Weird, Netflix used to compete with piracy so well that many people stopped pirating altogether, by offering a more convenient service at a reasonable price that was hard for even the most stubborn of pirates to refuse and resulted in a massive boom for its own industry. I wonder what could have changed that caused the people to leave Netflix and return to piracy. Hmm. I wonder.
It’s a mystery! I’ll never understand why the week after yet another price hike, I quit because of the price hike. I guess I just act randomly in response to price hikes.
My issue was cutting out the sharing. I was paying for 4 screens at a time. Why should they care which 4 screens are being used?
Once I realized a decent VPN was $5/month, that I could get TV shows without the 35% time addition of commercials, and stop worrying about what I get going away, the issue wasn’t that Netflix was bad, it was just worse than the alternative.
edit: not that Netflix has commercials, but the fact one could get anything without them as well (like paying for cable…)
not that Netflix has commercials
There’s a tier with commercials for many countries now.
Everyone decided they wanted to have their own streaming and wanted a bigger piece of the pie. That fragmented where to watch and caused old shows and movies to cost way more for streaming rights.
Then Netflix cancels too many originals without proper endings, which passes people off. After that they got rid of password sharing which made it a pain to have a work and home type of viewing experience. Now they’re adding ads. They’ve become shit and now it’s making it a bit harder for themselves.
It was inevitable and that’s even why Netflix started making their own content. Honestly, they should have made deals with the cable companies explaining if they entered the space they would create a consumer hostile environment and destroy the market. They probably wouldn’t have listened but Netflix should have known their only product was convenience.
I used to sail the seas like freakin Luffy, but Netflix and Steam (plus becoming a wage earning adult) got me on the straight and narrow for a good long while. Then when all the different services started to compete I started dipping my toes in the water again with some sense of guilt. But after various struggles getting Netflix running in different locations I frequent and my parents not being able to use my account anymore, I have no shame flying the Jolly Roger.
I fondly recall excitedly using Netflix on my PS3 all the fucking time in like 2011. It was cheap, there was an app right there on the device I already bought, and there was a pretty good selection of content that got updated frequently enough. I had friends who would pirate and I was interested in getting into that until Netflix came along and completely fulfilled the need for me. The incredible convenience made it worth it over the work to learn how to pirate and the time to safely find everything and the risk of getting caught, and then even after doing all of that it would be on a computer and not just a couple of button presses from my couch. I know piracy has gotten to a point now where it’s much more convenient, but back then it was a totally different beast. All of this was. YouTube was so much better for users and for certain classes of creators. Media and media platforms across the board are fucking terrible compared to back then. We used to chastise people for still having cable because Netflix was so fucking incredible in comparison. Idk what comes next, but these streaming companies are on the way out if they don’t figure it the fuck out. At this point, I’d rather go backwards to go to a goddamn Blockbuster these days.
Your local library probably has a better selection of movies and TV for free than any streaming service you might consider paying for. Let’s starve these beasts.
I miss my local movie store. Going to the movie store added a little adventure to movie night. Go out, browse a little. Get a stack of movies you have no clue about. Stop and get Chinese, maybe ice cream.
Ok, it doesn’t make sense anymore but I still miss it.
I think that still makes sense. Sometimes it feels like stuff like streaming and amazon orders have reduced our need to leave our homes. In general, this is largely a good thing, but I fear that people are becoming a little too isolated and aren’t being exposed to social interactions nearly as much. I don’t think people know how to respectfully disagree anymore, and I think that might lead to higher tension and make socializing even harder on people. I’m only 35, but it really does feel like most kids are having a more passive childhood than I remember having, and many adults today also live passively while feeling nostalgic for their more actively lived childhood. I don’t think people are particularly happy with life being this efficient and convenient.
So yeah, go out and get a movie and some Chinese food. Have a conversation with a stranger. I bet you’ll enjoy that more than doordash and scrolling through netflix.
2015 - 2018 I pirated very, very little. Didn’t need to. Between Netflix, Hulu, and HBO, I wanted for nothing. Then, every time I went to the bathroom, someone was creating their own streaming service. Suddenly everyone was pulling their IP from Netflix and Hulu. Netflix wouldn’t stop raising their prices. Their original shows are ok, but their movies are terrible.
Is it more that the original pricing model was unsustainable though? Like they were making a loss, or being funded continuously to capture the market and then raise prices?
Obviously it doesn’t help that all the shareholders want their cut and thus the money has to come from somewhere.
No - piracy, since it always carries at least some amount of difficulty and risk, is easy to compete against. And in fact, paid services, including Netflix, have proven that over and over. All it takes is to offer dependable convenience and quality and to treat customers well. People are always willing to pay a reasonable price for that.
The problem is that piracy becomes difficult to compete against when, as Netflix is currently doing, you shift from a business model of providing good service under fair terms for a reasonable price to a business model of providing crappy service under onerous terms for too much money, because the greedy, selfish, short-sighted sacks of shit at the top want to make even more obscene amounts of money. That’s the point at which piracy gains enough of an advantage to outweigh its difficulties and risks.
And when that’s the case, it’s pretty obvious what the real problem is.
The trick is to make as much money as possible then jump ship to a newer competing company that has the ability to grow more before you leech it to death again
It also doesn’t help that the studios all band together under banners that each launch their own streaming services and withhold all of their titles from the others. Maybe Netflix should spend less time fighting consumers and more time fighting the other cutthroat corporations who effectively make it impossible for their artists to choose their own distribution networks.
I’m back on the seas. Once I couldn’t leave my Netflix account set at my work site and my house, then they upped the price and added ads, it’s just easier to pirate anything I’d like to binge. My phone has like 640 GB of space. I can carry my own Netflix, with beer and hookers.
Fr stop producing c-tier content for millions of dollars and just pay for better content and/or make it cheaper. I don’t need 14 generic action movies starring Ryan Reynolds and dozens of forgettable shows.
Also, don’t greenlight 100 shows if you only plan on giving 5 of them a second season, and you base that decision entirely on algorithms instead of genuine human feedback.
And please, for the love of god, let me look at a movie for longer than 1 second before you start automatically playing it because your almighty algorithm determined that it would force users to pick a movie faster. It’s the most annoying “feature” that makes me inclined to avoid Netflix as much as possible.
I’ve never seen a magnet link respond with “this is not available in your country”.
They won’t even let you watch stuff like anime with subtitles if it’s not dubbed in your language. Like why?
In Disney+, in order to watch anything in French, you have to change the language of the entire interface to French for the option to appear. And then you lose most other languages.
The only reason I have a Disney+ subscription is because it’s hard to find kids’ shows in languages other than English in the high seas. And they make it so friggin’ difficult for no reason.
Finding stuff in German is also really hard. Wish I had a torrent tracker or usenet indexer/provider that had more German stuff.
Try SceneNZBs, they have tons of German content!
I actually bought a one year subscription yesterday. Will see how it goes.
Do you mean actual German shows/movies or German dubs of shows/movies?
I was raised in the Netherlands and I’m fairly sure that German Society is so braindead because they never had to indulge in foreign languages. Just teach your kid English, it’ll be good for everyone. Kids absorb other languages like a sponge.
I mean German dubs. Also, there’s a lot of immigrants here so a lot of people speak more than just German and English and we do learn other languages like French or Spanish in school but it’s mostly optional or only if you continue school after 10th grade. Calling us all braindead because we’re not forced to learn languages that we’ll never use is not very nice.
I have lived in Germany for over 30 years now. I just saw the difference between the Netherlands and Denmark vs Germany. It’s kind of sad how we shut ourselves into our own little language bubble, yet the world has so much to offer. I prefer watching movies in French/Spanish/Japanese/whatever with subtitles. I believe that a huge portion of the trade that is acting is conveyed through language. By overdubbing these movies a lot of the actual appeal is lost.
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What I want is content in Greek, which is a lost cause.
I know very little about this topic, do not take this as fact. One possible reason is licensing issues. It’s a mess. Not an unsolvable one, but one that pirates usually don’t have to deal with.
Might be licensing but I think it’s actually just that they will hide everything that’s not dubbed in the language you speak because I didn’t find anything on Netflix (back when I had it) that wasn’t dubbed in German
It’s just US managers who cannot imagine people speaking more than one language
I want this as a sticker for my laptop.
t-shirt for me
Mug
Since spotify was increasing the price AGAIN, I was willing to give Apple music a chance. Guess what, many of the soundtracks I listen to are not available in my country. Like why would you block it I already pay for the thing just let me listen to it. But I guess they just know better. And now I’m gonna selfhost my music just like I selfhost movies and tv shows.
Piracy isn’t even free! People pay thousands of dollars for hardware, and hundreds per year for electricity and various service providers.
But they actually get what they want for that money: Being able to watch whatever you want, anytime, on any device, in high quality and without ads. It must be really hard for streaming services to compete with features as futuristic as that!
Seriously. I’m running a Synology with 12x16TB. That’d buy a bunch of months of streaming services…but this way actually gives me content to watch that I want to watch.
And offline. And in the quality you define. And on any device.
Just out of curiosity, what drive configuration are you running?
You’ve made my DS220+ blush
I’ve got a DS920+ on a shelf, and she’s super jealous of the Rackstation.
I think many people may view those sort of costs differently than the monthly subscription costs of Netflix, etc. Hardware is generally seen as a “one time” cost, and the added electricity costs are difficult to tease out from all the other variable electricity costs.
My personal argument is that I pay a monthly subscription ($15/mo) for a seed box, which is roughly the same cost as subscribing to a single streaming service.
Back before the password sharing crackdown, I had access to my parents’ Netflix account, and every once in a while, I’d try it out, but I’d always quickly get annoyed and would finish watching whatever I was watching via my Plex server.The difference is that we own the hardware. We can treat it as bad/good as we wants and we only have ourselves to blame if things go wrong. It also costs exactly the same whether we use it for 1 month or 100 years.
Opex vs capex
Infinitely reproducible digital media has little inherent value. As the article acknowledges, the value proposition Netflix offered was convenience. If pirate sites offer more convenience than Netflix offers legitimate users, Netflix will lose. I find it baffling they are fucking around with ads and locking down access, making their experience worse. Same with Amazon Prime. It’s like they forgot their own business model.
Exactly. Steam figured this out early on and it’s how they have maintained their dominance in the game distribution business. It’s the same lessons the entertainment streaming platforms must learn - your value is convenience. Add more walls between consumers and content? you will be cast aside.
Yo, Netflix! This one right here! Read it and understand plz
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That’s just an engineering problem… Not a particularly hard one either
Wtf would you keep re-encoding it? If you don’t, it’s just binary. You can run error checks on it, save it on raid config with high redundancy, and it’s more stable than any physical media
Load it into memory and you can copy it all you want, do error checking at the destination and you’re golden.
The exception is if you keep uploading it to and ripping it from hosting sites which keep re-encoding/compressing it… But replication itself is easy
Operating Revenue: 33,723,297,000
Cost of Revenue: 19,715,368,000
Gross Profit: 14,007,929,000
Operating Expense: 7,053,926,000
Operating Income: 6,954,003,000
“Our profits may be obscene, but they’re not obscene enough! How could these evil pirates ever do this to us?”
The constant growth aspect of capitalism means that profits are never obscene enough for any business.
Hmmmmm it’s almost like growing infinitely large is not sustainable. Who would have thought?
What a communist thing to say. Are you a communist? Why do you hate freedom?
Communism is when you don’t convert all resources in the universe to large digital numbers
I like dividing net profit by total employees in 2022 they could pay everyone $350k extra that year.
4.49bil/12800
All we can do is 50k and some fruits in the office.
And a pizza party at the end of the year!
Note: Pizza will count as a taxable benefit in kind.
Maybe 3.5k and a pizza party.
won’t somebody think of the
parasitesshareholders‽
“We successfully competed against piracy and drove it to near-extinction, but now that we’re enshittified we can’t compete with piracy while continuing to make the obscene amounts of money that we want to make”
It’s not just the enshittification of their own service; it’s the fact that so many audios decided to pull their content and set up their own enshittified services.
Now, if I want to watch stuff legally, I have to have a bunch of subscriptions, and we’re back to where we started from.
It’s almost like some people don’t like being fucked.
“Piracy is Difficult to Compete Against”
Have you tried
Not Enshittifying
?
We’ve tried nothing and we’re all out of ideas
hey now, don’t discount bitching and moaning!
The really stupid thing is that everyone knows Netflix succeeded by offering - for the first time - a better product than piracy. A decade ago, Netflix offered a huge library of high quality, ad free content, which was easy to navigate and relatively free of bugs and viruses. People signed up because it was better than piracy where content could be difficult to find, time consuming to download or slow to buffer, with risks of malware or questionable websites.
People are willing to pay for a better experience that supports the people making art and entertainment.
Netflix already knows how to do this, built a company around it and launched an industry based on the knowledge that people will pay for a product that is better than free options. Now, it’s gone all the way back around. Streaming services are fragmented and expensive, content is hard to find and disappears without warning, streaming apps don’t always work on the devices they’re supposed to, quality gets unexpectedly throttled, and the ads are inescapable and unskippable.
Tbf, a lot of the problem is from content producers making their own platforms
I’m not sure I buy it. Just because content producers wall+jerk themselves off doesn’t mean you have to enshittify your own product, not when you are winning. Besides, Netflix already became a content producer themself partly as an answer to that.
doesn’t mean you have to enshittify your own product, not when you are winning
Since Netflix is a publicly traded company now, they pretty much have to.
Gotta pursue that infinite stock growth…
This is it. The stock market is pretty much the reason everything goes to shit. It’s run in rampantly criminal fashion in the first place, just a meat grinder for money, and if our legal system weren’t run in such a fast and loose, revolving-door echo chamber fashion, someone would have clamped down on it years ago. Why this isn’t more obvious to people is stunning to me.
It’s like religion. It corrupts you, makes you angry, sanctimonious and blind, and hence stupid. Avoid it like the plague it is.
Maybe it’s not even the stock market, but the laws surrounding it. To the best of my knowledge, a company’s primary legal obligation is to maximize shareholder value. Ethics and maintenance seem to be secondary as a result. There needs to be legal ways or more incentives for companies to be satisfied with their progress and seek stability/maintenance, and keep their stock price stable.
Fair point, capitalism ruins everything by definition.
People wouldn’t care nearly as much about password sharing crackdowns and random limitations if Netflix had a complete content library. Netflix with their originals aren’t going to match Disney’s decades-long catalog of content regardless of how much money they pour into it. Tack on Paramount, NBC, and Warner Bros, and that task becomes impossible. Piracy came back because people couldn’t get the content they wanted on Netflix or Hulu, and they couldn’t get that content because producers got super greedy.
TBH they could just have kept streaming their archived copies of that content (they did make backups, right? They work on IT, they would have known how important it is to have backups). If Disney or someone complains, let each side just pick their lawyer staff and toss them together at a mud cage match with wet T-shirts, for a couple of years, maybe a decade. They have way over good amounts of money to waste on that, and people would have kept enjoying a good alternative to piracy in the meantime.
Netflix would lose that lawsuit almost immediately.
EDIT: To explain further, it literally doesn’t matter if Netflix has copies of that media. If Netflix loses the rights to distribute that media, they can’t distribute that media. If Netflix continued to distribute said media, they would not have a case in US courts. When people in the US buy physical media, they only receive a license (intangible) and a copy of the media. With some exceptions, people have to adhere to the terms of that license. Even if ripping for personal use is allowed, you can’t buy a DVD, rip it, and then pass the DVD to a friend to keep because you transfer your license to use that media onto a friend.
Also true. Netflix decided on their own to limit resolution to 720p for browsers even for account that pay for 4k content
Content producers raised their prices to drive traffic away from Netflix.
oh they’ve definitely fucked themselves in the ear with a corn schucker, but watching your most profitable content flee your platform would make anybody panic.
Cry less, make better service more.
They didn’t seem to have any problems before they started fucking around with their pricing and policies and everyone else also started their own streaming services, splitting everything across multiple subscriptions instead of 1, convenient service.
I could keep up with what’s available where and shuffle my subscriptions around every few months to see what I want when it’s new… But it’s way easier to just use a torrent site now.
Press releases like this are corporate signaling to US Congress that they would like some lawfare and are willing to pay for it.
Pirate streaming growth itself doesn’t ‘threaten legal services’ as TF suggests. Any threat that arises is created by industry’s market response. It comes back to margins. Netflix could decide overnight to invest in a long-term ‘hearts and minds’ approach that includes a quality platform user experience free of hostile design, non-discrimination amongst devices, relaxed household access rules, attentive customer service, commitment to finishing programming properly, improved stream quality, etc. Becoming the Valve of streaming represents an expenditure increase, though. You’re now a lower margin business with a very sticky and content customer base. That’s not a story industry wants to tell its investors, knowing they will respond with ‘you should be petitioning for bills that enable more market captivity’.
They do the right thing only as a last resort, because the right thing is expensive.
Piracy is really easy to compete against. Ask GabeN. Steam has singlehandedly taken me out of the piracy game because they have what I want, it’s super easy to get and if it’s not reasonably priced today I’ll wishlist it until it goes on sale (and it will). If it sucks, or my hardware can’t run it, I just dm someone and I get my money back. I know they can disappear shit from my library like any online store but they haven’t abused that privilege with me yet and that makes me confident they won’t.
With Netflix, there’s a small chance that they actually have what I want. If they do, it’s gonna disappear soon. Prices only ever go up, not down, and that series you love is gonna be cancelled as soon as it stops driving new subscriptions. To watch everything I want I can spend a hundred dollars a month on a rotating set of accounts on several streaming services or I can go LOOK for the MOVIE 2 stream for free without even messing with a DOT TOrrent file.
Piracy is easy to prevent if you provide a better service than the pirates. What he meant was that it’s hard to get people to pay you to shit in their mouths when someone else is giving out sandwiches.
in fact for the games that have been removed I actually still have full access, like rocket League still in my library just not purchasable anymore
Isn’t that just because RL went free to play?
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until it goes on sale (and it will)
Except Factorio. It has never and will never go on sale, and they were able to use that policy to get money back that they lost from G2A.
That being said, Factorio is worth the price tag
G2a?
Gobble two asses
Yep, Steam is my “video game piracy canary”. The day I lose access to my games on Steam will be the last day I ever buy any video game, and probably any non-physical piece of media for the rest of my life.
when gaben dies the enshittification of steam will happen in short order. don’t put all your eggs in one basket
If that happens well then Piracy still exists. None of the other baskets aside from GOG are worth putting eggs in
Yeah back in the golden era of streaming you only needed Netflix, most of the shows on there were good, and everything would eventually be on there. So piracy was too much of pain in the ass to bother with to save $10 a month.
Now there’s 10 different streaming services most of them cost a lot more than $10 per month, you have to wade through pages of crap to find anything worth watching. If you hear about a show or movie that sounds interesting you can’t just wait for it to show up on Netflix. You have to go and search for which streaming service has the show you want and there’s a good likelihood you’re not subscribed to that one.
It’s now far easier to search on the 'bay for what you want to see (you have to do a search anyway) and they always have it. Yeah I guess you’re not instantly watching it, but you’re not instantly watching a thing you want to see on a streaming service now anyway, because have to scroll past a wall of crap to find anything.
My general feeling on piracy is that when you’re young and don’t have much money, you can’t afford to pay for it anyway, you may as well pirate it. When you get older and can afford it then you should pay for movies and video games and stuff. But when they make it more of a pain in the ass to buy something than it is to pirate things, then I dunno what to say. I have money and want to pay for a service that I can just chill and watch cool stuff, but they seem more interested in various schemes to impress shareholders than providing me the thing I’m willing to pay for.
You also won’t instantly watch anything on that streaming you found the movie you wanted on “justwatch” since you have to make a new account, go get your credit card to fill out the form, etc.
2013 Netflix competed just fine. Piracy was mostly dead back then
But 2013 Netflix didn’t have to compete with Prime Video, Disney Plus, Paramount Plus, HBO Max, Apple TV, Hulu, Peacock, or any of the million “add-on” channels that Amazon uses as an excuse to paywall you off from the content.
The fact that they all run in their own UI, desperate the shove the next instalment of mediocrity down your throat, means that I’ve gone back to piracy. It’s just much easier to type what I’m after into Radarr or Sonarr than it is to go through the services to see what’s available. Sure, I can use Justwatch, but 80% of the time what I’m after isn’t on anything I have.
I used to pay for Netflix, Amazon Prime, Disney+, and Paramount+. Then me and m wife noticed that every time we wanted to rewatch a show or a movie, it was not available on any of those. So now I only pay for Newsgroups.
Same thing for me. I can also use Findroid on my Android phone with microG to watch stuff from my Jellyfin server. I think the Netflix app wouldn’t even work on my phone.
I would like to see some evidence that the competition resulted in Netflix losing a lot of subscribers, and thus money, rather than not hitting their predicted revenue targets. Because I would bet it’s the latter and not the former. I don’t know of too many people who said, “well, I had Netflix, but Disney is doing streaming video now so I won’t be watching Bake-Off anymore.” They just ended up getting Netflix and Disney+.
For a while anyway. Now people are dropping these services due to the price hikes. Unless you downgraded your Netflix service when they added lower tiers with fewer options and ads, to maintain the basic Netflix service you had in 2016, you’re paying an additional $5 a month today.
Netflix and all the other streaming services are built upon the insane idea that there are an infinite number of new customers that will continue to sign up regularly. Some of them don’t even think you need all that much programming to draw them. Paramount+ has a fraction of the original programming of Netflix, Peacock, Apple, Amazon, etc. but still costs $10 a month and will most assuredly continue to raise its prices based on the idea that there are either an infinite number of Star Trek fans or they will have to raise their prices.
Or use jellyseerr/overseerr, and browse for media. Just like the streaming services.
More competition should mean lower prices. How is competition diving prices up? Seems rigged.
It is rigged. Exclusive deals keep content restricted so they’re not directly competing; if you want that show you have to pay for service X. Or, you know, yarrrr.
Streaming services are middle men with exclusivity rights on products. They sell simular but different things, think of them like dealership repair shops, they both fix cars but they fix different cars.
Same amount of content, more players, outbidding each other, passing on those lovely reverse savings.
See if it was like music, with a massive back catalogue available to everyone, you’d have four or five services competing on price. But it isn’t. And it will suffer for that.
if it was like music
If it were* like music
When using be in an if clause for an unreal conditional sentence, always conjugate it as were, no matter what the subject is. Even if the subject is first-person singular (I) or third-person singular (he, she, or it), still use were with an if clause in unreal conditional sentences.
https://www.grammarly.com/blog/conditional-sentences-was-instead-of-were/
When using be in an if clause for an unreal conditional sentence
*When using “be” in an “if” clause for an unreal conditional sentence
When referring to words, use quotation marks for clarity.
Great suggestion, thank you
Calling people out for their grammar isn’t cool anymore; now we just let one another live in peace. You should try it.
I hope this is sarcasm. They weren’t being a dick, just educating people, which is a good thing
Your comment makes no sense to me. It was never cool, and it isn’t now.
If it was never cool, there’s no need to extra uncool it now.
It’s only competition if they provide similar products.
The current landscape is like farmers markets and butchers. Sure they both provide food, but they don’t really directly compete with eachother.
They certainly do compete with each other but it’s just a general misconception that competition lowers prices.
Pepsi and Coke have been competing with each other for decades and Coke has larger market share. So why doesn’t Pepsi just lower prices? Pepsi even has the diversified income of doing more than drinks. Lowering prices doesn’t lead to market share and Coke can just match the price.
Look at Apple’s growth in the American market, they can sell a product that is significantly more expensive than competitors and still gain market share.
I still think you’re looking at competition slightly wrong.
Coke and Pepsi do compete with eachother, along with the rest of the drink market. And overall prices in that industry are pretty low, some people will buy other competitors (the store brand Cola’s). But overall competition is working.
Apple only kinda competes. Sure a phone is a phone and a laptop is a laptop. But unless someone is entering the market for the first time. They already have applications they are looking to use, so if you need an iPhone, you need an iPhone, and same for a Mac. But if you’re an android or Windows user, suddenly you have a lot more choice because there is lots of competition!
The reason companies setup walled gardens, or pay for exclusive access to a piece of media is to erode competition. If a user wants that thing, they can only get it from that one place.
Are you’re saying competition doesn’t exist because products aren’t the same?
I’m trying to not disparage your argument here but if I go with your reasoning then I feel like there is no competition so that you can justify prices not going down. Where I believe competition simply doesn’t lower prices because capitalism desires more profit not less profit. Why fight over scraps when you can create a market by manipulating people into thinking: Green chat bubble mean poor so me no use RCS or open blue bubble because green bubble mean poor.
If competition didn’t exist for apple then they could give android an imessage app.
I’m saying the competition can only exist because products that actually fill the same need.
If you decide that you need product A, and have multiple options on where to get that, you have competition.
So if you’re looking for a Cola, you have options.
If you’re looking to play StardewValley, you have options where you want to buy it and which platform you want to play it on, you don’t need to buy a new game system to play it.
If you’re looking to play the latest Zelda game, you don’t have options, you need to buy a Switch.
If you’re looking to watch Ozarks, you don’t have options, you can only watch Netflix.
If you’re looking to just have something playing on TV and don’t really care what it is, you have options.
If you’re looking to listen to music, you have options, most of the steaming services have most of the music.
If you’re looking to be able to text friends, you have options, any phone will work.
If you’re looking to be able to iMessage friends and for your case only iMessage will work, iPhone is your only option.
Competition is complex and is more dependent on a consumer needs than just classification of what a product is. In your earlier point you used Apple as an example of a company that can increase prices despite competition, but really Apple is a prime example of a company putting up walls to an ecosystem making it really hard to leave once you’re in.
Generally in the current tech landscape there barely is any competition outside openish platforms. But with tech, you often can’t look at competition as product A vs Product B. Like while we can say that Window competes with OSx, it’s harder to say that a Mac laptop competes with a given Dell laptop (because what you can do with each OS is different to different people).
This is why I like to think of all the tv streaming services as different types of food stores. There is no supermarket that supplies everything, you’re forced to have memberships to the single butcher, the single milk man, the single bakery, etc. if you want a particular food, there is currently no (or very little) competition. You can certainly survive on just bread, and people are happy to do that, but that bakery can and will increase prices whenever because they aren’t really competing with the butcher.
Most accurate piracy meme I’ve ever seen
Piracy is service problem
