this post was submitted on 03 Oct 2023
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When will the greed stop? At what point will these corporations realize that the average American is completely stretched thin financially and will have to cease unnecessary expenses? They’re all just shooting themselves in the foot.
As consolidation continues corporations do not need to compete on prices as there are no alternatives. Yes people will pirate but they’ve already lobbied vendors to embrace DRM and governments to make it illegal so that makes it as annoying as possible.
Are we reading the same thing? Netflix has more competition now than it ever has. When Netflix had cheaper prices when it has no competition than it does now. Piracy has been making a huge resurgence as well.
"More competition" meaning less access, people having to pay for multiple different services instead of having it in one place.
The competition should be about having the best platform, not exclusive content. There's no reason why the same show couldn't be on two different platforms. And available globally. Practically, all you really need is more local servers for where there's more traffic.
Those both sound like competition to me. What you are really asking for is "I want things to be cheaper" which is a separate and sometimes related issue to competition, but separate nonetheless.
The path to lower prices the way you want would be government-mandated price controls on the industry.
Now you're just talking dirty cause you can.
Mandatory price controls can be tricky economically. I could certainly consider them on thinks required for living (food, housing, fuel), but putting them on optional entertainment like streaming? That sounds very counter productive.
When Netflix started they entered the market as a licensor of content from studios to be distributed as part of a streaming service.
This possibility largely no longer exists. All of the studios have bought out competition, stopped licensing a lot of their popular content, and now release their content themselves. This means there is little competition in the film distribution market for streaming, beyond PayPerView.