from the the-kids-will-love-it dept

Fri, Oct 27th 2023 05:26am –
Karl Bode

Now that growth is saturated in the streaming sector, companies are increasingly behaving like the cable TV giants they once disrupted in a bid to deliver Wall Street improved quarterly returns at any cost. Even if it means annoying consumers and damaging the company’s long-term brand.

Netflix now wants to harass you for doing something it spent years saying was ok (password sharing). Amazon thinks it’s a clever idea to charge existing Prime subscribers an additional fee if they want to skip ads. All while catalog quality shrinks or gets worse and pricing increases.

And what passes for innovation just isn’t that innovative. Take for example Hulu, Peacock and Max, which are increasingly experimenting not with interesting new technologies or innovative new content ideas, but with ads that appear when you hit the pause button:

“The stakes are high. Despite subscribers’ disdain for watching commercials, more streamers are adopting advertising, cognizant that they need the revenue