group of friends, we have all major streaming services, with one person paying for one, another person paying for another, etc. Each one of us has their own personal profile on each of them, so when I watch something, it gets added only to my own profile without messing with my friends' profiles.
All of us have our own preferences, but a lot of popular shows we watch obviously overlap, and I don't see what issue that could cause. We just use our own profiles and have had zero issues with treating those as our personal ones.
My parents overlapped on some shows, but could have highly different tastes. I'm 6 years older than my sister and 11 older than my brother. We had a little bit of overlap, but not a lot simply because of maturity differences. If you are looking at the same amount of money, streaming would have seemed better simply because of less actual crap, more convenience, and increased satisfaction.
And no, we were not isolated at all. Public school and everything, though the city sizes changed. We were never that far from a somewhat bigger city, though.
Including cable internet we're paying around $107/mo for 4 services. For cable and internet it would be nearly $300/mo when all the taxes and fees. Not sure it's not a deal to cut cable. We might add sports for another $10 a month.
And none of those $10/m services provide local news coverage, so give over to social media to find out what's going on in your community. Or pile on another subscription for your local newspaper.
> And none of those $10/m services provide local news coverage,
Your local news coverage is probably already streamed on the web for free already but if it's not, they definitely stream it over the air.
All you need is to buy a 15$ antenna and you should be able to receive local news in HD to your TV.
I bought one specifically for that. I see this as just as important as having a battery radio for emergencies. We never know whether the internet will be up, but the antenna will certainly mostly always works as long as I can power my TV (and I'm equip for it).
Free OTA TV channels still exist. I get local sports and local news on those channels fine and they even come in 1080i now. Most TV still have digital tuners, so you just need an antenna. I use a HDHomeRun tuner hooked up to my network so I can watch and DVR it myself
Also YouTube TV has local channels and sports I believe. But that's 50$/mo
We use basic cable for that -- it is thrown in for free with our the internet package. Otherwise, it seems like most local news have free roku channels.
Do/did people regularly pay that much for cable without live sports? My understanding is that it’s usually the live sports channels (or HBO, etc) that would bump the cost into the higher tiers.
Why exactly? Netflix churns out more original programming than most TV networks, but like most VC plays, most of them fail and a couple become huge. Netflix has hit originals like House of Cards and Stranger Things but that's not exactly hurting HBO.
Ignoring the superior content quality of streaming services, lack of ads, and on-demand model, having 10 different content streams is still better than one even if only because you have finer grained control over the content you watch. I don't have to pay for a bunch of reality TV, sports, soap operas, infomercials, etc when the only content worth watching is a handful of shows scattered across 5 or 6 channels.
or don't. decisions decisions. if netflix can get a few good shows every month or a few movies... that's enough value for what they are charging and about the amount of free time i have to invest in watching tv.
