this post was submitted on 14 May 2024
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Leave it to corporate America to figure out how to make a simple thing difficult in order to sell (rent) you less for more.
Say what you will about streaming, but I think everyone born before 1995 will understand that todays streaming is way way way better than renting and old school cable. In the old days there was no on demand, so you could only watch what was on at the time you wanted to watch it. You literally had to go to to block buster to rent physical media that wasn't always available for things like new releases. TV shows weren't easily available by VHS/DVD. So with streaming, it's basically cheaper than what Cable + Renting movies used to cost, but I can do it without limits of physical media and have access to crazy amounts of back catalog. I purchased Band of Brothers back in the day on DVD box set for like 70 bucks which is 10 1 hour long episodes. For 99 bucks a year I can get all of band of brothers and a lot more content than that. Sure I don't own it all, but that's fine for most of my purposes. With streaming, I think we are actually getting a lot more for less in the grand scheme of things. And bundling make it even cheaper.
Netflix DVD by mail was actually peak.
Netflix streaming is also good, but DVD by mail was awesome to queue up movies and work through an intended set of watch items.
I would go hard for a cheap 5 disc physical Netflix again. $10 a month for 5 disc's at once, awesome.
Yeah. It took a while to work out the kinks of getting TV dvd seasons in the right order, but watching TV was easier when you didn't have unlimited options and more or less a pres defined playlist.
Counterpoint:
Thanks to streaming we don't spend quite as much time thinking about the media we consume and the deeper meanings and subtext and generating internal fanfictions about what could possibly be coming up in the next episode a week from now.
Streaming makes media easier to consume but fills it with culturally empty calories.
The grand majority of conversation I see about a show is, "Have you seen _? No? You should totally watch _, it's really good!" Or alternatively, "Yeah, it's great isn't it?"
Since Netflix came out we've definitely taken one step down the ladder rung closer to Idiocracy ass movies.
Bundling is only cheaper if I actually want all of the bundled things, but that's not how companies like Comcast bundle things.
Bundling works at scale if you maximize customer pool. I don't think ESPN cable would be affordable to most people without bundling it into cable packages; their TV is subsidized by every non sports watching household. I wish there was more transparency into the costs to determine if you are coming ahead or behind in the bundling.
But at the end of the day everyone hates paying for multiple streaming apps. To me that means people just want a bundle that magically has everything they want to watch.
Then it's not a viable network.
But that's exactly why people started ditching cable in the first place. They wouldn't be bundling ESPN with non-sports channels, they would bundle other less popular sports channels with ESPN so they can jack up the price because ESPN. But ESPN doesn't carry the sports I follow, and I can't get the network that does without paying double because it's in a bundle with ESPN.