At this point I'm sort of wondering what the point of the move to streaming even was. These streaming companies came in and decimated the "traditional" TV industry, but they're almost all losing money, and all definitely losing customer satisfaction. And now ads are creeping in. We just had a revolution and replaced one flag with another. It's no wonder people are going back to waving the pirate flag.
Cable was a shit product and ads finally killed it off, but the networks missed that ad money and they missed having control of the culture. They still wanted the power to choose what people will watch and when.
Netflix gave people what they wanted, a single low price for everything and they could watch what they wanted when they wanted to without ads. People strongly preferred binge watching. The networks decided to kill off netflix by puling their content and running their own ad filled streaming services that doled out episodes once a week on a schedule again so that they could control what people were watching and when, maximize advertising, and better control the conversations on social media.
The same people who made TV shit in the first place have been trying to force us back to what they preferred. Now people spend as much or more on streaming services as they did on cable, they see tons of ads, and they have to wait around for permission to see new episodes on someone else's schedule. Streaming services threaten to cancel anything that doesn't get a ton of views the moment they permit viewers to watch them. Popular shows like The Tick were canceled based on views after just six weeks after release!
Steaming as an alternative to cable TV was sabotaged deliberately and netflix is so bad at producing content that they can't save us. Piracy is the future of ad free TV on your own schedule.
