1y ago

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

www.businessinsider.com 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.

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.

Technology @lemmy.ml

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.

www.businessinsider.com /tech-broken-promises-streaming-ride-hailing-cloud-computing-2023-8

228 50

BrainWorms @lemm.ee

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.

www.businessinsider.com /tech-broken-promises-streaming-ride-hailing-cloud-computing-2023-8

95 15

Technology @lemmy.world

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.

www.businessinsider.com /tech-broken-promises-streaming-ride-hailing-cloud-computing-2023-8

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415 comments

You say "broken promises" I say "the plan all along" and "bait and switch".
- Yep. The business model has always been "Lure them in and stifle competition with a low initial cost. Then when we have the market we can jack up the price." Enshitification at its best.
  
  This is just capitalism at work. Capitalism = enshitification, exploitation, and destruction.
  
  Also known as the Wal-Mart business model.
- A lot of these things were proudly unprofitable, which is basically their way of getting around anti-trust violations. If they had a revenue stream to make the business profitable (outside of investors handing them more cash) then they'd be hit with anti-trust lawsuits for offering services at a loss in order to drive the competition out of business. But instead they just convince investors to hang on long enough to achieve the same goal, then raise their prices when they've got too much power to fail.
- "Rent seeking" has a nice ring to it in this case, I think. The previous situation was fine, except for not being profitable enough for the right people.
- Capitalism is just one big con, and you have no alternative but to play along.
- Yeah it’s called capitalism

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.
  
  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.
  
  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
  
  They were/are solutions to some of the problems though. Uber makes it way easier and convenient to get a ride which also helped lower the amount of drunk driving happening. Streaming made it was more convenient to watch what i want to watch when i want to watch it and without ads.
  The real solution would be for public infrastructure like subways, busses, etc so we dont need privatized solutions that start cheap and then ramp up the prices when we’re hooked. And we could have had films/series that get funded directly by the viewers without middlemen so for a cheaper price we can enjoy the art and have the money go directly to the artists but we instead we got different middlemen
- "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.
  
  "the cloud isn't tech it's a rental company" is a pretty dumb take tbh.
  Like, if you're trying to argue that AWS (or gcp, azure) services don't provide technical solutions that aren't available otherwise you just don't know what you're talking about. Is it expensive, yeah it definitely can be. But cloud is much more than server rentals at this point. Want a host that gives you bare metal? Great there are 'rentals' to choose from. I can see arguing SaaS hasn't really 'tech', but PasS and IaaS provide technology and solutions to problems. I hate Daddy Jeff as much as the next guy but AWS is very much 'tech'.
  
  Uber isn't a taxi company. They don't own a fleet. They're a company that makes an app.
- Capitalism would never allow utopia to come about, because the concept of utopia doesn't allow for an unequal distribution of goods. The inequality is very much a feature, not a bug.
- 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
  
  Not incapable, unwilling.
- 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.
  
  It's not even that; those services were subsidized by investors money on this idea that once you get a user base, you can then capitalize on the user base.
  Those promises were made at a loss which later had to become a profit. It's like Discord, there's no way hosting literal hundreds of thousands of servers for free and killing all the competition can and will continue indefinitely. I wouldn't be surprised if their monetization gets even more aggressive because transmitting all of that audio and video is not cheap.
  That's not even a "capitalism" thing, that's just a "someone's got to do the work thing" and the majority of gamers went "yup that somebody can not be free!" And what always happens does, the existing solutions lost tons of revenue and became increasingly stagnant because they can't compete with "free".
  That's why I've started paying for stuff (even when there's a "free" option or paying more for domestically produced goods -- even when there's a "cheaper" option). Cheap isn't cheap when it comes to manufactured goods (i.e., cheap imported junk), and free isn't free when it comes to online services. Ultimately, somebody's gotta make "free" happen (even if it's a government, and then that really means the tax payer).
  The race to the bottom only exists because that's what people vote for with their wallets. If it wasn't rewarded with sales, it wouldn't happen.
- I guess the thing where tech is relevant is that regulations thought it was different, so they didn't apply the rules against dumping and other illegal tactics ("because they're a start-up, it's different when they lose money year over year").
- Technology has and will always be awesome….. unless it’s in a society that is structured in an inherently exploitative way.
  
  Did you mean exploitative?
- Well, you're right that the bigger issue is people expecting tech to solve social problems created by social structure. But Yes, tech is absolutely failing at this. How could it not?
  Why not instead take this show of contempt for tech as another chance for people to recognize the underlying issue, not as a threat to the future of tech developments.

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.
  
  After a long break from the seas, returning after close to 8 years, pirate life has really improved.
  Synology + dockers + automation tools = the experience that streaming should have been
- Pirating taxis?
  
  I think that's just called robbery, but taxi pirate does have a nice ring to it.
- Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum!
- I love this response. 😀

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.
- the expectation would be a better solution will surface in reference to streaming.. the same way streaming was a solution to cable.
  What would that look like though? The current streaming model was pretty easy to predict ~15 years ago with the advent of online video streaming in general, especially mainstream forms of it such as YouTube. I have a hard time imagining how any other business model for distributing video content would look like, but then again I don't have a very entrepreneurial mind.
  
  If you had the answer you could make a lot of money
- 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.
  I’m interested to hear how you explain the drive to create streaming as an option to cable without including tenets of a market driven economy.
  Reddit/Lemmy/Etc really has a hard-on to blame all bad things on capitalism. Capitalism is amoral. It is cold and uncaring. But not recognizing it as a driving factor for growth, innovation and societal advancement is a path of willful ignorance.
  Everything has pros and cons in life.
- 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.
  
  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.
- 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.
  
  Other than the ease of app use I wouldn't say any of these are accurate anymore. I've been in plenty of hoopties using Uber, dealt with drivers juggling different apps at once and literally driving past me with some other customer in the car on the way to their destination (while Uber app shows you your driver is arriving), and had plenty of awful drivers take me places. I think this was true in the beginning but once the facade came down and people realized they aren't really making any money, Uber lowered their standards and took what they can get.
- I always thought dumping was illegal.
  
  FTC has been asleep at the wheel for 50 years
- Uber never made money because they chose to undercut prices of all competitors and bleed them out.
  I think that is only the first part of it. Uber invested a ton of money in autonomous vehicles. I think they were originally betting that they would undercut prices, bleed out competitors, and then be the only one who has the capital to deploy fleets of driverless vehicles.
  We are still far from having driverless vehicles and I think investors are realizing that so Uber upped their prices and lowered their pay. There is nothing revolutionary about them. They implemented a good tracking system and the ability for drivers to more easily figure out which rides would be best. They do not have that advantage anymore since taxi companies now largely have the exact same tech but without the massive overhead that Uber has.
  
  Um, on what planet does Uber have higher overhead than a taxi co, unless you're talking about debt service and maybe bandwidth? Uber doesn't own anything except tech infrastructure and IP.
- A better solution already exists. It's the arr stack.

Is this surprising? The prices were always going to adjust to the market. Any new cheap thing that undercuts the market will eventually become the market as it becomes mainstream, and prices will be increased to what the market will bear to maximize profits.
- I think the problem comes in with all the copyright and monopolization bs companies like Verizon and apple pull to remove all possible competition and allow them to jack up their prices
- This is surprising from a naive market based perspective. Think about how TVs and computers have gotten cheaper and better. The hope was that this wouldn’t just be the same product with new players. The idea (or the lie if you prefer) was that the new technologies would lead to efficiencies so we can all get more for less.
  It just didn’t make any sense for something like Uber. It costs money to give someone a living wage and their app wasn’t going to change the fact that someone still had to drive the car. The whole idea made no sense, which is why they were racing to autonomous cars. That hasn’t panned out.
  I actually think streaming is a much better value than cable, even at the same price. Shows are higher quality and more plentiful. Many high quality movies are included. You’re also not required to get every package. Skip Paramount if you don’t want it. I still think streaming easily beats cable.
  
  Exclusive rights to content are the problem here. There is no competition if the consumer has no choice (except not watching at all).
  There is a case here for legal separation between content production and distribution. Not just streaming services, it goes for any content, games, cinema, even patents.
  Uber on the other hand - I have a problem with their employment rights, not paying people or calling them "contractors" instead of employees.
  Otherwise it's a great positive example of free market in practice. Someone had an idea for a new business model, tried it, it appeared to work for a couple of years, and now they will fail because it doesn't have a long term perspective. It shook up existing monopolistic practices in the industry, and then tried to establish their own monopoly. And will fail because of that. It goes in circles.
- The prices were always going to adjust to the market
  The prices will always be inflated regardless. The free market is a myth at best, a delusion at worst.
- No it’s not surprising, we ALL STILL live in the same fucking capitalist nightmare.
  Anyone surprised is simply naïve and/or a literal child lol

Remember when we could only watch what had recently been on TV and cable companies were trying to lock people in to specific cable boxes that couldn't skip ads and we paid $120 per month for ad supported content and cable companies would attach random fees and everyone had to buy hundreds of channels to only watch 4?
And we'd build movie and music collections of physical media we had to keep in our homes and cars and we'd listen to the same three albums for months and if we were lucky enough to get a TV series box set, it'd set us back many hundreds of dollars and we'd have to remember which disc we were on and navigate arcane and slow menus?
And when we had questions, we had to find the answers ourselves by reading long form content and just be satisfied that there were many questions we couldn't answer at all because the information wasn't available?
Or when we wanted cabs, we'd not know how much a ride would cost until after we got to our destinations and they smelled like rotten farts and were covered in boogers and our only goal was to not touch anything and look out the window because what's a smartphone?
And when we wanted to go somewhere, we had to ask for directions and use atlases to figure out how to get to the general area of the destination, then drive in circles, accidentally drive past a turn 5 times because the street we were supposed to turn onto had two different names and we had been given the wrong one?
I was there and anyone who pines for the old days can just go there. We have cable and encyclopedias and taxis and atlases. Go nuts.
- Exactly right! While I think companies like Uber and Netflix did price things like Taxis and Cable out of business unethically, I don't want to go back to those days. I remember having to try to catch a Taxi and waiting over an hour and a half in the cold. They would ask where I was going and just drive off. Cable was full of scummy tactics and slowly introduced ads until it was just basically paying to watch ads. I don't want to go back to that shit. But Uber and the like should have been honest about what the pricing structure would have been from the get go.
  
  The business practices of Uber and Netflix are also unethical but in a different way. Uber pays basically nothing. Netflix as well as streaming pays very little to actors/writers/film crew.
  
  But Uber and the like should have been honest about what the pricing structure would have been from the get go.
  Pricing structure will be adjusted based on the market conditions. Applies to any company at any time.
- We have all these conveniences now and somehow people are not happier. Maybe the improvements you showed weren't improvements after all and society should have spent more time to focus on people instead of developing and selling the next great music platform.
  You are missing the point when you tell people to go back to cable, encyclopedias etc. because it's not about those things, it's about escaping into an idealized past while being depressed in the present. They should have your sympathy.
- I remember those days. People were happier then
  
  I'd say not because of those things but due to overall socioeconomic well-being.
- So now we can only what the streaming providers have licensed, and those things which we've "purchased" can and do disappear from our devices. And our answers are increasingly becoming hidden behind paywalls that require specific subscriptions & unskippable ads.
  "Today" is only better than yesterday due to a recent huge disruption called "the internet" and companies are absolutely scrambling to restore the "bad old days" status quo that you allude to.
- when we wanted cabs, we'd not know how much a ride would cost until after we got to our destinations
  Any cab I've ever been in had the mileage cost clearly posted in the taxi along with all of the other regulations. And they didn't change their rates depending on 'busy times of day'band inflate charges 2-5x as much.
  they smelled like rotten farts and were covered in boogers and our only goal was to not touch anything and look out the window because what's a smartphone?
  This sounds pretty much like the experience people tell me in any Uber or Lyft, except for the cell phone but you can use your cell phone in a taxi just fine, so I'm not sure why this is even relevant.
- looks like an exaggerated strawman

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.
- Where do you keep your off-site data?
  
  Parents house across the country. Nightly backups. Added a residential UPS. SSH access for updating/maintenance.

Tech never promised anything. They cut the price for people to be dependent to them and then rise the price.
It's just basic capitalism.
- Right. This is how it works. The marketplace sustained a value for watching entertainment at home (cable tv). When pricing outstretched customer desire to use the product, the business changed to start selling the service connection in addition to advertising to create another revenue stream. It got so ubiquitous that people don’t even remember that OTA tv was the majority solution for decades and was completely funded by ads. Eventually, prices stabilize and the business can only make more money by acquiring a larger share of the market or innovating something new. They’ll always try to increase that price, but it is balanced by how many customers choose to give up the service.
  When streaming platforms disrupted that business model, they were cheap because they had to convince the marketplace to change. As adoption got more prolific, pricing changes to recoup early losses… then to increase value to become more attractive to the customer and gain more market share… then to increase profits.
  We are still at the point you can cancel the service and jump around on a monthly basis, but the days of 12 month contracts are right around the corner… and they’re coming fast.
  
  It has honestly never been so reasonable to just buy the blue ray disks and just rip them to store locally. The other alternative is to pirate the media, but at least it's still legal to rip your own media, and honestly for how much we're all paying for streaming it's not unreasonable to just buy the titles we repeat watch outright.
  Of course, were probably not far from them phasing out DVD runs entirely, or for the DMCA to be amended to remove the fair use exception for personal use. I'm pessimistic enough to think they'll outlaw VPNs in the US too, and then all we'll have is SSD drops.
  
  When I go to France, I'm blown away by the number of tv channels they get for free over the air. It's incredible.
- It really is crazy that you can have venture capitalists operate at a loss for a decade just to change the entire infrastructure of society to be dependent on them in the future. Really undermines any kind of microeconomic common sense that is supposedly the basis of capitalism.
  
  Just goes to show that wealth distribution is so fucked if a small group of people can burn billions of dollars on essentially a bet. Just because they have enough bets placed that they know some will payoff.

On the flip side, piracy has never been easier.
- Honestly, yes it has been. It's not too bad, but it used to be easier.
  
  I would argue it's easier just in significantly different ways - the Arr stack of applications take more effort to learn and setup initially, but once you have it's absolutely effortless.
  
  Explain
- 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.
  
  I take it you're in a country in which VPNs are stringently regulated or outright don't exist?
  
  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.

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.
- The alternative is simple. The seven seas are calling out to you. :)
  
  Or read a book, or do literally anything else.
  
  Aye matey.
- 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.....

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.

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.
- For now.
- 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.
  
  I still believe there's a huge markup though. Look at premium Usenet providers - they store something like 1200 days of the posts (minus DMCA takedowns) which I think run something like hundreds of petabytes of data. Yet they can provide the service, including transfer, for what has to be a niche market at rates around $10 a month. Presumably there's no "magic" or subsidies in what they're doing. Yet what they're doing is essentially what a big streaming service is doing.
  Now you might say - well, yea, $10 a month - right around streaming prices. Sure, but you figure in the larger scale to spread the costs over. For Box etc, they're not even having the content costs that a Netflix would have (which I'll admit is a lot, and might well make up for the difference between just storage and transfer of Usenet) which makes them comparable in some sense.
  Even if you say that well, Usenet gets multiple companies cooperating in their competition and storing the same data so they get some redundancy for "free", compare to backup providers like Backblaze at $7 a month for unlimited storage (unless you're on Linux, then f**k you, so I don't use them, but still). Or Jottacloud that runs around $100 a year for 5TB soft cap 10TB hard cap.
  I still think there's a mix of a lot of markup, and people not actually looking much into competition - I know people who don't cross compare.
- We talk about being able to stop paying things as a service in it's own right lol.
- "Needs" lol

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.
- I'm fifteen and this is deep.

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.
- Oh, I don't know about that. I think Musk as a unique ability to spend money.
- Although prices are rising, the same work conditions remain for the workers, or get even worse. Take Uber for example. But the company will blame "regulations" from the government as the cause of rinsing prices, not its own greed.

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.
- Cloud computing is very much like the timeshare computing of old. It's the dream of every mainframe owner to keep the platters spinning. Ie, keep extracting computational rents for owning the big numbers boxes.

The enshitification of capitalism? Color me shocked!

So stop using that shit, problem solved
- And make new ones that aren't scams. I blame us(mostly y'all though)

The cloud was never cheap.
Where did you get such a weird idea?
- It starts out as $1.99 but everyone forgets that as life goes on they take more pictures and videos and have to keep upgrading cloud sevices to keep their memories intact.
  
  Fuck when you put it like that, existing sounds bleak.
  
  Google provides a feature to compress the photos, it's reeeally difficult to see a difference from the original. That saves a lot of space. It's a good practice to delete blurry/repetitive pictures. With that, 100 GBs can last a long time.
  It's a bigger problem with videos where higher bitrate/resolution make a difference and they consume a lot of storage.
  
  keep their memories intact
  Most social media users are struggling to export their 500+GB of data. Too bad for their memories got owned by corporates.
- 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.

LONG LIVE PIRACY!!!🏴‍☠️🏴

The pattern is: Offer something really cool for cheap or even free, then once people are hooked slowly reduce service while increasing price. It's a giant bait and switch.
- Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves.
  Doctorow, Cory (23 January 2023). "The 'Enshittification' of TikTok"

The goal is surely to capture every human need and package them as obnoxious subscriptions.
- Rentiership is the goal of every capitalist.

I'm I the only person who goes to the library for movies?
- Nope, we love our local library for nearly all of our media needs!
- You are not!! We utilize the shit out of our library
- Unfortunately here in the UK there has been systematic defunding of things like libraries.
  
  It's sad really as the idea that you could read a book for free in the 1900s was basically the OG 'fuck copyright'.
  Books are weapons in the war of ideas...
- Goes to? Now even many libraries have streaming options.
- Your library has free transportation and cloud storage?
  You're cherry-picking and strawmanning like crazy...
  
  Actually, my library does have free streaming through Kanopy app. It's pretty good. https://www.kanopy.com/ And my bike provides pretty good transportation.
- At that point? I’d just pirate. Streaming services are for convenience. Going to the library for a physical piece of media isn’t very convenient for me
- And video games.

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.
- 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.
- 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
- Very good counter arguments. I hate how the headline just lumps in cloud with streaming/ uber in value. Shows the naiveity of the author.

Streaming is still cheaper unless you get absolutely everything. It is also straightforward billing. The advertised price is the price you pay. I checked Comcast a week ago and they quote $70 with no contract. And then if you read the fine print, there is also a $25 broadcasting fee and a $10 sports fee. I am going to guess you also have a fee to rent the cable box for $10-15/month. They can still fuck themselves.
Agreed on Uber and Lyft.
Cloud was never cheaper.
- Cloud can most definitely be cheaper than on prem when it is managed for scalability. It really depends on the use case, and once a company grows past a certain size with constant traffic then they probably should switch to on prem.
  There are a lot of apps that the scalability makes a lot of sense for. Imagine a Christmas related web app. They only experience major traffic during the holidays, so scalable cloud resources would save a ton of money for that compared to an on prem solution.
  
  True. It largely depends on your workload as well as how consistent it is and what services you are looking to offload. That said, there are a ton of smaller companies that think it is easy and cheap to just throw your servers in the cloud.

Remember that all that “disrupting the market” ever meant was undercutting competitors. Everything else was window dressing.
- Not just undercutting competition but also by subverting regulations and organizations like unions.
- Undercutting competitors is how you foster a pro-consumer market. That's one of the core tenets of capitalism. On its own, that's a good thing. The problem is when companies think customers are so attached to them that they don't worry about being undercut themselves.
  
  No, the single tenet of capitalism is "make profit". Capitalism doesn't care how you do it- lying, stealing, manipulating, indoctrinating, forcing, polluting, killing, it's all good.
  For any corporation in the long run, a small edge translates into exponentially more capital, and since capital runs society, you can simply buy up the competition, or force them out of business.
  Monopolies are not an issue for capitalism, they are an issue with capitalism.

Has "cloud computing" ever been cheaper for most kinds of established businesses? Other than for some specific workflows, or very unpredictable workloads, the only cost-saving I've ever seen is avoiding the initial costs and avoiding the need for a real ops/obs team.
- I can tell you at the enterprise level, Cloud services were absolutely pushed as a cost savings measure. All the math in the world can't save you from a determined C-suite, however.
  We just finished our migration to the Cloud after 3 long years of effort, and while we are saving about ~2MM/mo in data center costs, our opex spend is up by around 2.5MM/mo YoY, not including all the Cloud-centric new hires.
  
  Are you saying they already (over)spent in unrelated opex areas the savings from going to the cloud? I'm unclear if you're saying it's a consequence of the move to the cloud.
- Initial and operational costs are huge if you are a small company of ~20 people. At least in this case the promise of cloud is achieved - bringing the economies of scale down to individuals and small companies.
  Sure if you have 10k employees it makes no sense, you have enough resources for these same economies of scale to be possible inside your company.
  
  You don't even need 10k employees, I see it make sense with ~450 employees if you also have a decent IT team and funding. The issue is most companies can't see the need to keep things they own up to date - there's always a temptation to "just put it off a year" to make the budgets look better, till they hit near catastrophe with being 5+ years beyond reasonable. The cloud "forces" them to put in update, maintenance, employee overhead etc up front and forever. They just pay a premium for that service IMO.
  I used to think it was kind of stupid, but then I realized - companies hire consultants at exorbitant rates to help them do things they don't have the in house skills for - so really - building that into the overall cost might still be a wash. The expensive part of Cloud IMO turns out to be needing training, consultants or new employees with different skills to manage it, which all charge more than traditional on prem because cloud is still the current ?fad?. And the unseen costs of screw ups by the cloud provider themselves losing data, being down, or having a security breach that affects you - and you're completely out of the picture with remediation or even knowing what might be a risk.
- And easy scaling options.
  
  As someone who does DevOps for a living, The scaling options are really what make cloud semi-affordable and useful for enterprises. Not to mention the “I don’t have to waste engineers doing menial upkeep” (aka, managed services means there’s a good amount of “not my problem”). The other part that’s a huge savings is being able to use things like terraform or pulumi to quickly deploy, destroy and redeploy for test environments and dr.
  I can completely redeploy an enterprise scale website in hours, code and data deployments included.
  Things are crazy busy because you ran a sale or ad during the superbowl, scale it all up in seconds. Want to test something or run a dev environment that people don’t use regularly? Only spin it up when they need it.
  We power down all dev and test environments every night and weekend. Some only spin up on demand. Saves tons on capital and nominal run rate.
  
  Yep, that's what I meant by "unpredictable workloads".

Hotels >>>>> Airb&Bs
- My bigger beef is with a centralised platform taking enough of a cut that they can buy whole neighbourhoods to rent out.
- I've seen some pretty shit hotels.
- Ehh... I have a family and there's something to be said about getting an air bnb with a kitchen and not having to worry about your kids being too loud
- I can't cook food in a hotel though. Also they kinda suck with kids.
  
  Look for suites when booking hotels not just rooms. You will of cplourse pay more.

I think we've started to discover what the ???? steps before profit were.
The model was:
Start streaming service
????
Profit
It's now:
Start streaming service
Subsidise it heavily creating premium content whilst undercutting competition.
keep doing it until competitors go broke
Raise prices to an actually sustainable level
Profit (although we've lost a ton of capital)
This is a form of market manipulation which is outright illegal in some countries (e.g. Australia) and can be illegal in the US and EU if it meets certain criteria. It falls under anti-trust and monopoly prevention laws.
Basically our regulators aren't doing their job well enough, but what's new?
- The regulators are doing their jobs, alright… It’s just not us they’re working for anymore.

Enshittification!
- The cloud-to-butt addon has become obsolete.

Yea, it’s “tech’s fault.” Not the self-imploding economic system known as capitalism. It’s definitely not the fault of giant tech corporations that have a hand in the government. It’s the streaming, Uber, and the cloud that’s bad.
- Yeah I was gonna say, there's nothing wrong with the technology itself per se, just the way it's being used/exploited.
  The fact that things like Netflix/Uber/AirBnB are useful and good value when they first come out and then turn to shit later shows that they can work and be successful, they just get greedy and go sideways.
  
  I don't know about "be successful", depending on how you measure success. All of these examples have been subsidized by cheap money for years, undercutting competition - and taking year after year of losses while they do it - for the purpose of capturing the market and driving out competitors, so that they can subsequently enact monopolistic behaviors to start actually turning a profit once customers have no other choice.
  The problem is money suddenly got expensive, so now they're scrambling to find a way, any way, to turn a profit, before full market capture was achieved.
  Can services like this be reasonably priced and user-friendly? Sure. Can they "succeed" / become sustainable while remaining so? Current examples indicate that's where the problem lies.
  
  The fact that things like Netflix/Uber/AirBnB are useful and good value when they first come out and then turn to shit later shows that they can work and be successful, they just get greedy and go sideways.
  Um, no.
  You have to turn a certain amount of potential energy into kinetic energy in order to provide a service that drives a customer from one location to another in an automobile. You have to squeeze a certain amount of information into the same or similar coaxial or optical or whatever-it-is-these-days cables in order to deliver a video and audio stream onto a customer's television (and pay enough for the same actors and writers to produce that media in the first place). You have to pay a certain amount in property tax, cleaning, and maintenance in order to provide a clean bed for a customer to sleep on.
  Yeah I was gonna say, there’s nothing wrong with the technology itself per se, just the way it’s being used/exploited.
  The "technology" itself was at most tangential to the service being provided, and the costs of providing the service. Also, the real technology involved hasn't actually changed. A car is still a car, a co-ax is still a co-ax, and a building is still a building.
  An app was never going to change physics. We were probably idiots to think it would.
- VC investing is effectively predatory pricing, squeezing out original non-tech service providers by providing services below cost, then replacing them with monopoly tech versions. The funding is intimately tied to the industry and they all use the same strategy.

Bullshit this is the fault of “Tech”. Every last greedy tech company, every last penny pinching pig that seeks to maximize profit without any concern for anything, literally anything else. Every last piece of shit corpo pig in govt too
Fuck Ajit Pai , I hope his stupid mug sucks ass

I don't know Google Drive options are pretty fucking cheap.
- not if you have more than 2tb of data because you're a videographer or an audio engineer
  
  Bro, nothing is cheap for you if you do that.
  For the average consumer cloud storage is still pretty damn cheap.
  
  If you have 2 tb + of cloud storage then you are far removed from the average person lol.
  
  Sorry but you are using the wrong cloud storage provider.
  I've switched to pCloud on black Friday. It was a one time payment for 2TB lifetime (10TB is also available) cloud storage. I checked and it was ~250€ at the time.
  Considering the amount of HDD I've burned through in the early years I've already saved a couple thousand dollars and I haven't lost any file since.
  Just make sure to watch their price as they currently have a sale and I don't believe for 1 second that the initial price was in fact 1140€ for 2TB as advertised.

It was the free hit to get you hooked and dump your cable subscriptions. Now they have you and they're going to increase costs every year from here on out and then start with advertisements because fuck you you're going to pay it anyways.

You are paying money for streaming movies? Why?
🏴‍☠️🏴‍☠️🏴‍☠️🏴‍☠️🏴‍☠️
- YAHAR!! We be sailing again boys!
- Convenience - it's a hassle to watch pirated stuff on my TV. But the cost of having to have a bunch of streaming subs means sometimes piracy's hassle is worth it compared to the alternative.
  
  Same, but it's only a matter of time before it's less of a hassle to pirate vs purchase.
  
  Nowadays piracy isn't a hassle, and it's certainly not a hassle to get things to play on your tv. Just set up a Plex/jellyfin server and install the appropriate app on your tv or tv box. With the arr suite + overseer + qbittorrent + Plex/jellyfin piracy is heaps more convenient than streaming services

Cloud was never really cheap. People just didn't understand the total cost involved, and companies are finally beginning to realize that on prem wasn't actually a problem.

Airbnb is worse than hotels
- I've given up on Airbnb. hotels have decent check in services. no strange rules. clean beds.
  same price.
  
  Heard, chef.

I spent a week on vacation and finally saw ads again. It did give me a very small list of TV shows that I will download from the internet. It also made me realize that the US has way too many ads for drugs and lawyers willing to sue anyone and anything for you.

As far as Ubers, I'm happy to pay them as much as taxis in tips at least — the people driving them are hard working people who could use it.
But dang, there's lots of streaming services. The new rise of piracy is not surprising.
- Yes, for me Uber and the others in that space have never been about cost for me. It's the convenience of pressing a button in an app and getting home without needing to phone anyone, or hunting for a taxi rank.
  
  For me it's the fact that I get an upfront price, and know the ride is tracked and there's a company that can resolve disputes. I've had a bunch of super uncomfortable taxi rides where the driver was clearly taking longer routes to drive up the fare.
  
  Rank...? Maybe it's my gender privilege showing, but it's just a person in a car that drives you from A to B. It's not exactly the kind of interaction I would think to rank 99% of the time.
  E: Seems I misunderstood. Disregard. But I still prefer taxis
- You wouldn't copy an Uber...
- I think it says something that people feel the need to subscribe to half a dozen services.
  Never even mind piracy, people don't need to be binging TV endlessly.

This is the best summary I could come up with:
Paramount+ with Showtime costs $12 a month and the live TV part has commercials and a few other shows include "brief promotional interruptions," according to the company.
The Financial Times recently reported that a basket of the top US streaming services will cost $87 this fall, compared with $73 a year ago.
Some companies, such as Dropbox, have even repatriated most of their IT workloads from the public cloud, saving millions of dollars, the VC firm noted.
Last month, Google, the third-largest cloud provider, started a pilot program where thousands of its employees are limited to using work computers that are not connected to the internet, according to CNBC.
If staff have computers disconnected from the internet, hackers can't compromise these devices and gain access to sensitive user data and software code, CNBC reported.
Disclosure: Mathias Döpfner, CEO of Business Insider's parent company, Axel Springer, is a Netflix board member.
The original article contains 877 words, the summary contains 150 words. Saved 83%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
- Looks like the bot got an update!
- Who’s a good little bot?

No matter what new technology we come up with .... it will always be bottle necked, manipulated, and limited by human greed.

Streaming is now just as expensive and confusing as cable.
Being a little bit melodramatic there. Streaming is nowhere near as expensive, confusing or hostile to consumers as cable was, unless you want access to every single service and show all at once. Anybody with a modicum of intelligence would only subscribe to one or two services at a time based on what they were watching in that period and still pay several times less than cable.
It has become more pricey but that's mainly because shows are fractured across many services now. Everybody and their fucking mother are now working to build their own streaming service after looking at Netflix's meteoric success with dollar signs in their eyes and while it's worse for the consumer, it's also led to a lot of failure. Disney have hemorrhaged their profits due in large part to how much they're diluting their brands with shitty DIsney+ spinoff series.
When Disney, HBO, Netflix, Amazon, Paramount and all the other major players start locking you into lengthy multi-year contracts, hiding every single 'cancel subscription' button, forcing ads upon everybody (not just those on the cheaper ad-supported tier) and training entire call centres of outsourced wage slaves to make it as difficult as possible for you to unsubscribe, then we can talk.
Ubers cost as much as taxis.
What many forget is that Uber (and other gig-economy apps) skirted past loads of employment and safety laws to undercut their competition by doing shady shit like classing their drivers as 'independent contractors' to avoid even paying them the minimum wage. Earning potential as an Uber driver was basically nonexistent before the law caught up.
AWS is set to start charging customers for an IPv4 address, a crucial internet protocol. Even before this decision, AWS costs had become a major issue in corporate boardrooms.
Perhaps this is because IPv4 addresses are in limited supply and we're very close to exhausting this supply, hence why IPv6 was introduced?
What about security? Last month, Google, the third-largest cloud provider, started a pilot program in which thousands of its employees were limited to using work computers that were not connected to the internet, CNBC reported.
The reason: Google is trying to reduce the risk of cyberattacks. If staff members have computers disconnected from the internet, hackers can't compromise these devices and gain access to sensitive user data and software code.
So, cloud services connected to the internet are great for everyone except Google? Not a great cloud sales pitch.
Google's strategy to restrict internet access for work devices is actually pretty clever, and honestly using this as a reason to doubt confidence in their cloud services is a stupid take.
The difference is that these machines have elevated levels of access to Google's servers when compared to the end user. All it takes is a Google employee clicking a dodgy attachment or link.

wondering if i should say this but at one point i pirated so much that i have to use will power to stop watching stuff.
- i mean 🤷‍♀️ at least it was free lmao

I wonder how much price increases stem from a lack of creativity in finding more nicer ways to be profitable, and overall inefficiency of their operations
- Yes

Capitalism being capitalism.

Capitalism destroys everything.

And we still don't have flying cars!
- Thank god! When I look how baddly people act on our roads I REALLY don't want them to have the ability to fly around as easily.
  
  It wouldn't be so bad if we'd actually take away the privilege when people fuck up... But it makes more money to just ticket people and let them keep on fucking up.

Let's be real: Uber/Lyft is actually better than calling a cab. Even for the same price, it's more convenient. When you actually share the cab, it's more efficient too, you get a price cut while it optimizes the route automatically to pick up and drop off people.
- I have a cab company in my city (near Chicago) that you can order it online or in the app for now or in the future and it is cheaper than Lyft/Uber. No hailing a cab like back in the old days.
  
  That probably wouldn't be an option if they weren't forced to compete with companies like Uber. Traditional taxi services were infamous for shitty customer service.
  
  The problem IMHO is just that you need a different app for each cities cab companies. That's great if you were living in that city and regularly taking cabs. I don't know what the percentage is, but at least for me, I only take cabs when I'm travelling, otherwise I drive my own car. I like having one or two apps, and I don't have to find, sign up for, and configure an app for each city I go to.
  Note - this is actually a bigger issue, not one that the cab companies can necessarily fix - but I think PayPal is doing the best here in having a "checkout with PayPal" on random websites and I don't have to do anything but log into paypal. I'm still surprised it seems like no one else is really doing it. I've very occasionally seen Pay on Amazon, but I don't recall if in those cases I still needed to create an account on the website etc unlike the newer offering from PayPal.
  Where's American Express, Visa, Mastercard, Zelle, Venmo, Cashapp, etc or even another new offering that just makes it as easy as PayPal does to have your "Pay online / in the app" account that if you do it gives the seller the payment (without exposing your actual card number), and address if needed for shipping?
- Last time I called a cab I was charged $20 to come to my house and pick me up. After that it was another charge to go where I needed. That's a cost you don't need to pay if you're just hailing a cab in the city.

So tired of this trope.
Streaming is like HBO in the old days — you buy a channel for a few months, watch what you want, cancel it. Rotating channels costs $20 a month. Cable costs $80-100.
Canceling a streaming channel is easy. Canceling cable requires calling the cable company and arguing with them. Then you have to return the set top boxes. Then you get a bill for the set top boxes anyway, and you have to argue some more and show them your receipt.
Also free streaming channels are a thing. Plenty to watch for free (unlike cable).
- With CableTV management people moving over to Streaming, this will soon be .."rectified". I think Netflix has one of them and look at them now.

Uber always cost as much as a taxi, it's a private hire taxi company exactly like any other private hire taxi company, their rates are controlled just the same. In the UK, anyway.
Obviously I'm not talking about black cabs, those bastards are ripoff merchants that only tourists use. I'm talking about normal taxis.
- In the UK sure, but in the States Uber was half the price of a taxi if not a quarter. In its infancy it was this amazing way to hail a cab, no more run down disgusting vehicles, no more asshole taxi drivers taking the longest route possible to run up the meter. It was nice vehicles and a set price for the ride. It's still mostly that but the prices have sky rocketed.
  
  Yeah for real. Taxis were fucking horrible. Public transit is needed but it's a good stop gap until that comes on fully.

Ye ol bait and switch. I need to go back to cabs

Streaming is still much cheaper than cable.
Assuming netflix vs cable in my xountry... Yeah I know which one has better value.
- That's the thing though, it's not Netflix vs cable anymore. It's Netflix + Disney + Prime + whatever other streaming services have the shit you actually want to watch. And when you add it up, it's just like cable packages. The only advantage is it's all on demand.
  
  If you add them all up, it's still cheaper than cable. They either need to create another service or two or raise prices like 20% more before it goes over that amount.
  
  Plus ad free for the most part.... For now at least.

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