People are spending just as much time watching TV as they ever did. If they've always paid $70/month for it, why would the entertainment companies settle for people paying less now?
Wasn't it obvious that if you want all shows/services, you will still pay at least the same amount? The cost of producing content is not going down just because there are more content providers. As long as the same amount of content is being produced, consumers still need to pay the same amount of money to see it all. If consumers decide to pay less, there will be less content.
It's possible less content for less money is OK with people. The current pricing scheme of TV never got a chance to test that hypothesis. It's certainly true for me.
This is equivalent to shrinkflation: pay the same, get less. Streaming platforms want to retain most users, but also extract more value from them. Slowly a new threshold for what's "normal" is set, and perhaps then -more- adds can be added. There's no need to speculate where things go from there. Just look at where cable TV is.
Anyone imagining they were gonna get all their favorite shows for less money was likely delusional. Especially if that includes sports.
It costs a certain amount of money to make these programs, if everyone is paying 50% less to get channels/services 'a la carte', then there's not enough money to make all those shows anymore.
People don't turn down free stuff. It's just that they no longer value the content provided via TV channels at the price they are asking. The fundamental problem is content that used to be delivered via TV is no longer worth what it once was.
I think this is becoming the new normal. Especially when each provider has one or two massive and expensive "hit" shows. But once enough people do this, they'll just change the structure to something that doesn't really allow it, e.g. $50 for the fist month, $20/mo after that or $200 for the year.
That's a good point, though I think the time/generational factor may cause it to trend downward. My parents unhappily paid cable prices their whole life. I've never once paid for cable TV and never will be willing to pay that much for subscription entertainment, but I'm willing to pay for one streaming service and have considered a second at times. Anecdotally reading places like here, I don't think I'm an uncommon case. Again to your point, even though there's fuss every time a streaming provider raises the cost (especially Netflix being one of the larger players and who has been around long enough to have increased prices more than once), it seems each service is viewed as cheap and well under what people are willing to pay.
I don't have much sympathy for this argument. If you're a very heavy consumer of the content, it makes good sense that you end up paying more.
It used to be that your only options were cable or satellite packages that included lots of content you didn't want to pay for. People complained, and wished they could only pay for the content they watched. Now we have multiple competing Internet streaming subscription services, and people are complaining it isn't all bundled together.
If you only watch a few shows, you can buy them a la carte from Google/Amazon/iTunes/etc.
What really matters is pricepoint. A couple of subscriptions still runs far cheaper than a cable package. People will keep complaining until they can get every show there is for a minimal fee, but I don't see why we should expect that to be a realistic possibility.
The situations aren't quite comparable. But yeah. I imagine if there were an "all content" streaming channel for $100-$200/month, a lot of people would think that was outrageous pricing because they want to watch so little of that content.
Personally, I'd probably be happier watching a lot of content with a la carte pricing but TV shows in particular seem to be at something of a premium with that model. (Assuming they're available.)
It doesn't bother me if everyone subsidizes my entertainment or not.
For people like me, entertainment is fungible. I can enjoy myself watching football, playing a game from Steam, reading Mr. Money Moustache, streaming something from Netflix, or renting from RedBox. The game has changed. There is literally more high-quality entertainment than I have time to consume. Of course there is going to be downward pressure on prices.
If any of those things cost too much to be worth it (like non-local-market NFL games and non-event films in theaters), I'm going somewhere else with my money.
If the economics don't make sense for Hulu to entertain me for cheap (the number of commercials are pushing it already), no skin off my nose. There are probably some books I haven't gotten around to reading anyway.
So, for me, the supply of entertainment is high, my supply of attention and my budget for entertainment are both rapidly shrinking. So for me, and I suspect more people every year, paying a large monthly fee for cable (or even streaming services) is absurd.
The article seems to focus on the worst offenders (aka outliers) and some recent cost increases (when inflation happens to be going up after a decade of stagnation).
I currently have 7 different subscriptions ranging from $5 to $15 per month. They add up to $61/month. That's less than I used to pay for a standard cable package. And combined they provide me so much more of what I actually want, at an overall higher level of quality.
As a bonus, I spend less time viewing advertisements now than at any other time in 40 years.
While I get that that's more money than a lot of people have to spend, all of those combined are cheaper than a typical non-basic cable or satellite plan even today - after they know they need to compete with streaming services. It's a lot cheaper (especially adjusted for inflation) than those services were 10 years ago. So anyone that could afford content then is probably able to afford it now, but they have better options - so they might choose not to.
While the article suggests the increase is due to external pressures (e.g. inflation meaning that people have less to spend on entertainment), something that I've noticed over the past couple of years in my neck of the woods is an increase in the cost of streaming services. When you throw in the proliferation of streaming services with exclusive content, which has been happening for several years, I'm not terribly surprised that people would be trying to cut costs.
The problem with looking at streaming service pricing in the context of inflation is that a lot of people have also dropped their cable TV subscriptions. I probably subscribe to too many streaming services but I'm still paying half of what I was paying for just cable TV alone.
I suspect a lot of people buy or rent more than you and your friends.
For example, many people have either a cable TV or online streaming subscription that's another $50-100/month. HBO would be another $15 or so. And so forth.
There is an argument that, at some point, there are only so many hours in the day and a Spotify for video (i.e. most content for one monthly fee) makes sense but that's probably a $100-200/month fee in the US (assuming you could get most players to cooperate). YouTube TV alone is $65/month these days.
There's two sides of this coin. On one hand, consumers have gotten a horrendous deal in the past with cable. Expensive price, plus tons of commercials; they literally don't even broadcast a good portion of the day. Even current Netflix, with their shitty lineup, beats the deal I was getting on cable.
On the other had, consumers have now grown accustomed to really favorable deals on content. All media must be free. Everything must be rolled into one low, low price. We used to happily buy 1-4 CD(s) a week. I'm pretty sure I've spent more on CD(s) in a single transaction than on an entire year of spotify... and that was as a kid with no money.
We used to buy DVD(s) all the time. You'd spend $200-500 a year on several streaming services. I feel like I spent that just on DVD(s) as gifts for christmas every year. People don't want to pay a cent for news or subscription media. This used to be a major expenditure.
It used to be that a good chunk of your money was spent on media. You have to have entertainment to make your life better, so you pay whatever you have to. In the past there was far less competition, and consumers were getting some really bad deals. Now I think consumers are often out of wack with their expectations.
Why on earth should the government implement price fixing to limit what people make on intellectual property? Why do you think $10-20/mo is the fair price for ALL THE CONTENT IN THE WORLD, vs. the $50-100 you'd have to pay (and a cable package would be like $100-300)... In the 90s we'd pay over $100/mo for like 5 CD(s), and cable prices were insane.
This stuff isn't cheap, easy, or risk free to produce either. I've been as critical of producers as anyone, but people often lose sight of this.
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