while the streamers are all jacking up their rates/introducing ads/locking down sharing/enshittifying
This has been fucking baffling to watch. Like, even if I try to put myself into the shoes of a wealth hoarding dragon who opposes good things and only wants to increase the size of his hoard, raising the prices of streaming services while everyone is on strike is a fucking insane choice. You’re going to have less new content, everyone’s already pissed at you for treating writers and actors so badly, you just had record profits, and you think now is the time to raise prices?
What are you doing??? That’s a terrible idea! Wait until the strike resolves and raise prices THEN, and claim you had to do it to afford to strike demands!
It’s honestly frustrating to watch capitalists be so fucking bad at capitalism and just fail upward anyway because if you have billions of dollars it’s impossible to do anything other than make billions more
See, this is why you are not thinking like a capitalist.
For the monopolist capitalists, this is exactly the time to raise prices. When the war in Ukraine started in 2022, the commodity monopolists all raised their prices in anticipation of potential shortages in the near future, which led to inflation. Nobody could do anything about it.
It’s the same logic here. The streamers have already priced in the potential drop in subscriptions by raising the prices, making those who continue to subscribe compensate for the loss in revenues. There is no need to wait until the strikes end.
This is how a monopoly economy works. There is no alternative to Hollywood - the actors and the writers on strike eventually have to go back to work somehow, and back to the same groups of employer, unless they intend to switch their jobs entirely. So, the capitalists will simply wait it out until the strikers can no longer keep going, and come back with contracts offering even shittier conditions than before.
Shareholders require infinite money, and we are their cash cows. The cattle should stampede the shareholders, but are too busy being distracted by influencers, and so stay impoverished. It really is the perfect crime.
History seems intent on demonstrating that the more money a person has, the more detached from reality they become. Holy shitsnacks, just look at the average wealthy influencer: they’re the mentally absent funded by the very same.
my guess is it’s some kind of pre-emptive move. there is still completed content from before the strike trickling out, so now is the time to pull the trigger… before the perception of “there is nothing to watch” / stagnation becomes intolerable to a subscriber… before people have finished their rewatch of some beloved series and scoured the catalog for everything worth a fuck.
as stupid as it is to do it now, it would be a major boner jam to do it in 90 or 180 days if the strike hasn’t been resolved. doing it now gives them a little extra cash now to either make a play for a merger/back catalogue purchase or give a quick handy to the shareholders to cash out or re-organize from a position of strength.
This has been fucking baffling to watch. Like, even if I try to put myself into the shoes of a wealth hoarding dragon who opposes good things and only wants to increase the size of his hoard, raising the prices of streaming services while everyone is on strike is a fucking insane choice. You’re going to have less new content, everyone’s already pissed at you for treating writers and actors so badly, you just had record profits, and you think now is the time to raise prices?
What are you doing??? That’s a terrible idea! Wait until the strike resolves and raise prices THEN, and claim you had to do it to afford to strike demands!
It’s honestly frustrating to watch capitalists be so fucking bad at capitalism and just fail upward anyway because if you have billions of dollars it’s impossible to do anything other than make billions more
See, this is why you are not thinking like a capitalist.
For the monopolist capitalists, this is exactly the time to raise prices. When the war in Ukraine started in 2022, the commodity monopolists all raised their prices in anticipation of potential shortages in the near future, which led to inflation. Nobody could do anything about it.
It’s the same logic here. The streamers have already priced in the potential drop in subscriptions by raising the prices, making those who continue to subscribe compensate for the loss in revenues. There is no need to wait until the strikes end.
This is how a monopoly economy works. There is no alternative to Hollywood - the actors and the writers on strike eventually have to go back to work somehow, and back to the same groups of employer, unless they intend to switch their jobs entirely. So, the capitalists will simply wait it out until the strikers can no longer keep going, and come back with contracts offering even shittier conditions than before.
But that could be a whole fiscal quarter away. There’s cash to be grabbed now.
Shareholders require infinite money, and we are their cash cows. The cattle should stampede the shareholders, but are too busy being distracted by influencers, and so stay impoverished. It really is the perfect crime.
History seems intent on demonstrating that the more money a person has, the more detached from reality they become. Holy shitsnacks, just look at the average wealthy influencer: they’re the mentally absent funded by the very same.
my guess is it’s some kind of pre-emptive move. there is still completed content from before the strike trickling out, so now is the time to pull the trigger… before the perception of “there is nothing to watch” / stagnation becomes intolerable to a subscriber… before people have finished their rewatch of some beloved series and scoured the catalog for everything worth a fuck.
as stupid as it is to do it now, it would be a major boner jam to do it in 90 or 180 days if the strike hasn’t been resolved. doing it now gives them a little extra cash now to either make a play for a merger/back catalogue purchase or give a quick handy to the shareholders to cash out or re-organize from a position of strength.