Just a Quickie/Snippet – what streaming service(s) are you watching right now? Just asking because I’d like to know. Use the Comments section below. Enquiring minds need to know…
Here’s the article I’ve just perused. TL;DR is that people are feeling the pinch from the supermarkets and energy companies they’re looking to save a bit on entertainment and so – I’m starting this all wrong aren’t I?
Here’s the article I’ve just perused. TL;DR is that people are feeling cost of living pressure, and it’s made some interesting changes in the streaming service leader ladder. The fact that the cost of living crisis is directly the result of corporate greed by various groups of a nasty rapacious species called “shareholders” is never openly discussed, but should be more important than entertainment.
How The Article Stacked Them Up
The overall winner was (surprise) Netflix, followed by Prime Video, Disney+, Stan, and Paramount+.
I’m frankly surprised that Disney+ is still in the game after Disney world tried to use a man’s membership as an impediment to his lawsuit of wrongful death when a meal there caused the death of his wife through allergy. ou’d think that bastardry-by-proximity would knock them further down the ladder…
Paramount+ apparently gained the most new members. an 18% increase.
Okay that’s all just horses in a race, so what was the deal with this one weird membership tier that provides this “godsend” for the newly impoverished populace?
The Cheap Seats
The life-savers are the ad-supported low-fee plans. Netflix and Paramount+ are eight bucks a month, Binge and Britbox will cost you a tenner, with Britbox getting cheaper by $1.50 a month if you take an annual sub. You get the idea.
By a strange coincidence, not even a week before that article dropped on The New Daily, we dropped Britbox after our year was up because we thought we could put that ten bucks somewhere better, and that somewhere was Netflix.
We’re on that extremely funny tier of income known as “age and disability pensioners” which causes lots of snickers and comments about cat food on toast, a few people to have genuine empathy for us, and most important of all, it causes us to be the bellwethers of poverty.
For us to do something like even take up a membership with a streamer takes a hefty analysis and then a financial decision. As a pensioner couple, we get about 30% less than a single age/diso pensioner, on the premise that we share a house so life costs us less. That means we really do have to be that kind of canny with money.
We’re luckier than many of our peers. I cook mostly from scratch and we do our best to have a productive garden to reduce costs a bit more.
So our program of Amazon Prime, Stan, and Britbox now has Netflix instead. Like many Aussies we’ve opted for the barebones levels of entertainment andespecially last year and this year. Thank you ColesWorth and ElectriFuel oligopolies! We really wanted to have to watch ads.
Reasons Why We Use Streaming At All?
Keep an eye on this series on The Conversation – the whole picture with news and FTA TV is changing. Old services are becoming less important. Everyone wants their entertainment on their schedule, not have to arrange their weeks around a timetable.
Like it or not, soon we won’t have much choice. I know it doesn’t seem like it but cinema today is a pale shadow of what cinema was for the USA in cinema’s heyday. Replaced by TV. Slowly, surely, movie theatres gave way to drive-in cinema gave way to TV and has now given way to streaming. Letter writing gave way to the telephone and the telegram and the fax gave way to email.
Streaming started becoming a necessity for entertainment over a decade ago. A sort of nice-to-have thing. During COVID it became a bit of a necessity, and has stayed there because we’re tending to stay at home much more. I don’t know about you but Kerry and I wear masks when we go anywhere even now, because the virus hasn’t slowed down, only the media coverage of it has.
And at every change in technology we lost so much material. Think about it – who’s got cartons of the letters they or their parents were sent in their lifetimes? All that communication is now gone. While newspapers and magazines held petabytes of minutiae of life as little as thirty years ago, most newspaper and magazine archives got thrown out when the publishers went bust. Those old silent movies and Pathé news – the majority is gone.
Even our “modern” technology is subject to data rot – Almost no TV station still has a complete archive of their news, adverts, and programming. Radio station logtapes get overwritten. Stuff I saved to floppy disk in the 80s and 90s – how many people have a floppy drive still connected to their machine? How many can still insert a CD or DVD in the side of their laptop? Can I still play my old CDROM of MDK today?
AAANND getting back to streaming platforms. Many have old faithful shows available for those low-tier accounts, but at some stage their playlist directory becomes too crowded for viewers to still find newer more profitable shows – so older shows get dropped out of the rotation list and quite often also dumped off their servers. I can’t find several shows that used to stream and are now gone forever it seems. Unless I indulge in a bit of searching on pirate sites…
In a way, those torrent sites are acting as an historic archive, but they too get taken down with monotonous regularity, and shows get lost – forever – in such takedowns.
We are increasingly a stay-at-home society. High prices of entertainment from theatre and live events (oh yeah I haven’t even mentioned how many annual / special live music events are getting cancelled or no longer scheduled for return because of the low turnouts) to movies to restaurants – all quite rapidly disappearing. To us living this in realtime it seems to be a slow creep but historically this will seem to have happened overnight, and once again, the majority of such content will be lost.
That’s A Wrap
It’s the way of things, and we’re seeing a world in rapid flux. In another five years we’ll look back even just this far and realise just how much has changed, more change happening in those five years than happened in may parents’ lifetimes. You may not think so but even you and I won’t know ALL the huge changes that happened in that five year period. My parents lived through a lot in eighty years but kids that are ten today will have lived through that many changes by the time they’re fifteen.
So anyway – what are you watching this year? Leave a comment here or on any social media announcements I make and I’ll add your comments from there to this article if you ask me to. But better yet, do it now, in person, while you’re here.
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