Before this week, I had never heard of Watcher Entertainment. But because of the quirks of social media, I now know that they people behind Watcher decided to leave YouTube and put up their own streaming service only to try to compromise a few days later. It's your classic internet snafu (and the second time we've had 3 ex-Buzzfeed guys on a couch apologizing to their fans) that's a bit of a train wreck that you can't look away from. From a professional standpoint, it's going to be yet another case study on how NOT to handle your content creation company.
One of the most tone-deaf moments in the initial announcement video was the claim that charging $5.99 a month was a price point that everyone could afford. That's just a dollar shy of Netflix's ad-supported subscription tier in the US for a bunch of people who make YouTube videos. It's kinda crazy to think about it from an objective standpoint, but this is where we are now. Everyone thinks that putting up their own streaming platform is the right thing to do. And now it costs more than a cable service to subscribe to all the platforms out there.
And it's not like these services are getting any cheaper. Disney+ has pretty much doubled its rates and I think we're either going to switch to month-to-month billing only when we have key shows of interest or I'll downgrade us to their more basic plan just to avoid paying that much more. It'll just limit our concurrent streaming options, but this admittedly isn't much of an issue since we typically watch together and when we're apart (usually for work trips) we can't even use Disney+ in other countries. I guess it'll really depend on what content will be available when our annual plan finally expires in November.
I really need to kill our WOW Presents Plus subscription since we don't watch as much Drag Race outside of the regular seasons of Drag Race Philippines I think. Amazon Prime Video has already been demoted to on-and-off status based on what shows are available and I think we're going to wrap up now that we've finished watching Fallout. Maybe we should blitz watching Marry My Husband or something before we go. Plus House is back on Netflix, so I don't even need to watch it there.
And because of this blog post, I've stopped the autorenewal on WOW. Good job, Rocky. Maybe we should opt for HBO Go instead of WOW during the next season or something.
Anyway, the only real way to manage these costs is to take advantage of the lack of a lock-in period for these services and only subscribe for key shows. Netflix is actually doing pretty well and it remains our only true always-on subscription service. Disney+ is significantly disappointing me because of the price increase so we'll see how that goes. We still watch a lot of good things there and we just got started on Bluey hahaha
These are the problems of our modern life.
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