And yet they're the one that pulled Prodigy. IDK how popular that was, but if they pulled S1-3 of Discovery for "similar reasons" or whatever Trek you were planning to watch later on... that really kills the whole pay for streaming as a back catalog.
I otherwise agree - you need to make paying you easier than pirating, while actually being affordable - and.... they're not. Outside of NetFlix, everyone else has some streaming problems, UI problems, etc. You know what pretty much doesn't? Having a mp4 file. You can play that in any of a number of competing players with UI etc that are actually directly competing on the UI and performance.
I just think Netflix is kind of screwed now that they don't have the licenses from most of the media companies. They now have ever increasing costs (inflation) and yet - demand is down (end of pandemic) and people don't really like price increases even if they're even with inflation (not saying theirs is, but they can't shrinkflate) - but 2009 $7.99 is 2023 $11.36 - but that's the government CPI / inflation, that many people think is kind of skewed. Shadowstats claim it's $27.96. But for just one service, that's more than a cable bill ad-on for HBO was last I checked (the Shadowstats amount). So, assuming 2009ish was actually profitable, which it may not have been, and inflation - even if everything else stayed the same there'd need to be a noticable to LARGE price increase to break even. And everything didn't stay the same - competition, license pulls, and running their own studios / funding their own shows. And as the price goes up, people see less value, and less people are likely to join to see how it is.
I saw the actual fiber spools they rolled out. It's a fiberoptic cable. I just live out in the country and the other option is LTE4. The DSL company basically quit selling it, and it was slower than LTE4.
I'm not sure how you mean the last paragraph, but P+ already removed Star Trek Prodigy, and I think it just stopped "airing" so people might rightly want to "record" the show.
Yea sadly I have fiber at 100down and 10 up. And from what I can tell, I need faster upload to stream anything to anyone. And yes, this is the best option available.
Oh god - I swear no one talks to co-workers or relays information anywhere in the US now adays. I don't understand it, I don't understand the systems that can't handle bouncing you around different people when they also enforce doing that, and I don't think it's specific to the US border patrol.
What's so interesting to me is that from much of what I've read - bombing civilian populations as a way to end a war has basically never worked. It was pushed heavily in WWII due to I think LeMay theories, but basically strengthened morale to stand up to the enemy instead.
Of course, not saying the Russians, or really anyone who gets into a war is necessarily behaving rationally, but this is sadly very destructive with very little history saying it'll help anyone achieve any goal.
I mean, the essential problem is the streaming video services don't have close enough to "everything" that the streaming audio services have. So you essentially fragment your market. You basically become a specific niche (in a way) because you can't appeal to "everyone" because you can't afford to make a popular version of "any show". This tied with people already wanted to shrink their cable bill so most people DO NOT WANT 10 streaming services. Even if they have the money to burn, they will feel (like you do) that they can't possibly make use of 10 streaming services worth of content. So you start to be choosy about what shows you want to watch, and probably start to lose FOMO because it's so fragmented there's just not that many "everyone is watching the show and I want to talk about it with them" that used to make appointment TV. I.e. there's less peer pressure to talk about any given Netflix (or Hulu, or P+ or D+ etc) show, so you might well think "hey, that's something I might like, but it's like not important enough for me to pay to see it or plan to see it." And today, if you aren't scheduling it - I'd say there's a good chance it'll be like that 500th book you got at the local book sale for $0.50 that "you definitely plan to read" that's been sitting at #500 for the past 10 years.
What's even worse is unlike in the 80s when cable took off is that there's so much content and competition that people probably aren't even watching as much "TV" as they used to. I already mentioned books, but there's comics, graphic novels, forums like this, YouTube, Anime (a big portion of a whole other cultures collective TV series added in now mainstream), video games, 3 hour long podcasts, and just fricken getting off a device and going outside. Some of this always existed, but a lot is new, and competing. I'd argue that as a share of what you could do in your spare time, as a whole TV is down.
I don't know if it would ever work, but I do wonder if we don't start to see something like "personal syndication" return. I know the app stores used to sell an episode of a specific show for $4 or something, but that's way too much. But I wonder if we start to see much lower per ep pricing where you literally pay for the show you want more directly. But again, we rapidly hit the microtransaction problem again. Maybe you just can't pay for an episode at at time, you have to pay per season to make it work. Maybe $4 a season / no ads would work? IDK. I guess as soon as you want more than 4 shows on a given streamer it makes sense to buy it bulk.
I mean, the other thing that's kind of stupid is - lets say a companies stock once issued goes to 0 and is delisted. So what? That's not the company going bankrupt. The stock market valuation has no direct application to a company once the shares are issued and bought the first time. But ignoring shareholder demands that would destroy the company wouldn't likely tank the stock of a otherwise good company - because there's someone out there who just wants value to hold and preferably dividends vs infinite growth (that doesn't exist). Now, you could buy enough stock to throw out the CEO and whatever, but that's likely to be expensive and a PITA. So while there's going to be some high profile examples, A) that gets close to taking a company private anyway, and doing a shitty job and B) generally limited numbers of companies will have people going to these lengths.
I think the bigger issue isn't wanting companies to be profitable - that's kind of the point of companies. The issue is shareholders trying to make capital gains on everything. This isn't possible long term because infinite growth isn't possible. I would argue what people and decent investors should want is the steady dividends and not worry about if the stock is up or down.
Keepass XC + syncthing. doesn't have to touch the cloud at all. It's what I do, though I have investigated Vaultwarden for work. But no real SSO / AD integration with it is potentially a deal-breaker. Though I get that it's probably complicated to add.
I have a younger sister, and we pretty much get along great. We live next door to each other (and near other family and friends), and her and her husband and I tend to go on trips semi frequently. We text frequently, and hang out etc.
The problem is they stopped making the dumb click in docks that just connected right to the motherboard. I think they did this for "thin" and also those docks just worked too well, and basically never died. And you needed one from the laptop vendor because they were model specific. But man, the USBC crap is STILL not really an improvement.
It also makes Amazon a lot less enticing to shop on. If I want cheap shit, I'd just as soon get it cheaper direct from China (Temu, AliExpress). If I want brand name products (IDK - do they even exist anymore?) I need to go to like Best Buy I guess.
See, I think this is the big issue - totally different travel instances. AirBnB was sold (back in the day) as cheaper than a Hotel room, and I think a lot of these posts are people saying, well, I wanted a cheaper hotel room, but the market doesn't actually support making cheaper hotel rooms when done professionally as a business because hotel rooms are very competitive so there's likely to be one at whatever price point you want that's profitable.
So anyone who was in the "market" for a single hotel room now feels like AirBnB is a ripoff, and I tend to agree.
For larger accommodations when travelling - they've always existed, Suites / Long Stay hotels / Timeshare Resorts / and traditional house rentals. But I was ignorant of these "being an option" because I always assumed they're be prohibitively expensive. AirBnB and I guess other market forces have really made that not the case anymore, and there's likely to be something in most places, especially if it's a tourist area. And I think a lot of people are like me - "Oh, that rent a house, those people are rich". "Oh a Suite? Mr Moneybags over here". When in reality it's often not that much money when you compare - especially for larger family groups.
I can't say it's always available, but you might want to look for suites? I stayed in a hotel in Ocean City that had a full kitchen, and most timeshare resorts (that you can also rent) tend to have that too.
It's also obvious that most of the savings in the US anyway go away when you're running it as a business. AirBnB has basically turned into VRBO, but apparently sketchier.
I can believe you - people when travelling are so used to hotels they're stuck in that "Hotel Room" mindset, which is great if it's 2 people, or 2 couples that share a room. I don't think many people have looked into "larger accommodations" so the "economy of scale" as it were can kick in. And I can see renting an entire house if you've got enough people going, for long enough, to be more economical. I know it has been for 1week or so. It's hard to compare most hotels where people tend to stay for less than 5 days IME, and have less than 4 people to larger group trips.
And yet they're the one that pulled Prodigy. IDK how popular that was, but if they pulled S1-3 of Discovery for "similar reasons" or whatever Trek you were planning to watch later on... that really kills the whole pay for streaming as a back catalog.
I otherwise agree - you need to make paying you easier than pirating, while actually being affordable - and.... they're not. Outside of NetFlix, everyone else has some streaming problems, UI problems, etc. You know what pretty much doesn't? Having a mp4 file. You can play that in any of a number of competing players with UI etc that are actually directly competing on the UI and performance.
I just think Netflix is kind of screwed now that they don't have the licenses from most of the media companies. They now have ever increasing costs (inflation) and yet - demand is down (end of pandemic) and people don't really like price increases even if they're even with inflation (not saying theirs is, but they can't shrinkflate) - but 2009 $7.99 is 2023 $11.36 - but that's the government CPI / inflation, that many people think is kind of skewed. Shadowstats claim it's $27.96. But for just one service, that's more than a cable bill ad-on for HBO was last I checked (the Shadowstats amount). So, assuming 2009ish was actually profitable, which it may not have been, and inflation - even if everything else stayed the same there'd need to be a noticable to LARGE price increase to break even. And everything didn't stay the same - competition, license pulls, and running their own studios / funding their own shows. And as the price goes up, people see less value, and less people are likely to join to see how it is.