Is the Stream Starting to Run Dry

Ten years ago, we felt like we pulled off the heist of the century. We had everything, But lately that golden feeling is starting a look a lot like rust. Let's talk about it this time on Wife's Thoughts Studios Production. Hey, everybody, welcome back to the podcast. Welcome to another episode of Weis's Thoughts. I'm Terry Weiss, your humble house, and I'm so glad you're here. And if you want to listen to more episodes, you can go to Weis's Thoughts dot com or Purplefitstudios dot com. If you wanna tweet at me on x it's at Terry Weiss and look for the YouTube channel. Just go to YouTube and search for Wife's Thoughts. All right, we're gonna get into something that is affecting nearly everyone and the free world, and especially in the United States of America. On this episode of the podcast, we're talking about the increasing subscription costs that keep going up, up, up, up up up up with no end in sight, sometimes more than once a year. This time on White's Thoughts, Hey, everybody, welcome to the podcast. Welcome to Wis's Thoughts. I am Terry Weiss and I am so glad you've decided to join me today for this episode of the podcast. And hey, if you enjoy the podcast, would you do me a do me as solid as the younger generation likes to say, do me a favor? Won't you please recommend us to your friends and leave us a rating and review on your favorite podcast provider or better yet, you can go to the Purple Pit Studio's website, click on the podcast's tab at the top of the page and rate there, select your podcast, and you can leave a review right on the website. Won't you please do that? Super So, how you doing. I hope everyone is well. I hope everyone is enjoying the spring here in the United States of America. Weather's getting a little turbulent, as it always does around springtime. But I hope everyone is happy, healthy, because this is the time of the year when write, mister Producer extraordinaire that the weather can be a little uncontrollable. Well, weather's uncontrollable anyway, but it can be a little you know, one day or sixty seventy degrees, next day you're twenty five or thirty. But you know what, you got people running out there. The sky is falling Oh, it's climate change. It's isn't it. Honestly, folks, it's been doing this ever since I was a little youngster. It happens around this time of the year. It does happen. Mother Nature will not be denied that little lady there, Mother Nature. She's gonna do what she want to do when she want to. As they say, so, let's get into the program, shall we. And I want to talk to you about today's topic. Okay, the golden era seemingly is over for streaming. Let that sink in. Yeah. I mean, honestly, ten years ago, we felt like we pulled off the heist of the century. We traded one hundred and twenty dollars cable bills, you know, for a seven ninety nine Netflix subscription. We had everything, no commercials, no schedules, just pure, high quality content on demand. It really was a golden era. But that feeling is starting to, like you know we talked about in the opening teas to look a lot like rust. I mean, if you look at your bank statement this month, you might notice something. Netflix here is going up, Disney Plus going up, Hulu Max, Spotify, Hbo going up, the ESPN plus going everything is going up. They're all creeping up. Some services are hiking prices once or even twice a year now. And if you want to keep the price you started with, well you have to sit through commercials again. Today on the podcast, I want to ask the hard questions. Is it time to ditch the streaming giants? I mean, is this convenience still worth the cost? Or are we being boiled like frogs in a digital pot. I'm gonna go with the ladder. We have cut ties with some streaming services in the White's household, we actually have. You just can't you can' can't keep up. You know, there has to be a breaking point. There has to be a point where you say, you know what enough is enough. I told this to the missus, you know, a few months ago. I said, we're you know, we're gonna have to start making some decisions here. I mean, streaming is not a necessity, okay, you know, having every streaming service under the sun, because you like two things on this streaming service and one thing on that, and one thing on this and one thing on that. Paying these monthly or yearly fees, it ain't worth it, you know. I mean, let's look at the numbers when Disney Plus launched back in twenty nineteen, not that long ago, folks. It was six ninety nine a month. Today today for the same ad free version, you're looking at nearly double that Netflix with their recent price increase that they're going to start pushing here this coming month, their premium tier is pushing twenty three dollars a month. Yeah, you heard right, twenty three dollars a month. Now, I know some of you are they're going to say, well, well, Terry, you know they've they got their football games on Christmas and now they got Baseball, and they got Monday Night Raw, and they got live programming. I don't care. I never asked them to go out and get that. Did you did you take a survey? I didn't. I mean you got NFL football. You know, one week it's on regular TV, next week it's on Amazon Prime, then it's on ESPN, then it's on now Netflix, then it's on Peacock. And these companies just think that they can bitch slap us around any way they feel. At some point, we as the consumer have to make a stand with our dollars in our pocketbooks and say, you know what, no, enough's enough, and believe me, they'll they'll listen because if enough people back out and they start getting losing that revenue stream, there's gonna be hard decisions made at those organizations because you know what, without money coming in, what are you gonna do? Right? You're gonna either have to change your behavior or you're gonna go out of business. I'm gonna probably err on the side if these companies would change their behavior. I mean, when you add up three or four services, you're right back to one hundred dollars cable bill. I mean minus the local channels and in many cases the local sports and local programming. But it's worse than cable because the content is fragmented. You need one service, like I said, for your prestige dramas, another for live sports, and a third just because your kids want to watch a specific cartoon. The industry calls this ARPU, and it stands for average revenue per user. Wall Street isn't satisfied with how many subscribers these companies have anymore. Nope, they want to know how much more blood they can squeeze from each stone. And then there's the purge. Have you noticed shows just disappearing to save on residuals and taxes. Services like Max and Disney Plus have been deleting original content entirely, so you're paying more money. Think about this, You're paying more money, more money for less library, less choice. It's a bold strategy, I admit, But is it a winning one for us, the consumers? Is it? How many times have you been frustrated trying to find a show you were watching. I'll give you a good one. For example, the HBO show Westworld was a pretty popular show, okay, had some stars in it, Anthony Hopkins the most notable, one of the most notable. Good luck trying to find it streaming because it's not anywhere to be found. HBO deleted it sometime ago, and no other streamer has picked it up now, you know. And they throw out they try to throw shade and say, well, it's the streaming rights, it's the you know, the residuals we have to pay, you know, the companies, and this and that not our problem, folks. Entertainment companies, you make this product, you should secure the rights properly and distribute it then to the consumer, to the end user. And just because you know, companies get a little greedy. It's not the end user's problem. Now, sure you could still watch the series. There's a couple of ways you can do it. You can go spend sixty seventy eighty dollars to try and buy it, you know, hopefully if you can buy it through digital content online and buy it and own it that way. But then you quote unquote air quote really don't own it because at any moment, if they decide to pull that license, you've just there goes your seventy bucks. Or you can spend the exuberant amount of money that I've seen onlines for this particular show, if you want to buy a hard copy version, i e. A Blu Ray disc box set, the DVD boxed set. I've seen some out there for as high as three to four hundred and even five hundred dollars for this box set on Blu Ray DVD. I don't know about you, but I don't love any particular show that much that I would pay five hundred dollars for a box set. I don't care if it had five hundred episodes. Now, and then the other method is you just pirate it. Now, I'm not condoning piracy, but you know that being said, you know some of these corporations wonder why they're content, and it gets pirated if you make it unaffordable for people, you kind of push them that way. Now you'll still have folks, and I'll still pirate it just for the sake of pirating it, you know. And it happens to software two and again. Let me be perfectly clear, I am not condoning piracy, but I certainly understand why many out there do it. 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Welcome back to the podcast. Welcome to White's thoughts. What happened there, mister producer? Extraordinary? We fall asleep in the booth or what. I know? It's one of those days, ain't it. Well, we don't pay it to fall asleep, we pay it to work a Welcome back to the podcast. Welcome to White's thoughts. I'm Terry Weiss, and we're talking about the golden age is streaming when we could all save money and find all kinds of good content at our fingertips online. And uh, well, that golden age, it looks like, is over. And we were talking about before the break there about again why I understand why some people choose to go about nefarious means, shall I say, for lack of a better term, to you know, satisfy their their streaming desire. And I get it, I certainly understand it. Again, not condoning it, but I certainly understand it, you know. And here's here's the question we really need to ask ourselves. And I want you to think about this too. Okay, even after this episode of the podcast is over, I want you to really think about this. Why don't we just quit? I mean, psychologically, these companies rely on subscription inertia. We sign up for one show, maybe it's Stranger Things or The Bear, and then we forget to cancel fifteen dollars here and ten dollars ten dollars. There feels smell, Let's be honest. It feels small enough to ignore, right, but collectively it's the leak in your kitchen. But there is a movement growing. People are returning to physical media. Hard drives are filling up again. Blu rays are becoming cool because a disc on your shelf is the only thing a CEO can't delete at three am to balance their spreadsheet. I mean, the boycott isn't necessarily about a mass of organized protest, okay, It's about personal streaming and what's called stream trimming. It's the realization that we don't need to be subscribed to everything all at once. I mean, think about it. You see these commercials on TV. I think one's called Rocket Money where it goes through and you know all these subscriptions you sign up for, whether it's entertainment streaming or these software packages. Remember the old days where you can buy software and own it for a few years, you know, three four, maybe five years, and they would, you know, release you some updates here and there. But here's here's what they get you on the software too. And I figured this out my friends. When you buy a piece of software and they want you to pay the air quotes subscription fee monthly or yearly, they slide it in under the scare tacked it up scare tactic of well, we constantly got to do security updates so your information doesn't get stolen and your computer doesn't get hacked. Guess what years ago people are on the internet. You never needed this before. While the attacks terrry have been more advanced and they have more anybody out there with a little bit of common sense and on some Windows machines some decent software to you know, prevent that antivirus software they call it, or just like I'd like to say, good old fashioned common sense. You know, if you get an email from a Nigerian print saying you're a long lost relative of wan Nah or something some other name you can't pronounce okay, and says you've just been left two billion dollars. Please give me your social Security number and your bank account number. Well, if you're a fool enough, if you're foolish enough to do that, well, actions have consequences, not this cut, not no time, not never, okay, But that's how they get you the scare. Remember when someone's trying to get their hand and it's an rush and I use a lot and my wife, you know, just says, why do you say that? Because everyone's trying to get their hand in your pocket and not for pleasurable ways and means. They're trying to get every last nickel they cannot, of you, squeeze every nickel they can, ring it dry. My advice, honestly, would be to try and get into get software that you can pay once and then use it for a while, and then if you want to upgrade when they release a new version, pay it again, buy it again if you want. But everything's pushed online, online, online, Well guess what. A lot of these online software things, a good majority of them once you stop paying for the subscription, you lose it. You lose access to everything currently and in the past. So you've just forked over all that money to rent software. It's like paying rent on a home. You never really own it. It's just someplace to park your keyster for a while. Now, if you got money falling out of your backside and buy pockets and your wallet, and you've just got all kinds of discretionary fund as well, bless your heart. Good for you. But a majority of us here folks nowadays don't have that kind of luxury. You know. I've heard people say it out and I've heard it out in public. Oh my god, I have to have Netflix. No you don't. Oh my god, I gotta have Hulu. I just gotta have Hulu. I gotta have Disney Plus. Oh I can't live without HBO Max. Yes you can. Twenty five years ago, you did. Twenty years ago, you did. I just can't. I just can't live without my subscription to you know, Adobe Audition. Now you can many machine come with basic DAWs in them, and there's a lot of free ones out there, and buy dows, I mean digital audio workstations. You know, you want to get a workstation and you want to use it at a semi pro level and you need it, okay. If you buy a Mac computer, you can get it comes with okay, many many features that are built in Now even Apples started to go to some subscription stuff, but you can get you can buy pro. You can buy Logic Pro still as a standalone for three hundred dollars and you keep getting certain amount updates. There's certain new things now with their online subscription which I will not be subscribing to. And I'm a fifteen plus, twenty plus year Apple user. I will not pay a subscription for that, you know, just like they've up up the updated pages which is their form form of Microsoft Office and things. I won't pay a subscription for stuff like that. I refuse to call me old fashioned, call me a but I won't pay for pages and this and that and the other. No, you've got my money. When I bought the computer, which I paid thousands of dollars for, okay, I paid the Apple tax, as a lot of people like to call it. You paid the Apple premium tax. Okay. And that the contract I entered into with Apple was these programs came with it and they are free, don't change it after the fact. You know, there's many free digital audio workstations out there. There's Audacity and a few others that are free. Granted they're not as feature rich. I mean, if you need something where you want, I'll tell you what I use, Okay, And I'm not in any way endorsed by these folks. There's a couple of them I use, but I'll give you the one I actually paid for, Reaper and what I love about Reaper. And you can look this up on YouTube or just do a simple Google search what a digital audio workstation? Because you can tailor that any way you want. You can make it look like whatever digital audio workstation you had before. Okay. You can do keyboard shortcuts, screen sets which sets the screens in a certain way. If you want to split screen or a quarter of the screen, you can have it. Do I mean you want to talk about a digital audio workstation that is updated almost bi weekly, it seems like. And when you buy Reaper, if you do under twenty thousand dollars of business in a year, you just buy the personal license and that's good for two full versions, which averages out to be maybe about three to every three to four years, it's only sixty bucks. Sixty bucks, that's it. And if you're a big business where you're making over twenty thousand plus dollars a year, it's two I believe it's was a two hundred mister producer or something like that, two hundred and two fifty. And that's good, like I said, for about three to four years. By the time they go through two full version upgrades of the SAW and then you just buy another one, or you can hang on to that one and that'll still work. They don't give you the proverbial screwing of saying, well, you know you bought it in the past, and now you're not going to buy it again, so we're going to cut off access to the one that doesn't work. That's what infuriates me. If you're paying a subscription for some type of software, when you stop paying for a subscription, then you should get that last version that you work that should be just working without any of the new updates. There should be some type of law preventing these companies from, you know, making their software that you paid for for the past two, four, six, eight years obsolete. When you decide, you know you can't afford five hundred dollars a year for a subscription for something that used to cost two hundred. Now over the past seven or eight years it's gone up to five hundred. That's just my opinion for what it might be worth. So I mean, is it time to boycott? Well, my thought is this. You don't have to quit the Internet, but you do have to quit being a passive customer. It's time to move to what I like to call tactical streaming. Now what it is, it's the one at a time rule. Pick one service, one service, watch your shows when the season ends, hit cancel, then move to the next one. Then resubscribe that resubscribe button. It's always going to be there. Audit your apps. If you haven't opened an app in thirty days, why are you even paying for it? Seriously, it's like buying a Maserati, putting it in the garage and never driving it. You know, try the return to free. Don't sleep on fast services. Free ad supported streaming TV like two B, t Ubi, Pluto and freeb have massive libraries and yes there are ads, but you know what the best thing about those the price is zero. You don't pay anything for them. And their content has been leveling up lately. I mean, if we keep paying, think about this, Think about this. If we keep paying these bi annual price hikes without flinching, they're just going to keep happening. The only language these platforms speak is churn rate when people leave, prices stabilize, or features return. We were promised a revolution. Instead we got Cable two point zero, just with a different plug. Maybe the boycott. The boycott isn't about ditching entertainment, but it's about reclaiming our choice. Don't let your credit card be on autopilot for a service that doesn't value your loyalty. Think about it. That's what's on my mind today. What about you? Are you ready to hit that cancel button? Or is the convenience still king? Thanks for listening to wife's thoughts. Catch you in the next one, Hey, thanks for listening to the program today. I truly appreciate each and every one of you out there, and remember to see a change in the world, you have to be the change in the world you want to see. It all starts with you, the person looking back at you in the mirror every morning. Remember to be kind to yourself, be kind to others. If you want to tweet at me on Twitter, it's at Terry Weiss. Stop by the website Weis's Thoughts dot com just to make sure you spell my name right. Wysee Wis's thoughts dot com, and hey, leave us upon positive rating and review on your favorite podcast provider. Won't you tell your friends, tell your family, tell your pets about White's Thoughts And I look forward to gathering yet again around the virtual campfire with you real soon. Take care,