How A Vaunted Business Model Has Already Started Going Away
Before I begin, Merry Christmas and Happy Yule to everyone, I hope yours was as relaxed and good as mine was. Let’s jump into this one.
Booyyyy, bet some of you got this one same as me. I won’t lie, it irks me to no end. This is one of my things in life is the occasional complaint. This is a complaint I’ve had going back many years now.
I remember seeing that Netflix was only $7.99 when I first signed up. The reason I didn’t sign up for it initially when it first kicked off was because I lived so close to movie rental businesses and they always had stuff for sale super cheap. I’d just go there and buy several movies. If I didn’t like something, I was barely out three dollars on the movie I bought. Surely, someone at work would want it. I finally broke down and got a subscription and all manner of movies and TV shows were open and available. Best part? I didn’t have to get up to change a disc. A few years later, they began offering their own programs and exclusives and the price went up to $9.99 a month. I was okay with that but then the “original programming” devolved into pandering, lecturing and certainly wasn’t for me. Fact is, at the point we’re about to come to, the only two things I remotely enjoyed on Netflix were Stranger Things and Black Mirror. Having Amy Schumer’s special constantly entering my recommended feed despite my best efforts at jettisoning it was frustrating, finding anything that I did like aside from those two shows was an exercise in having to look up “secret menus” online and then they announced the price hike to $14.99 and that’s when I checked out. I finished up on my two favorite series and I was out.
By then, I’d started checking out Plex. At the time, Plex was billed as the “roll your own Netflix” and how it worked was that you could rip your DVDs onto a hard drive and stream them from your own computer. Essentially you curated your own library of movies and TV shows. At the time, I was paying $4.99 per month to stream it anywhere from my phone, tablet, etc. A Black Friday Sale for about $80 one year gave me a Lifetime Plex Pass and now I pay nothing. I still curate all my own stuff and sometimes even watch what others might have if I have an invitation to their server. Later, Plex added their own movies and TV shows, ad-supported, of course. Then they added a Live TV functions. My price went up by $0.00. I’ve never had to pay for anything else ever again.
Before I go on, I should note that I realize that a lot of these companies, in fact all of them, are business. I support their right to make money however they think they can. I don’t think government can fix what is happening.
One of the comments I got to posting this was “but…but…muh capitalism.”
Jesus …Horatio…Quintana…in a bowling alley.
Here we go again. Okay look, while others are not en masse advocating piracy, I’m here to hold up a hand and say “Alright everyone, calm the fuck down. Hey! Sit Your Ass Back In That Seat!”
Netflix once proved that a company charging a fair price for a service works. When the price and product are reasonable, we, as customers will purchase it and recommend it to our friends and family. Business can then grow.
This comes with a couple of caveats.
When people invest in a business, it is legally obligated to make money for it’s investors, this is true but that relies on infinite growth.
Investing is never a guarantee of making money, you may even lose money.
Let’s break it down. So government in the form of the legal system has placed all the onus on the business here.
Now there are two groups needed to be kept happy in order to maintain the business: The Customer & The Investor. These two are, most times, mutually exclusive.
The Investors, being State Street, Blackrock, etc and private equity firms and hedge funds are really pushing the DEI initiatives lately, causing the programming to be shit and for the end product or service to be one that people are growing increasingly tired of seeing.
They go elsewhere.
Business loses money.
Investors are scratching their heads.
Business blames it’s customers.
Not a really good way to go.
Compile on the fact that companies like Disney, Paramount, CNN, ESPN, Discovery, etc all seem to want to have their own app, their own streaming platform and their own monthly cost. Too many people in the crew for the split to go evenly or to make any serious money. All this stuff is happening on the business end and that’s where these socialist radicals think this is an own on capitalism.
Nope, it’s not. In fact, the own is well on the way and I think what you need to look at is how many of these “forced behaviors” and “wrong politics” and “wrongthink” have infected these companies over the last several years alone. Torpedoing something from the inside doesn’t mean that it failed on it’s own, that’s goofy and it’s the 21st Century, not the 19th, Friendly Reminder: We Do Not Use Gaslight Anymore.
Nobody ever talks about the customer side of things. There are plenty of cheap to free alternatives and even most of Warner Bros. content is getting shuttled off onto services like Tubi which are ad-supported …but they’re free to us. Tubi, Xumo, Roku TV, Pluto TV, and even Plex have to have that ad money in order to facilitate the constant generation of power to keep those servers lit and that internet bandwidth up. Pretty simple to figure out. Amazon, not so much. Something’s Fucky there and I’m going to take a stab at saying that fucking with Lord of The Rings for over a billion dollars, blaming fans and causing chaos might have had something to do with this.
I am not going to pay a subscription fee and let you force ads on my screen. I’ll find something else, if that’s the case. No, companies, you’re not going to nickel and dime me to death especially during an age where I’m barely keeping pace with what bills I have. I still have a collection of physical media if all else fails. I have tons of music on my phone, plenty of books to read and plenty of games to play. Entertainment companies have forgotten that they are a luxury, not a necessity
This wraps up the crux of the entire argument. No, this isn’t capitalism. This is a series of poor decisions made when socialists and radicals were given fake jobs and those were the first to start getting the axes the moment the money stopped rolling in and started rolling out.
The customer didn’t care for the services and products you offered so they sought alternatives just as you requested we do and now, you’re gonna find out that putting us on the hook for your stupidity didn’t work out in your favor. That’s capitalism. We don’t like or want what you have to offer. That snapping sound is our wallets closing and slipping back into our pockets. Offer something we want and like and that will change, but until then, our wallets remain closed. Alternatives will spring up and take over and I’m certain that even Tubi may come out with a low-priced, ad-free subscriber tier that will offer something of value to the customer. Business models change and customer needs and desires change over time. Keeping the customer happy is a sustainable model. Keeping the investor happy is going to be contingent on keeping the customer happy and, finally, investors need to go in with the understanding that there is no such thing as infinite growth.
Government trying to save all of us from businesses being “too big to fail” was a lesson that should have been learned in 2008. Need I remind some of you that “Too Big To Fail” should not even be part of any conversation. Ever.
Even large corporate entities can fail under capitalism and this provides valuable lessons to everyone as to how to conduct business and create competition that is good for the market. When a product that is offered is desired and comes at a reasonable price, people will buy it. When no one wants it, there’s no forcing it onto the customer.
The Ravens Nest 
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