in a pretty limited, cultural archival and dissemination point of view, mayyyyyyyyybe.
the vast majority just want free entertainment.
No, they want easily accessible entertainment for a reasonable price.
Currently I’m supposed to pay 3-4 services at 10-15€ to get a somewhat reasonable library. There’s up to 60€, each month. For a collection of services, that I’m realistically using maybe 2h a day. That’s completely unreasonable.
And if you see, that especially Netflix seems to spend 90% of that money on extremely low quality crap, this price tag seems even less reasonable.
How much would you be willing to pay for your entertainment? Historically 1$/hour isn’t a bad deal. Games used to cost double that on average. Movies have always been 5-10$ per hour if adjusted for inflation. A book is cheaper (say, 20$ for maybe 60h of reading), but an audiobook is around that 1$/hour you’re complaining about.
If you’re really complaining about how you cannot afford to be entertained, I’d surmise it’s a salary problem where the minimum wage hasn’t followed inflation almost everywhere on earth, and not the price of entertainment itself.
My issue with streaming isn’t a cost but a categorization. Even if I subscribe to five services there always seems to be two problems; 1. how do I find shit to watch and on what service, and 2. there always seem to have that elusive content that I haven’t subscribed to and would take me ten minutes to add all my information which honestly is just a blocker. I want TV to be more like music is right now (from a UX), even if I have to pay extra for that convenience.
I’m absolutely able to pay 100€ a month, for me personally it’s not a salary problem.
But I’m comparing streaming to public access TV here in Germany, which is currently 18€ per month and household and somehow manages to produce something like 20 TV channels, 50 radio stations, tons of podcasts, top notch news coverage, pensions for thousands of old journalists and doing all of that within the famously efficient German bureaucracy. So, how exactly is Netflix spending its money? Especially if you keep in mind that they can distribute most of their self-produced content worldwide.
