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Amazon Prime Video will start showing ads on January 29th unless you pay extra for ad-free
(www.theverge.com)
this post was submitted on 26 Dec 2023
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This may be a shocker to many of you but it costs money to produce TV shows.
Cable was lucrative because of the subscription fees and the fact that channels could still run ads. People are now expecting to pay $10 a month for access to everything ad-free when previously they'd have to pay multiple times this amount to watch shows at scheduled times, and still sit through ad breaks. There was no such thing as an online on-demand catalogue just fifteen years ago.
Now imagine that networks are making far less money per viewer, have to pump out shitloads of original content to keep people subscribed (and in the case of Netflix, Amazon, Hulu and others, mitigate the risk of copyright holders jacking up fees for third party content), can't run ads to supplement their income and have to deal with huge levels of inflation because governments had to print a fucktonne of money to bail us out of a financial crisis and a global pandemic.
Piracy has raised a generation of entitled cheapskates that refuse to pay for content, and these are the people who are most likely going to break a lot of studios and publishers.
The only real saving grace here is that this could be the downfall of Disney, which would be a net boon for copyright reform. Disney are the core reason why US copyright law is so fucked and why we're only now close to seeing Steamboat Willie (first Mickey Mouse cartoon from 1924) enter the public domain.
Speaking of entitled cheapskates, most of the good content is older shows not new ones. Most of these streaming providers are coasting on shows and movies made before they existed.
I don't care about the "cost of new shows" because most of them suck. Just because you have a big CGI budget doesn't mean you made a good show. Not only that, but good new shows are all cancelled after one or two seasons.
The reason for this is obvious: creating a new show adds another "square" on the Netflix screen. Adding more seasons to an old show doesn't. Plus you can advertise "new show" and people will just watch to see what it is. Viewers need to stop watching things just because they're "new".