The Enshittification Of Streaming Accelerates With Price Hikes, More Password Sharing Crackdowns

Culture

from the more-money-for-a-shittier-product dept

If you hadn’t noticed, it’s not just good enough for a publicly traded company to provide an excellent, affordable product that people like. Wall Street demands improved quarterly returns at any cost, which, sooner or later, causes any successful company to begin cannibalizing itself to feed the “growth for growth’s sake” gods. Mergers, price hikes, offshored labor, whatever it takes.

While high level executives and some shareholders benefit from this enshittification, there’s just an endless list of casualties from this process, whether it’s product value, quality, customer satisfaction, customer support, employee pay, jobs, or even the long-term health of the company itself.

As the streaming market saturates and competition grows, enshittification has come to the streaming video sector in a big way. Products once heralded for low cost convenience now see relentless price hikes at the same time there’s been an erosion in quality and convenience. All to a backdrop of striking workers, many of whom say they were never paid a living wage during the sector’s heyday.

Netflix, as we’ve well documented, seems intent on charging more and more money for a lower quality product, while it demonizes the kind of password sharing it once praised for contributing to its success. Disney now seems intent on following suit on password crackdowns, as Hulu, Disney, and all the other streaming giants race each other to impose sometimes biannual price hikes.

On many fronts, streaming was a notable improvement to the traditional cable TV model, which mandated that consumers purchase massive bundles of largely unwatched channels. Or pay their cable company a ridiculous monthly fee to purchase a dusty old cable box. The problem: a lot of streaming’s novelty and innovation obfuscated many other long-percolating problems in the sector, including unchecked media consolidation and attacks on labor.

Alena Smith, showrunner of Apple TV+’s Dickinson, wrote about how new streaming Hollywood in many was is worse that what it disrupted, especially when it comes to creative pay and the transparency creatives have into the success and impact of their work:

…to this day I have no earthly clue how many people have seen it [Dickinson], nor what value my near-decade of creative labor generated for the company. Not only do I have no metrics for my own success, I don’t even know how Apple would determine those metrics in the first place.) In their mad rush off the digital cliff, these companies transformed Hollywood from a high-wage, high-profit, hits-driven industry into a low-wage, low-profit, subscription-driven one. They also broke the basic bargain at the heart of show business, which is that creative artists and independent producers will share in the financial success their work creates.

Like most of America’s problems, the one two punch of mindless consolidation with feckless regulatory antitrust oversight has had some fairly unsurprising results, especially for workers. Executives like Discovery CEO David Zaslav fail endlessly upward, receiving outsized compensation for blistering incompetence. All while their products, customers, and workers take the hit for pointless merger mania (see: the broad dipshittery that has been the AT&T–>Time Warner–>Discovery series of mergers).

Smith is correct to affix the blame on greed, mindless consolidation, and feckless regulatory oversight as opposed to blaming the underlying tech:

You might say if you were a viewer of my limited series about the streaming wars, we’ve seen this movie before. Unregulated platform capitalism has already chewed up and spat out most of the 20th century’s once-profitable culture industry, from music to journalism to books. People often blame “the internet” for this rampant destruction of livelihoods, as if the technology itself were some kind of demon, hellbent on erasing the value of creative work. 

We can control and structure the marketplace of the internet through our laws and the enforcement of those laws. We can eliminate glaring corporate conflicts of interest and make the web — our now-de facto gathering space as a society — a better place to be an artist and an audience member. We’ve done it before: through laws like the Paramount Consent Decree, which legally separated the production and distribution of films, thereby ending the autocratic “Studio System” of that era; or the “fin-syn” rules of 1970, which blocked TV networks from distributing their own content during prime-time hours, ushering in a golden age of independent TV production.

None of these problems are new or unique to Hollywood. You see the same grotesque dysfunction in journalism, health care, education, telecom, traditional cable TV, transportation, energy, and countless other heavily consolidated sectors and industries. In large part because we’ve utterly normalized corruption and greed and let it run amok; often under the pretense of unbridled, patriotic free market American innovation.

There are counterbalances to Wall Street greed and the brunchlord hubris of the executive set. Antitrust reform (not the GOP performative type, but real antitrust reform), properly and competently staffed regulatory agencies, functional merger review, unionization of exploited work forces, functional consumer and labor abuse protection, checks and balances for monopoly and monopsony power, campaign financing and lobbying reform, and more.

You can feel the seed of real change growing thanks to unprecedented anger at the now comically tilted playing field by savvier, younger generations, but it remains an open question of how stupid and unbalanced we’re willing to let things get before meaningful, consensus-driven reform actually arrives. Judging from our trajectory from the 80s, 90s, and early aughts, we could be waiting a while.

Filed Under: antitrust reform, competition, enshittification, media consolidation, mergers, streaming, video