For a moment, it seemed like the streaming apps were the things that could save us from the hegemony of cable TV—a system where you had to pay for a ton of stuff you didn’t want to watch so you could see the handful of things you were actually interested in.
Archived version: https://archive.ph/K4EIh
Man Hulu is one of the last streaming services I pay for and a 20% hike is dog shit.
Welp I can very easily not give them any money, sucks I guess.
The only reason I even have Hulu is because I pay for Spotify. Otherwise, it’s just not worth the price tag for me.
Spotify, though…raised its price recently, but also gave me new features that I use, so I’m not complaining.
What are those new features? I haven’t subbed to Spotify for a while mainly over their UI and giving money to not great people.
The one I know for sure is new that I use is an AI DJ feature. It plays music in sets it thinks you’ll like, then lets you know when a new set is starting and what it’ll be like; lets you start a new set manually if you don’t like the type of music being played.
As someone who lived alone, when it came out it was nice to have a friendly voice (sounds like a young, 20-something guy), even though fake, to talk to me about my music.
Clearly I need to do research on them, though; I’m out of the loop on their nastiness.
I’m on a Disney/Hulu bundle for $19.99, that isn’t bad. Hopefully that won’t change. But as soon as Ahsoka is over I plan to cancel.
Doesn’t look like that bundle is increasing in October, but it’s only a matter of time.
I was listening to boomer radio in my car yesterday and one of the hosts brought up an interesting point that eventually all of these streaming services will just have ads anyways because there’s a certain breaking point in the subscription price past which people start unsubscribing and they absolutely have to keep revenues up and the only way to do that is through ads. A couple years ago I would have thought that was unlikely and that there will always be a more expensive no-ad tier for everything and a cheaper ad-supported one, but man I think the future’s bleak for streaming services from a user perspective, I think he might be right. Fucking Spotify still runs ads on some stuff with a paid subscription, as does ESPN+.
This is what happened to cable too I think. My grandpa was saying back in the day cable was what you got to avoid ads
I can’t see any removing the ad free option, they’ll just make it more expensive.
Yeah but sometimes there’s nothing better than a good foie gras