Now this could be said about most of the entertainment industry, music, gaming, etc, but I think this video brings out to light how well the evolution of streaming shows how it's killing its own evolution.
I guess maybe best to watch it first before reading any more of my thoughts around it - only 2300 views after 4 days so make sure to give the uploader a sub and like if you enjoyed it!
If for some reason you aren't able to watch the video, here's a quick breakdown from my recent memory:
In the past, piracy was quite a big thing, even regular people started pirating simply because they didn't have access to certain movies or tv shows from their location. The era between TV and internet was a big reason to this I think, most things regular folks would watch what was on TV, but if for some reason you were located in Finland such as I was, there was usually jack shit to watch. You could pay for cable but even there you wouldn't be able to find shows like The Office that were buzzing on the internets, etc, so you were kind of forced to pirate.
Eventually, Netflix took over this part and offered convenience and a lot of different shows and movies as long as you had an internet connection and a device that could play them. This removed the need for piracy from most regular folks, the fear of downloading something sketchy, the inconsistency of torrent websites being taken down, etc, so it lead to a lot of customers moving away from pirating and being driven to the convenient, clean and fast service netflix was providing. As Netlix was growing however, content producers and the studio's behind them started wondering why they're giving/licensing netflix their content when they could be doing what Netflix is doing themselves instead.
Now everyone is their own netflix, making life harder for customers who not only need to subscribe to more than one netflix, but it's also getting more and more expensive and content getting harder and harder to find as they keep switching and looking for which of the platforms gives them the most money. These actions have now caused people to have to pick which streaming platform they wanna use while being restricted to the content they can see as it can get up to $100+ per month to use more than one platform as they're fighting over content to maintain and drive people towards their service instead of others. This has now caused people to want to go back to pirating, which in and of itself hasn't evolved much but continues to offer the freedom it has always provided to pick and choose what entertainment you want to watch without the hassle of having to first check where it exists, to then sign up for that platform and then at times also check if it's even allowed in your country without a VPN - something the youtube video didn't get into but is a real problem as well. Not to mention streaming platforms even going to lengths to check if you are using a VPN and not allowing you access if you do.
Ugh, I kind of forgot what I was going to post about this now after going through the video again. It's kind of funny however how most usage of VPN's has been for streaming services, so much so that they'll use that example in most of their ads, to then realize that streaming services have caught up to it and are now not letting you watch them if you're using a VPN. Makes you wonder how these VPN services still have so much money to throw at ads and sponsorships in every youtube video.
Anyway, it's kind of weird that we haven't seen any real competitors to these services pop up in the decentralized space, maybe everyone in their fake web3's is just too busy making that quick money to actually work on solutions and just using these terms to sell out to exchanges, vc's and dumb traders rather than the long term profit they may attain by improving on aspects that'd make it cheaper for customers and more rewarding for the people putting these things together rather than those investing in them. The word crowdfunding comes to mind whenever I think about how the entertainment industry could improve. Things like spotify taking huge cuts for something as simple as providing bandwidth to a song to users wanting to listen to it while the artist gets very little in return and the end consumer may not use the services as much as it costs. What if we could just directly pay these artists a cent whenever we listen to music, how many songs can a regular person listen to in a day? 50-100? that's $1 and that's way more than what these services give them for 100 listens.
This industry is waiting to be disrupted, but for some reason things are taking longer and money's going in all the wrong places it feels like.
