Sure, and if you think the 26% of the workforce that works from home is more representative of the average household go for it. WOW and most video games work just fine on DSL and don’t require the massive bandwidth
For myself I typically stream and video conference on at least two and up to 4 devices simultaneously for 7-10 hours per day. I don’t think my household usage is typical in anyway though. Even if you somehow justified your other usages to pay for upgrade of your internet you would have to break down that usage by hours spent streaming vs other things. The internet cost should be added to your streaming cost.
By the way what appliances are you running that require high speed internet. Even security cameras don’t do that.
Wow! I actually had no idea it was that high. 26% is probably double what I’d have guessed. That’s incredible!
And no, I don’t think 26% of people working remotely is representative of anything, but my wife doesn’t work remotely (anymore - she’s a teacher) yet has plenty of uses for the internet when she’s at home grading, preparing for the next day, etc.
I don’t play WOW or any other MMO, and sure, you CAN play (or just download/keep updated) games using DSL, if you, for example, hate yourself and want to make yourself miserable
I’m sure this is geographic, but I live in a fairly sizeable city and when I just looked up whether I could get DSL if I wanted to here, I see that all of the providers in my area have canceled their DSL service. I have 4 options available at my address: one cable provider (what I use now, but I am overpaying and it’s slower than Fiber, so I will probably switch), one fiber provider, and two satellite providers that cost more and have slower speeds than my other options.
I’ve heard you can save money if family members, who don’t live in the same house, share passwords. Then you don’t have to subscribe to everything. It’s what I’ve been told, anyway.
How dare you accuse me of such heinous crimes, sir or ma’am! I said I’d only heard about such things. What could possible make you think that I, or any member of my family, would share our passwords?
That sounds horrible. That would end up costing more than just the monthly fee, and you only get one episode instead of everything they have!
That model may work for music, since maybe you only want one or two tracks off an album, so paying $0.99 per song is OK, but who would pay for only one or two episodes? Now you’re out $10 for all ten episodes when a full month’s subscription is only $4.99.
Yes, that’s what I was talking about. But it sounds like, in @MrDibble’s region, Rick and Morty is released in a similar way. I have to agree it’s unusual for Netflix not to dump a season (or half season) at once, regardless of the reason. I wouldn’t be surprised if this was done because they wanted it released like a cable show, since that’s what Rick and Morty is in other markets.
I did think it made sense for the Joel McHale show, as that was trying to remain topical. It would probably make sense for South Park, too, for similar reasons. But I get why it’s annoying for other shows.
I do also get, though, why some creators want that. There is a different experience for bringing and not binging. You can tell when you binge older shows. On the other hand, it might be a ploy to get people to stay subscribed rather than just joining to binge the show. For me, though, it actually makes me more likely to wait it out, because it feels like a cynical ploy.
The success of The Mandalorian probably helps the new streaming service plan to release weekly - the buzz and discussions lasted much longer than in your Netflix drop at once strategy.
I’d say that, for that model to work, it would need to be a season pass for the whole show, rather than per episode. If that price was less than the full subscription to the service, that could make sense.
Though I could see allowing paying per episode for the rights to download and watch that episode in perpetuity. That might be nice if you have a particularly good episode (e.g. apparently that Christmas episode of Ted Lasso). I could also see the advantage if you, like me, don’t actually like binging, and want to space things out longer than the subscription.
And that is 100% why I didn’t subscribe to Disney+ on a monthly basis. My sister tells me to check out that show, and I had already been considering subscribing monthly for the other content. But that strategy feels manipulative to me, so it discouraged me from doing that.
I hate that feeling when marketing feels like it’s trying to get me to do something. It’s why I don’t watch ads, and, when they get shoved in my face, I will deliberately check out all of their competitors before even considering what they offered.
Is this probably pointless, due to a contrarian streak? Yeah, probably. I doubt this will change their practices. But I just don’t like that feeling where it seems I “fell” for their marketing strategy.
I will note their competitors are moving in their direction. Amazon has been releasing some of their big shows on a weekly basis even. Hulu did it for Handmaid’s Tale. Apple TV+ is doing weekly. Paramount+ does it for their Star Trek stuff.
Really Netflix is the only hold out as I imagine Amazon and Hulu will continue to do a weekly release for certain shows at least.
It would take some economist analysis to come up with the proper pricing. I pulled one dollar out of thin air. Granted, some households with 5 TVs/tablets going 8 hours a day every day would be a very different proposition than one watching 3 hours for 3 nights a week.
For me, I just don’t want to pay for time and content I’m not using.
You’re assuming that someone will watch all ten episodes within one month. Some people might prefer to watch one episode a week, on Thursday when they get home because that’s their busy day at work, or the like. Keeping a $5/month service for ten weeks would then cost more than $1 per episode.
Not saying I’d do it that way, but some folks might.
I’d like to point out again, that NO ONE is charging $1 an episode. They charge per episode now on Amazon and iTunes and it’s usually $2.99 or $3.99 an episode. They aren’t charging less than that because they won’t make any money doing so.
While theoretically you can switch streaming channels after watching all the content you care to see, most people won’t and will keep paying for stuff they don’t watch much.
We watch 10x the hours on satellite than we do on streaming. It helps to have a lot of good local stations on your satellite feed. And we have only so many hours a day to sit in front of the tube. There are streaming channels we might add when we got the time.
BTW we play everything through our DVR, recorded in advance, so it is pretty much on demand, practically speaking, and we see few ads, except for stuff on local news. Even that we often pause at the beginning of the show and get back to later skipping ads and boring stories,
Wouldn’t surprise me if a broadband-only service used these price hikes as a way to shoehorn themselves into the industry.
If, as people ditched cable (and their landlines) and found their high speed internet going up from, say, $50 to $100, it would create an opportunity for a new IP to offer service at a cheaper (than the new, higher) price.
At this point, it wouldn’t surprise me if Amazon or Netflix tried to get in on that game. And as long as Net Neutrality is still in place, you don’t need to be worried about having other services throttled.
Most people have an option between their local cable monopoly and their local phone monopoly. As far as I know, there are not that many (any?) places in the country where a new ISP can easily set up shop and get even a hundred thousand customers without running afoul of the existing legal monopolies.
Google was in that game. They decided it wasn’t for them. Google Fiber still exists in the handful of cities where they initially installed but there are no plans to expand it any further. It’s very pricy and there’s dubious return on investment.
iTunes has dozens of shows at 99 cents per episode. I assume it’s promotional, but it’s a very large catalog with a lot of high quality/popular shows for their entire runs like Cheers, Futurama, a bunch of the CSIs, The Larry Sanders Show.
