Streaming Apps Are “Investor Fraud” That Kills the Planet
Reprinted with permission from Ryan Farmer.
Streaming Apps are a form of “Investor Fraud”.
In my last post, I ranted for a bit about streaming companies that largely “slop us” with low quality “content”, and Disney’s staggering losses. This post will be more about what’s going on in streaming from a practical and financial (on their end) point-of-view.
I have had Paramount Plus for over a year, and have never paid them.
It started out when they offered my husband a free trial plus 3 months where American Express gave us 100% rebate, and then when we went to cancel, they said basically “Please don’t go, here’s another three months!”
By that time, they offered me three months on my American Express card, and so I switched the payment method to my American Express card and got a 100% rebate for another 3 months. Well, first I went to cancel and they offered me another month in the interim, so I got 7 months in without paying them.
Then after my 3 American Express rebates came in, I went to cancel again, and it offered another 3 months without paying them.
A rational person might wonder what the Hell is going on here. One might wonder how they expect to get paid at some point.
They have no idea.
They are honestly hoping that you forget you even have it and start paying them by accident.
I’m not even usually watching it because there’s no reason to. Occasionally when my mother is here, she watches I Love Lucy, but other than that, and me binge-watching Dexter, I’ve found no other reason to have it, even for “free”. They have very little in the way of something good to watch. Other than old episodes of Star Trek that you can buy on DVD, and things of this nature, Paramount Plus is a dud.
After waves of layoffs at Paramount Plus, I am beginning to wonder when someone there will say uncle and pull the plug. They’ve tried everything including a free basic tier they give away to anyone with Walmart+. Walmart employees get Walmart+ for free so there’s a natural captive audience when they send 1.4 million people who work at Walmart an activation link to get their “free” Paramount Plus.
I tried that tier, and it’s an ad sewer. But like most streaming disservices, the basic tier is an ad sewer, and the expensive tier just means “less ads”, but there are still ads.
Putting commercials into a product people are paying $12.99 a month for that hardly has anything on is dumb. Why the Hell would anyone that isn’t some sort of mindless animal tolerate this out of something they are subscribed to?
Paramount is constantly talking about “revenue” while it gives a lot of that away to credit card companies trying to attract customers they do not retain.
They constantly talk about “subscriber growth” while they spam Walmart employees with some junk that is an ad sewer.
When people cancel, they get “free months”. Eventually they stop giving you free months, but by then it’s like “Fine, keep it. You suck anyway.”
Even Disney Plus is not immune to this. Part of their expense of attracting and retaining customers, is giving American Express cardholders (the blue personal cards) half off a Disney Plus premium membership. For a $7.99 a month rebate, it really salves over the price hikes, but they constantly test the limits of what people put up with.
These streaming companies are like Uber. They baited the trap with cheap rides, and now the Regional Transit Authority in Chicago is having a budget crisis. And half of all service will be cut in the middle of next year unless the State bails them out.
They SHOULD pass a bill bailing them out and making Uber and Lyft pay for this, but my feelings are that they probably won’t. They’ll probably just add it to the deficit and borrow from banks.
But my point is, a lot of that subscriber count and revenue in streaming is utterly fake.
Customers take the cheese out of the trap and then they leave without getting caught.
Meanwhile, another thing hampering their growth is despite paying Microsoft, Apple, and Google to DRM everything for them, literally everything they put up is on the pirate sites an hour later.
They’re all having that problem.
Surely one of the reasons why pirates are easily breaking the DRM is that there’s so many versions of DRM software on so many devices. Intel can barely make processors that work. Why would they be able to make DRM invulnerable?
Regardless of how it’s being done, it’s being done. So they are competing with their own library, which someone else hosts for free.
The industry is now “sunsetting” the manufacture of Blu Ray Disc players. This is an incorrect strategy.
You won’t get me to pay for streaming by making it impossible to buy new Blu Ray releases or find players. I’ll go dumpster diving for players if I need more players, I’ll buy TVs that still have the ports, used if necessary. I’ll trawl ebay for the movies I want and hoard them like a dragon sitting on a pile of gold in a cave. But I will never EVER pay for streaming.
What’s the big deal?
There’s a lot of big deals, which I’ve talked about in my last post. Including the ads and ongoing cost, but another is the waste and pollution.
Every time they increase their “security” requirements for the DRM, you will have to throw out another working television set. This could be every year, it may be every 2-3, or 5. What does it matter? The set I have in my living room is a 2015.
Do you know how people dispose of TVs?
In my front lawn! That’s how. No, I’m not joking. I’m serious.
Despite it being a crime to fly dump a television, despite it being a crime to even put one in the dumpster, despite the law setting designated recycling centers in every county that will literally take it for free, people pitch them in the middle of roads, they throw them in your front lawn, they move out of their apartment and say “That’s the landlord’s problem.” and then 7-8 months later when there’s another 2-3 TV sets out there with it, my landlord will take them, when he gets back from India.
Now, you see the problem. Cheap TV sets with a Roku built in are cheap to buy but they won’t be cheap to keep!
Not only will you end up throwing them out constantly, eventually they’ll be finished deleting the ports so you can’t even use your disc players you have already if you want to. It won’t accept plugging in a Roku.
Why would it?
From Roku’s point of view there’s one in the TV. The entire TV will be disposed of at the whim of Roku.
Nobody in the 90s would have done anything this stupid and paid for it!
We had something in the 90s this stupid that flopped!
It was called DivX.
You were supposed to buy a DivX Player (which looked an awful lot like a DVD player and thankfully also played DVD, so people didn’t have to throw out however many were made).
Then each DivX disc you bought for a few bucks at Circuit City only played once, and then you threw the disc away, or you could pay to upgrade to DivX Silver.
A license server over the phone line would authorize your player to play that disc indefinitely if it was Silver.
Nobody was going for it.
They all went “What kind of a horrible deal is that?”
At the time, we had tens of thousands of movie rental stores (which employed people who were basically unemployable otherwise), and you returned the DVD when you were done. We didn’t need disposable discs.
Articles at the time pointed to what an environmental catastrophe DivX could be if people went for it. Unfortunately, there’s nobody writing about the catastrophe that is happening from a system where you stream and then throw the TV away when you are having trouble “making it go”. (Star Trek reference.)
The DVD Forum paid for a lot of this ad campaign against DivX and the failure of DivX was a big reason why Circuit City went bankrupt ahead of pretty much all the other electronics retailers, like H.H. Gregg.
Best Buy will fail more quickly now that they’re not selling Blu Ray players and discs. Lots of people want discs. The reason why Best Buy is having trouble selling discs is that they have a rather bloated and dated business model, but there is absolutely a demand for discs.
If you get me into Best Buy looking for that latest Blu Ray, you might get me browsing the TV aisle or wondering if it’s time to get a new vacuum cleaner or small appliance.
The less trips I make there for small stuff, which I can easily get online, the less trips I make there, period, then your sales go down, and you get millions of people making less foot traffic to your store, you eventually get another bankrupt electronics store with thousands of empty locations.
If Criterion was having trouble selling Blu Rays for $20-30 apiece and UHD Blu Rays for over $40, they’d be in massive trouble. I seriously hope that rather than dying completely, discs become an enthusiast format.
There’s a market for this, but streaming doesn’t cater to it. No streaming video in 2025 looks as good as a Blu Ray does. That’s because Blu Ray discs can hold up to 100 GB of information, and you can use up every last bit dialing the compression way back and keeping every discernible bit of visual and auditory detail. With 100 GB devoted per title, you’ll be looking for things to add. So after you put in 8 language tracks and subtitles, or dubbing, you can add gigabytes of extras and behind-the-scenes stuff and director’s commentary. Stuff nobody is going to do with streaming.
For starters, they have to pay for gigabytes of bandwidth from their providers every time a customer streams a movie, so the incentive is to be miserly with that data, so they use horrible compression levels and all that lovely detail goes away. It’s just horrid, and being able to easily compare that title with the Blu Ray just makes it all that more noticeable. A format from 2006 still pops.
I was watching The Lion King on Blu Ray last night. I got that and a bunch of other Disney Blu Rays from the 80s and 90s in that haul, the good stuff.
Anyway, with my eyeglasses on (getting into older age sucks) I was just amazed at how much there is to see that could not be adequately represented in 1994, or when I last saw it on VHS. You could easily put this out today and people would go crazy. It’s aged so well that all it needed was a format that did it justice.
We still have lots of good Hi-Fi systems from brands most people will never hear about because they don’t sell crap like that at Walmart. Why shouldn’t movie discs go on?
If you look at the audiophile forums, people are still ordering vinyl and having that age old debate that nobody can settle, even though…*clears throat* CDs are superior!
*ducks*
But the point here is that people said how dead vinyl was. I can go on Amazon, or even in Walmart, and buy vinyl.
Oh God, not vinyl. You mean that stuff they were listening to back during the dinosaurs?
Yes.
The stuff you can’t play on your Apple Music?
I know, right? The pain, the paaaaiiin. 😛
Seriously, though. Streaming music is even dumber than streaming movies.
Stores don’t necessarily need to stop selling discs, what they need to do is cater to a choosier customer. One with more disposable income that values quality.
When I was a child, I had three jobs. None of them paid very well, but I was one of the first people in America with a first gen DVD player sitting in my living room.
In fact, three years after I plonked down the inflation-adjusted equivalent of $900 for a DVD player (which skipped when changing layers!), 79% of the country was still using VHS.
If something was just “ahead of the curve” I’d be all over it. I saw DVD as a major technological breakthrough worthy of laying down that kind of cash. And at 13, one of my first DVDs was a Criterion disc, and another was Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut, which I finally got to see uncensored on Blu Ray disc about a month ago.
Every time you watch this movie, something else jumps out at you.
Even in plain old DVD, they’re going for $1-2 a disc now which is insane. I’m getting boxes full of them at the post office multiple times a week. They probably wonder what it is. They know me. As soon as they see me, they grab them.
I have a walk in closet in the bedroom that is full of discs. Some of them were the first batch I bought from Walmart and Columbia House when I was 13.
Before I went to bed last night, I recalled an episode of Breaking Bad where Walt was hiding out in Vermont with every cop in America looking for him.
The man who ran the “vacuum cleaner repair shop” as a cover for hiding fugitives arranged for him to have a cabin miles from anyone, but the entertainment was sparse.
Walt: “Mr. Magorium’s Wonder Emporium…”, the guy explains he’s not really much of a movie guy, and Walt continues… “Two copies.”
We’ve had 30 years of physical media being used as a place for everyone to take a dump, and it’s why we have DVDs that went to print with as little as a 0% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Although, Mr. Magorium’s Wonder Emporium got 40%, which was on par with Disney’s Lion King live action remake with Donald Glover in 2019.
Streaming now on Disney Plus. █