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.
This has nothing to do with tech and EVERYTHING to do with FUCKING CAPITALISM.
What a dumb fucking post, tech didn’t promise us shit were still living in a capitalist nightmare where quarterly earnings are far and above the primary value, over any and all people.
What the fuck is this waaaa tech didn’t usher in an age of utopia!!! It’s almost like we have to solve other problems first. Fucks sake
Can we actually have a discussion on what’s at hand here instead of knee jerk reactions?
Perhaps you had to have been there for all the “building better worlds” and “bringing people together” horseshit every silicon valley company was spewing since the dot com boom in the 2000’s
It’s not an actual promise so don’t act pedantic. The point is- society was sold these concepts and ideas as solutions to existing problems, and they’ve instead become bigger and more expensive problems.
Honestly, not to blame the public, but people were sitting here for the last decade going, don’t like being censored? Don’t use Google/Facebook/whatever. Don’t like being tracked across the internet? Don’t use Google/Facebook/whatever. And everyone kept using it. As for streaming services, I mean, if you don’t want monopolistic pricing power, abolish copyright/DMCA. We complain constantly about the consequences of these big corps but society keeps religiously buying shit from them or participating in their services. Just like complaining constantly about global warming but driving your car 3 miles to the store to get a 1L bottle of water. We set up these structures and put people in these positions where they can exploit you, then act surprised when they do, and we have an excuse for why we think every individual part of it needs to stay exactly the same.
OK, maybe to blame the public a little.
abolish copyright
17 years is enough.
Cheaper has never been a promise of big tech. Better, personalized, more convenient, flexible, faster. Cheaper? I missed the promise where we’d get all these benefits for nothing, and in fact be given discounts for getting all these benefits.
Before anyone starts: yes Uber is better than a taxi. Yes, cloud computing is better than on-premises. I’m so sad for this author who can’t work their streaming services, but as bad as cable? Give me a break.
Yea cable sucked way more, atleast we aren’t locked into contracts with these services. Subscribe for a month watch the last years entire catalog and unsubscribe, rinse and repeat. You don’t need every subscription to be always active.
Yeah, but they said those things before going public or when a few people had the vast majority of shares.
If they cash out, there’s now a board in control, and the big investors want big returns. So that’s the direction companies inevitably go.
Because if capitalism.
It might be the same company, but it’s often not the same people calling the shots
I’m not usually one for an ad hominem, but it’s business insider—that’s probably one conclusion they are incapable of arriving at
Agree, it’s 100% greed for investors’ money. But it’s way easier to get away with lying in tech than in most other industries.
“Tech” doesn’t exist. Entire concept is a lie propagated by companies trying to appear like something different.
Not a tech company - a taxi company, a short term rental company, a video distribution company …Look at what they sell, not what tools they use to do it.
Uber isn’t a taxi company. They don’t own a fleet. They’re a company that makes an app.
Yarrrrr…shiver me timbers. Fly the Jolly Roger high matey, there be booty ta plunder!
Main reason I’m in the works of a nas myself.
I love this response. 😀
Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum!
Don’t blame tech, blame the bait-and-switch business model of loss leading products.
Uber never made money because they chose to undercut prices of all competitors and bleed them out.
I’d argue that newer streaming companies (those founded by studios, such as Disney +) did the same thing by roping in customers before jacking up prices.
It may be the “fault” of capitalism, but consider it was capitalism that birthed streaming in the first place. In the long term, the expectation would be a better solution will surface in reference to streaming… the same way streaming was a solution to cable. Thus is the business cycle.
You had me until that utterly stupid drivel at the end. You cannot give credit to the system that happened to be in charge at the time…
Then you’d have to thank Monarchy for a billion things that weren’t invented by monarchs…
You’re confusing economic systems with systems of government
Also worth noting in the case of uber, even if price is equal with taxis, the experience is much better. Nicer cars, better drivers and much easier app use. Even at price parity, its a very superior product in most cases.
Remember that every invention discovered and improvement made before capitalism, happened before capitalism.
Remember that even in a system in which workers own companies, those workers still want to make more money
A profit motive is not unique to nor a product of capitalism.
Those workers still want to live. The money is the means- controlled by those with the most money.
Capitalism and democracy as exclusive concepts.
None of this makes any sense, both on its face and as a response to my comment
Bold deconstruction of the argument. Capitalism didn’t invent iPhones, workers did. There are economic systems other than capitalism, that can do better, without the unilateral domination of capital.
You act like capitalism is something that was invented. Market economies have existed since the dawn of time.
Think of it more like a spectrum where free market and unregulated capitalism is on one end and economies under total state control are at the other.
There is clear evidence that one side of that spectrum favors innovation more than the other.
I guess you could argue that one end of the spectrum is more “moral” than the other, but I would counter that the opposite end is amoral rather than immoral.
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You mean capitalism is inherent in the matrix of the space-time continuum as opposed to invented?
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Market economies have not all been capitalistic.
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Innovation is not the singular motivation of mankind. Survival, comfort, stability, peace, equality are more important.
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An amoral society is no better than an immoral society.
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I always thought [dumping](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumping_(pricing_policy\)) was illegal.
Take video streaming. In search of better profitability, Netflix, Disney, and other providers have been raising prices
Piracy and buying/ripping physical media is back on the table bois. Been running my own personal media server secured with a VPN to access it. Costs are the symmetric gigabit connection, a simple raspberry pi for WireGuard, and old computer for media server. Plus some technical knowledge.
Any physical media I have has been ripped to digital form (4K where possible).
A 3-mile Uber ride that cost $51.69
Yet another reason why we need to have more diverse options in transportation. Public transportation is dismal in the USA due to suburban sprawl and car centric society. Alternative forms of transportation such as bikes or even walking is not accessible to a large portion of people.
Took a bus the other day and the total cost for 24 hrs was exactly $2.50. Don’t have to worry about psychos on the road driving to and from their deadass suburban home and deadend job.
Cloud promises are being broken
Fuck the “cloud”. It’s just another persons/companies server. Switched off major cloud platforms long ago.
Have off site backups take place nightly. No middleman scanning my stuff. No more upselling. Besides ISP costs, everything else is static or one time setup.
Yeah, I’m already automating my entire Plex configuration, got some friends as admins on my services to help me run it, and I’m sharing it with all my friends through secure connections with let’s encrypt. There’s no reason to keep giving massive companies our money, data, and freedom. Fuck the cloud, fuck these subscription services, fuck SaaS, fuck it all. It’s piracy all the way down from now on.
We should have seen this coming. I remember the early 80s when cable was the new hotness, and it was cheap, with no ads unlike broadcast television. That was its major selling point.
Then over the next decade the ads crept in, and we were all paying for cable with ads, even though the whole point had been no ads. Then the price skyrocketed and the ads remained.
Steaming was always going to follow the same path. Cheap with no ads at first, then adding ads, then skyrocketing prices, then crazy prices with ads too.
They know as long as all of them raise their prices, where are we gonna go? They have exclusives. We can’t just take our money elsewhere.
Wait, there was a time when cable didn’t have ads???
Yeah, because you were paying for it. Where as broadcast was free over the air.
What’s surprising to me is that anyone didn’t see this coming. The ideal of online streaming being cheaper and better was very alive and well when Netflix was the only streaming service. However, I started to note that some content from specific copyright holders started getting removed from Netflix and from that single indicator, I saw this happening…
I could almost see them gearing up to launch their Netflix competition service which would be analogous to channel “packages” on cable. You get the Netflix package for x, y, and z shows, the $studioG package for shows a, b, and c, etc etc. Creating the exact problem that we’re trying to eliminate with going to streaming. From that moment, I committed myself to sail the seven seas and download all my own Linux ISOs. It seemed like everyone else couldn’t see what I saw, and nobody cared. Then it happened… HBO, Hulu, Prime video, Paramount+, Disney+, etc, all came out of the woodworks, and now this.
My argument is that the MPAA needs to learn the same lesson that the RIAA did after the Napster lawsuits. Some people who were “sued” by the RIAA actually fought back. Most couldn’t because they didn’t have the money to pay for a drawn out legal battle, so they settled, but a few brave souls fought back… The story is long but it’s clear to me that the RIAA learned a very important lesson: it’s not profitable to sue everyone who pirates their content; and if you look at the music industry now, there’s very little piracy, and almost everyone has a music subscription service, whether Spotify, Apple music, tidal, YouTube music, or something else. Anyone without a subscription generally suffers through ads, with very little difference between which service you use (at least, regarding what’s available), or how you use it… There’s still people pirating the music (far fewer than in the days of Napster), and still people buying physical media, but long term, they’re safe from going under from P2P sharing. The vast majority of consumers are paying for the content either through ads or subscription and all music is available on all services.
The MPAA is still hard headed about all of this. Disney is trying to fix the problem by buying everything up, so other studios are forced to have their work on D+, because the big D bought them… I’d argue that Disney is doing a better job at squashing video media piracy than the MPAA… The problem right now is that the various video streaming services are all run by the studios that publish the content on them. A truly third party streaming service (that is not also a competing studio) is needed, who can license content from everyone… Most won’t license their content to a third party service because it’s not as profitable compared to running their own service… So we’re stuck. If the MPAA stepped in and made such a service, and not-so-politely asked the various studios to license their content to it, then made it affordable, I would hang up my black hat and skull flag and never look back.
The chances of this happening are so small that I’ll just go ahead and order a new flag… My current one has been flying for so long it’s looking a bit sun-bleached.
I have zero hope or expectation of this happening, and bluntly, if it did, whether we admit it or not, I think most of us would hang up our hats and relent, because it’s far easier to simply pay a (reasonable) monthly fee than to do all the crap associated with getting it another way. They won’t, so yo-ho-ho.
It’s economics 101, prices will rise to what the market will bare… Unfortunately the market is irrational and has access to credit cards.
As long as current economic/cultural model exists, there is no escape from advertisements. Consumerism can’t thrive without advertisements and any technology that gets mass adopted is perfect venue for that.
Today, its only entertainment platforms which are infected with this bug, tomorrow it’ll be your car, fridge and anything which needs internet connection(almost every home appliances).
None of those things need Internet access. They are doing this so that you’ll own nothing. Cars are a good example here. Why in the world would they introduce heated seats that are subscription based? Because they don’t want to sell you or me a car anymore. They are looking forward to self driving autos, and intend to sell fleets to cities and corporations. You and I will rent the cars much like a cab, but now the manufacturer can still make money charging $1 to roll down the windows, $5 for the radio, $7 for A/C, etc…
But I can binge streaming services and then cancel without multiple hundred dollar fees. And I can use the same app for Uber no matter what city I’m in.
So… I get things aren’t paradise but let’s be clear they’re still largely covering a lot of folks needs.
Moreover, not to take sides with Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Dropbox, Box, etc, but storing files costs money to maintain (there needs to be redundancy, every once in a while drives need to be replaced, they need to be cooled, etc), so we’d like it to be cheap, but doing all these things cannot be free for the hosting company.
This is not to say they are jacking up prices, but that it cannot stay super cheap forever.
Still, these services have been very handy so far, though I’m looking to see if the plan I have is still convenient compared to the competition
Seems to me like it would be more sustainable if it was super cheap for a large common library so a large userbase would maintain a continuous subscription, supporting a large continuous revenue, rather than signing-up and quitting intermittently.
The media companies are ruining it for themselves by trying to squeeze more out of the users, which leads them not to stick with any of them.
Seems to me like it would be more sustainable if it was super cheap for a large common library so a large userbase would maintain a continuous subscription, supporting a large continuous revenue, rather than signing-up and quitting intermittently.
Excuse me, but how would a tiny percentage of people profit off of this?! What is even the point if there are no shareholders to demand record profits year after year? /s
“Needs” lol
Time to disrupt the disruptions.
I have this idea for a consolidated ISP, cable television, home security, and telephone landline company. Gotta have the landline.
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On the flip side, piracy has never been easier.
Not sure how it’s easier I can’t get near a torrent site without getting dumb letters from ISP. "get a VPN… "
OK. Well that’s not easier than ever, is it lol.
Use Mullvad, $5/month prepaid and you can even mail them cash if you have no other way to pay. No subscription or other scammy stuff. Your entire login is a single auto-generated number, and if you use their app (Open source, 3rd party audited) you just punch it in and boom, VPN time.
I think from signup to using the service was under 5 minutes!
For the power users you can log in on their site and generate Wireguard keys, which you can use with Docker to wrap up all your piracy stuff inside a container that can only access the VPN connection for safety and convenience. But you don’t have to do that, you can just run the app and put everything through the tunnel when you’re downloading.
They don’t allow port forwarding
True but this was a reply to someone who wanted it easy, they’re not running a seedbox they’re just looking to leech and maybe seed back a reasonable ratio if the torrent is active. And that’s totally achievable without port forwarding.
I take it you’re in a country in which VPNs are stringently regulated or outright don’t exist?
The tricky part is making sure your VPN is set up correctly and verifying that your torrent client doesn’t try to fall back on using your unmasked IP if the VPN connection goes down.
I’ve gotten dumb angry letters since from ISPs since Napster.
But I’m hard pressed to remember a time when so much content was so readily available so quickly.
And a $4/mo Proton VPN is downright trivial when the cost of a good laptop has fallen from the $1000s to the low $100s.
The thing about unregulated capitalism is it will always fuck over society in favour of sociopaths. Unregulated capitalism rewards sociopaths because it focusses on profits above all else – shareholders get stupidly rich only if they don’t care about the damage done to workers and the public, sociopaths who don’t care about such damage can promise the highest profits, and that’s rewarded by a hyper-focus on the bottom line.
Unregulated capitalism rewards ruthless cost-cutting, treating people like robotic assets, slash-and-burn corporate policies, and a culture of near-slavery.
Adding new tech only makes inhumane policies easier to implement. It’s why people like Musk have more money than they could spend in a thousand lifetimes. When the goal is to maximise profits at all costs, of course the consumer will get fucked. That’s rather the point.
E: in short, prices will continue to increase as these people try to find the ceiling. Ps: there is no real ceiling.
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Uber was never a tech proposition, it was a predatory disruptor.
The streaming fiasco is sad but inevitable as greed does what greed does.
Cloud was never primarily about price, the big cost save initially was to get rid of purchased or rented iron and locations but the main reason of the Big Switch was the scaleability and opportunities for quick deployment of new technologies and methodologies.
Uber may be predatory but in a lot of parts of the world, the taxi “system” is also a predatory racket. For both the drivers and the clients.
The way taxi co’s behaved, it’s not to wonder that Uber took off. Acting like a modern era guild system, intentionally taking long routes to drive up the price, etc. There’s no way that kind of behavior can succeed in an era where everyone has military-level accurate GPS mapping units in their pocket and greater impatience than ever with entrenched bullshit.
This is all by design. Once they have you/us/them captured again, we’re going to take another trip around the “raise prices and squeeze services until it’s unsustainable, because shareholder and CEO profit”. It has all happened before and it will all happen again.
The cloud is just someone else’s computer. The uber is just someone else’s car. Streaming is just someone else’s media library. They have you right where they want you, dependent on them.
The cloud was never cheap.
Where did you get such a weird idea?
I probably first got the weird idea when I signed up for Gmail and they made a whole show and dance about how your storage space just continually increases. The little storage space ticker was animated to the point of annoyance.
Today Google just annoys me with alerts that I’m 90% full and better give them money or else.
I don’t use Uber because it is cheaper, I use it because I know the fare ahead of time, I don’t need to dial a dozen different cab companies, and the vehicles are generally nicer. I don’t use streaming because it is cheaper, I use it because I don’t need to worry about time shifting, and can access much higher quality content than on cable. As for the cloud? You can pry my big iron from my cold, dead hands.
In Czechia they simply made an app any Taxi guy can sign up to, Liftago, you input your destination and you get offers from Taxis in the area.
Taxis have more regulation regarding their cars (being well maintained) than Uber drivers so it’s safer, and because capitalism you get naturally low prices due to competition.
just a much better system than Uber.
Uber is also banned in a lot of places as they are basically Taxis sidestepping the regulations
Exactly. Its not the money. Streaming is ‘messed up’ because content producers all want to own their own ‘exclusive’ platform. Had goverments regulated the market so that content could not be exclusive to a platform (like they did with movie theaters), streaming would be fine.
Very good counter arguments. I hate how the headline just lumps in cloud with streaming/ uber in value. Shows the naiveity of the author.
The enshitification of capitalism? Color me shocked!
