As Amazon becomes the latest platform to push an ad-supported tier, TV writers greet this retro model with frustration and, in some cases, disdain: “I thought 'Nine Perfect Strangers' with commercials was horrible,” says David E. Kelley of his Hulu show with breaks.
TV economics are hard. I think where basic cable and network TV make it work is that the content was filmed in a way to have natural ad breaks to make it less disruptive to the viewing experience. That becomes terrible when you shoehorn ads into places they don’t belong. On the other hand, watching that content without ad breaks that was filmed with ad breaks also plays out weird because you’ll have that commercial cliffhaner music/scene that is quickly followed with resolution before you have time to wonder “what is going to happen?” So shit gets weird when you have a tier model where some people get ad breaks and others don’t because your content isn’t made to satisfy both use cases.
TV is expensive to make and these are businesses that make money. A simple reductive “if user pays any money they deserve no ads” problem. It’s a challenge of things like “The business needs to make X dollars per user and if we have ads we need to charge Y bucks where Y = X - expected ad revenue.” The other challenge is in order to have an ad business you need to convince advertisers you have ad viewers they want to reach. Well, advertisers like rich people with lots of money, and they probably don’t have the cheaper ad supported tiers. So can a TV company really support a completely ad free tier? Or do they still need to serve some, but less ads, to make sure their advertisers know they can get their ads seen by the platforms richest users?
It’s an industry that’s earning literal billions every single year…they absolutely don’t need to have ads, they could serve their paying users a good ad-free product, and still make money. They choose to deliberately annoy their paying customers because they’re fucking greedy.
Capitalism. Must not only make profits, and must not only make the same profits as last time, but must make MORE profits. They must always increase or else you’re declining according to capitalism. The greed is built in to the system.
Fuck the system.
Fake news. Netflix is the only one making a profit. https://www.cnbc.com/2023/09/17/hollywood-streaming-profits-struggles.html
I don’t know why lemmy users love spreading misinformation that all streaming platforms are taking in profit hand over fist.
I’m not talkong about streaming services in an isolated case, I’m talking about the entire company behind it. It only makes sense to evaluate them as a whole and not their subcategories in isolation from the rest of their company.
Paramount, Disney and HBO are profiting in the billions.
You were talking about the streaming platform specifically as an industry.
It’s okay to be corrected.
I mean, it’s pretty simple for me in that I won’t pay for a streaming service that has ads. Others might, but I don’t care what others pay for. I left cable for this reason and I’ll leave its next incarnation if that is to be.