Streaming’s Slow Enshittification Continues As Netflix Kicks Users Off Cheapest Ad-Free Tiers
from the pay-more-for-less dept
We’ve illustrated repeatedly how as streaming subscriber growth has slowed, streaming giants have had to pivot to some bad industry habits to ensure Wall Street gets those sweet improved quarterly returns. That’s included everything from utterly pointless layoff-creating mergers and price hikes, to annoying new restrictions and a steady increase in ads (that you have to pay more to avoid).
Streaming giants want to drive users to advertising because there’s greater profit potential in charging more for ad placement and collecting user behavioral ad data than there is in subscriptions. So that’s the direction the industry is headed, whether consumers like it or not. Some people don’t mind the ads; personally they just remind me that I’m living in a shallow dystopia.
Last year, Netflix stopped selling its cheapest $11.99 ad-free tier in the U.S. and UK. Last week, it started warning customers still on that plan in the UK and Canada (and soon the U.S.) that the plan will soon be shut down. There is a $7 per month ad-based plan, but you’ll need to pay extra if you want to do anything with it (multiple concurrent streams, 4K, share your password).
Reddit users aren’t pleased:
“$5.99 (sic) with new features … those new features … they’re adverts 🤦🏻♂️”
Superficially, the argument is that this is “progress” because users are paying less money for a cheaper tier, for now.
But the price of that introductory ad-based will also rise endlessly, disproportionate to product quality, feature restrictions, and shrinking device support. The need for improved quarterly returns (at any costs) creates a consumer “pricing funnel” that forces consumers to pay more and more money for a product that’s often getting worse (the traditional cable and broadband industries perfected this thanks to monopolization) with a steady uptick in monetizable restrictions.
Want to avoid ads? That’s extra. Want to share your account with your college-aged son? That’s extra. Want to watch things in (now fairly standard) 4K? Sorry, that’s extra. Want privacy? Pay for it. Though it’s going to take some time, Wall Street’s need for impossible, endless growth will result in the recreation of traditional cable — and all of that industry’s worst impulses.
To be clear, consumers still find value in streaming services like Netflix, and it remains an improvement over traditional cable because of cost and the ease of cancellation. But with “subscriber churn,” becoming an issue as cost-conscious users binge watch a service catalog then cancel, I can absolutely guarantee that these companies will find creative new ways to make cancelling annoying and difficult.
I’m not sure what that will look like quite yet. I’m sure it will include making the “cancel” button more elusive, but I also suspect it could come via confusing promotional bundles increasingly tethered to other subscription services; all designed to make cancelling service more of a headache on other fronts.
You’re also going to see a growing number of harmful sector mergers as executives (who have run completely out of ideas) try to boost stock valuations and grab tax cuts via purposeless consolidation. Consolidation whose only result historically has been more debt, higher prices, worse quality products, and layoffs.
And as more and more subscribers get annoyed and head to the exits (and alternatives like piracy), executives will blame absolutely everything (VPNs! China! Regulation! the wokes!) for their inevitable downfall, having learned absolutely nothing in the process.
Filed Under: advertising, cable, enshittification, price hikes, streaming, tv, video
Companies: netflix
Comments on “Streaming’s Slow Enshittification Continues As Netflix Kicks Users Off Cheapest Ad-Free Tiers”
I’ve unfolded my Jolly Roger already. I’ll alternate streaming services that fit my monthly budget and download whatever isn’t available at the ones I’m subscribing when the need arises.
This bullshit allied with how low they pay artists themselves, the AI debacle, insane pricing and the likes make me not willing to give a single unity of fcks to the companies behind and their self entitled tears.
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I’m right there with you, and I’ll give you one of many reasons why.
We’re fans of a MLB team. We wanted to buy a season subscription to watch all their games and we thought that would be easy and relatively affordable. But no. It turns out that even if we pay for it, we’re NOT guaranteed that we’ll get every game — some will be georestricted, some will be blacked out, etc. Which ones? Guess. No, really, that’s the answer: guess. So there’s no way to know up front how many games or which ones we’d actually get.
Look, all we wanted was 162 games (and postseason) for one team, and we were holding our money in our hand ready to pay, and we can’t get it. There are too many complications and it’s too hard. (And it’s not like we’re technically unsophisticated: 74 years of IT experience between us.)
So now we have a VPN subscription and a lot of links to pirate sites and neither MLB nor the team are getting a penny from us.
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Sports broadcasting has been doing their best to chug along the enshittification track since the beginning. By now they should be perfecting that delicate art.
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I wouldn’t say, even with all the hikes that prices are insane (compared to a movie theater ticket nowadays) but since that most of the subscription money isn’t obviously spent to improve theses services but into dump marketing and useless technologies supposed to “protect” the customers or even to “improve the experience”, it surely a big waste of money to subscribe to any streaming service.
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I’m too lazy to pirate, but I fully support you and anyone else hoisting the black flag for any reason or no reason at all.
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This is also my position, but for me, it’s not so much being too lazy to pirate but the hoops one has to jump through to do so nowadays.
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Do you mean pirate static programming like last night’s fav’ TV show, or live sports? Because my anecdotal experience is that there’s a difference in the hoops one has to jump through. Getting last night’s fav’ TV show–easy, even in 4K, often within a couple of hours (or less) of the show being “broadcast”/(released on legit streaming). Download torrent, download file, unpack, watch.
Pirating live sports is a nightmare though, especially if you want to cast it to an actual TV.
Seems every little business adventure now a days wants to set you up with their Plan or their Tier which is just another monthly subscription service.
If there are not many takers they scream piracy because it is impossible for people to simply do without.
Want privacy? Pay for it.
You’re joking. There is basically no privacy in any of these services. They make more by selling your data than they make from selling to you.
Face it, privacy equals piracy.
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“Want privacy? Pay for it.”
Or not .. do not need their service nor content and subscription is not yet mandatory.
Nice of Netflix to make it so easy to cancel by hardly making anything worth watching anymore. Amazing they can be so arrogant when they’ve suffered a huge decline in quality. Not that they were ever very good but at least they had something.
Somehow, I’ve ended up dropping video streaming services again over time and reverting to the streams provided by broadcasting companies and YouTube. And my kids have recently got interested in my archive of digitized TV shows I videotaped back in the 80s/90s. The video quality sucks, but they still seem to find the shows entertaining.
I pirate everything, even live sports.
Haven’t dabbled with those iptv services yet, but mostly just download 2160p copies of the shows I want to watch and then keep them on a hd to seed others and rewatch later. Can’t remember the last service I paid for…maybe Paramount+ but that was a few years ago. Most TV is crap anyway–certainly not something I’d be willing to pay for (alone alone pay AND watch ads for).
btw, All Lives Matter.
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Racist dogwhistle.
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I was at a shitty crustpunk bar once getting an after-work beer. One of those shitholes where the bartenders clearly hate you. So the bartender and I were ignoring one another when someone sits next to me and he immediately says, “no. get out.”
And the dude next to me says, “hey i’m not doing anything, i’m a paying customer.” and the bartender reaches under the counter for a bat or something and says, “out. now.” and the dude leaves, kind of yelling. And he was dressed in a punk uniform, I noticed
Anyway, I asked what that was about and the bartender was like, “you didn’t see his vest but it was all nazi shit. Iron crosses and stuff. You get to recognize them.”
And i was like, ohok and he continues.
“you have to nip it in the bud immediately. These guys come in and it’s always a nice, polite one. And you serve them because you don’t want to cause a scene. And then they become a regular and after awhile they bring a friend. And that dude is cool too.
And then THEY bring friends and the friends bring friends and they stop being cool and then you realize, oh shit, this is a Nazi bar now. And it’s too late because they’re entrenched and if you try to kick them out, they cause a PROBLEM. So you have to shut them down.
And i was like, ‘oh damn.’ and he said “yeah, you have to ignore their reasonable arguments because their end goal is to be terrible, awful people.”
And then he went back to ignoring me. But I haven’t forgotten that at all.
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Sime years ago in San Diego I was accused by one hotel of having be there before and making trouble when I had never been there before. Someone had stolen my identity. I was the victim but was treated like the criminal.
I got my revenge. After I had to go into Mexico to find a hotel room I did from Mexico, launch an attack and crash their computers back in the USA and then just threw my laptop in the trash before returning to the USA
The cfaa has no jurisdiction in Mexico so I could not have been prosecuted in the USA when I did that 10 years ago because it was donr from Mexico
Re: Re: Re: Cool story Ralph
“ Mrs. Krabappel and Principal Skinner were in the closet making babies and I saw one of the babies and the baby looked at me!”
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Because two wrongs totally make a right, yeah? Dumbshit.
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That’s so fucking obvious and taken for granted that the only ones that say it are racist against black people and ableist against autistic people, the two groups faced with the most discrimination-related death.
This literally screams death by a thousand cuts, from no matter whose perspective you look at this, except of course for the companies running these services, which cannot see the big picture at all through their forests of dollar signs.
Enshittifucation is even happening now with pirate IPTV srrvices
To get all the channels i want now I have to subscribe to three three different IPTV sites now even though one of them has over 170,000 channels.
I need Canadian TV to watch shows that used to be in the USA, so I need one just for citytv just to get The Price Is Right abd Let’s Make A Deal as well as Kelly Clarkson and Jennifer Hudson. They are ONLY on Citytv
When enshittification starts happening on pirate IPTV you can see the future.
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That’s distressing. Sorry You’re experiencing this.
Just curious: what do you pay monthly for IPTV services? How do you pay? Crypto? Paypal? Something else? Any recommendations on an iptv provider to try?
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There are spouting up like weeds, you just too see what suits your needs
Some are going crypto only to protect their users in certain countries.
While VIEWING the streams is not a crime in the USA, that is not the case in Britain, south Africa, Italy,the uae, Japan,or the Koreas fur varying reasons
In the UK, it is because you can evade TV Licensing, especially if you use a VPN and tor combined where you cannot ever be traced.
Because the feds are likely watchingy posts from what I have posted here before, I combine VPN and Tor where I cannot be traced
In Italy, south Africa, Japan and the use, it is copyright, abd in North ave south Korea it is because they can be used in one country to watch TV from.the other
In the case of TV Licensing, using one of the services with VPN and Tor means that TV Licensing will never detect that your are watching TV without a TV Licence as what you are doing will be encrypted and cannot be monitored
And sites are using new cryptocurrencies designed to be even.more untraceable ave that will explode in value in a few years meaning the purveyors on these sites may well.brcime among the world’s richest men
These new cryiricurrencies will , I think, mint the first trillionaires and maybe even quadrillionaires in just a few years
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That should be uae and not use
Damn autocorrect works against you sometimes abd there is no way to turn.thst off on Android or iPhone
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No worries. Thanks for taking the time to reply. I haven’t really looked into iptv offerings, mostly because my needs are being met by standard private tracker stuff. But I always see iptv services offered. Just not sure what I’d subscribe to one for. Cheers!
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Not quite. I found the current rules on the Royal Television Society website, and they say that watching TV online without a license is only an offence if you watch on the BBC website (which doesn’t seem to be possible without a legitimate license number) or you watch something at the same time that it is being broadcast on terrestrial TV (live TV). If you have set up your TV so that it doesn’t receive audiovisual signals through the aerial, then it’s not illegal to use it without a license.
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Iptvgreat, Ipofficial and had-iptv all carry BBC programming. A subscription to one of those plus the cost of a VPN subscription would be less than a TV licence.
And her one that accepts Bitcoin or the newer more secure crypto they are going to, so that your info will never be found by TV Licensing.
That is why some sites are going crypto only to protect uk, UAE, Japan, Italy, South Africa, North Korea, and South Korea users from being identified
There is a solution to all this shit: Pluto TV.
Seems most people don't even watch the ads
The worst parts about the ads on streaming services are they are inserted based on a equation. Often they are put in the middle of a sentence or during the best part. They are the same ads over and over and over and over and over….
The part they are missing is that we are not watching the ads. We are muting them while not paying attention.
Pushing customers away
My Netflix subscription was cancelled because I was on the Basic tier and they gave me a choice between a horrible cheap option (w/ ads) or an expensive one (~50% increase) that does have some minor upgrades, but ones I don’t care about. If that’s how they’re playing it, I’m out.
I won’t pirate either. The net has tons of entertainment so I don’t need their service, not even a direct concurrent. I have a backlog of games that can last me for years. I have books. I have outdoors activities.
If they don’t want my money, fine by me.