I was just yesterday thinking what a brilliant move it would be for a business to cause some outrage, get a bunch of people to unsub. and then jack up the price for when they come crawling back. I should have gone into marketing.
I'm not sure its that brilliant. You just had an event that made people really think about if they actually wanted it or not with potentially a lot of cancellations. You may have had a few people come back, but now with a price hike they're once again re-evaluating if they really wanted it. For others you lost, you're now probably continuing to cement that decision. Meanwhile, those that felt "I can't quit, its just too good of value" are now also reconsidering that evaluation.
I'm not the one that needs to do any crawling. Guess what I discovered these past couple of days? I get along fine without Hulu. And JFC, $20/month and I still get ads? Yeah, piss off with that shit, I'll read a book first.
I'm not so sure it's a keen business strategy to piss off a bunch of folks, and just days later while they're still a bit pissed, jack up the prices. Might work for some, for others like myself: "wow, check out the big, clanky balls on Iger".
I'm pretty sure the networks sued over DVRs but they lost because they had already lost against VCRs in the 1980s (skipping ads is just a form of time-shifting).
Yep, that's true. The difference now is that streaming services have attempted to make it a crime to record the streams you get from them by embedding DRM in the connections between the streaming device and the screen you watch it on. This is the primary reason for the HDMI standard. Combined with the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, it's considered illegal to decode that video stream and record it with e.g. a screen capture device, even if it's solely for personal use.
So now if you want ad-free, you either pay extra in perpetuity for just that one feature , or you break the law. It's no wonder that piracy is back in such a big way.
I've had a lot of fun canceling subscriptions this year due to the low quality of 95% of the content, the series cancellations and the rising costs. I refuse to have the equivalent of the "cable bill" of 20 years ago.
I'm willing to pay for consistently good content but ads of any kind are a deal breaker. For the moment I'll set aside that the quality and frequency of good content has fallen across the leading services and that current prices are no longer appropriate for the value received. My plan is to put together a dedicated media server with a high-end GPU and an input capable of recording HDMI 2.1 4k HDR10+ (at a 42Gbit data rate (FRL 48G)). I accept that this will be expensive and difficult but it's important to me. I've already acquired and tested a box capable of stripping HDCP copy protection from such an HDMI feed (because future availability is never certain).
My goal is not only skipping ads but also skipping around in program content with low latency and high responsiveness. This is because another result of the failing streaming media economic model is that content providers are "padding" the length of content they commission to cut their per-hour costs while retaining perceived value. So an 8 episode mini-series is really ~6 episodes of story stretched to fill 8 and now a two hour 'original' movie is just a bloated cut of a 95 minute tight story. Once you've paid for the actors, crew and sets, shooting longer scenes and using more coverage shots is cheap. Having a background in film and video production, it's surprisingly easy for me to spot content that's been padded and then self-edit it in real-time - although features like auto scene detection and variable speed playback (with audio pitch correction) would make it even better.
Even the better DVRs in cable/satellite boxes are too laggy and, of course, most don't provide much flexibility in skip increments and other necessary features. Media distributors are only providing DVR as a checkbox feature because they can up-charge for it but then hard-limiting its features because it hurts the other side of their business model. I don't expect the "almost acceptable" built-in DVR I have today to remain acceptable for long - because the DVR provider's incentives aren't aligned with mine. It's slowly going to keep getting nerfed, which is why a stand-alone DVR is the only viable option for the long-term. And thanks to HDCP DRM and the DMCA, the only DVRs which will give viewers what they want will be DIY hardware running open source components. My medium term plan is to train up an AI for auto-skipping commercials.
> DVRs solved commercials on cable back in 1999, "unskippable" isn't an issue there.
I had a DirecTV DVR box that had unskippable ads for some content. It would download fresh local ads from the internet into the ad breaks from the pre-recorded satellite content. Blocking the cable box from the internet just ensured it was always the same old ad content or forced the original ad segments but also limited/broke a lot of other features of the cable box.
It only did it on some shows on some networks. Paramount was the most obvious one, a lot of the recordings of their shows had that "feature" enabled.
You don't cancel them when there isn't any show on that you're watching, and then resubscribe?
Like I feel like it's pretty common to be either a Netflix or Disney/Hulu household all the time, and then just subscribe to one other in any given month depending on what show you're mainly watching.
Like now that Slow Horses is back, it's time to wait a couple weeks and then switch to Apple TV for a month to catch the 6 episodes.
I'm convinced that "all the content, everywhere, all the time" has made people worse consumers. We just give the companies money every month and if we have time, we consume whatever they decide to give us, and if they decide they don't want to show something anymore, we can't complain.
I'm becoming nostalgic for the Netflix DVD-by-mail era. Prioritizing your queue was important, since there were significant costs in returning a DVD and waiting for a new one to arrive. There was real anticipation in getting the next DVD, instead of binge-watching an entire series in one night without leaving the couch. We cared about what we watched since it wasn't readily available.
You can be just as intentional about your streaming services as you were about Netflix DVD's. You can prioritize your queue of upcoming shows, since there are significant costs in paying for a month of streaming you don't use. There's real anticipation in switching from Apple TV+ back to HBO, both of which generally release shows weekly, not at once. And then you can keep your list of movies you want to watch, and look forward to which ones will become available when you do switch streamers.
I mean, if you want to waste all your money subscribing to everything at once, then sure maybe everything is readily available. But most people I know, the thing they suddenly want to watch the most often isn't on a service they're currently subscribed to. So the anticipation you talk about continues to be a very real thing. Everything isn't readily available unless you've got lots of cash to burn.
And back in the day of Netflix DVD's, plenty of people watched network and cable TV just as mindlessly as you seem to think they do with streaming today... renting DVD's was an active intentional choice.
Even more than $120 in the early 2000s, if I recall correctly. Not to mention contracts, installation fees, and having to wait on hold on the phone. And that was for a limited selection of media that happened to be shown at a certain time, with ad breaks.
The whining about not having every single piece of costly media production at your fingertips at all times makes no sense to me, especially when there is so much other media available at many price points (including $0).
Perhaps cut down on screen time if that much needs to be spent.
Used to. Just like Netflix used to be $11.99. You can easily hit up to $200/month for TV with sports (and by this I mean just channel availability, not things like League Pass/Season Ticket) and some movie channels, and nothing too esoteric.
People used to hate cable TV because of the bundles. They wanted streaming so they could pay for only what they wanted. Somehow we are now paying more and getting less.
You forgot to add the fees for an internet connection. With cable, you only paid a one-time installation charge. For streaming services, you also need to pay your ISP for the "data".
Surely they can spend out of their $90B/year in annual profits. Certainly, companies need revenue to make new content, but they're also squeezing consumers for as much profit as possible.
I wish they went back to just Mickey mouse... just for kids. No one says, "I'm compromising on my art" quite like modern Disney. Just look up "the companies Disney owns". Gonna be a hard pass for me.
Nope. If I did, I'd probably set something like FieldStation42 up and roll my own retro Disney channel for them. Kids today already have so, so much more content than existed when I was a kid... Whereas I mostly only had Disney growing up, I think it'd be pretty simple to find them something else to watch these days.
I just subscribed because I noticed there were several series that I thought I would like to watch, between Disney, Hulu, and Max. Then I got the notification they were raising prices, and realized I had not watched a single episode of the shows I thought I wanted to watch. So I cancelled.
Lower prices all you want, Disney, I'm still not resubscribing after the Kimmel incident. Wait, they're doing what?
$20 a month for ads? Good god. We gotta start teaching more people how to pirate because these subscription prices are insane across the board.
[dead]
Can’t wait to see the price hikes factored into all the ancillary services that include Disney+/Hulu as some kind of bullshit “perk” now.
I was just yesterday thinking what a brilliant move it would be for a business to cause some outrage, get a bunch of people to unsub. and then jack up the price for when they come crawling back. I should have gone into marketing.
Extra effort/churn for nothing. Netflix hikes the price like clockwork, no charade.
Very funny but you overestimate your counter-party
I'm not sure its that brilliant. You just had an event that made people really think about if they actually wanted it or not with potentially a lot of cancellations. You may have had a few people come back, but now with a price hike they're once again re-evaluating if they really wanted it. For others you lost, you're now probably continuing to cement that decision. Meanwhile, those that felt "I can't quit, its just too good of value" are now also reconsidering that evaluation.
...for when they come crawling back
I'm not the one that needs to do any crawling. Guess what I discovered these past couple of days? I get along fine without Hulu. And JFC, $20/month and I still get ads? Yeah, piss off with that shit, I'll read a book first.
I'm not so sure it's a keen business strategy to piss off a bunch of folks, and just days later while they're still a bit pissed, jack up the prices. Might work for some, for others like myself: "wow, check out the big, clanky balls on Iger".
$19 for just the Disney no-ads plan. (Which has asterisks indicating that there will sometimes be ads.)
The worst thing about this is that DVRs solved commercials on cable back in 1999, "unskippable" isn't an issue there.
Imagine the uproar and drama if the ad-skipping DVR was invented today. It simply wouldn't be allowed to happen.
I'm pretty sure the networks sued over DVRs but they lost because they had already lost against VCRs in the 1980s (skipping ads is just a form of time-shifting).
Yep, that's true. The difference now is that streaming services have attempted to make it a crime to record the streams you get from them by embedding DRM in the connections between the streaming device and the screen you watch it on. This is the primary reason for the HDMI standard. Combined with the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, it's considered illegal to decode that video stream and record it with e.g. a screen capture device, even if it's solely for personal use.
So now if you want ad-free, you either pay extra in perpetuity for just that one feature , or you break the law. It's no wonder that piracy is back in such a big way.
And then from the jaws of that victory we snatched defeat.
DVR's like Tivo fell out of favor not by accident. Any lever the cable companies could pull they did to prevent them from functioning.
The DVR is a standard device a cable company is expected to offer today. I can still skip commercials, but yeah it's a Verizon box and not Tivo.
I've had a lot of fun canceling subscriptions this year due to the low quality of 95% of the content, the series cancellations and the rising costs. I refuse to have the equivalent of the "cable bill" of 20 years ago.
I'm willing to pay for consistently good content but ads of any kind are a deal breaker. For the moment I'll set aside that the quality and frequency of good content has fallen across the leading services and that current prices are no longer appropriate for the value received. My plan is to put together a dedicated media server with a high-end GPU and an input capable of recording HDMI 2.1 4k HDR10+ (at a 42Gbit data rate (FRL 48G)). I accept that this will be expensive and difficult but it's important to me. I've already acquired and tested a box capable of stripping HDCP copy protection from such an HDMI feed (because future availability is never certain).
My goal is not only skipping ads but also skipping around in program content with low latency and high responsiveness. This is because another result of the failing streaming media economic model is that content providers are "padding" the length of content they commission to cut their per-hour costs while retaining perceived value. So an 8 episode mini-series is really ~6 episodes of story stretched to fill 8 and now a two hour 'original' movie is just a bloated cut of a 95 minute tight story. Once you've paid for the actors, crew and sets, shooting longer scenes and using more coverage shots is cheap. Having a background in film and video production, it's surprisingly easy for me to spot content that's been padded and then self-edit it in real-time - although features like auto scene detection and variable speed playback (with audio pitch correction) would make it even better.
Even the better DVRs in cable/satellite boxes are too laggy and, of course, most don't provide much flexibility in skip increments and other necessary features. Media distributors are only providing DVR as a checkbox feature because they can up-charge for it but then hard-limiting its features because it hurts the other side of their business model. I don't expect the "almost acceptable" built-in DVR I have today to remain acceptable for long - because the DVR provider's incentives aren't aligned with mine. It's slowly going to keep getting nerfed, which is why a stand-alone DVR is the only viable option for the long-term. And thanks to HDCP DRM and the DMCA, the only DVRs which will give viewers what they want will be DIY hardware running open source components. My medium term plan is to train up an AI for auto-skipping commercials.
> DVRs solved commercials on cable back in 1999, "unskippable" isn't an issue there.
I had a DirecTV DVR box that had unskippable ads for some content. It would download fresh local ads from the internet into the ad breaks from the pre-recorded satellite content. Blocking the cable box from the internet just ensured it was always the same old ad content or forced the original ad segments but also limited/broke a lot of other features of the cable box.
It only did it on some shows on some networks. Paramount was the most obvious one, a lot of the recordings of their shows had that "feature" enabled.
I've never seen that before, but I've never had satellite. That's terrible.
Hmm, let's see:
My Disney+/Hulu/Max bundle is $32.99/month.
Paramount+, $12.99
Netflix, $24.99
Apple TV, $12.99
The ugliness of multiple subscriptions needed because of licensing etc. is starting to really add up...
You don't cancel them when there isn't any show on that you're watching, and then resubscribe?
Like I feel like it's pretty common to be either a Netflix or Disney/Hulu household all the time, and then just subscribe to one other in any given month depending on what show you're mainly watching.
Like now that Slow Horses is back, it's time to wait a couple weeks and then switch to Apple TV for a month to catch the 6 episodes.
I'm convinced that "all the content, everywhere, all the time" has made people worse consumers. We just give the companies money every month and if we have time, we consume whatever they decide to give us, and if they decide they don't want to show something anymore, we can't complain.
I'm becoming nostalgic for the Netflix DVD-by-mail era. Prioritizing your queue was important, since there were significant costs in returning a DVD and waiting for a new one to arrive. There was real anticipation in getting the next DVD, instead of binge-watching an entire series in one night without leaving the couch. We cared about what we watched since it wasn't readily available.
I don't know what you're talking about.
You can be just as intentional about your streaming services as you were about Netflix DVD's. You can prioritize your queue of upcoming shows, since there are significant costs in paying for a month of streaming you don't use. There's real anticipation in switching from Apple TV+ back to HBO, both of which generally release shows weekly, not at once. And then you can keep your list of movies you want to watch, and look forward to which ones will become available when you do switch streamers.
I mean, if you want to waste all your money subscribing to everything at once, then sure maybe everything is readily available. But most people I know, the thing they suddenly want to watch the most often isn't on a service they're currently subscribed to. So the anticipation you talk about continues to be a very real thing. Everything isn't readily available unless you've got lots of cash to burn.
And back in the day of Netflix DVD's, plenty of people watched network and cable TV just as mindlessly as you seem to think they do with streaming today... renting DVD's was an active intentional choice.
It's very weird to want to be subscribed to all of these. Especially at the same time.
Didn't cable TV used to be like $80-120 for top packages (equivalent to having all of the content subs)? What is that in today's dollars?
Even more than $120 in the early 2000s, if I recall correctly. Not to mention contracts, installation fees, and having to wait on hold on the phone. And that was for a limited selection of media that happened to be shown at a certain time, with ad breaks.
The whining about not having every single piece of costly media production at your fingertips at all times makes no sense to me, especially when there is so much other media available at many price points (including $0).
Perhaps cut down on screen time if that much needs to be spent.
I definitely don't "want" to be.
Used to. Just like Netflix used to be $11.99. You can easily hit up to $200/month for TV with sports (and by this I mean just channel availability, not things like League Pass/Season Ticket) and some movie channels, and nothing too esoteric.
People used to hate cable TV because of the bundles. They wanted streaming so they could pay for only what they wanted. Somehow we are now paying more and getting less.
You forgot to add the fees for an internet connection. With cable, you only paid a one-time installation charge. For streaming services, you also need to pay your ISP for the "data".
You're paying for hulu twice?
Oops, fixed!
And piracy is how much…?
If everyone did it, there wouldn't be much to pirate. Nothing new at any rate.
https://thewaltdisneycompany.com/the-walt-disney-company-rep...
Surely they can spend out of their $90B/year in annual profits. Certainly, companies need revenue to make new content, but they're also squeezing consumers for as much profit as possible.
Subscription Prices Gone Wild - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45364292 - September 2025
Mullvad is roughly $6/mo :)
Seedbox: $9
In other news, the price of hard drives remains unchanged.
Imagine watching Disney in 2025... let alone paying for it.
Not a Disney defender but they are more than just Mickey mouse now.
I wish they went back to just Mickey mouse... just for kids. No one says, "I'm compromising on my art" quite like modern Disney. Just look up "the companies Disney owns". Gonna be a hard pass for me.
Do you have any children?
Nope. If I did, I'd probably set something like FieldStation42 up and roll my own retro Disney channel for them. Kids today already have so, so much more content than existed when I was a kid... Whereas I mostly only had Disney growing up, I think it'd be pretty simple to find them something else to watch these days.
I just subscribed because I noticed there were several series that I thought I would like to watch, between Disney, Hulu, and Max. Then I got the notification they were raising prices, and realized I had not watched a single episode of the shows I thought I wanted to watch. So I cancelled.