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.
Sooner or later, everything old is new again.
We may be at this point in tech, where supposedly revolutionary products are becoming eerily similar to the previous offerings they were supposed to beat.
Take video streaming. In search of better profitability, Netflix, Disney, and other providers have been raising prices. The various bundles are now as annoyingly confusing as cable, and cost basically the same. Somehow, we're also paying to watch ads. How did that happen?
Amazon Prime Video costs $9 a month and there are no ads. Oh, except when Thursday Night Football is on. Then there are loads of ads. And Amazon is discussing an ad-supported version of the Prime Video service, according to The Wall Street Journal. That won't be free, I can assure you.
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. Translation: ads.
Streaming was supposed to be better and cheaper. I'm not sure that's the case anymore. This NFL season, like previous years, I will record games on OTA linear TV using a TiVo box from about 2014. I'll watch hours of action every weekend for free and I'll watch no ads. Streaming can't match that.
You can still stream without ads, but the cost of this is getting so high, and the bundling is so complex, that it's getting as bad as cable — the technology that streaming was supposed to radically improve upon.
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. The average cable TV package costs $83 a month, it noted. A 3-mile Uber ride that cost $51.69
A similar shift is happening in ride-hailing. Uber has been on a quest to become profitable, and it achieved that, based on one measure, in the most-recent quarter. Lyft is desperately trying to keep up. How are they doing this? Raising prices is one way.
Wired's editor at large, Steven Levy, recently took a 2.95-mile Uber ride from downtown New York City to the West Side to meet Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi. When asked to estimate the cost of the ride, Khosrowshahi put it at $20. That turned out to be less than half the actual price of $51.69, including a tip for the driver.
"Oh my God. Wow," the CEO said upon learning the cost.
I recently took a Lyft from Seattle-Tacoma International airport to a home in the city. It cost $66.69 with driver tip. As a test, I ordered a taxi for the return journey. Exact same distance, and the cab was stuck in traffic longer. The cost was $70 with a tip. So basically the same.
And the cab can be ordered with an app now that shows its location, just like Uber and Lyft. So what's the revolutionary benefit here? The original vision was car sharing where anyone could pick anyone else up. Those disruptive benefits have steadily ebbed away through regulation, disputes with drivers over pay, and the recent push for profitability. Cloud promises are being broken
Finally, there's the cloud, which promised cheaper and more secure computing for companies. There are massive benefits from flexibility here: You can switch your rented computing power on and off quickly depending on your needs. That's a real advance.
The other main benefits — price and security — are looking shakier lately.
Salesforce, the leading provider of cloud marketing software, is increasing prices this month. The cost of the Microsoft 365 cloud productivity suite is rising, too, along with some Slack and Adobe cloud offerings, according to CIO magazine.
AWS is going to start charging customers for an IPv4 address, a crucial internet protocol. Even before this decision, AWS costs had become a major issue in corporate board rooms.
As a fast-growing startup, Snap bought into the cloud and decided not to build it's own infrastructure. In the roughly five years since going public, the company has spent about $3 billion on cloud services from Google and AWS. These costs have been the second-biggest expense at Snap, behind employees.
"While cloud clearly delivers on its promise early on in a company's journey, the pressure it puts on margins can start to outweigh the benefits, as a company scales and growth slows," VC firm Andreessen Horowitz wrote in a blog. "There is a growing awareness of the long-term cost implications of cloud."
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.
What about security? 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.
The reason: Google is trying to reduce the risk of cyberattacks. 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.
So, cloud services connected to the internet are great for everyone, except Google? Not a great cloud sales pitch.
If you subscribe to all the services, it can be expensive. But it's still FAR more flexible than traditional cable, since you can pick and choose which services you want on any given month, and cancel when you've binged all the shows. The shows that don't shove ads down your throat every 5 minutes, BTW.
This just reads like an ad for cable companies. "Please stay with the worst customer service in the country, the competition is just as expensive if you ignore how people actually use it!"
As a fan of animation, I have to subscribe to a good few services to get what I want. Netflix for Nimona and Castlevania, Max for what's left of cartoon network (RIP Summer Camp Island), Paramount for nick stuff, Amazon Prime for Vox Machina, Disney for Gravity Falls, and Crunchyroll for anime. (obviously these aren't an exhaustive list, just some examples of stuff I've wanted to watch recently).
And yeah, I could try to juggle all of these by subbing and unsubbing each month, but I don't want to spend that much effort on something I'm trying to do in my downtime. And even if I did, their selection is still limited to relatively recent stuff and region locked to hell, and as a cherry on top, they might decide to nuke entire series with no way to access them (again, looking at you, Max). And every year they get more strict about password sharing, are more expensive, and include more ads.
So yeah, still not as bad as cable, but it's been a shitshow in the past 5 years and doesn't show signs of getting any better.
Cable not offering a la carte services doomed it. But most of the networks just put their IP on a streaming service so it's the same thing except they still get to milk the boomers.
before i dumped cable, i had an a la carte option. 15 channels (no sports or 'premiums') + locals instead of 200+ of junk. "saved" a whole $5-6 a month.
the problem isn't necessarily the providers' product offerings.. it's greed.. rampant and excessive greed.
A la carte would be more like if you could pick and choose the individual channels, not just select from a few packages.
Your main point is still solid, though.
I mean I certainly get it though. Streaming has gone down hill with more and more studios packing up to launch their own service and take all their content with them. It feels a LOT like cable. The difference is no ads. $80 spread out to all the streaming services they only get your money. $80 for cable they make that plus ads. I think it hurts more cause Netflix keeps raising and the quality doesn't match. Promising shows don't get the time. They spend the money on big stars or something?
In my opinion the real problems are that the streaming services are now starting to follow Netflix's lead and look into cracking down on password sharing. My other issue is it seems it can be arbitrary what gets renewed and idk other services but netflix certainly seems unfair and a horrible way to track when you literally have all the data possible. When something releases they only look at views of the first week or something! And for some reason a really small amount of time watching counts? None of it makes sense to me. What about how many people "add to list" or watch the full preview?
You do realize that streaming companies have been looking at ways to prevent people from subbing and canceling constantly. That won't be an option much longer. Just like the password sharing crackdown and price increases, they are constantly looking for ways to keep that revenue.
Wouldn't surprise me if 18month deals are the only way to get under $10 a month soon
And you need a Netflix dongle.
I'm in the US. I subscribe around Black Friday (day after our Thanksgiving) for the year. Usually some streaming service has a deal. I currently have Disney+ and Hulu with ads bundled together for $5/mo and Peacock for 99 cents/month for the year, and Starz for $3 for two months (have to remember to cancel soon). Those deals are the only reason why we are subscribed to those.
IIf they offer deals two or.more years in a row, my husband and I take turns subscribing.
With all those options there is still very little to watch.
Yup, not sure if the OP is a cable astro-turf account or just a useful idiot. Yes, if you subscribe to every streaming service under the sun, you might manage to reach the cost of the average cable subscriber. If you want a real apples to apples comparison through, cable tended to be a lot more expensive, once you had premium channels and made the mistake of wanting that one channel what was only available in their top, hand us your wallet and bend over a barrel tier.
Back before I cut the cord, I was paying ~$200 a month to my local cable company. Why, I wanted HBO, FX and Discovery (before Discovery went to shit). The only way to get that mix was in "fuck your wallet" package and also paying for HBO as an add-on. Fortunately, Discovery went to shit and we realized that we could go OTA and streaming and get everything we wanted for way less.
Sure, prices have creeped up over the years. Netflix is getting really expensive, and we've added other services. We're still well under $100 a month. Also, we can pick and choose what services we subscribe to. We regularly purge services we're not using and pick them back up when something interesting comes along. This is way, way better than the cable company's "fuck you, pay us" system.
One difference is that you used to be able to get a cable plus Internet plus phone package for a temporary deal of $99/month for two years. You could threaten to.cancel.and the cable company would offer to extend it or offer a similar deal (say, the same package for $125/month). If you were willing to inconvenience yourself, you could go ahead and cancel.and get another member of the household to get the package as a new customer, bringing it back.down to $99/month (or, if you were a tenant, you could get the new deal.when you moved again).
Now Internet is separated from the entertainment piece, so it's $110+/month for Internet plus whatever you pay for all of the streaming services plus cell phone (since hardly anyone is paying for a landlines anymore). (Plus VPN or other Internet adjacent spending if so inclined. ) That adds up.to more than the old school cable, Internet and.phone package. I think separating everything out is where people are feeling the pinch.
Ya, if you're willing to setup a house of cards and you count worst case scenario for the streaming setup, they're close. Though you still find yourself stuck with whatever service the cable company was willing to give you. At the same time, if you put a bit of effort into the streaming side, the math gets worse again. My internet is $25/month. I have the T-Mobile Home Internet and caught their $25 for life deal. Cell phone is a wash, as I had T-Mo for many years and wouldn't touch AT&T again with a stolen dick. As for VPN, you only need one if you're regularly pirating, I don't do that. Really, there's nothing to recommend going back to cable. It's just a bad deal all around.
Whoa, 200 a month? Just for cable? And I thought I had it bad, paying like 35 a month for everything (HBO and all). Hell, I ditched HBO and now its like 10$ a month.
Ya, the mix of channels we wanted put us in the highest cost tier, and then we had HBO on top of that. We were also outside the promotional period; so, our rate had reset to the actual rate, not the teaser one. We cut the cord, went to Netflix and an antenna for live TV and used the savings over the next year to buy a kayak.
Our cost has been creeping up and I'll admit that it's reaching a low tier cable plan level. Though, that is really on us and our choices. Which, we actually have choices. Unlike cable where the choice was "take it or leave it".