Tech’s broken promises: Streaming is now just as expensive and confusing as cable. Ubers cost as much as taxis. And the cloud is no longer cheap::Some tech is getting pricier and looking a lot like the older services it was supposed to beat. From video streaming to ride-hailing and cloud computing.
You say “broken promises” I say “the plan all along” and “bait and switch”.
Yep. The business model has always been “Lure them in and stifle competition with a low initial cost. Then when we have the market we can jack up the price.” Enshitification at its best.
This is just capitalism at work. Capitalism = enshitification, exploitation, and destruction.
Literally working as intended. Not sure why it takes people so long to figure this out.
A healthy dose of western/capitalist propaganda since birth and until death helps a lot. So many people under the illusion that this is the natural progression of civilization, or the best.
A lot of these things were proudly unprofitable, which is basically their way of getting around anti-trust violations. If they had a revenue stream to make the business profitable (outside of investors handing them more cash) then they’d be hit with anti-trust lawsuits for offering services at a loss in order to drive the competition out of business. But instead they just convince investors to hang on long enough to achieve the same goal, then raise their prices when they’ve got too much power to fail.
Remember when we could only watch what had recently been on TV and cable companies were trying to lock people in to specific cable boxes that couldn’t skip ads and we paid $120 per month for ad supported content and cable companies would attach random fees and everyone had to buy hundreds of channels to only watch 4?
And we’d build movie and music collections of physical media we had to keep in our homes and cars and we’d listen to the same three albums for months and if we were lucky enough to get a TV series box set, it’d set us back many hundreds of dollars and we’d have to remember which disc we were on and navigate arcane and slow menus?
And when we had questions, we had to find the answers ourselves by reading long form content and just be satisfied that there were many questions we couldn’t answer at all because the information wasn’t available?
Or when we wanted cabs, we’d not know how much a ride would cost until after we got to our destinations and they smelled like rotten farts and were covered in boogers and our only goal was to not touch anything and look out the window because what’s a smartphone?
And when we wanted to go somewhere, we had to ask for directions and use atlases to figure out how to get to the general area of the destination, then drive in circles, accidentally drive past a turn 5 times because the street we were supposed to turn onto had two different names and we had been given the wrong one?
I was there and anyone who pines for the old days can just go there. We have cable and encyclopedias and taxis and atlases. Go nuts.
Tech never promised anything. They cut the price for people to be dependent to them and then rise the price.
It’s just basic capitalism.
Yarrrrr…shiver me timbers. Fly the Jolly Roger high matey, there be booty ta plunder!
Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum!
Pirating taxis?
The goal is surely to capture every human need and package them as obnoxious subscriptions.
Take video streaming. In search of better profitability, Netflix, Disney, and other providers have been raising prices
Piracy and buying/ripping physical media is back on the table bois. Been running my own personal media server secured with a VPN to access it. Costs are the symmetric gigabit connection, a simple raspberry pi for WireGuard, and old computer for media server. Plus some technical knowledge.
Any physical media I have has been ripped to digital form (4K where possible).
A 3-mile Uber ride that cost $51.69
Yet another reason why we need to have more diverse options in transportation. Public transportation is dismal in the USA due to suburban sprawl and car centric society. Alternative forms of transportation such as bikes or even walking is not accessible to a large portion of people.
Took a bus the other day and the total cost for 24 hrs was exactly $2.50. Don’t have to worry about psychos on the road driving to and from their deadass suburban home and deadend job.
Cloud promises are being broken
Fuck the “cloud”. It’s just another persons/companies server. Switched off major cloud platforms long ago.
Have off site backups take place nightly. No middleman scanning my stuff. No more upselling. Besides ISP costs, everything else is static or one time setup.
Yeah, I’m already automating my entire Plex configuration, got some friends as admins on my services to help me run it, and I’m sharing it with all my friends through secure connections with let’s encrypt. There’s no reason to keep giving massive companies our money, data, and freedom. Fuck the cloud, fuck these subscription services, fuck SaaS, fuck it all. It’s piracy all the way down from now on.
Where do you keep your off-site data?
Parents house across the country. Nightly backups. Added a residential UPS. SSH access for updating/maintenance.
Hotels >>>>> Airb&Bs
My bigger beef is with a centralised platform taking enough of a cut that they can buy whole neighbourhoods to rent out.
I can’t cook food in a hotel though. Also they kinda suck with kids.
I don’t use Uber because it is cheaper, I use it because I know the fare ahead of time, I don’t need to dial a dozen different cab companies, and the vehicles are generally nicer. I don’t use streaming because it is cheaper, I use it because I don’t need to worry about time shifting, and can access much higher quality content than on cable. As for the cloud? You can pry my big iron from my cold, dead hands.
Exactly. Streaming is ‘messed up’ because content producers all want to own their own ‘exclusive’ platform. Had goverments regulated the market so that content could not be exclusive to a platform (like they did with movie theaters), streaming would be fine.
Enshittification!
Is this surprising? The prices were always going to adjust to the market. Any new cheap thing that undercuts the market will eventually become the market as it becomes mainstream, and prices will be increased to what the market will bear to maximize profits.
The prices were always going to adjust to the market
The prices will always be inflated regardless. The free market is a myth at best, a delusion at worst.
The thing about unregulated capitalism is it will always fuck over society in favour of sociopaths. Unregulated capitalism rewards sociopaths because it focusses on profits above all else – shareholders get stupidly rich only if they don’t care about the damage done to workers and the public, sociopaths who don’t care about such damage can promise the highest profits, and that’s rewarded by a hyper-focus on the bottom line.
Unregulated capitalism rewards ruthless cost-cutting, treating people like robotic assets, slash-and-burn corporate policies, and a culture of near-slavery.
Adding new tech only makes inhumane policies easier to implement. It’s why people like Musk have more money than they could spend in a thousand lifetimes. When the goal is to maximise profits at all costs, of course the consumer will get fucked. That’s rather the point.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Paramount+ with Showtime costs $12 a month and the live TV part has commercials and a few other shows include “brief promotional interruptions,” according to the company.
The Financial Times recently reported that a basket of the top US streaming services will cost $87 this fall, compared with $73 a year ago.
Some companies, such as Dropbox, have even repatriated most of their IT workloads from the public cloud, saving millions of dollars, the VC firm noted.
Last month, Google, the third-largest cloud provider, started a pilot program where thousands of its employees are limited to using work computers that are not connected to the internet, according to CNBC.
If staff have computers disconnected from the internet, hackers can’t compromise these devices and gain access to sensitive user data and software code, CNBC reported.
Disclosure: Mathias Döpfner, CEO of Business Insider’s parent company, Axel Springer, is a Netflix board member.
The original article contains 877 words, the summary contains 150 words. Saved 83%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
It was the free hit to get you hooked and dump your cable subscriptions. Now they have you and they’re going to increase costs every year from here on out and then start with advertisements because fuck you you’re going to pay it anyways.
The enshitification of capitalism? Color me shocked!
I think we’ve started to discover what the ??? steps before profit were.
The model was:
- Start streaming service
- ???
- Profit
It’s now:
- Start streaming service
- Subsidise it heavily creating premium content whilst undercutting competition.
- keep doing it until competitors go broke
- Raise prices to an actually sustainable level
- Profit (although we’ve lost a ton of capital)
This is a form of market manipulation which is outright illegal in some countries (e.g. Australia) and can be illegal in the US and EU if it meets certain criteria. It falls under anti-trust and monopoly prevention laws.
Basically our regulators aren’t doing their job well enough, but what’s new?
