Originally Posted by Horizon
The article is "typical" Guardian fare, especially the bit where the author says "There’s a huge difference between not being able to watch everything because there’s too much choice and not being able to watch everything because you don’t have enough money."
There's never been a opportunity, yet, to watch everything either on channels or on Netflix.
As the author says, if you wanted to watch whole tv shows, just one season would cost over £15 to buy the DVD and if the tv shows were long running over ten plus years, this got very expensive. There was never a time before Netflix where you could watch all of a tv show on a tv channel, something totally omitted from the article. Netflix provided an exceptionally cheap way to view content, which obviously people got very used to.
Another omission is that you couldn't even watch shows and films for a very long time on Netflix because the rights expired, which caused and still does cause, major headaches for Netflix as people complain when content is removed from the service. Sometimes the rights are renewed especially for major shows, but many times they're not. So, it was never a eat all you can bucket that the author quips about.
Each media company having its own streaming services brings the possibility, the possibility, of providing a permanent archive of all their back catalogues, something Netflix could never do with other company's content.
DVDs, TV licenses, pay tv subscription all used to add up each month. Fast forward to today and if the DVDs are gone and if the pay tv superscriptions are, or at least pared back, then adding in most of the main streamers will be affordable to many people, especially those paying hideous amount like £100+ each month for their tv and broadband needs.
And just a reminder, which the author forgets, Amazon, Apple and Netflix's original content are all new shows and films, so of course the prices would be higher, because that's additional new content which was never available before.
Netflix and other streamers haven't necessarily made things more expensive, especially when you throw in DVDs into the mix, they've made things more available and expanded the choice immeasurably.
Do you remember repurchasing Star Wars for the billionth time on different formats and then special editions, limited editions etc? That nonsense is gone and I welcome it.
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