A similar thing is happening in the music space. For quite a few years, I was happy with Spotify for my streaming needs.
Now, thanks to outages, an increasingly crappy app, and a conscious decision to constantly shove podcasts in my face (despite the fact that I am a paying customer for a music service), I've quit Spotify in 2022. At this point it's safe to say that I don't miss it at all.
Growth will be the death of the entire technology sector eventually. It erodes quality services, you can never rely on anything because they'll eventually be mined out for profit.
For the last few years, a similar thought has been bugging me. You mention the technology sector specifically, but I think your thought could be applied to almost anything.
Waking hours in the day, mental stamina, physical stamina, life span, external resources (food, shelter, etc.). All of these things are finite, and they are all required by humans.
Most businesses cater towards growth or profit to be more specific. This desire does not have any upper bounds.
If the desire for profit exceeds the ability of the current local population, what happens? It seems natural that everything will implode at some point. For the time being everyone puts their heads in the sand and hope that future tech will improve efficiency.
I have seen the modern version of piracy and there is no way to compete with it.
Full polished web-apps to browse and select titles to download, automatically, which appear almost instantly in your plex/emby/jellyfin server, which give a superior UI for queuing up titles and tracking progress, that play on any and every device in your house. Full quality, (usually) the exact same bits, no DRM.
Here’s the killer - there is now a multitude of services that will do ALL of the above for you without having to lift a finger. They run the backend infra, put the media server on a 1 Gbps pipe in a datacenter, run a reverse proxy somewhere nearby that you have decent peering with, and it just works. If they have a large enough base of users, you hardly ever have to do the request step and just have a firehose of literally everything being released, plus the back catalogue of almost everything released on Bluray.
You basically have the dream of Netflix (aka Spotify for video) right now and it can cost as little as $10/mo. Share your media server just like your Netflix login with your friends and family even. It’ll spread just like that, and it’s impossible to compete against.
Could you share any of these “hosted” services? I’m thoroughly disillusioned after paying for 3 streaming services and still not finding quality content
I’m unsure of HNs stance on piracy so I’m hesitant to post any specifics. For a single account, key words to search for are “plex shares” or “emby shares” and if you want to run your own server instance to be able to invite others and change the metadata (fix mismatches and choose specific artwork , basically) the keywords are “plex appbox” and “emby appbox”
You’ll find that the majority are on Discord, so you’ll have to get in on that platform, but it kind of works better as it’s easier to keep track of the different offerings, switch if needed, etc.
If you get really stuck, let me know a way to PM you and I’ll give specifics
I think the lack of content worthy of payment has pushed people back to piracy.
Or pushed people to complacency. Indeed, I think Hollywood and other streaming providers are overly flattering themselves if they think piracy is why their numbers are down - the vast majority of new content sucks. It lacks all storytelling, creativity or any other compelling reason to justify it’s consumption.
Indeed when you see sneering comments made about “fan service” that tells you all you need to know about the decline in numbers - and piracy isn’t the main reason.
Needs (2018) tag. I wonder how this trend has changed (if at all) since this article was written? If anything, the trend towards more and more exclusivity and the proliferation of streaming services seems to have continued unabated.
I'm unironically thinking about getting DirecTV. I loved channel surfing the movie channels as a teen, found so many good movies I never would have sought out otherwise. I'm sick of all the walled garden bullshit and companies throwing a deluge of low-quality shows against the wall to see what sticks.
I don't have an issue discovering something I would find interesting at any given moment in time, between subscribing to Amazon Prime, Netflix, Hulu, Disney+ and HBO Max. And I have a few "add ons" on Amazon Prime as well. If anything, if I'm randomly looking for "something" to watch, I have more choice than I could ever need.
BUT... what is still frustrating as hell is that I pay for all these subscriptions, and if and when there is a time that I want to watch something very specific for whatever reason, it's probably 50/50 at best if that "something" will be included in a subscription I already pay for, or will require me to pay yet again. It really is starting to push me back to bittorrenting stuff again, as TFA talks about.
All of that said, if it's a movie I want to watch, and I'm pretty sure I will only ever want to watch it once, and its rental price on Prime is about $3-4, I don't mind so much doing a rental. And if anything, the option to rent movies like this is one thing that has been keeping me on Prime more than on Netflix lately. But if a movie isn't available on Prime, or costs too much to rent... hello KTorrent.
The idea of going back to commercials makes my skin crawl. I haven't seen a single commercial while watching TV in over 5 years if not longer. Whenever I'm back home and my parents are watching sports I'm reminded of how lucky I am that I don't have to see commercials (and that I don't care for sports which doesn't have a legal OR illegal way to watch that doesn't suck).
Give me something like the Netflix DVD plan recommendations, but allow me to download a DRM-free video file (with configurable subtitle options) for like $5-$10/movie. I'd be all over that service. And since I'm paying per movie, doesn't even really matter if it's five services.
"The content industry spent years trying to battle piracy via all manner of heavy handed-tactics and lawsuits, only to realize that offering users inexpensive, quality, legitimate services was the best solution. Many users flocked to these services because they provided a less-expensive, more flexible alternative to traditional cable. Now, if the industry isn’t careful, it could lose a sizeable chunk of this newfound audience back to piracy by making it overly expensive and cumbersome to access the content subscribers are looking for."
Now, thanks to outages, an increasingly crappy app, and a conscious decision to constantly shove podcasts in my face (despite the fact that I am a paying customer for a music service), I've quit Spotify in 2022. At this point it's safe to say that I don't miss it at all.
Growth will be the death of the entire technology sector eventually. It erodes quality services, you can never rely on anything because they'll eventually be mined out for profit.