Streaming came to end piracy and is causing the opposite
The latest example of price increase has been Disney, a company that started charging the base subscription from $7.99 to $11.99, and if you want to keep the initial subscription, you have to consume it with ads. The Disney+ plan with ads «They will last 15 seconds, 30 seconds or 45 seconds. You can expect up to four minutes of ads per hour. “Disney+ Basic, however, does not support offline viewing because ads load at the time the content is played.” As you may know, discontent among users has quickly shown.
However, Netflix was one of the first to carry out this advertising policy and, amazoneven though streaming content is not its main sources of income, it will also add ads to your series and movie content. «Amazon Prime Video users will see ads on shows and movies starting early next year unless they subscribe to an ad-free tier […] “Amazon will roll out an ad-free subscription tier for an additional $2.99 per month for the US.”
The consequences of rising prices
The policy of price rise and control Given the incompatibility of being able to share accounts between friends and family, it is causing the piracy is increasing more than ever, especially in Europe, although it is a global phenomenon.
“Data shows that accesses to pirated content per internet user per month for all content types started at around 11.5 in 2017, reached a low of around 5 in early 2021, and rose to 7 by the end of 2022. […] The recent increase is mainly due to the growth of television piracy, which accounted for 48% of total aggregate piracy (TV, movies, music, software and publishing) in 2022 […] There is some substitution between pirated and legal content. Models have shown that there is an inverse relationship between legal content consumption and piracy across all domains. […] “Low per capita income, a high degree of income inequality, and high youth unemployment are associated with increased consumption of pirated content.”
If this situation continues, probably the exponential growth of streaming services will begin to have problems attracting clients because with the current inflationary situation, the price of food, the political crisis in Europe and the lack of salary increases, people are increasingly going to have more problems when it comes to accessing this service. subscription and I don’t think the solution is the addition of ads, but the possibility of maintaining shared accounts.
And don’t let it sound like a fan boy, the only one who has known how to alleviate the rise in prices has been Apple with its Apple Onewhere it has managed to give users monthly and annual discounts for having all Apple services.