by throwaway7783 13 hours ago
This should really be the end goal. We are worse off than cable right now with all these streaming services and worse , overlapping content.
Strong disagree on being worse off than cable. I now almost never see ads, that is a huge benefit in my book.
it is nice that if you pay enough you can avoid ads, but they are definitely coming to all the lower price tiers… and the premium tiers will of course get more expensive over time
At some point, the market will no longer be able to bear premium price hikes, and they'll just shove in ads instead - exactly as happened with cable.
There is a difference between a streaming platform and cable. Streaming platforms are on demand while cable is broadcast.
To have an ads/no ads option with cable, you need 2 distinct channels with different programming, as you need something fill what would be the ad breaks. With an on-demand platform, there is no fixed schedule, so you can insert ads at will without having to account for that.
So even if the market for no ads is small, it doesn't cost them much to provide that option, and they just have to price it above how much they get from ads to make a profit. Even the seldom used YouTube Premium is actually quite profitable for Google. Streaming platforms won't miss that opportunity.
Whenever a no ads tier is offered, a few ads always get shoved into the premium subscription eventually (see: spotify) because companies want to be able to reach the premium customers, who have more disposable income on average.
HBO never had a tier with ads when it was on cable, it was simply expensive.
Lots of things didn't have ads on the past (basic cable TV for example). Today the model has changed to being expensive and still collect data/push ads. This isn't a cable vs streaming thing, it's a then vs now thing.
This meme needs to die and was never true.
Cable TV started out as a means to broadcast network TV in areas where they couldn’t get it over the air. Those stations always had ads.
Then came nationwide rebroadcast of local “SuperStations” in Atlanta (TBS) and Chicago (WGN) with ads.
There has never been a time where basic cable didn’t have ads
True. People forget television itself is barely 100 years old. Business models don't grow on trees, they need to be invented and they evolve along with the technology.
Advertising was with us for centuries, but it took until last few decades for it to evolve into a social cancer it is today.
I'm really confused why this comment is downvoted to me. It's a pretty salient observation in my opinion. If it's because it's obvious to others, I think it bears repetition because it's an important distinction to the contrary.
That was 80s Reagan/conservative American. Those folks weren't as greedy as modern day companies and they cared about their product/experience, whereas nowadays caring about that is outsourced (see the Mad Men mess) and greed is king.
It's wild to long for the day of 'caring', 'sane', Reagan era corporate 'governance'.
Look up "corporate raiders" if you think business people weren't greedy in the 80s, or the dissolution of Ma Bell, that used to rent you your phone. In fact, the 80s era cable TV also started the box rental racket. You could not choose to buy, you had to rent.
Regan's politics are completely orthogonal to IP content today.
My understanding is that they already make more money on the ad tiers.
(So the price increases are about finding the revenue maximizing price for the ad free tiers, not about overall profit)
...and piracy will once again become rampant!
Where's the amazon prime tier where I don't get ads?
As far as I can tell there isn't one. Even when you pay extra for no ads the interface itself is infested with them. A truly ad free amazon prime tier wouldn't constantly push shows and movies you that you have to pay for on top of the higher monthly fee you're already paying for or show ads for shows and movies on other platforms.
They're clever with that, by offering subscriptions to various producers and other streaming platforms within Amazon Prime video UI. The Amazon subscription is very cheap, but then you end up sub-subscribing to SkyShowtime and MGM and Apple Video to get access to your favorite space shows, and suddenly it's cable 2.0.
Wouldn't be so bad if the player didn't suck. You'd think video streaming chrome would be a solved problem by now, but it's not, and somehow we're regressing on this front.
It is called: Prime Video Ad Free
Go to the Prime Video website, or check your settings in Prime Video on your device.
I have lived a video ad free life for decades. I am convinced video ads do bad things to our brains. In aggregate, beyond any individual impact they may or may not have.
Ad blockers, ad free YouTube, Kagi, … whatever it takes.
Two to five years ago. :P depending on how you feel about their cross-promotions (which are ads, but at least aren't inserted into the content)
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Cable was like $80/mo for me and the vast majority of the channels was absolute garbage. Now I pay like 25/mo and swap services every month or two. There’s always something new and interesting to watch - for my relatively minimal watching hours at least. I’m not sure how you feel worse off? You know you don’t need to stay subscribed to every service year round?
Did people forget that on cable you could only watch what was being broadcast in that moment?
Streaming is infinitely better.
> Did people forget that on cable you could only watch what was being broadcast in that moment?
On-demand cable content existed and was significant at the tail end of the period when cable was still dominant, so it is probably lost of most people's baseline (at least, those that didn't either abandon it early or never had it at all) in comparing to cable.
Steaming is slowly going back to that too. Netflix got popular for letting people binge shows that released but increasingly they are putting out shows one episode a week so that they can keep the hype up over a longer period and better monitor/control social media.
Netflix also hides a ton of their content and aggressively pushes whatever is new because it makes it easier for them to get immediate metrics on how popular something is.
Right now, you're pretty much stuck watching whatever is being "streamed in that moment" as it is. For example, netflix added the austin powers movies in October, but by Dec 1 they were removed. You had a window of just 2 months to watch and if you missed them you're stuck waiting for them to "rerun" just like regular TV. I expect that trend to continue with shorter and shorter windows as Netflix pushes people to watch shows when they want you to watch them.
growing up I always had on-demand and recording on the set top boxes
Certainly TiVo came in--as well as boxes from cable companies (though I only had TiVo). And, if you really want to go old school, you could program VCRs to record shows if you were off on vacation.
But there was a long period even after cable came in for more channels and potentially better reception when TV was largely on a set schedule.
Didn't the VCR still work with cable? (I haven't used one)
It did, but it was awkward.
Analog cable channels were on a wider range of frequencies than regular TV (radio broadcast) channels. So the VCR's tuner had to be "cable ready".
Some cable channels, especially premium channels, were "scrambled", which meant you needed a cable box to tune them. So the VCR, by itself, could only record the basic channels that came with all cable packages. To record something from a movie channel (HBO, Showtime, etc.), you needed the cable box to tune it in and provide an unscrambled signal to your VCR.
And that meant the cable box needed to be set to the correct channel at the time the VCR woke up and started recording. The simple method was to leave it on the correct channel, but that was tedious and error prone. As I recall, there were also VCRs that could send a command to the cable box to turn it on (emulating the cable box remote) and set the channel, but you had to set that up.
Later, when digital cable came along, you needed the cable box involved for every recording because the channels were no longer coming over the wire in a format that the VCR could tune in.
So yeah, you could do it, but it was a pain.
I was probably still using recordable VCRs when I had cable--though it was probably still composite video/audio input. But at some point I started using TiVo. Don't remember the whole tech evolution.
For a short time there VCRs and DVRs even came with ad blockers that automatically removed commercials!
I remember upgrading the tivo for this
How was that possible? Audio loudness?
Where I lived the local cable company boasted something like 250 channels on the base tier. But when your cable box arrived you discovered there were less than 50 actual broadcast channels, and the rest were pricey on-demand channels. I think it was about $5 for a movie, which is more than Amazon Prime today and much more in constant dollars.
Why is overlapping content an issue? Isn't that good?
Let's say I like Show A and Show B. Show A is available on Provider 1 and Provider 2, Show B is available at Provider 2 and Provider 3. Thanks to overlapping content, I can subscribe to Provider 2 and I can watch both of my favorite shows.
It depends on what you watch and how much you watch.
Cable in its heyday was expensive, even for a low tier package with CNN, TNT, MTV, Nickelodeon and other non-premium channels. Most people did not have premium channels like HBO, Showtime, Cinemax, Starz, etc. Even Disney was a paid add-on in the early 90s. Adding or removing those channels at the minimum meant calling customer service and in certain eras of cable technology could even mean waiting on a tech visit to provision physical descrambling equipment. And obviously TV was linear, not on-demand.
If you watch a series or movie here and there, and aren't a big TV viewer, the streaming era is much, much cheaper with greater choice. You can often even access what you want to watch through a free trial, a single-month subscription, or a free service like Tubi or Pluto. Movie rental options are much better, more convenient, and cheaper (often even before adjusting for inflation) than Blockbuster, and you have access to much better information before you pull the trigger on renting a movie you haven't heard of before.
Oh my god no. The content is much better and you can watch whenever you want.
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