poopkins @ poopkins @lemmy.world

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2 yr. ago

I see. Whether or not the price covers costs, businesses will often invest into attracting new customers, for instance through marketing campaigns or incentives to switch from a competitor. In such cases, the cost isn't visibly calculated through to the consumer.

However, since the cost is a main factor for purchase decisions, companies might similarly invest in growing their customer base by offering a pricing tier below cost. This doesn't necessarily mean that the service as a whole is operating at a loss, because there might be higher cost tiers that offer premium content or family plans. Different plans might also have degrees of underutilization that reduces service costs. Finally, cohorts of service tiers might change based on external factors like economic recession or competitive offerings.

All this is to say that pricing models are complicated, and breaking even with a SVOD service is extremely difficult in an industry with extremely high production costs, aging licensable content that viewers are losing interest in all while being overrun with complex, regional licensing agreements that affect both. Especially when this is further compounded with macroeconomic factors including inflation and interest rates that affect both corporations operating at a loss and consumers looking to tighten their belts or user decline due to subscription fatigue, an argument could be made that some middle ground needs to be found to simply remain in business.

Whether or not the insights are deep or shallow, Lemmy would be an inclusive place where discourse is welcomed and civil interactions are commonplace.

Instead, any comment that invites conversation to go more in depth is downvoted with ad hominem attacks, further adding toxicity to the cesspool that is the comment section behind effectively any post on this community.

Why is this linking to some oddball social network that in turn links to a broken CNET page?! Here, I'll save you the clicks and frustration with this TL;DR.

Use Google's privacy tools to be informed when your personal information is searched:

1. Open your web browser and type myactivity.google.com/results-about-you.
2. Select “Results to review.”
3. Choose “Get started” and press “Next,” twice.
4. Add your personal info: name, address, phone number, email. You can add multiple entries for each one.
5. Confirm this is all your information.
6. Choose the way that you want to be notified. You can choose email or push notifications, or both.
7. Last, you will get a pop-up that says, “We’re taking a look."

Edit: adding a note that it's not available in all regions.

Doesn't taking that stance effectively acknowledge that they have a monopoly? "If we didn't have a monopoly it wouldn't be any cheaper, scout's honor."

Almost all games these days have a requirement to be online to play them, even in single player, and are absolutely ridden with DRM, sometimes even to the extent that it installs rootkits like in the case of Uplay and Valorant. By not voting with your wallet and pirating it yourself, you're doing yourself and the community at large a disservice. ^♪

I have genuinely asked myself this, and can't help but find it strange that the only comments in this thread and other almost identical threads are effectively complaining about corporate greed, and never go into any kind of depth about underlying causes and contributing factors.

Why instead is the same old empty rhetoric repeated and upvoted time and time again? This platform seems to be an echo chamber for ignorance.

Why is this being downvoted? I thought Lemmy was a place for discourse? How does this not contribute to an open discussion?

With regards to discounts to lure new customers, I was thinking about conventional subscription based services like newspapers or cable providers. It doesn't seem unreasonable to me that in a sector with heavy competition, such services might be offered at an initial loss if data suggests that retained memberships can recoup it.

I misunderstood what you were referring to with a definition of "fake audience." I wasn't giving any merit to their claims about how it all ties to piracy, clearly that's nonsense. I'm not completely following your train of thought with a "fake price," though.

It's possible this might result in a harsher stance on piracy again, that's true. Realistically, though, I think it's more likely that three things will happen: we as consumers will gradually recalibrate our cost expectations for streaming services, production corporations will cut costs with more reality type content, and smaller companies will either be bought up or go out of business as users settle on a deliberate few services to subscribe to.

There are certainly consumers out there with this kind of mentality, but it's a common sales strategy to lure new customers with a reduced subscription fee for the first months only. It evidently works, because businesses have been doing this long before SVOD services, or even the internet for that matter, existed.

I expect that indeed, a significant number of customers cannot be bothered to cancel a subscription once they begin to use it, or, put another way, perceive the value of it to be justified against the increased price. I don't think it's fair to call this a fake audience, because these are real users of which a certain percentage will be retained.

Another factor that probably weighs into this is the competitive race to the bottom among the many SVOD offerings that are available today. Users like you and me perceive a certain dollar amount as the maximum that we are willing to pay, but where does that figure come from? If you are a new player in this space, you are effectively capped to the current market price for subscription fees, whether or not that covers your costs.

The free market effect will gradually resolve this as services that are all currently operating at a loss will correct their price models, which is what I believe is currently happening.

I'm not disagreeing with you—the conclusion these services have taken are indeed not logical ones based on historical trends—but I'm curious how you know these services didn't need to raise the fees? Why have you assumed that it's to "grow infinitely"?

From my understanding, almost all streaming video providers except Netflix have been operating on a loss. That can only be sustained for so long before the parent company will need to see it begin to generate a positive revenue stream. The most straightforward way to do that is to increase subscription fees. Furthermore, the number of subscribers of Paramount+, MGM+ or even Disney+ is certainly not trending towards "infinite growth."

I'm not justifying anything, because with five monthly services that have been hiking prices I'm looking at what to slash myself, but I was eager to encourage a bit more discourse on this topic.

It's not specified what precisely is provided in the payload of the multicast body. I suspect that the original MAC address is included in something like a Bonjour broadcast, but I wasn't able to find any documentation that confirms that.

This bothers me as well. The headline might as well be based on some other survey about sexual orientation or height or hair color. What a strange thing, to further propagate association by race.

It also doesn't have a tape deck!

I've reached the point where I will downvote anything relating to Elmo the muppet.

If you had read the article, you would have known that the bug relates to a very specific field inside a multicast payload and a network-specific unique MAC address is generated and retained as advertised. I'm not defending Apple; just reiterating the facts.

Plus, you will still need their software to enable a replacement chip due to serialization. From my understanding, this entire aspect isn't addressed in the current wording of the bill.

I suspect that they have found a loophole in the current bill's wording and don't want it to be changed.

One of the clients I worked for had an interesting relationship with both Microsoft and BlackBerry at the time: both companies just outright paid them to build and maintain the Windows Phone and BlackBerry 10 apps, respectfully. Another agency did Windows Phone, but we billed them directly for the BlackBerry port of the Android app and its maintenance.