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https://www.techdirt.com/2023/08/14/the-enshittification-of-streaming-accelerates-with-price-hikes-more-password-sharing-crackdowns/>
"If you hadn’t noticed, it’s not just good enough for a publicly traded company
to provide an excellent, affordable product that people like. Wall Street
demands improved quarterly returns at any cost, which, sooner or later, causes
any successful company to begin cannibalizing itself to feed the “growth for
growth’s sake” gods. Mergers, price hikes, offshored labor, whatever it takes.
While high level executives and some shareholders benefit from this
enshittification, there’s just an endless list of casualties from this process,
whether it’s product value, quality, customer satisfaction, customer support,
employee pay, jobs, or even the long-term health of the company itself.
As the streaming market saturates and competition grows, enshittification has
come to the streaming video sector in a big way. Products once heralded for low
cost convenience now see relentless price hikes at the same time there’s been
an erosion in quality and convenience. All to a backdrop of striking workers,
many of whom say they were never paid a living wage during the sector’s heyday.
Netflix, as we’ve well documented, seems intent on charging more and more money
for a lower quality product, while it demonizes the kind of password sharing it
once praised for contributing to its success. Disney now seems intent on
following suit on password crackdowns, as Hulu, Disney, and all the other
streaming giants race each other to impose sometimes biannual price hikes.
On many fronts, streaming was a notable improvement to the traditional cable TV
model, which mandated that consumers purchase massive bundles of largely
unwatched channels. Or pay their cable company a ridiculous monthly fee to
purchase a dusty old cable box. The problem: a lot of streaming’s novelty and
innovation obfuscated many other long-percolating problems in the sector,
including unchecked media consolidation and attacks on labor."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
