from the brilliant-idea-boss dept
We’ve noted more than a few times that media and streaming execs are all out of original ideas. Now that the market has saturated and subscriber growth has slowed, streaming companies have decided to stop giving the public what it wants (few restrictions, low prices, better quality content) in order to provide Wall Street with the illusion of impossible, endless quarterly growth.
Instead they’ve started focusing on brand cannibalization efforts that have devastated the traditional cable sector: pointless and harmful mergers, price hikes, and the imposition of annoying new nickel-and-diming restrictions. Their latest big idea is the imposition of even more advertisements, or even higher fees to avoid them.
In early 2024, Amazon began charging Prime customers $3 extra every month just to avoid ads that didn’t previously exist. At the time, they promised they’d try to keep ads to a minimum; yet in less than 18 months they’ve doubled the amount of ads users have to deal with.
Warner Brothers Discovery’s “Max” has, of course, followed right along, stuffing fifty-percent more commercial breaks into each program in its ad-based tiers. We noted when this trend emerged that Wall Street demands for impossible quarterly revenue growth would mean these companies wouldn’t be able to help but push their luck, so this sort of thing is right on cue:
“A support page for Max’s Basic with Ads plan says to expect six minutes of ads per hour, a 50 percent jump. And despite its original promise not to show ads during HBO programming, Max has been breaking up HBO shows with commercials as well.”
Max originally promised “a commitment to the lowest commercial ad load in the streaming industry.” But, like Amazon, those promises were utterly worthless. Very cool. Very innovative.
As Ars Technica notes, this is steadily eroding the value of streaming. And there’s more enshittification to come. Linear TV still reportedly shows 13 to 16 minutes of commercials per hour, so there’s still plenty of runway for these execs to make their services shittier and erode their own quality standards further. At which point you’ll absolutely see a surge in piracy that these execs will blame on everything but themselves.
By 2026 or so you should see a lot of resurgent industry whining about piracy, followed by terrible industry ideas to try and “fix” a problem they created; like lobbying Congress for a ban on VPNs, or working even harder to kick poor people off of their broadband connections for downloading a TV episode.
Filed Under: advertisements, competition, fees, growth, hbo, hbo max, innovation, max, streaming, tv, video
Companies: warner bros. discovery
