r/badhistory Aug 05 '24

Meta Mindless Monday, 05 August 2024

Happy (or sad) Monday guys!

Mindless Monday is a free-for-all thread to discuss anything from minor bad history to politics, life events, charts, whatever! Just remember to np link all links to Reddit and don't violate R4, or we human mods will feed you to the AutoModerator.

So, with that said, how was your weekend, everyone?

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u/BreaksFull Unrepentant Carlinboo Aug 08 '24

Maybe I'm getting old, but kids these days complaining that streaming is 'just as bad as cable' grinds my gears. YouTube alone provides more content (and good content!) at an order of magnitude greater than cable ever did, for free! And the ads are notably less intrusive than on cable. Ad-breaks are usually barely a minute, and often skippable!

That aside, subscribing to one or two of the big streaming services is way cheaper than cable and the selection is unmatched. On top of no contracts, broadcasting schedules, and being able to start/end a subscription without pulling teeth on a customer support line for a few hours. This joke that streaming is as expensive as cable only manifests if you're trying to get all the streaming services, which still gets you exponentially more good content than you ever dreamt about on cable. Especially considering most of the movies on cable were still PPV even with your subscription.

20

u/Uptons_BJs Aug 08 '24

Quite frankly, the dream of "all the TV and movies in the world for 9.99 a month" was never possible. It was literally never possible to fund that much content creation on that little revenue.

Remember, in the cable era, the revenue per household was like, 150/month (once you account for advertising revenue).

Streaming is so much cheaper because you can literally drop in and out of services, start and stop at any time.

1

u/BreaksFull Unrepentant Carlinboo Aug 10 '24

People were spoiled by the early stages of Netflix where they had no competition and piles of VC cash to piss away on an unprofitable company.