Max Adds More Ads, Takes Aim As Password Sharing
from the making-everything-worse-to-the-max dept
We’ve documented in detail how the whole AT&T–>Time Warner–>Warner Brothers Discovery merger process has been a pointless mess, resulting in no limits of layoffs and damage to the underlying brands. What was supposed to be a gambit by these companies to dominate streaming TV, wound up being a very expensive act of seppuku by over-compensated executives clearly out of their depths.
After paying a premium for the HBO brand just to deprecate it, steadily eroding the quality of their streaming catalog (how many reality TV shows can there be involving people having sex on an island?), firing countless employees, cancelling popular shows, raising prices, and implementing all kinds of new restrictions, Warner Brothers Discovery is unsurprisingly starting to lose subscribers.
Having learned absolutely nothing from history or experience (preposterously outsized executive compensation ensures there’s simply no financial incentive to), the company has since proceeded to make more of these same sort of decisions, including recently making John Oliver harder for fans to watch.
But they’re not done yet; the company (HBO) once known for artistic quality also says it’s on the cusp of following Netflix’s dubious crackdown on the public menace that is password sharing, and is expanding the type and volume of ads paying users get to enjoy:
“On the network side, HBO is known as a channel with very few commercials and a primary focus on its own content. Now that WBD is focusing on driving the streaming side of HBO through the Max app, it would prefer that the content be more synonymous with ads.”
Of course, the whole streaming industry is heading this direction: more restrictions, higher prices, shittier product catalogs, lots of pointless, layoff-producing mergers, and more ads. And they’re heading this direction because as publicly traded companies, it’s simply not good enough to provide people with a quality, popular product at an affordable price.
The need for improved quarterly returns at any cost sooner or later begins a process of brand quality cannibalization that eventually winds up driving users to the exits (and back to piracy). At which point executives inevitably blame absolutely everything (VPNs! China! Piracy! Regulators! Youth!) for their own reckless pursuit of impossible, unsustainable scale. Just like Cable TV did.
At that point the cycle begins anew, with a fresh set of pesky innovative upstarts developing services that excite customers, until they too succumb to Wall Street’s impossible thirst for unlimited growth.
Filed Under: ads, enshittification, max, password sharing, streaming
Companies: warner bros. discovery
Comments on “Max Adds More Ads, Takes Aim As Password Sharing”
I’m surprised the author hasn’t learned of HBO’s about-face on this. A few days after they announced that the main Last Week Tonight segment would be uploaded to Youtube several days later than it normally would, John Oliver popped up on Youtube to say that not only would the uploads go back to Monday, but they would start uploading episodes in full.
On top of that, they would start adding the entire back catalogue of LWT on the LWT Youtube channel.
Good things do happen every now and then.
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Holy shit, that’s great news!
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John Oliver being a problem child again just like with AT&T. Good on him!
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Do you have a cite for that? I haven’t heard that anywhere, and looking at Oliver’s feeds I see no mention of it, and in searching for reporting on it, all the latest reporting was that it was still being released on Thursdays.
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Evidently, I misremembered to a degree. In the video linked below, Oliver says that the videos will only be available to people in regions where there’s no distributor with exclusive rights to LWT. I live in Denmark where the videos are available in full, but if I connect to a US server on my VPN, they’re unavailable.
I apologise for the faulty information.
Here’s the video of John Oliver making the announcement: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PbzW9qcVBJ0
And the first four full videos:
Supreme Court Ethics
Pig Butchering
Boeing
Medical Boards
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Oh wow. Yeah, any of those links from inside the US come back as blocked “not available in your region” but if I VPN elsewhere I can see them.
Fascinating.
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The information might not have been 100% accurate but it’s definitely useful to know all I need is a VPN and YT to watch LWT.
Nope....
I cancelled my subscription when they first gutted their catalog. I have Apple TV+, Hulu, Disney+, Paramount, Crunchyroll, HiDive, and probably a couple others I am forgetting about…enough is enough.
You can charge a subscription OR you can advertise to me, not both! (take note, Amazon!) And you need to have a COMPELLING catalog of titles.
Expecting customers to pay MORE for LESS content is not a winning strategy!
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Passwords-Netflix
Gotta point out the whole cracking down on passwords things worked out great for netlfix, lending a noticeable bump in revenue.
So it’s not that crazy.
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You are just full of bad takes, aren’t you?
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It’s not a “take” if it’s the truth; they did get a bump in subscribers.
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We’ll never know for sure. Maybe they lost a lot of subscribers but also gained a lot for different reasons and got a net increase that was less than what they would have. Their growth has been slowing recently but that could also be the natural process of a maturing market.
All we know is, it didn’t kill them.
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We do actually know for sure. There was a clear bump right around that time. It clearly worked.
I’m not saying I’m happy that it worked, it’s just inarguable that it worked.
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You should look up “post hoc, ergo propter hoc”.
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Thinking that a short-term bump in profits(which may have happened anyway) is better than long-term customer retention and satisfaction is a bad take.
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It sure did, Matt. Now I pirate exclusively, because I’m being charged more, for less.
Can you guys get Netflix in Russia or do you have to use a VPN?
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Cute, but I’m a US citizen and resident, thanks.
If I used a VPN it would be so that Netflix would show me the Star Trek episodes they paid to produce anyway. No one is signing up for Paramount. (I pirate those) But ultimately Netflix is worth the $20 or whatever for the convenience. I’m not gonna distribute USB sticks to all 5 TVs where my family wants to watch something.
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Ooh, the hypocrisy burns! Can’t exactly scream about Trump not following the law when you refuse to follow it yourself as a member of the electorate that voted him in, Bratty Matty.
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And cellphones cause cancer, and MMR causes autism, and consumption of milk causes autism… Got any more fake news to sell us?
So tired
Of all this crap, and watching Capitalist LEARN over and over again.
How long does a TV series last if you have commercials every 10 min, in 3 min sets?
How long and how many shows in a season? It used to be 50/50 26-30+ shows then repeat.
Lookup all the Internet Broadcast channels for Sony. Go try to watch some of them.
10 min of Show 5 min of commercials.
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When you download the media by sailing the high seas, you get none of that garbage. Just the content and these companies give better reasons every single day for more people to sail the high seas.
“At that point the cycle begins anew, with a fresh set of pesky innovative upstarts developing services that excite customers”
That will happen when AI gives common folk the ability to, say, make their own Star Wars series and upload it to YouTube because they hate what Disney has been doing.
That’s gonna thwack all the streamers upside the head unless they somehow divert the fan made productions to their own services by making their services more YouTube-ish, if they are nimble enough to recognize the threat, move fast, and not let the lawyers drive their decision-making.
If the streamers don’t do this, then YouTube just gobbles up all the profits.
ahoy matey tis time to hoist the colors…
Charging More + Deleting Catalog Choices + Sloppy App UI + Self Serving PR = Get Boat Out Of Dry Dock To Sail The Seas