Continue reading your article below...The email arrived late last year, a harbinger of a new era. Disney+ was jacking up their annual plan to a whopping $140. It wasn't an isolated incident. Netflix announced their cheapest tier would now come bundled with ads, Amazon Prime would be $3, TV went from $66.99 to $99.9 a month there are so many great things to watch and they're all spread across so many different Services. I want to watch them all but man does it hurt to Fork up so much money every
And the funny thing is, rather than competition driving down prices, they only seem to be competing for who can charge the most while showing more ads.
They’re not truly competing because they make every show they can exclusive to their platform
Yep, there can be no competition with exclusive access
Fair point, honestly. It’s more like a group of mini-monopolies than any kind of actual competitive space.
Streaming infrastructure is expensive, and all these smaller networks that decided to spin up their own didn’t seem to realise that. Prices go up, ad tiers get added because none of them are actually making any money. It’s just quarter after quarter of loss even with substantial revenue due to the fact that producing content, hosting and then scaling globally to make it available to a wide variety of geographic locations just isn’t cost effective. Even Amazon, the lord of cloud compute itself, hasn’t been able to maintain this.
So in this case, competition limits the only way they make money: people subscribing. Greedy bastards.
A lot of the infrastructure is provided to ISP’s free for local caching/deployment. Netflix has the Open Connect program to greatly relieve stress on interconnects and backbones.
If memory serves, ISP didn’t like this and would rather profit from fees for the internet traffic. I feel like those fees and licensing fees account for a significant increase in subscription costs.