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Another step down the path of cable television. Its initial selling point was: no advertising. Now Prime tries to steer you to content with ads; Peacock has an ad-supported tier and now so does Netflix. Soon your only choice will be to pay and still watch ads.

HBO and now others release episodes of shows weekly. When Paramount does that, recent episodes are shown in "live" mode which means no ff or rw -- those controls send you back to the beginning of the episode which can only be viewed at one second/second.

And shows have windows, appearing and disappearing mysteriously. No "infinite playlist" like there is on the music side.

I doubt this will end well for the streaming platform.

Nothing quite like the greedy desire to show year on year profits. It’s not just Netflix - it’s every for-profit company now.
> greedy desire to show year on year profits

People's pensions depend on the stock of companies that grow, so the the source of pressures/incentives is rather diffuse.

I've recently been thinking about this problem because we need to get rid of fossil fuel, but those big companies actually have a lot of unwitting supporters (staff, shareholders, and the staff and shareholders of the smaller companies in the ecosystem) that will suddenly wake up and say, "wait, this hurts me in the short term".

It's easy to blame the studio and streamers' execs, just as it's easy to blame the (actually greedy) fossil fuel execs, but there is more to the story. It's simply that there's a general pressure to enshittification.

I expect streaming to be unwatchable in a few years, except for those who can tolerate advertising interruptions. And this time there will be no Tivo to skip the ads.

I’m fairly confident this was the plan all along. They don’t really want you paying less, but a lot of people were ready to jump ship when Netflix blocked password sharing.

They have the exact numbers on how many people were sharing accounts. If 3 people were sharing a $15 account, that’s $5 each. So they persuaded everyone to pay a little bit more — $7/month to appease them.

Now that $7/month is gone and everyone has to pay more again.

Frog in the boiling water.

More discussion over here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36787886
Not surprising.

Every few months, Netflix pulls some MBA-oriented move that makes the service less appealing.