The Future Of Streaming TV: More Pointless Mergers And Making It Harder To Cancel
from the those-who-fail-to-learn-from-history dept
Major TV providers lost another 5 million paying TV subscribers last year, as users increasingly jump from fat and expensive cable bundles, to streaming. At the same time, a lot of the executives and bad ideas that plagued the traditional cable TV sector are coming along for the ride, resulting in a streaming sector that looks more and more like the kludgy cable sector.
Thanks to industry consolidation and saturated market growth, the streaming industry has started behaving much like the traditional cable giants they once disrupted. As with most industries suffering from “enshittification,” that generally means steadily worse service at higher prices as it tries to appease Wall Street’s demand for improved quarterly returns at any cost (even long term company health).
Netflix has started acting like password sharing, something it advocated for for years, is a dire cardinal sin. Amazon decided it would be fun to increase the number of ads it runs, charging Amazon Prime users even more money to avoid them. Consumers are paying more for streaming than ever as layoffs abound, streaming catalogs shrink, and the underlying products steadily get worse.
In response, customers are starting to be a little smarter about their shopping habits, increasingly cancelling streaming services when they’re not watching them. According to the New York Times, more than 29 million U.S. consumers — about a quarter of all domestic paying streaming subscribers — cancelled three or more streaming services sometime in the last two years:
“Among these nomadic subscribers, some are taking advantage of how easy it is, with a monthly contract and simple click of a button, to hopscotch from one service to the next. Indeed, these users can be fickle — a third of them resubscribe to the canceled service within six months, according to Antenna’s research.”
The reduced revenues from people cancelling for months at a time will create new pressure on streaming giants to deliver Wall Street those sweet quarterly returns. Streaming profitability was already a challenge (NBCUniversal’s Peacock lost $2.8 billion last year). In other words: improving service quality and expanding catalogs won’t be at the top of the executive menu.
So now the race will be on to thrill Wall Street and goose revenues in other ways. That means more price hikes, more pointless mergers (see: the whole AT&T Time Warner Discovery mess), and more bizarre restrictions. I’d also suspect they’ll soon take another terrible cue from traditional cable: cutting corners on customer service, and making it increasingly difficult to cancel service without headaches.
That’s not to say that streaming still hasn’t been a dramatic improvement over traditional cable television. But if the industry isn’t careful, and there’s no indication it wants to be, it’s going to be repeating the same exact trajectory and create openings for disruption of its own business models.
Filed Under: cable, consumers, cord cutting, customer service, streaming, tv, video
Comments on “The Future Of Streaming TV: More Pointless Mergers And Making It Harder To Cancel”
Fluff. A rare miss. We all hope it doesn’t come to pass, but kind of expect it to the way things are going. Not wrong, but please come again with evidence.
Re:
Evidence of what? Did you miss all the links in the article?
Re: Re: nothing but anecdotal evidence in that article
For starters, the article is only about Americans. Netflix is 75% foreign subscriptions now. The streaming business is obviously global and most customers are not Americans. That’s true for Netflix and all the other streamers that survive will get there too.
So what’s up? Do Americans just love to churn but foreigners are a lot more loyal? How does the NY Times explain Netflix’s continued growth to 270M subscribers if everyone is churning up a storm? Obviously there are still big numbers of new people flooding into streaming.
I suspect that churners are a minority of the audience for Netflix and all the others. Maybe foreigners churn less because streaming is more likely to be new to them, or because all the competitors (like Max) haven’t expanded to the whole world so there is less to churn to.
And what’s going to happen is, the streamers will look at the content the non-churners watch and make more of that, too keep them loyal. As for churners, they will roam at will and be ignored.
Re: Re: Re:
True.
I'm happy
I pay for one GREAT streaming service but I won’t say what it is, lest it be ruined.
I might hint at some of the Criteria used to choose a streaming service, though.
This comment has been flagged by the community. Click here to show it.
Freedom from corporate greed, ineptitude, and malfeasance
Freedom. How to.
Use the below tools to escape corporate greed, ineptitude, and malfeasance.
A Computer
https://www.pishop.us/product/raspberry-pi-5-4gb/
An Infrared Remote and Heat sink Case
https://flirc.tv/
Some Software
https://libreelec.tv/
Tagging tools if you want metadata browsing. metadata makes libreelec beautiful and 100x faster. There are probably better tools, but TMM is what I used for eons.
https://www.tinymediamanager.org/
Ahem, to download the above software with privacy, ahem, use a vpn
https://torguard.net/anonymoustorrentvpn.php
Of course, this post’ intent is not to promote piracy. It’s intent is to promote freedom of choice and remove the massive frustrations of dealing with unchecked corporate greed. So only use the above tools to view videos you own, and have the rights to store and view. Otherwise that would be naughty.
Re: I've never pirated a thing...
…but reserve the right to start if and when my red lines are crossed.
Red lines:
-Making it hard to cancel
-No monthly tier
-No ad-free tier
-Excessive price increases.
So, it’s up to you, corporations. My red lines are perfectly reasonable and if you cross them, it’s your fault that you no longer get any of my money.
Re: Re:
Or, as Mike Masnick and Louis Rossmann have stated before, just don’t pirate it. Don’t consume it. Don’t give the content the light of day. It’s completely legal, and corporations can’t do a damn thing to stop that.
I can’t wait until we get to the “Feel free to opt out of providing us the monthly subscription by sending a registered, notarized letter to: P.O. Box bla-de-bla-etc……”
Re:
If that happens, you call your credit card company and say the service is charging you without your permission and you want to file a charge back.
A few hundred charge backs will make life difficult for the streaming company.
Mergers will continue until customer choice improves
God I love watching corpo-rats/MBAs fuck themselves over time and time again. Almost as much as I love watching merger after merger after merger greenlit in the name of ‘customer choice’. It’s a laughably stupid position, and blindingly obviously so to anyone with the barest whiff of critical-thinking chops, but since politicians are so god damn cheap I don’t expect we’ll see fewer mergers any time soon.
MBAs truly are completely and utterly useless. I keep thinking I’ll find a use for one, some day, but that seems quite impossible to do in practice.
Re:
Can I note that I have an MBA and I started this site you’re commenting on?
Re: Re: MBA worthwhile
I did an MS in Finance, rather than an MBA. The graduate degree transformed my life and earrings potential compared to my BBA. So ya, an MBA can make a huge difference particularly if you buckle down and get a GPA the recruiters will notice.
Re: Re:
I never doubted not-wholly-incompetent business strategists existed. TD is a good example thereof, apparently.
That, unfortunately, doesn’t change the number of times I’ve had my workplace swing from normal operations to complete and utter clusterfuck within a week thanks to orders from the brilliant folk on high.
The latest one was magnificent: Our EU VP of marketing, for reasons known only to him and, I presume, Beelzebub, rammed through a change to procurement that resulted in our field techs no longer being allowed to choose their own tool bags based on their actual needs and job descriptions, as we had been doing for the nine-ish years I’d been there, then. The replacement? A faux-leather bag, with a singular(!) giant opening. No locks. No additional storage of any sort. No adjustable straps. No reinforced seams. Nothing. How it was allowed from a financial PoV I’ll never understand (and yes, I asked them all – mum’s the word). How the damn marketing wanketeer was allowed anywhere near procurement for a BU he has exactly zero relevant knowledge of is another question I got no answer to.
The guy spent roughly the equivalent of my local branch’s operating costs for an entire fiscal year on those craptacular tool-bags-that-weren’t, which every single office was then mandated to order for their technicians. That walking catastrofuck of a man still has a job, somehow, only now with a higher salary, because… fuck if I know.
Re: Re: Re:
At some point people just fail upwards. The system needs people to still believe that bloated college qualifications count for anything meaningful to ability, tenacity or whatever the fuck buzzword happens to be popular on LinkedIn that week. The result is that people get carried by a piece of paper they can fling into someone else’s face and use companies as playgrounds, sinking them before going on to collect remuneration packages while the grassroots-level grunts get something between jack shit and fuck all.
Of course that means more people start sinking money and time into getting MBAs. Which means more competition for an ever shrinking pie just to get the opportunity to fail upwards, too, and choking the market with prospective CEO wannabes looking for the chance to roleplay as Elon Musk. Because what else would they do? It’s not as though the best role models are doing any different.
When you or I get fired from our jobs it’s called a warning sign recruiters use to deny you any wiggle room. When an MBA-holder gets fired from their last job after leading the company into the ground, it’s called being a visionary, a pioneer who led the last project through unpredictable times, or something else scribbled down by an unpaid college copywriter intern. Or ChatGPT, whichever’s cheaper.
Re:
Um, are you sure that’s what’s happening? Cable had a pretty good 40-year run, which is about the length of an “MBA” career. None of the high-level corporate employees seem to be hurting for money. Had the companies not fallen ass-backward into internet service, they might be failing by now, but I think there’d still be some good looting to be had on the way out.
So, if the streaming providers follow the same trajectory with the same timing, the people running them will be fine too.
Re: Re:
Piss-poor phrasing on my part. It’s meant to be read as ‘fuck their own firms over’, rather than themselves, but even I can’t see it, in hindsight. I blame a lack of coffee.
I’ve never once doubted the higher-up corpo-rats would be, and always will be, just peachy. Anything else would be surprising in the extreme.
Eff harder the cancel
Kill it with the Credit Card Company
Re:
Rumor has it that some credit card companies are getting really stingy with the charge-backs; whoever made the charge disputes it, and it’s back on the customer’s bill.
If you’ve got one of those temporary/virtual card-number things, that might work, ’cause they’d be unable to bill once the number’s canceled.
Re: Re:
But your contact information will still be on file with those streaming services, and if you miss too many payments, they will send collection agencies after you and tank your credit score.
the mergers aren't actually pointless
Just look at customer behavior. They go for a big service like Netflix or Amazon, maybe Disney. The others, not so much. A lot of people just want a big library to choose from and don’t care if they miss Show A or Movie B. Maybe they’ve never heard of them.
This means there’s a high cutoff bar for success. Amazon, Netflix, Disney/Hulu, Max, Apple – all above. Paramount+ and Peacock, below. Peacock+ might be saved if Sony buys it and funnels its content to Paramount+ rather than Netflix.
As for making it harder to cancel, not allowing monthly subscription, not allowing ad-free tiers: all red flags that signals it’s time for me to switch to piracy, which I’ve never done to date (honest!)
But I think the more likely option is that streamers focus on the type of subscribers who never churn (and do other things they like, such as subscribing to ad tiers and bundles) by making content for them and ignoring the churners. They have enough data on everyone to tell the difference.
Netflix has 270M subscribers now and they’ve always made it easy to cancel. So clearly ease of cancellation is not the “problem.” The problem, like it or not, is that some of the platforms need to merge or die because there are too many of them in a field that mainly rewards sheer bigness.
Re:
👍
Sorry for being pessimistic but:
But if the industry isn’t careful, and there’s no indication it wants to be, it’s going to be repeating the same exact trajectory and create openings for disruption of its own business models.
Youtube has already been having problems.
And I doubt tiktok would be the disruptor for long, sold it not.
Also, do you realize the companies could also follow the disruption and do the same thing they did to streaming and cable?
I think their service model is wrong
I don’t want to subscribe to ANY service. I just want to watch show X or Y or Z, and once I’ve watched it, be done; or I want to watch sports team A or B or C during their season, and then be done.
Sell me this at a fair price and I’m in. But try to make me do the subscribe/unsubscribe dance, and I’m out – and I’m going to stream or torrent whatever-it-is from a pirate site.
Re:
“Sell me this at a fair price ”
The fair price used to be the exposure to advertising.
Re:
Ultimately, they’d still be “selling” something with near-zero marginal cost; a set of bits that any number of people are quite willing to give you for free. So it’s never really gonna make sense.
Re:
Agreed. It becomes even more infuriating when it’s becoming more and more obvious data harvesting and sales is the real goal of everyone and their dog, these days, no matter what product or service happens to be that particular outfit’s data harvesting vehicle of choice.
Stop pretending the industry heads are somehow going to suffer any unwanted consequences from this. They’ve had this planned and it’s all unfolding as they expect.
They know some people will give up streaming, making it less lucrative. If/when it doesn’t pull the numbers they want, they’ll cut their budgets for streaming and focus on something else that’s gotten more popular instead. Eadem, Sed Aliter.
They know exactly what they’re doing, there’s no “lesson” to be learned here.
“Among these nomadic subscribers, some are taking advantage of how easy it is, with a monthly contract and simple click of a button, to hopscotch from one service to the next. Indeed, these users can be fickle — a third of them resubscribe to the canceled service within six months, according to Antenna’s research.”
Ah yes, your product being convenient for users is the problem.
Reread that and wonder why they are losing money.
Within 6 months is about the time it takes for 1 service to dump the content the user was following as it bounced from service to service.
Reread that and wonder why they are losing money.
Fickle… you mean like not clearly alerting users to what content will be gone in the next month?
Fickle… you mean like vanishing content people thought they had purchased from their libraries?
Fickle… you mean like using less than 2 weeks of streaming stats to decide if a series should be dumped before it can be discovered?
Fickle… like trying to make your service a bit harder to navigate?
Fickle… like claiming using a service paid for in 2 locations is somehow theft?
Fickle… like deciding to just add advertising turning yourselves into the industry you disrupted?
Fickle… like not working out a system to acquire the original soundtracks to series rather than replace them without informing the user who is then confused why their memory doesn’t match?
Fickle… like rebranding yourself 8 times in 2 years, rather than admit you suck at this and should just license your content to someone who knows that they are doing?
Yes the problem is the users, the people paying you to provide them entertainment and not you finding all of the ways you can fuck that up over & over.
ASIDE.
most internet services have CAPS.
And I want to Charge the internet services NOT ASKED FOR(adverts) for money for wasting my Data limits.
Re:
INCLUDING MY PHONE, when they Turn on my Paid for cellphone sevice networking to DOWNLOAD CRAP.