More competition… =Prices increase.
This is not the outcome I was told would happen.
Wait, what else was I told that never came correct.?
Student loans Housing Pay raises Protect and serve Self driving cars Pot/Gateway Equal opportunity Meritocracy
… I’m beginning to think all of society, in it’s entirety, is just one big grift.
It’s not competition if everyone has exclusivity contracts on all the content. Take Spotify vs Netflix for example. Spotify will have mostly the same base content as Apple Music, Deezer, what have you. With Netflix… You don’t get any Disney movies, no game of thrones, you have to buy all of the services to get access to even just the content you want.
I’ve never felt I was missing out on anything with Spotify, as I likely wouldn’t with YouTube music either. Maybe some have less but it’s at least a very comparable catalogue across the board.
Weird thing about music streaming in comparison to video streaming is that music streaming services are all third parties. There’s little to no exclusivity in that market because the streaming services all license from the same sources. The big music publishers haven’t gone and created their own streaming services, but are (more or less) happily working with Spotify, Apple Music etc.
That’s simply not happening in the video streaming market.
Is it really competition when for example Disney has a monopoly on Disney Streaming Content?
Yes there is competition for streaming but not for the specific content of the services. With music I can choose Spotify or Deezer or whatever, but for Disney content I can only use Disney+ or for Paramount Content only Paramount+, so they have a monopoly for their respective content if I want to stream it.
For me, it’s the decision fatigue. The content is so fragmented across so many services and it’s constantly getting worse. The rising costs adds to the fatigue because the fragmentation is less manageable now with all the services raising prices and cracking down on password sharing. I just feel like I have to think about it too much now.
I mean, there literally are complex websites created just to help people find and filter for streaming services that serve a movie or a series under what conditions or prices and the results are so fragmented and unsatisfying. Hell, so often a simple classic movie is on none of the streaming services or just on one on which you even then have to pay even if you are paying for a subscription (looking at you, Prime). So what the f, how should I happily decide for a subscription if the next day I have to yet pay for another one just because a effin movie is on another platform? Streaming has become a damn chore.
Jellyfin best streaming platform
Can’t wait for Christmas money to build a home server and doing (amongst other things) exactly that.
In the meantime, you might find Real Debrid useful, combined with an app like Weyd, Stremio/Torrentio, Syncler, etc. You can immediately stream torrents without having to download them, since Real Debrid caches them on their end.
For royalty-free videos only, of course. Nobody would dare use the internet to illegally acquire copyrighted material.