Sooner or later, everything old is new again.
We may be at this point in tech, where supposedly revolutionary products are becoming eerily similar to the previous offerings they were supposed to beat.
Take video streaming. In search of better profitability, Netflix, Disney, and other providers have been raising prices. The various bundles are now as annoyingly confusing as cable, and cost basically the same. Somehow, we’re also paying to watch ads. How did that happen?
Amazon Prime Video costs $9 a month and there are no ads. Oh, except when Thursday Night Football is on. Then there are loads of ads. And Amazon is discussing an ad-supported version of the Prime Video service, according to The Wall Street Journal. That won’t be free, I can assure you.
Paramount+ with Showtime costs $12 a month and the live TV part has commercials and a few other shows include “brief promotional interruptions,” according to the company. Translation: ads.
Streaming was supposed to be better and cheaper. I’m not sure that’s the case anymore. This NFL season, like previous years, I will record games on OTA linear TV using a TiVo box from about 2014. I’ll watch hours of action every weekend for free and I’ll watch no ads. Streaming can’t match that.
You can still stream without ads, but the cost of this is getting so high, and the bundling is so complex, that it’s getting as bad as cable — the technology that streaming was supposed to radically improve upon.
The Financial Times recently reported that a basket of the top US streaming services will cost $87 this fall, compared with $73 a year ago. The average cable TV package costs $83 a month, it noted. A 3-mile Uber ride that cost $51.69
A similar shift is happening in ride-hailing. Uber has been on a quest to become profitable, and it achieved that, based on one measure, in the most-recent quarter. Lyft is desperately trying to keep up. How are they doing this? Raising prices is one way.
Wired’s editor at large, Steven Levy, recently took a 2.95-mile Uber ride from downtown New York City to the West Side to meet Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi. When asked to estimate the cost of the ride, Khosrowshahi put it at $20. That turned out to be less than half the actual price of $51.69, including a tip for the driver.
“Oh my God. Wow,” the CEO said upon learning the cost.
I recently took a Lyft from Seattle-Tacoma International airport to a home in the city. It cost $66.69 with driver tip. As a test, I ordered a taxi for the return journey. Exact same distance, and the cab was stuck in traffic longer. The cost was $70 with a tip. So basically the same.
And the cab can be ordered with an app now that shows its location, just like Uber and Lyft. So what’s the revolutionary benefit here? The original vision was car sharing where anyone could pick anyone else up. Those disruptive benefits have steadily ebbed away through regulation, disputes with drivers over pay, and the recent push for profitability. Cloud promises are being broken
Finally, there’s the cloud, which promised cheaper and more secure computing for companies. There are massive benefits from flexibility here: You can switch your rented computing power on and off quickly depending on your needs. That’s a real advance.
The other main benefits — price and security — are looking shakier lately.
Salesforce, the leading provider of cloud marketing software, is increasing prices this month. The cost of the Microsoft 365 cloud productivity suite is rising, too, along with some Slack and Adobe cloud offerings, according to CIO magazine.
AWS is going to start charging customers for an IPv4 address, a crucial internet protocol. Even before this decision, AWS costs had become a major issue in corporate board rooms.
As a fast-growing startup, Snap bought into the cloud and decided not to build it’s own infrastructure. In the roughly five years since going public, the company has spent about $3 billion on cloud services from Google and AWS. These costs have been the second-biggest expense at Snap, behind employees.
“While cloud clearly delivers on its promise early on in a company’s journey, the pressure it puts on margins can start to outweigh the benefits, as a company scales and growth slows,” VC firm Andreessen Horowitz wrote in a blog. “There is a growing awareness of the long-term cost implications of cloud.”
Some companies, such as Dropbox, have even repatriated most of their IT workloads from the public cloud, saving millions of dollars, the VC firm noted.
What about security? Last month, Google, the third-largest cloud provider, started a pilot program where thousands of its employees are limited to using work computers that are not connected to the internet, according to CNBC.
The reason: Google is trying to reduce the risk of cyberattacks. If staff have computers disconnected from the internet, hackers can’t compromise these devices and gain access to sensitive user data and software code, CNBC reported.
So, cloud services connected to the internet are great for everyone, except Google? Not a great cloud sales pitch.
Did anyone actually expect anything else?
Capitalism will never cost less in the long term.
Left to its own ends it seems it will cost the same but have better margins concentrated into greater wealth for fewer people.
We need UBI, like, 5 centuries ago.
I mean, I like the idea but you don’t think greedflation will just jack up the price of things more once “we all have more money to spend”?
Exactly. Until we put either the heaviest lid on capitalism (never going to happen) or upend the system entirely, UBI will “drive inflation,” meaning we’ll still make the same (or probably somehow less) at our jobs while the UBI money literally just keeps everything at the same affordability. There is no world in which business doesn’t just go after that money. We saw very recently, with the flimsiest of excuses, capitalists will claim “inflation” while pocketing record profits. They’ll do the exact same if UBI is implemented without some massive changes to capitalism.
Burn it all down. Anyone that still has hopes for fixes that maintain the capitalist system are fooling themselves. We have no other options at this point. It’s either we do it now, or wait until capitalism and the devastating effects of climate change force our hand. At least if we do it now, at our own discretion, we might be able to throw the emergency-emergency brakes on climate change. Otherwise, companies and the capitalists that run them will absolutely watch us all fry from their self-sustaining pod homes that are built in the upper atmosphere to keep the temperature bearable and to stay above the devastating weather events. And they’ll do it without thinking twice.
The best solution would be to raise taxes for the richest, but considering the fact, that bullshit like big corps being allowed to lobby in the US is a thing, well… It is not going to be easy.
But raising taxes for the richest is a small band aid on a massively flawed system. It’d be like getting a second, even smaller bucket to bail water out of the titanic. After it’s broken in half.
There are so many incredibly serious problems that higher taxes for the wealthy wouldn’t fix. Liberals tend to cling to this option because it worked back in the 20th century. But capitalism has kept getting more and more “streamlined,” fucking over the working class more and more. Because the concept of endless growth has continued through multiple decades of massive changes to the game that only favored the wealthy, changes to the tax code being one that happened so long ago that it’s an entirely different concept at this point. Outsourcing, vertical integration, the explosion of invasive advertising, data mining, the explosion of privatization, the infestation of private money dictating policy, the infestation of private interests writing policy…this is a small list of the most visible things that have become so entrenched that a wealth tax would almost be nothing.
That money would get funneled right back into their pockets, even if they somehow let a wealth tax bill through—yeah, they LET a bill through. As you said, a massive stumbling block that only goes to show how deep this problem is.
Nope. People will focus on life hacking their way through surviving of fractions of UBI.
UBI is a freedom.
To dismiss it as something that will be immediately taken is how one finds themselves clinging to their shackles from comfort; pearl clutching them over the uncertainty of freedom.
One question, where was UBI 5 centuries ago?
Honestly i thought the concept of Uber would work. I’m commuting and you are too so you give me a few bucks to go my way. It was supposed to be “Cash, grass, or ass” minus the grass and ass.
But then people started driving purely to get people to pay them and suddenly its a taxi service.
Uber would never have gotten venture capital if it didn’t promise a monopoly on taxis.
Oh of course. Half of the staff at any of these types of apps are looking for a huge sell out which requires bastardizing the concept. I just wish for once one of these apps would stay true to their original stated purpose. Ride Share means you’re going this way for a reason too, not just to be a taxi.
Reminds me this talk: https://youtu.be/mrGfahzt-4Q
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/mrGfahzt-4Q
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
Candles were once a significant cost. But lightbulbs are incredibly cheap.
Food used to take a whole day to acquire.
We have things that even royalty didn’t have before, like air conditioning, out-of-season food, international travel, etc.
Capitalism sucks for sure. But it has given society a few benefits, and sometimes things do get significantly cheaper long term (but I’m generally skeptical about which items will go that way)
I wonder why how AC and international travel(if we are talking about aviation) is capitalism’s achivement? Scientists behind it were paid in taxmoney which doesn’t sound like hardcore capitalism.
Also, how’s your internet costs?
You’d have thought it was obvious, but everyone I’ve ever met IRL thought they’d be cheaper forever.
I work in IT and I’ve been against the cloud for over a decade and I always got looks like I was crazy. We still have vendors pushing us to buy into the cloud, I’ll fight tooth and nail all the way. Unfortunately, a lot of vendors aren’t giving much of a choice anymore by making their services cloud only. We’ll have to start building custom applications soon to keep everything on-prem.
As a fellow IT person, Cloud is the same as any new Buzzword tech.
It’s an especially good fit for a handful of use cases, but the execs hear about it through whatever channels they frequent and think that it will solve a bunch of problems that dont exist.
And that’s exactly how they intended it. They’ve been planning a corporate takeover of the internet since 2010, and it has largely succeeded.
The fediverse might be all that’s left of the original spirit of the internet.
What makes you say 2010? Moneyed interests have been working on it since at least 1998.
i have an inconsistent internet connection. it’s fine, but i refuse to ruin a movie by trying to stream it. since netflix and others don’t give you a way to pre-download the movie, they can completely suck my balls. 0/10. 🚽🪠
Well, you can pre-download. Sometimes it’s called torrent))
yes this is the way
Many of them do give you a way to pre-download a movie, at least on mobile and windows apps. It’s not every service, or every movie, though.
My mother was a journalist, her heyday was in the 80s-early 00s, she covered the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as well as the wars in the former Yugoslavia. We had a long phone call last weekend where we ended up talking about Twitter, the online service that changed journalism. I explained to her that the current owner put a foot in his mouth and was forced to buy it at a higher price than the initial valuation while grumbling that it was not turning profit, she guffawed at this. She said, “When has the media ever made profit??”
The only difference between old media and new online media is that online media also sell user data to make more revenue (along with old time subscription models and selling ad spaces), and even with this they’re still not making profit.
I agree, except that Facebook and Google make completely insane amounts of money.
Old fashioned as I am, in my head Facebook is still an online forum/social network/social gaming site like MySpace, Orkut, Friendster and that ilk. And Google is a search engine. But you’re right. Of course they’re new media.
Here’s my veeery slight pushback, Youtube doesn’t seem to be that profitable for Alphabet and Facebook is pushing the Metaverse because they think they might need a turn left and start selling hard products (like VR headsets) to keep engagement. Media is tough business.
Google the search engine and Facebook the social media site function as uber-media: they control access to readers and viewers. It’s difficult for actual media to not be on facebook or google news, though larger companies have been increasingly trying.
YouTube is slightly different, having a lot of content made specifically for YouTube. It is profitable but not nearly as much as Google’s other businesses - still, on it’s own, it would be a significant corporation itself. I suppose part of the value is it prevents someone else from having a large business hosting long-form videos. They’ve been trying hard to copy TikTok though, for whatever reason… possibly because it’s easier to stick ads in between 1 minute videos than 60 minute videos.
Facebook/Meta has done their best to evolve over time, since the original Facebook website has been somewhat dying (in the US) since around 2015. WhatsApp is huge for them, mainly outside the US. Instagram was a good purchase which they evolved into at least 3 incarnations since then… added videos and messages, basically making it more like Facebook, then added Stories to copy Snapchat after Snap refused to sell to them. Then, added Reels to copy TikTok. And more recently, released their Twitter imitation, Threads. The Metaverse thing seems to have been a flop, possibly because they’re facing competition from companies like Valve and Sony who actually have a clue about the game business, and nobody really wants to do VR Facebook outside the context of a game (if they did, they’d play Second Life…). Pretty much the Metaverse thing was a dumb idea. Oculus is somewhat successful, though.
Meta is evolving in interesting ways. The Oculus Rift line was huge for modelling artists and designers who worked with engineers (the ones I knew anyway). Now they revived Threads but interestingly it’s marketed as “Threads by Instagram”, because Facebook as a brands is somewhat tarnished, and Meta is a punchline, but Instagram is still popular and well-liked.
My prediction for the Metaverse is, and I’m just another idiot on the internet, that they’re trying to make it into a play AND work platform, where people might do online meetings in VR, spend online money with Metacoin to buy real world stuff, then also spend leisure time playing in the Metaverse. The way Amazon have consumers who are also products (and sometimes also Amazon workers), the vision for Meta might be that one day people could live their whole lives on the Metaverse and be this worker/consumer/product in one fell swoop. I wouldn’t want that, but I can see how this might be their line of thinking.
The deal with Threads and Instagram is they’re sharing the same account base. Rather than make a 3rd or 4th product with a new set of signins and credentials, you just activate your Instagram account on Threads. It seems like a decent idea. It is notable they chose Instagram vs. Facebook… but also, Threads as a product is more similar to Instagram. Instagram has been way more trendy with their desired market for several years now, too.
Sure, I agree that’s their vision for the Zucka-Metaverse. It’s a somewhat sound theory, if people get used to it and the software is sufficient. It might take another generation or two before people are really into that.
I still wish it wouldn’t go that far. I remember around 6-7 years ago my friends speculated about space tourism over a dinner party. That the contemporary space research wasn’t about the environment, it was about rich people’s tourism. I was genuinely disappointed that my friends’ “silly” predictions turned out to be true.
Yeah, the vision of living in VR seems like a dystopia. Plus, it’s facebook, which makes it even worse.
Honestly, given the current fragmentation of Streaming Service, it has become completely anti-consumer.
People don’t like to spend so much money just to watch one or two shows from one platform. They like the concept of AIO platforms and being on-demand & ad-free. All three of them have been broken.
I’ve ditched both and have gone mostly back to physical media. Even standard 1080p Blu-ray from 2007 look better than any streaming app as the bitrate is significantly higher, and you can find used Blu Ray for super cheap right now. New releases are a little expensive but there are still rental options
I was in the middle of watching Avatar The Last Airbender series for the first time (I somehow missed it all this time, crazy right?) on a Netflix shared accout when they did their dumb lockout.
So I went to The Exchange (gamestop but better) and got that and Legend of Korra on DVD. The special features and commentary are there too, which Netflix doesn’t give you at all.
Also I don’t know who needs to hear this but libraries have all kinds of movies and shows on Blu Ray and DVD that you can take home! It’s one of my favourite things to check out there
You are right! People often forget about libraries, torrents of the past.
Rental is bad unless it’s for free. Or unless you rent to rip.
Same rodeo, new clowns.
The point on the cloud is quite arbitrary to be honest. Yeah aws is coming to charge for extra unused ipv4 addresses, because there’s a damn shortage of them and it’s literally impossible to “produce more”. The solution is ipv6 but the infrastructure is not ready yet, which is embarrassing by now.
The point about security seems so god damn stupid. If you can work with limited outside access, it’s going to be more secure, the point of cloud being more secure is not to compare to your personal pc, it’s to compare to pcs that you expose to the exterior. In fact, Internet access and cloud servers don’t necessarily need to be the same thing, when people talks about Internet access they usually mean the web, and servers talk with each other with a myriad of other protocols that are not https.
I’m amazed I even read half of that, and even more that it was such uninformed bullshit.
What’s even the point of this post, I’m clearly not it’s target audience.
Bro really read a Business Insider post and criticized it from a technical point of view 💀
At least you didn’t get an aneurysm reading it.
yeah… I partially read the written post here, not realising that it was a BS article. It’s still annoying that it got almost 1k upvotes.
Yeah, cloud is unicorn thing that automagically fixes all bugs and vulns in software that company runs on it
That’s not true either? I never said that. Please don’t phrase your sentence implying I said thing I haven’t.
Cloud has its uses, and price and security are two big ones if you know what you are doing. And even if you don’t, if your use case is big enough that cloud’s expensive aspects arise, you really should hire extra engineers to manage those resources efficiently, wtf.
In any case, if the use case is big enough that managing it without proper planning on the cloud will be expensive, I assure you that doing it on premise will be more expensive the moment you need to expand your resources.
Don’t forget plastic money, when we’re promised to use “free” debit cards. There is always a fee, and one way or another we have to pay it. Problem I see is that there is more and more difficult to use cash. All except one cash machines were removed from where I live. The one’s left behind 80% of time doesn’t work. We’re in tech “utopia” trap.
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There is a fee (UK), just you don’t pay it, the shop pays it. That’s what hits the small businesses - they either have to raise the price of the product to cover the cost of the card machine or pay that from their own pocket. Obviously they will not ask customers to cover the difference.
Handling cash isn’t free either, it has to be transported, counted and probably insured, all that costs money.
Not sure why you’re being downvoted when you’re right.
Uber was unsustainably underpriced in order to gain market share. Pricing is temporary; the core benefit as a consumer was always the ability to request one from anywhere using an app (where you also paid) and have them come directly to you instead of needing to hail one. Taxi companies added that ability and now everything is better. There’s no reason why the approximate cost should vary much, outside of limited promotions. An Uber, a Lyft, and a taxi should cost roughly the same. Why wouldn’t they? Perpetual VC-funded pricing wasn’t what we were promised; the promise was convenient ordering and stress-free payments.
They should be the same price but are definitely not. I always open Lyft and Uber when I’m gonna take one and Lyft is ALWAYS more expensive. The only time its not is when I have a coupon.
and Taxi’s are slightly more expensive than both where I live so I don’t bother. Most taxi’s where I live only do non-emergency medical transport anyways.
Greed. It’s nothing new.
This is why, these days, I pay for just for Tidal as my only streaming service. Sill decently priced and convenient. I gave up my movie/shows streaming services because it just got too costly and fragmented, and using one for a month and then canceling to swap to another the next month is just annoying and not something most people would be willing to do.
So I stream my movies and shows through 3rd parties, such as movie-webb.app, himovies and fmovies. I still torrent anime though.
I suspect more and more people will search for illegal streams first before resorting to torrents. Or, like my parents, go back to cable. 🤷
Plus there is Subscription fatigue. I’ve gotten tired of all the damn subscriptions. Might go back to buying 4K blu-rays though for my favorites; physical media does always win.
I tried Streamio before and couldn’t figure out how to add my own streams (like himovies and fmovies).
The cloud was never cheap.
What a strange idea.
So for half these things, early on the costs of doing business were carried by other people. Streaming services relied on studios to produce content, and Uber relied on drivers to carry maintenance costs and downtime cost.
Now Netflix is a full studio and all the other services that are competitive have original content. Uber drivers are unionized.
Cloud services are fine for set low computation things, but once you scale past a certain point keeping your own IT staff busy is easy, and they provide a tailor made infrastructure.
It’s almost like the underlying premise doesn’t change with tech.
The things that can/should be broken is the stupid medallion system.
Tech has become a scam in many areas. It’s just doing the same thing as it always has been, just with an abusive corporate master. The goal is to scam the investor into funding bad ideas, or use that funding to undercut the competition. It is rarely about innovation anymore.
Tech is the post regulation industry. It was born after we Reaganomics the business landscape. Other areas are just further behind as they had pesky regulators for most of their history.
