Many Are Once Again Sailing the High Seas of Piracy
The Cost of Streaming Now Approaching the Cost of a Cable TV Subscription
There is a troubling trend happening in the world of cord-cutting, many TV streamers who used to be happy subscribing to Netflix, are finding the high seas of piracy looking much more attractive.
The TV Streaming Industry Has Become a Convoluted Mess
It used to be a lot easier in the early days of cord cutting. You could just dump your expensive cable TV or satellite subscription, then sign-up for Netflix, and for less than $10/month you could watch all the content you could consume, even in 4K. But things have changed rapidly since then. Netflix now costs $20/per month in order to watch content in 4K. And most of their best content is now gone. As many content producers found out, it was more lucrative for them to pull their content off Netflix in favor of their own competing service.
Now we have many more streaming TV providers we need to pay a monthly fee to, in order to watch the same content we used to be able to watch from one or two.
This has dramatically increased the price of TV streaming, to where it is approaching what some were paying for cable. And with the current state of our economy. Many simply can no longer afford it.
Piracy Once Again Rears its Ugly Head
It's a shame the television industry can't get their act together the way the music industry has. With music today, it does not matter if you sign up for Amazon Music, Spotify, Pandora, or several others. Most have all the same content available on all their services.
But this is not at all the same for television content. Today you need to switch between several apps, to watch your favorite shows. And this right there is one of the biggest reasons many will turn to pirate apps. Because it's easier to search, find, and watch content when pirating than it is by needing to search through several apps. Only to find you need to subscribe to yet another app to watch what you want.
And there lies the problem. Because most cord-cutters wouldn't mind paying a fair price for the content they consume. But make it too difficult or require too many steps and many may decide to look elsewhere for easier ways to watch television. And this is why once again we are seeing an uptick in the number of users turning to pirate sites to consume their content online.
Free TV is Another Option But Has Its Own Set of Issues
One thing we have now that we did not have before is there are many more free ad-supported streaming services now available. While the content does vary on apps like The Roku Channel, Tubi TV, Pluto TV, STIRR, and others. Much of the content is older, and it's ad supported. Which does suck up a lot of time.
A two-hour movie watched with ads may take 2.5 hours to finish. And many sites don't have much advertising inventory at all. So you can end up watching the same ad many times during the course of an hour-long show. And even more times during a movie. This becomes annoying very fast.
These ads are proving to be lucrative to the content providers, otherwise, we would not see everyone and their brother offering free ad-supported channels.
The Current Streaming TV Model is Broken
If the trend continues, more and more people will be dumping their streaming TV services, and looking for other easier and cheaper solutions. This is why we are seeing so much churn in the streaming TV industry today. Dumping a service month to month is easy, especially since you can binge-watch a few shows you really want to watch, then cancel, and next month and watch more shows on a competitor's platform.
Until we see content providers forming an alliance to provide all their content that can be searched for and consumed from a single app. More cord cutters will once again be turning to the high seas of piracy.
This is really too bad because the Netflix model worked well. It even actually reduced piracy because it was reliable, fast, and easy. Then then the television industry got greedy and blew it.
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