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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   2592 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for March 22, 2024

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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I think a relevant factor - socially if not economically - is the fact that Netflix (and to a lesser extent its competitors) basically used loss-leading prices and venture funding to kill off or hugely hobble cable television, independent studios for TV shows and animation, and other competitors to it's model.

Then once all the other sources of this type of media are dead in large part due to not being able to compete with Netflix's pricing model, Netflix raises the prices, and customers have no surviving good options to turn to.

This is not an unusual tactic - loss leading prices are common, tech firms cornering the market while losing huge amounts of money and then turning around to hike prices and degrade services to turn a profit are common. But it does in a very real way hurt the consumer by crafting a market that is hostile to their interests and is low on competition, where following their short-term interests harms their long-term interests in a way that's frustrating and hard to navigate.

Customers have every right to be mad about that, and honestly I think even non-customers have a right to be mad about what it does the media and the culture more broadly.

The "predatory pricing" idea is very bad business. If anyone reading this is the CEO of a company I'd highly advise against it.

I tried to go and find my post about it. I might have written it in response to you. Instead I just read all my top posts from the last year. I gotta say, I really like my writing. Need to feed it to a text generator and get more of it or something.

I agree with /u/freemcflurry that there's still lots of competition- Netflix has not led to much infrastructure degradation, and people can switch back to the old model or a modern competitor without much difficulty. Plus there are still lots of alternatives to television- people can still see movies in theatres, buy blu-rays, read books, watch youtube and tiktok, hell even pirate shows and movies.

Netflix has not meaningfully "cornered" the market. No more than Blockbuster did anyway, and we all know how rapidly they fell.

But the cable networks are still there and there are a half dozen big streaming services to choose from as well. Plus no yearly contracts, you can subscribe for a couple months and then switch when you're bored. This is way better for consumers than the cable days.

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