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.
I got to point out that ipv4 addresses are a serious supply/demand issue. I’m so fucking glad that they cost real $$$ just because I hate dealing with NAT and ipv6 will fix a lot of that, immediately.
These are three topics that people love to focus on price against traditional services without looking any deeper.
Streaming is only just as expensive as cable if you subscribe to a bunch of them, but if you pick and choose, start and stop, it is cheaper. Further, it is a better experience. You can watch what you want, when you want. You don’t need an annoying DVR setup, etc. The experience is better, even if you do choose to pay the same.
For Uber and Lyft, I don’t use them because they are cheaper; I use them because they are better than traditional taxis. Seriously, how many people who say they aren’t better than taxis have even used taxis heavily while traveling? Using taxis sucks, except possibly around airports or in the rare city you can walk outside and hail a cab. Outside of that you often have to call in, wait for an extended time with no ETA, etc. Lyft and Uber are a better experience, especially when you are outside major tourist or travel hubs.
Finally, cloud is more expensive, but gets you all sorts of benefits. Those benefits may or may not be worth the cost depending on you or your org, but it is not 1-1 to running on prem. On AWS you can trivially automate events across the entire ecosystem of services, run serverless infrastructure, etc. There are many great use cases for spending the money on the cloud, and most organizations should have a hybrid approach.
Sorry, end rant, but I always get tired of the false equivalence of these three things and the tunnel vision on price.
But what if I like servers? I mean, I don’t today, because Dell not making legacy updates easy on me…but you know, in general!
You do you, you beautiful server hugging butterfly!
Uber was unsustainably underpriced in order to gain market share. Pricing is temporary; the core benefit as a consumer was always the ability to request one from anywhere using an app (where you also paid) and have them come directly to you instead of needing to hail one. Taxi companies added that ability and now everything is better. There’s no reason why the approximate cost should vary much, outside of limited promotions. An Uber, a Lyft, and a taxi should cost roughly the same. Why wouldn’t they? Perpetual VC-funded pricing wasn’t what we were promised; the promise was convenient ordering and stress-free payments.
Uber was treated as a tech company by VC and was dramatically overvalued, white it should have been treated as what it is: a taxi company
Exactly that’s why these VC backed startups threw money on free rides and discounts. Blitzscaling to establish market dominance and then hike prices.
Honestly I’m not complaining. This was, functionally, a large transfer of wealth from rich venture capitalists to ~everyone in the form of below-cost rides for several years.
start at a loss, ignore annoying legal requirements like worker status and collecting taxes and stuff, build up business, collect vc, sell at a bigger loss, run competitors out of town or buy them out on the cheap. crank up the prices, modify terms and policies, quit handing out free lunch… or sell out or go public and let making a profit be someone else’s problem.
textbook.
And that’s exactly how they intended it. They’ve been planning a corporate takeover of the internet since 2010, and it has largely succeeded.
The fediverse might be all that’s left of the original spirit of the internet.
I find these kinds of posts to be so entitled and pessimistic. Yeah, prices have definitely gone up, but the tech solutions are almost unilaterally better than their replacements.
- Streaming: you don’t actually have to subscribe to every single streaming service, and most are dead simple to cancel (good luck canceling your cable service). Most are very lax about sharing passwords, or have cheaper ad-based tiers if you want to save a bit.
- Uber: you can summon a comfortable car that seats up to 6 and can set your destination as well as multiple stops, and have it pull right up to where you are, often in 5 minutes or less, without needing to talk to or hail someone. In the US prices have crept up but in other countries it’s still a bargain compared to taxis, which are sometimes run like a racket.
- Cloud: I don’t even know what this is doing here since we are talking consumer tech and this is more about B2B services. For the consumer the cloud is still dirt cheap and transformative, and doesn’t even have a “back in my day” equivalent.
Everything is amazing and no one is happy.
Because it’s getting worse. The trend (capitalism) is about squeezing more and more money from consumers and leaving less and less value. In a year the price of streaming could be another 20% up, and they could have added more ads. Because that’s what they do, always. It’s always getting worse after the initial honeymoon period, and it keeps getting worse.
It’s very different from open source for example, where things constantly get better every year.
I’m calling out your streaming counterpoint: in the beginning, there was Netflix. It had almost everything from almost all studios, didn’t care about password sharing, and was easily very affordable, even more so if you split costs between everyone sharing accounts. The best part? No ads. The content kept getting better, the show formats kept getting more accesible.
It was clearly more convenient for everyone to just have Netflix, even more convenient than piracy, but now? Every studio, every company, they all veered away from Netflix and decided to create their own services. Then the price wars started, then the crackdowns on password sharing, and the ad-supported tiers, and then they started canceling shit, good shit, in order to claim them as losses in their tax declarations. And then we all lost, because now we can’t find most content in a single place, we have to endure ads if we want to save money, and we cannot even use some services while traveling since there are limits to devices linked to the accounts. Oh and that show you liked? David Zaslav wanted a bonus this year, so it got shelved even though it was a huge success. It’s no longer convenient to use streaming services, at least not as convenient as it used to be.
You know what’s convenient now? Piracy, through Plex, Jellyfin, and Emby, all with automations, all easily shareable between friends. That’s what I’m doing now, friends chip in when more storage space is needed, or when some additional service is needed. It’s more work for the more tech-oriented of us, but hell if it isn’t fun to just sail the high seas, giving the finger to these companies, while giving friends a good experience.
Best thing about Uber is it relieves the unknown of being just on the meter. I hated having to get a cab and watching that meter tick up and wonder if was going to be 5 or 25 before I got.there. then get feeling was it worth it. Yes you could ask the cabbie for estimate but was not accurate and most of the time you felt locked in at that point anyway
Well… while i don’t disagree with the thesis, nobody is forcing peasants to buy this shit. This is not food, this is not shelter, education or healthcare… vote with your fuckin’ money.
Transportation is up there, and I guess the cloud computing stuff is at the whims of employers and corporate overlords. But it is possible to get by without streaming services.
Correct! Prolly next after food and shelter…
entertainment is mental health and mental health is just as important as physical health… don’t be so damn condescending!
Imagine telling someone with actual problems that watching Game of Thrones is actually a critical component of you living a bearable life.
mental health doesn’t mean you’re suicidal… maintaining mental health is about your whole life and is something you do every day
I doubt peasants are buying much cloud service.
Did anyone actually expect anything else?
Capitalism will never cost less in the long term.
What does this have to do with capitalism? Are you implying that communism would not have that problem or that it would be expensive to begin with?
No, you absolute brick. They are implying that a economic system built on maximizing profits would eventually subvert innovation to once again achieve maximum profit. Who the fuck brought up communism?
What do you you mean “who brought up communism”
The implication that there would be some alternative system that would somehow invent cloud computing and Uber and streaming, but somehow just not raise prices this year?
No other system would have created this, so blaming the cost on capitalism is absurd.
Clearly the market is working exactly as if should do because Über and Lyft are constrained by the same realities as taxis.
It’s like blaming capitalism for stepping on a Lego.
The whole line of reasoning is utterly absurd.
Capitalism is bad because you have to pay more for Disney?
The fuck?
I agree with the other person. You’re an absolute brick.
This one is Brick 2: Electric Boogaloo
You’d have thought it was obvious, but everyone I’ve ever met IRL thought they’d be cheaper forever.
I work in IT and I’ve been against the cloud for over a decade and I always got looks like I was crazy. We still have vendors pushing us to buy into the cloud, I’ll fight tooth and nail all the way. Unfortunately, a lot of vendors aren’t giving much of a choice anymore by making their services cloud only. We’ll have to start building custom applications soon to keep everything on-prem.
As a fellow IT person, Cloud is the same as any new Buzzword tech.
It’s an especially good fit for a handful of use cases, but the execs hear about it through whatever channels they frequent and think that it will solve a bunch of problems that dont exist.
“it will solve a bunch of problems that dont exist”
Fellow fellow IT person here, yeah we have non-tech managers always coming to us with some vendor that’s trying to sell them on something that will undoubtedly get us into a bullshit subscription because the sales pitch included the phrase “productivity increase” and they think by spending 30k and adopting an application that their people hate and would rather just use excel for, they’ll save the company millions and will get a blowjob from the CEO.
“The cloud is just someone else’s computer.”
Honestly i thought the concept of Uber would work. I’m commuting and you are too so you give me a few bucks to go my way. It was supposed to be “Cash, grass, or ass” minus the grass and ass.
But then people started driving purely to get people to oay them and suddenly its a taxi service.
Left to its own ends it seems it will cost the same but have better margins concentrated into greater wealth for fewer people.
We need UBI, like, 5 centuries ago.
I mean, I like the idea but you don’t think greedflation will just jack up the price of things more once “we all have more money to spend”?
Exactly. Until we put either the heaviest lid on capitalism (never going to happen) or upend the system entirely, UBI will “drive inflation,” meaning we’ll still make the same (or probably somehow less) at our jobs while the UBI money literally just keeps everything at the same affordability. There is no world in which business doesn’t just go after that money. We saw very recently, with the flimsiest of excuses, capitalists will claim “inflation” while pocketing record profits. They’ll do the exact same if UBI is implemented without some massive changes to capitalism.
Burn it all down. Anyone that still has hopes for fixes that maintain the capitalist system are fooling themselves. We have no other options at this point. It’s either we do it now, or wait until capitalism and the devastating effects of climate change force our hand. At least if we do it now, at our own discretion, we might be able to throw the emergency-emergency brakes on climate change. Otherwise, companies and the capitalists that run them will absolutely watch us all fry from their self-sustaining pod homes that are built in the upper atmosphere to keep the temperature bearable and to stay above the devastating weather events. And they’ll do it without thinking twice.
Nope. People will focus on life hacking their way through surviving of fractions of UBI.
UBI is a freedom.
To dismiss it as something that will be immediately taken is how one finds themselves clinging to their shackles from comfort; pearl clutching them over the uncertainty of freedom.
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Candles were once a significant cost. But lightbulbs are incredibly cheap.
Food used to take a whole day to acquire.
We have things that even royalty didn’t have before, like air conditioning, out-of-season food, international travel, etc.
Capitalism sucks for sure. But it has given society a few benefits, and sometimes things do get significantly cheaper long term (but I’m generally skeptical about which items will go that way)
Not sure how much of those improvements is capitalism and how much is technological improvement.
Stop conflating market economics with capitalism, they aren’t the same thing.
All the technology we need for ultimate entertainment is already here. Profits for the “big boys” is the only.piece that they think is missing. The truth is, everything works perfect before you have to inject a way to make money with it.
The ultimate entertainment was always available in each other’s bodies tbh.
You’re on main my guy
Not a guy, and that shouldn’t be news imo.
Everything always raises the prices to the amount people will pay for them. It takes time, but nobody will ever leave money on the table.
…and Cable TV didn’t eliminate commercials…and ATMs didn’t reduce banking costs resulting in higher interest on savings…etc…
Interest is set in relation to Fed reserve benchmark rates. Even then most banks will not pay proper interest rate unless you shop for a brokered CD or buy treasuries out right.
This same idea is applied to any pricing… they charge as as much they can for the lowest quality product they can provide while you are still buying. They will only adjust if peasants stop buying. Business 101
Amen
So for half these things, early on the costs of doing business were carried by other people. Streaming services relied on studios to produce content, and Uber relied on drivers to carry maintenance costs and downtime cost.
Now Netflix is a full studio and all the other services that are competitive have original content. Uber drivers are unionized.
Cloud services are fine for set low computation things, but once you scale past a certain point keeping your own IT staff busy is easy, and they provide a tailor made infrastructure.
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!
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!”
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.
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.
I do sometimes wonder if people don’t realize they don’t have to subscribe to every streaming service. Just pick the ones that have enough stuff you want to watch that makes it worth the price. It’ll probably only be a couple, and you’ll still be paying less than cable.
Yeah, I’m thinking the same. I pay for some services, but not all. YouTube Premium family for ad-free yt experience for the kids as well as music, Netflix for the kids and Amazon’s streaming is included with prime that I use mostly for free shipping now and again as well as a free twitch sub to a buddy of mine. It’s way cheaper than the ~€150 that others are paying for some TV package that is packed with ads.
F YouTube premium, I just use an ad blocker and NewPipe.
YouTube literally can’t make the company work without premium. 2022 revenue was 30 billion. YouTube has almost 3 billion users, and only 80 million premium subscribers.
At $12/month, 12 months/year, that’s almost 12 billion of their revenue coming from premium subs… Meaning that the other 2.92 billion people account for only 18 billion, around $6/user/year.
Their whole business model is to keep making the experience of YouTube shitter so that they can charge a premium fee for what should be the default version of the site.
I hope the whole business fails.
Once it got overly complicated and expensive, the old reliable alternative became viable again.
I’m not sure your comment is actually a response to mine. What I’m saying is it’s not overly complicated: you subscribe to the services that have stuff that you want to watch, and you don’t subscribe to the ones that don’t. That’s pretty simple, actually.
What the rest of us are saying is that actively managing subscriptions every month is a PITA headache. And so many people lap it up like that extra homework is totally normal.
It isn’t and it shouldn’t be. My tastes haven’t changed very much in the last 3 years. Hulu’s available content has probably rolled through thousands of titles in that time. I shouldn’t need an extra service just to do a bunch of work to figure out where most of the stuff I like is located. Or which that thing I was watching switched to. It’s asinine and totally pissing in the face of people like me that just want to pay a reasonable price to watch the things I like.
Well, what do you propose as a solution to your troubles?
pay a reasonable price to watch the things I like
🏴☠️
Oh, I thought this conversation was about wishing that either cable or streaming services were either more affordable or easier to use. If you’re just going to pirate everything anyway, why do you care what anything costs or how “confusing” it is to use?
No one’s asking you to do this every month. Every few months or so, when you feel like it. That way it doesn’t feel like homework.
The issue for me is that coming from pirating as a teen (no way my parents were paying for any digital entertainment), I got used to “choose what I want to watch” first and then finding a solution on how to watch it.
Streaming platforms don’t solve this problem at all, and even when you subscribe to everything some must-watch movies are not on any platforms.
It’s more satisfying to complain about the evil greed of companies rather than acknowledge that perhaps one can manage one’s prescriptions a little more wisely.
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.
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.
Wouldn’t surprise me if 18month deals are the only way to get under $10 a month soon
And you need a Netflix dongle.
It’s almost like the underlying premise doesn’t change with tech.
The things that can/should be broken is the stupid medallion system.
Tech has become a scam in many areas. It’s just doing the same thing as it always has been, just with an abusive corporate master. The goal is to scam the investor into funding bad ideas, or use that funding to undercut the competition. It is rarely about innovation anymore.
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.
That’s not even close to accurate reporting.
They removed internet access from engineers’ build machines, not from peoples’ workstations.
Builds at Google are reproducible and do not require external network access. See Bazel.
Yeah. Build machines should never have had internet access. Any dependencies your product uses should be downloaded once and then cached in your own artifactory. If you don’t, what you deploy in production could be different from what you tested in staging. That can allow attacks like this to happen much more easily.
