Re: Streaming TV Enshittification Will Continue Until Morale Improves

On Thu, 21 Nov 2024 20:16:16 -0000 (UTC), BTR1701 <atropos@mac.com>
wrote:

We've documented in detail how the whole AT&T–>Time Warner–>Warner Brothers
Discovery merger process has been a pointless mess, resulting in no limits of
layoffs and damage to the underlying brands. What was supposed to be a gambit
by these companies to dominate streaming TV, wound up being a very expensive
act of seppuku by over-compensated executives clearly out of their depths.
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Executives say they’re also exploring, like Amazon, steadily increasing the
number of ads paying customers see. And they will, of course, just be
increasing prices steadily until they see a mass exodus of subscribers:

So they are going to do just like the fast food companies did and
increase prices until the bottom line is hurting. The problem with
that is that once you lose a customer it's hard to get them back.
Cable companies learned this lesson long ago and fought hard to avoid
that churn. Guess it's not time for the streaming companies to learn
the same thing. Especially since so many of their customers are only
paying for a couple of shows that they could just binge and then
disable the service but they don't out of inertia. Make the expensive
enough and they will leave and either never come back or come back for
a month to binge what they really want to see.

I know Ian has talked about doing just that so it's something that can
even impact those that watch a lot of TV.

    WBD also hinted at potential price hikes for Max today.
    During the earnings call, JB Perrette, WBD's CEO and
    president of global streaming and games, noted that although
    Max has raised US subscription prices twice in the past
    two years, WBD believes it can get away with even higher
    prices: "We think the premium nature of our product in
    particular lends us to be-- to have a fair amount of room to
    continue to push price."
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Except the "premium nature" of the product doesn't exist anymore. Any cachet
enjoyed from the HBO brand has largely been killed off thanks to executives'
prioritization of lower-quality reality TV dreck as they pursue lowest common
denominator engagement bait at scale. There's still occasionally good art on
Max; but the heyday of HBO as a prestige production empire is long, long
dead.

Sadly that seems to be the path that all of these services/channels
follow in the search for ever more money.

Meanwhile, the kind of things that customers actually want (lower prices,
better quality, better customer service) cost money and erode those sweet
quarterly returns. The kinds of things customers and labor don't want (price
hikes, sagging quality, layoffs, weird new restrictions on access) are where
the current growth and revenue boosting resides. So guess what you're going to
get.
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It's not enough for a publicly traded company to provide an affordable product
that people really like. That doesn't achieve exponential, impossible growth.
To get that (or the illusion of that) requires a certain aggressive creativity
and if streaming can't obtain it via annoying price hikes and restrictions, as
Time Warner Discovery CEO David Zaslav has made clear, they'll achieve it with
pointless new harmful mergers under Trump. These folks insist they're just
engaging in the cold calculus of cost efficiency, but you'll notice that
excessive and unwarranted executive compensation somehow always avoids
scrutiny.
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Again, I suspect what's next for the industry is a whole bunch more
consolidation and mergers to try and minimize any serious price competition
and to nab tax breaks. From there I suspect you'll start seeing a greater
fixation on finding creative new ways to "reduce churn", which will likely
include complicated new tricks to make cancelling services more difficult.
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When customers inevitably revolt and flock back to piracy (which is already
starting to happen), execs will freak out and blame everyone but themselves
for the trend (VPNs! Generational entitlement! The wokes!), and the innovation
and disruption cycle will repeat itself all over again.
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https://www.techdirt.com/2024/11/19/streaming-tv-enshittification-will-continue-until-morale-improves/
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