Just when cable TV technology was getting “good” — pause live action, get almost any content on demand, one monthly fee for 100’s of channels. Streaming services had to “disrupt” the “old cable” and now everything sucks just a little bit more.
We were promised streaming services were going to be great. Many free shows. Low prices on great content, convenient to watch on your schedule and all the high quality entertainment you could imagine right at your finger tips.
But here we are a decade or so later and what did we actually get…
Streaming is the new cable without the reliability of getting your signals over a wire. They simply hold the “good stuff” and demand higher prices for the same content.
Pay a monthly fee for the “basic channels.” Pay “max or plus” for the good stuff without commercials. Wait for each service to load. Wait for each program to load. If you don’t pay the max or plus penalty, wait through the fucking commercials.
The average American is now paying more than $60 a month in streaming services. On top of the $120 or so they pay for cable.
Just when I figured out how to pause live TV and then speed through all the commercials, all the good shit I want to watch is on the streaming services and I’m forced to watch these goddamn commercials again. Why am I paying a subscription fee and watching commercials? How much of my time and money do you greedy bastards need?
Apparently, they need $90 billion. That’s the revenue the big streamers pulled in last year.
Of course the streamers investors complain they are not making enough “profit,” so up go the prices on plus services. Up go the number of ads on the basic packages.
And down go the number of good new shows after the production boom from 2015-2020.
Of course they flooded the entertainment zone with so much shit, I don’t think anybody can watch everything — even when they were just sitting at home and watching it all during Covid-19.
So now they are doing their best to squeeze a profit from the investments the Wall Street, hedge funds and Silicon Valley made in the streamers since 2015.
Cable is losing customers but still making money. Streamers are making bigger revenue and finding ways to cut their costs (sorry writers and actors — you got a better deal just in time for the production companies to stop producing shit).
Shitty services
The customers (that’s me) are getting screwed with higher bills, more time sunk into “figuring out TV” and a terrible user experience.
The wife and I spend half our evenings trying to remember “which service has which show.” Check Hulu — nope. Netflix? Nope. Prime? Apple then Peacock. No matter where we start it’s always the last one we pick.
Each service takes 10-30 seconds to load. Another minute to two to scan and search. Each screen is different. Filled with ads for the new shit on top and hiding “continue watching” someplace you would never look to find it.
If you are done with a show it disappears forever. Didn’t they used to have a little checkbox for “already watched.” Damn, I don’t know. It seems like they change this screen every month. They make the pictures bigger, remove all the words and hide any hint of how to navigate.
That’s called being “intuitive.”
Tour de France easier to ride than watch
For the past 20 years, I have loved recording the Tour de France from NBC sports on my DirectTV. Watch 6 hours of cycling coverage in 45 minutes. I could speed through every commercial. I would fast forward and watch the kilometers click down to catch only the key minutes of the race. No commercials, all the scenery.
This year they moved that shit to Peacock. Stream it. Watch it whenever — already recorded they said.
Pay extra for Peacock. The streaming picture sucks — half the time it is out of focus as they try to keep up with the race through the mountains. The only time the image is clear is when it is in the studio with former racers talking about the race. The actually race is a blurring pixelated screen that screams “not enough data for this shit.”
Fast forward hides the picture — I can only guess at the contents. I can’t scan the scenery. I can’t countdown the miles toward the end. I can’t skip the commercials.
It’s a shittier, more expensive version of the same thing I had for 20 years.
Welcome to TV technology. Getting much worse since 2002.
nailed it