movies

Homelessness spiked 18% last year. Inflation is kicking up again in certain sectors in anticipation of Trump's tariffs. And yet...

The Suits: The people just have fatigue! They're just busy spending their money on "short term purchases like groceries", we've got to find a way to get them to spend the money on this instead!

Soon: "Millennials are killing the streaming industry!"

I've started spending 100% less on streaming services this year.

When all the content I could possibly want was on Netflix, I happily and without reservation paid for it. I would have even paid more, (and did, when 4k streaming became a thing) and was generally happy with what they offered.

But of course, we all know that their content licenses were not renewed, and then they engaged in a non-stop campaign of cancelling any show I found remotely interesting, and that was basically the end of a 15-year subscription history with them.

And it's not like any of the replacement services were better: they all had little bits and pieces of shit I might want, but they had multiple tiers, mostly with ads, and I just couldn't be fucked to figure out which service had what content - and, worse, sometimes they had the content but not EVERYTHING: who the hell wants to watch a show on a service that has season 2,4,5 and 6, but not 1,3 or 7?

You would have to subscribe to several services to get everything, and suddenly they were looking worse than the cable subscription they were supposedly replacing, but were claiming to be better than.

Basically, they made a product worse than me doing it myself, and so, after a very long stretch of paying for shit, I went back to uh, not paying for it.

Spotify is in that list too: I realized I was a grumpy old man and that for my purposes I could just buy and rip second-hand CDs and build a library that didn't cost me money every month, and well, if I bought a couple of CDs a year, it was STILL in my favor by a huge margin. (And, as a bonus, I wasn't contributing to certain poor choices of podcast funding they had made.)

The apps used to work flawlessly.

Now the apps spend months at a time failing to work (Disney Plus!) or whining about how many devices my family has (Netflix!).

The app bugginess is presumably because they need to add DRM to ensure I'm not stealing their precious content while voluntarily paying them to license it. This has lead to my refreshing my interest in DRM free ownable media. For me that's DVDs. For most people piracy is the best answer.

I use the device limits as a reminder to cancel the service until the next thing I'm really interested in comes out.

It's not fatigue. It's that a bunch of deeply stupid assholes make the decisions at the major streaming platforms.

I would gladly pay cable prices for premier high quality on demand television and movies without ads. That was the deal two years ago, and I gladly paid for most of it.

But now I'm collecting DVDs until, presumably, a piracy service reaches a maturity level where I can't tell it's illegal and happily pay for it, instead.

It's all too fragmented now. I don't want to commit to any of it. Each platform is 90% garbage and 10% good. You basically have to pay for ten services now just to have a wealth of good content available. It's easier to just fill my thumb drive up with the content I want.

I think this is the primary cause, and is likely to be an overall revenue increase for the streaming companies since they get additional ad recenue based on time watched instead of all coming from a flat subscription fee.

The decline in streaming spending comes as ad-supported streaming hit a record high in 2024. A record 43% of streaming subscriptions were ad-supported by the end of Q3, according to Antenna, a market research firm. And between July and September, 56% of new streaming subscriptions were ad-supported — indicating Americans are opting for the cheaper option, even if they have to sit through a few commercials.

Fuck steaming services for jamming ads back into the experience and raising prices on those of us that don't want them.

Find it hard to believe half of Americans still have cable

Literally dropped everything but Netflix and back to pirating.

Fuck stratification.

I started piracy, but I also watched less pirated content because 2024 seemed pretty fucking dull with content. Too much reality TV bullshit made it's way to the streaming platforms.

dropped netflix this month for the first time in, god, like 17 years. Just not watching it and all the trash behavior they engage in. When a few services finally crash and burn and get consolidated and everyone stops piecemealing out the rights, maybe I’ll come back. Til then, ahoy.

Good ol piracy. I let a few price bumps slide, but when I started losing features AND paying more money. Nah, I’m just gonna get my hat and my flag 🏴‍☠️