Tech’s broken promises: Streaming is now just as expensive and confusing as cable. Ubers cost as much as taxis. And the cloud is no longer cheap::Some tech is getting pricier and looking a lot like the older services it was supposed to beat. From video streaming to ride-hailing and cloud computing.
You say “broken promises” I say “the plan all along” and “bait and switch”.
Yep. The business model has always been “Lure them in and stifle competition with a low initial cost. Then when we have the market we can jack up the price.” Enshitification at its best.
This is just capitalism at work. Capitalism = enshitification, exploitation, and destruction.
Literally working as intended. Not sure why it takes people so long to figure this out.
A healthy dose of western/capitalist propaganda since birth and until death helps a lot. So many people under the illusion that this is the natural progression of civilization, or the best.
So much propaganda some people think that if a government offers public services they are about to be sent to a gulag.
When you’ve been exposed to nothing but capitalsm your whole life it’s incredibly hard to be convinced that anything else could even work. Just like people born into religious cults, it’s hard to break when it’s all you’ve known.
Growing up in the '70s and '80s in the US, I know that the “greatest country on earth” propaganda worked on me. It took me until my 30s before I kind of looked around and said,“What the fuck is going on here?”
It’s just impossible to have a conversation about anything here, isn’t it?
Capitalism without any regulation*
Even well-regulated capitalism strives for this and somehow manages to achieve it. It is the nature of capitalism.
It is in the nature of power. Reducing this to a particular economic system is nearsighted.
Every social system with a power dynamic (i.e. a system with two or more people in it) is vulnerable to power abuse. Power blinds, blindness strips powerful of perspective, decisions made without good information drunk-walk towards ruin.
The only common thing is the fact that it’s the average Jane who suffers first and whose rage ends up counteracting the ruin.
It is in the nature of power. Reducing this to a particular economic system is nearsighted.
I will agree that it is the nature of power. But I will argue that few other economic systems actively facilitate (and actually reward) the concentration of power the way capitalism does. I’ll also point out you are basically resorting to a “whataboutism” argument.
I’ll also point out you are basically resorting to a “whataboutism” argument.
That explains… a lot. I apologize for wasting your time.
Yeah but then the wealthy eventually start buying away regulation. The only thing that made capitalism get under any sort of control was fear of a worker’s revolution
The only thing that made capitalism get under any sort of control was fear of a worker’s revolution
Yep, and so they made capitalism global, exported all of the union jobs to countries where labor abuse is permitted or encouraged, and then created new categories of unorganized, exploitative jobs faster than labor could keep up with them.
If its actually well regulated it wont be capitalism. Just like Europe has many kingdoms yet isnt full of actual monarchy.
All capitalism is, at its core, is the system of owning and investing capital for greater returns later. You can have that while regulating things–at least in theory.
An actual dictionary definition of capitalism:
an economic and political system in which a country’s trade and industry are controlled by private owners for profit.
Any definition of capitalism that doesn’t in some way mention private ownership of capital is simply wrong.
So your issue is that I didn’t use the word “private” in my write-up?
Also known as the Wal-Mart business model.
“Rent seeking” has a nice ring to it in this case, I think. The previous situation was fine, except for not being profitable enough for the right people.
A lot of these things were proudly unprofitable, which is basically their way of getting around anti-trust violations. If they had a revenue stream to make the business profitable (outside of investors handing them more cash) then they’d be hit with anti-trust lawsuits for offering services at a loss in order to drive the competition out of business. But instead they just convince investors to hang on long enough to achieve the same goal, then raise their prices when they’ve got too much power to fail.
Capitalism is just one big con, and you have no alternative but to play along.
Yeah it’s called capitalism
Yarrrrr…shiver me timbers. Fly the Jolly Roger high matey, there be booty ta plunder!
Pirating taxis?
You wouldn’t download a taxi
Yes. Yes I would.
A fake taxi like they say.
I think that’s just called robbery, but taxi pirate does have a nice ring to it.
I love this response. 😀
Main reason I’m in the works of a nas myself.
After a long break from the seas, returning after close to 8 years, pirate life has really improved.
Synology + dockers + automation tools = the experience that streaming should have been
Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum!
Don’t blame tech, blame the bait-and-switch business model of loss leading products.
Uber never made money because they chose to undercut prices of all competitors and bleed them out.
I’d argue that newer streaming companies (those founded by studios, such as Disney +) did the same thing by roping in customers before jacking up prices.
It may be the “fault” of capitalism, but consider it was capitalism that birthed streaming in the first place. In the long term, the expectation would be a better solution will surface in reference to streaming… the same way streaming was a solution to cable. Thus is the business cycle.
Uber never made money because they chose to undercut prices of all competitors and bleed them out.
I think that is only the first part of it. Uber invested a ton of money in autonomous vehicles. I think they were originally betting that they would undercut prices, bleed out competitors, and then be the only one who has the capital to deploy fleets of driverless vehicles.
We are still far from having driverless vehicles and I think investors are realizing that so Uber upped their prices and lowered their pay. There is nothing revolutionary about them. They implemented a good tracking system and the ability for drivers to more easily figure out which rides would be best. They do not have that advantage anymore since taxi companies now largely have the exact same tech but without the massive overhead that Uber has.
Also worth noting in the case of uber, even if price is equal with taxis, the experience is much better. Nicer cars, better drivers and much easier app use. Even at price parity, its a very superior product in most cases.
Other than the ease of app use I wouldn’t say any of these are accurate anymore. I’ve been in plenty of hoopties using Uber, dealt with drivers juggling different apps at once and literally driving past me with some other customer in the car on the way to their destination (while Uber app shows you your driver is arriving), and had plenty of awful drivers take me places. I think this was true in the beginning but once the facade came down and people realized they aren’t really making any money, Uber lowered their standards and took what they can get.
Remember that every invention discovered and improvement made before capitalism, happened before capitalism.
You act like capitalism is something that was invented. Market economies have existed since the dawn of time.
Think of it more like a spectrum where free market and unregulated capitalism is on one end and economies under total state control are at the other.
There is clear evidence that one side of that spectrum favors innovation more than the other.
I guess you could argue that one end of the spectrum is more “moral” than the other, but I would counter that the opposite end is amoral rather than immoral.
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You mean capitalism is inherent in the matrix of the space-time continuum as opposed to invented?
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Market economies have not all been capitalistic.
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Innovation is not the singular motivation of mankind. Survival, comfort, stability, peace, equality are more important.
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An amoral society is no better than an immoral society.
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Remember that even in a system in which workers own companies, those workers still want to make more money
A profit motive is not unique to nor a product of capitalism.
Those workers still want to live. The money is the means- controlled by those with the most money.
Capitalism and democracy as exclusive concepts.
None of this makes any sense, both on its face and as a response to my comment
Bold deconstruction of the argument. Capitalism didn’t invent iPhones, workers did. There are economic systems other than capitalism, that can do better, without the unilateral domination of capital.
Not making any profit does not imply running for losses.
Many companies can run for minimal margins, ensuring they can pay staff, stock and services.
Profit is what is left on the table after every expense is paid, including salaries, which usually doesn’t reach the workers pockets.
No but companies raising prices to make more money is absolutely related to making profit, and a worker-owned company still has a profit motive.
Companies being able to run at a loss is a feature of capitalism, not a bug. Most small businesses do not turn a profit for two to three years.
If a company sets its mark at not making profit, it does not mean it runs at a loss.
Was I unclear?
Profit is what is left after all expenses are paid, including salaries, and a company can run with a non profit objective and still create jobs with fair salaries.
Profit is the end goal for the so called investors that have no real involvement in the day to day operations of companies and demand quarterly reports with ever increasing revenue.
If a company makes enough money to pay salaries, replenish stocks and/or provide ita services and pay its daily and monthly expenses it is not running on a loss. Profit is not a requirement for a business.
I am aware that non-profits exist as a concept, but that’s irrelevant to what we are discussing which is how profitability and viability are not necessarily linked
the expectation would be a better solution will surface in reference to streaming… the same way streaming was a solution to cable.
What would that look like though? The current streaming model was pretty easy to predict ~15 years ago with the advent of online video streaming in general, especially mainstream forms of it such as YouTube. I have a hard time imagining how any other business model for distributing video content would look like, but then again I don’t have a very entrepreneurial mind.
If you had the answer you could make a lot of money
The answer was already found with music streaming. Whether you’re using Spotify, Apple Music, or YouTube whatever, you’re still getting 99% of the same content. These companies compete on price and features not on content.
That case is a bit different. Most music streaming platforms haven’t leaned heavily into the production of exclusive content like Netflix or Amazon, or own a huge swath of IPs like Disney. We might get there yet, however…if we do, we’d likely see the same price hikes and fractured availability of content.
I would do the same as was the case with cinemas: anybody can buy any streaming content. If you produce a movie, you are forced to sell it to anybody who is willing to buy it. (Just like every cinema can have any movie which wasn’t the case back then. There were specific cinema exclusives before the law forced this shit out.)
This is the way. Unfortunately, it requires competent lawmakers that dares to target anti-competitive business practices. I guess we could pin our hopes on the EU, but they might not want to open this can of bees (yet). Besides, they are plenty busy dealing with all the other areas that the US allowed to run rampant, my guess is that there’s a hard limit to how much can can be targeted at once. Let them handle right-to-repair and big tech privacy violations first, since they don’t have soft solutions / workarounds.
A better solution already exists. It’s the arr stack.
You had me until that utterly stupid drivel at the end. You cannot give credit to the system that happened to be in charge at the time…
Then you’d have to thank Monarchy for a billion things that weren’t invented by monarchs…
You’re confusing economic systems with systems of government.
I’m interested to hear how you explain the drive to create streaming as an option to cable without including tenets of a market driven economy.
Reddit/Lemmy/Etc really has a hard-on to blame all bad things on capitalism. Capitalism is amoral. It is cold and uncaring. But not recognizing it as a driving factor for growth, innovation and societal advancement is a path of willful ignorance.
Everything has pros and cons in life.
I always thought [dumping](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumping_(pricing_policy\)) was illegal.
FTC has been asleep at the wheel for 50 years
This has nothing to do with tech and EVERYTHING to do with FUCKING CAPITALISM.
What a dumb fucking post, tech didn’t promise us shit were still living in a capitalist nightmare where quarterly earnings are far and above the primary value, over any and all people.
What the fuck is this waaaa tech didn’t usher in an age of utopia!!! It’s almost like we have to solve other problems first. Fucks sake
“Tech” doesn’t exist. Entire concept is a lie propagated by companies trying to appear like something different.
Not a tech company - a taxi company, a short term rental company, a video distribution company …Look at what they sell, not what tools they use to do it.
Uber isn’t a taxi company. They don’t own a fleet. They’re a company that makes an app.
Um, not sure where you live but in most cities I know taxi companies don’t own the fleet
“the cloud isn’t tech it’s a rental company” is a pretty dumb take tbh.
Like, if you’re trying to argue that AWS (or gcp, azure) services don’t provide technical solutions that aren’t available otherwise you just don’t know what you’re talking about. Is it expensive, yeah it definitely can be. But cloud is much more than server rentals at this point. Want a host that gives you bare metal? Great there are ‘rentals’ to choose from. I can see arguing SaaS hasn’t really ‘tech’, but PasS and IaaS provide technology and solutions to problems. I hate Daddy Jeff as much as the next guy but AWS is very much ‘tech’.
I could buy a server and run AD. I can rent a cloud server and run AD. In that way, you’re correct.
But what I want to do is buy a local server and run AAD. They won’t let me. Their cloud solutions are an artificial limitation to force us to rent servers rather than license software. It’s another form of vendor lockin.
You know how to fix air conditioning? How about program an alarm system? These are side services a storage company provides their clients to enhance their main product. If uber is a taxi company and Netflix is just Blockbuster 2.0, the cloud is just a big Westies in the sky.
The cloud is just data server farms with fancy marketing. Shut your pie hole.
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I guess the thing where tech is relevant is that regulations thought it was different, so they didn’t apply the rules against dumping and other illegal tactics (“because they’re a start-up, it’s different when they lose money year over year”).
Can we actually have a discussion on what’s at hand here instead of knee jerk reactions?
Perhaps you had to have been there for all the “building better worlds” and “bringing people together” horseshit every silicon valley company was spewing since the dot com boom in the 2000’s
It’s not an actual promise so don’t act pedantic. The point is- society was sold these concepts and ideas as solutions to existing problems, and they’ve instead become bigger and more expensive problems.
Honestly, not to blame the public, but people were sitting here for the last decade going, don’t like being censored? Don’t use Google/Facebook/whatever. Don’t like being tracked across the internet? Don’t use Google/Facebook/whatever. And everyone kept using it. As for streaming services, I mean, if you don’t want monopolistic pricing power, abolish copyright/DMCA. We complain constantly about the consequences of these big corps but society keeps religiously buying shit from them or participating in their services. Just like complaining constantly about global warming but driving your car 3 miles to the store to get a 1L bottle of water. We set up these structures and put people in these positions where they can exploit you, then act surprised when they do, and we have an excuse for why we think every individual part of it needs to stay exactly the same.
OK, maybe to blame the public a little.
abolish copyright
17 years is enough.
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Yeah, but they said those things before going public or when a few people had the vast majority of shares.
If they cash out, there’s now a board in control, and the big investors want big returns. So that’s the direction companies inevitably go.
Because if capitalism.
It might be the same company, but it’s often not the same people calling the shots
They were/are solutions to some of the problems though. Uber makes it way easier and convenient to get a ride which also helped lower the amount of drunk driving happening. Streaming made it was more convenient to watch what i want to watch when i want to watch it and without ads.
The real solution would be for public infrastructure like subways, busses, etc so we dont need privatized solutions that start cheap and then ramp up the prices when we’re hooked. And we could have had films/series that get funded directly by the viewers without middlemen so for a cheaper price we can enjoy the art and have the money go directly to the artists but we instead we got different middlemen
Friendly reminder that Uber makes use of public infrastructure to do its thing.
As do all the airlines.
Cheaper has never been a promise of big tech. Better, personalized, more convenient, flexible, faster. Cheaper? I missed the promise where we’d get all these benefits for nothing, and in fact be given discounts for getting all these benefits.
Before anyone starts: yes Uber is better than a taxi. Yes, cloud computing is better than on-premises. I’m so sad for this author who can’t work their streaming services, but as bad as cable? Give me a break.
Yea cable sucked way more, atleast we aren’t locked into contracts with these services. Subscribe for a month watch the last years entire catalog and unsubscribe, rinse and repeat. You don’t need every subscription to be always active.
Yyyyep. The way they package channels is so irritating. And the advertising load you get with cable TV is intolerable to me. My parents are conditioned to it after decades but it drives me insane fast.
That’s why I just bittorrent the fuck out of everything. I’ll never play the game.
For now. Long term contracts are coming to streaming
Haha good luck with forcing people into a contract when you got like 2 shows airing at any given time. If they want a contract the content has to explode by atleast 4 fold
Capitalism would never allow utopia to come about, because the concept of utopia doesn’t allow for an unequal distribution of goods. The inequality is very much a feature, not a bug.
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Well, you’re right that the bigger issue is people expecting tech to solve social problems created by social structure. But Yes, tech is absolutely failing at this. How could it not?
Why not instead take this show of contempt for tech as another chance for people to recognize the underlying issue, not as a threat to the future of tech developments.
I’m not usually one for an ad hominem, but it’s business insider—that’s probably one conclusion they are incapable of arriving at
Not incapable, unwilling.
Agree, it’s 100% greed for investors’ money. But it’s way easier to get away with lying in tech than in most other industries.
It’s not even that; those services were subsidized by investors money on this idea that once you get a user base, you can then capitalize on the user base.
Those promises were made at a loss which later had to become a profit. It’s like Discord, there’s no way hosting literal hundreds of thousands of servers for free and killing all the competition can and will continue indefinitely. I wouldn’t be surprised if their monetization gets even more aggressive because transmitting all of that audio and video is not cheap.
That’s not even a “capitalism” thing, that’s just a “someone’s got to do the work thing” and the majority of gamers went “yup that somebody can not be free!” And what always happens does, the existing solutions lost tons of revenue and became increasingly stagnant because they can’t compete with “free”.
That’s why I’ve started paying for stuff (even when there’s a “free” option or paying more for domestically produced goods – even when there’s a “cheaper” option). Cheap isn’t cheap when it comes to manufactured goods (i.e., cheap imported junk), and free isn’t free when it comes to online services. Ultimately, somebody’s gotta make “free” happen (even if it’s a government, and then that really means the tax payer).
The race to the bottom only exists because that’s what people vote for with their wallets. If it wasn’t rewarded with sales, it wouldn’t happen.
Technology has and will always be awesome…… unless it’s in a society that is structured in an inherently exploitative way.
Did you mean exploitative?
Yup thanks!
Hello L4S!
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It’s a nice idea but not possible for everyone. I tried with a Synology NAS but gave up since I do not have a huge living space and any mechanical device with fans and hard drives is just annoyingly loud to me. I want a silent home and that thing was very far from silent even at optimal settings. A 64 bit 8-16 GB RAM device running TrueNAS will also not be silent unless I spent a fortune.
Then comes the price for electricity. I don’t know where you live but where I am it is extremely expensive and prices will continue to rise.
Then there is networking skills. Do I want to expose my home IP and my most private personal data to the internet from home? It might be doable in a somewhat safe way but … not doing it will always be safer. And the time spent setting it up (and constant safety worries) is not negligible.
So I faced reality and sold my NAS. All in all to me it’s better to stay 100% offline with my data and backups (like I do now) or spend the money on some proper E2E cloud service.
I live in an RV. I’m having no problems running a small server aside from 5g internet and CGNAT.
That makes sense, thanks for the insight!
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Cloud was never really cheap. People just didn’t understand the total cost involved, and companies are finally beginning to realize that on prem wasn’t actually a problem.
I don’t use Uber because it is cheaper, I use it because I know the fare ahead of time, I don’t need to dial a dozen different cab companies, and the vehicles are generally nicer. I don’t use streaming because it is cheaper, I use it because I don’t need to worry about time shifting, and can access much higher quality content than on cable. As for the cloud? You can pry my big iron from my cold, dead hands.
In Czechia they simply made an app any Taxi guy can sign up to, Liftago, you input your destination and you get offers from Taxis in the area.
Taxis have more regulation regarding their cars (being well maintained) than Uber drivers so it’s safer, and because capitalism you get naturally low prices due to competition.
just a much better system than Uber.
Uber is also banned in a lot of places as they are basically Taxis sidestepping the regulations
Exactly. Its not the money. Streaming is ‘messed up’ because content producers all want to own their own ‘exclusive’ platform. Had goverments regulated the market so that content could not be exclusive to a platform (like they did with movie theaters), streaming would be fine.
Very good counter arguments. I hate how the headline just lumps in cloud with streaming/ uber in value. Shows the naiveity of the author.
Capitalism: It just works™℠®©
At first the internet was like the wild west. Free, wide open spaces, with lots of exploring (minus the slaughter of indigenous people).
Then the capitalists got hold of all the land and made it like everywhere else. Restricted, controlled, expensive.
There’s no finite land on the Internet. You’re just as free to set up your own server today as you were 30 years ago.
You can also set up your own ISP, news conglomerate, microchip factory, global shipping line, and a nuclear plant.
It will take a while to get noticed, but in a few decades you can look forward to being bought up by the monopolies in the respective domains.
There’s just as much content on the internet as before, and that free and open content continues to grow at a faster rate then it ever did before. They didn’t have anything that the proprietary services of today offer, so there’s no “better days” comparison there.
I spent a week on vacation and finally saw ads again. It did give me a very small list of TV shows that I will download from the internet. It also made me realize that the US has way too many ads for drugs and lawyers willing to sue anyone and anything for you.
I wonder how much price increases stem from a lack of creativity in finding more nicer ways to be profitable, and overall inefficiency of their operations
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Paramount+ with Showtime costs $12 a month and the live TV part has commercials and a few other shows include “brief promotional interruptions,” according to the company.
The Financial Times recently reported that a basket of the top US streaming services will cost $87 this fall, compared with $73 a year ago.
Some companies, such as Dropbox, have even repatriated most of their IT workloads from the public cloud, saving millions of dollars, the VC firm noted.
Last month, Google, the third-largest cloud provider, started a pilot program where thousands of its employees are limited to using work computers that are not connected to the internet, according to CNBC.
If staff have computers disconnected from the internet, hackers can’t compromise these devices and gain access to sensitive user data and software code, CNBC reported.
Disclosure: Mathias Döpfner, CEO of Business Insider’s parent company, Axel Springer, is a Netflix board member.
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