Technology

If media companies want a consistent user base, media companies can politically lobby for their users to receive wages high enough to include disposable income. If media companies won't go to bat for their subscribers, why should their subscribers give them anything more than short shrift? (there's your phrase for the day)

Because everything they want to watch isn’t on ONE single service so I can’t say I blame them.

Also, streaming companies boast this as a feature, so they can’t really complain.

Someone should teach them how to pirate.

Somehow, nobody takes issue with the cancel and renew instead of purchasing part. So they were successfully indoctrinated into the you will own nothing part, except the and you will be happy didn't work out.

DVDs at thrift stores for a buck. My collection is massive and still growing. My Steam backlog will outlive me.

So... they're taking advantage of one of the selling-features of streaming services, that being the ability to scale your spend pending your own personal preferences. In the early days of streaming services, they had enough content to justify paying a monthly subscription each month -- it's not the customer's fault that streaming got enshitified. Hell, a bunch of them switching to 'weekly episodes' was just a very poorly disguised attempt to drag out how many months they thought their one flagship show could capture audiences. The old practice of dumping a whole season all at once in one month, because you knew you'd have another season of some other good show the next month, is practically gone -- with streaming reverting back to the old network practices they'd usurped.

Same with games. Tons of titles are just shitty early access things, things that get abandoned mid-development, things that rely on a live-service platform that companies'll shut down a month or two later, and so on. And some titles are askin like $80+ for their shitty offerings. Yeah, that's not the customers fault in the slightest. They're right to look for discounted offers, what sane person wouldn't?

Also all of that interfaces really suck it's like they don't actually want you to use their platforms.

Apple TV is the buggiest piece of crap I've ever used, Amazon prime TVs interface is confusing as hell, even Disney can't pull it off with their categories of Marvel, Star Wars, kids movies, and other, where other contains literally everything else.

There are streaming services that only contain four seasons of a show with 16 seasons, then there is a different streaming services that contain everything but those first four seasons.

Is it any wonder people pirate, they raise the price diminish the catalogue split everything up into 60 different services and all of them have terrible UX. It's like they don't even want my money.

So you're saying people without money don't act like they have disposable income? Fucking science!

Millennial here.

I grew up with sneakernet through irc-napster-kazaa-limewire-directconnect-bittorrent-oneswarm. I gave all that up when netflix and spotify.

Those subscriptions have been ended a couple of years back and the eye patch is back on.

Netflix' catalogue has just diminished, as everyone who owns rights to the good stuff want to do their own streaming service.

I wasn't really listening that much ro spotify, but when they started injecting ads into podcasts I bid adieu. (Yes, injected - I'd listen to an English podcast and get very local ads between segments).

Is this because they don’t know how to torrent? Or did the “you wouldn’t download a car” ads get into the water supply?

Won't, or can't afford to?

Millenial here, I have zero subscriptions, the only thing close to that is that I manually pay for a gift card for Geoguessr once a year.

I do it this way so I don't forget the cost of the service and should I come onto bad times, it is not something that will automatically renew and keep charging.

I am considering getting a lifetime subscription to Nebula, it is very expensive, but just a single payment that can be budgeted for, and once paid I'll keep access even through bad times.

I'm not subscribed to any video streaming sites, too pricey for just watching one thing once in a while. As for audio, I have Tidal and so far it has been quite good actually; but if that ever changes I'll just revert back to physical media/piracy.

Steam sales tend to be pretty good, what's even better is that keysites tend to drop the price accordingly.