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.
Tech never promised anything. They cut the price for people to be dependent to them and then rise the price.
It’s just basic capitalism.
Right. This is how it works. The marketplace sustained a value for watching entertainment at home (cable tv). When pricing outstretched customer desire to use the product, the business changed to start selling the service connection in addition to advertising to create another revenue stream. It got so ubiquitous that people don’t even remember that OTA tv was the majority solution for decades and was completely funded by ads. Eventually, prices stabilize and the business can only make more money by acquiring a larger share of the market or innovating something new. They’ll always try to increase that price, but it is balanced by how many customers choose to give up the service.
When streaming platforms disrupted that business model, they were cheap because they had to convince the marketplace to change. As adoption got more prolific, pricing changes to recoup early losses… then to increase value to become more attractive to the customer and gain more market share… then to increase profits.
We are still at the point you can cancel the service and jump around on a monthly basis, but the days of 12 month contracts are right around the corner… and they’re coming fast.
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where I am currently living, you can’t even rip stuff for PERSONAL use, which I think is ridiculous. I understand making it illegal if you’re profiting off it, or selling it, etc. but if it’s only ever used personally by you, I don’t see why not?
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Depends on where you live.
In the Netherlands it is legal to “pirate” media, since they pay a small fee (2-5€) on every device that could play those media, and use this money to pay the artists.
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They will not outlaw VPNs. Every major company uses a form of VPN to allow workers to connect remotely. No chance this will happen.
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When I go to France, I’m blown away by the number of tv channels they get for free over the air. It’s incredible.
It really is crazy that you can have venture capitalists operate at a loss for a decade just to change the entire infrastructure of society to be dependent on them in the future. Really undermines any kind of microeconomic common sense that is supposedly the basis of capitalism.
Just goes to show that wealth distribution is so fucked if a small group of people can burn billions of dollars on essentially a bet. Just because they have enough bets placed that they know some will payoff.