Aardvark Daily

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Is the end of online video nigh?

So much change in such little time.

That's the sentiment right now regarding the online world.

For decades, life online has been pretty consistent. We've had email, the world wide web, instant messaging along with access to music and video content.

The ubiquity of connectivity has slowly eroded the strengths of traditional entertainment technologies such as radio, television, DVDs etc., replacing them with a much simpler delivery mechanism that encompasses the huge array of options now available.

We've seen radio and TV broadcasting wane in popularity and profitability as well as the demise of the once highly lucrative VHS/DVD rental libraries that every town had one of two of.

Even the once popular subscription TV services, delivered by satellite or cable, have withered and all-but-died.

Who signs up for SkyTV's satellite service these days? Who can afford it?

I recall that when I first subscribed to Sky TV it cost around $75 a month for a tiny handful of channels, few of which contained anything really worth watching. However, outside of the video rentalshop it was all there was and since I lived half an hour's drive from town it was cheaper than spending all that petrol just to get a night's entertainment.

Then came streaming video on demand (VOD) services such as Netflix, Prime Video, Neon, Disney+, YouTube and a raft of others.

Suddenly huge libraries of titles, old and new, were avaiable for less than the price of a few barrista-made coffees in a month.

I signed up for Netflix and Prime Video, the latter being a real steal at just $8 a month.

Life was good and although I don't watch much of the content on these services, the wife enjoys spending a few hours each evening in front of the living room TV.

It was great, for a tiny fraction the cost of more traditional subscription TV, we were getting access to a huge and regularly updated library of video content that didn't even disappear whenever there was a torrential downpour. Even better, this was ad-free viewing (well except for YouTube).

Like all good things, this utopia couldn't last forever.

In recent years we've seen all the VOD companies slowly winding up their prices and/or reducing the signal to noise ratio of their offerings.

Not only are we now paying more for the basic service but they've also started throwing advertising in, unless you pay even more again.

Just to piss me off even further, Prime Video's main page is now more of an advertisement for a raft of other streaming subscriptions and offers to rent you videos that aren't part of the subscription you're already paying.

Piss off!

We're rapidly headed back to the days where Sky TV was the only option if you wanted a subscription-based TV service. The only benefit these other streaming services now offer is the "on demand" (rather than linear) nature of their offerings.

Price-wise, if I was still paying for these streaming services, I'd be right backwhere I was when I was being extorted every month by Sky TV, paying a fortune for increasingly crappy service with a rapidly deteriorating signal-to-noise ratio.

To be fair, none of this really affects me but the old sheila called me into the living room the other evening and asked "what's this?".

On the screen was a notice from Prime Video that we would now start seeing ads on their service unless we went online and "upgraded" to the ad-free plan.

Hang on, we were already on the "ad free" plan and had been for several years. Why would I need to upgrade and pay more for something I had already purchased?

Big mistake Prime Video!

Goodbye Prime Video!

Any company that automatically downgrades the service I'm paying for and then expects me to agree to pay more just to get what I was already getting can take a hike. This, combined with the fact that they're now more a storefront flogging video rental and other subscription services has completely turned me off their service.

So now the old sheila will have to make do with Netflix and YouTube but YouTube's ever-increasing ad frequency and duration is souring us to that too. Sure, I could pay for YouTube Premium and lord knows they nag us about doing so with monotonous regularity but algorithmic changes on that platform are ruining its attractiveness as well.

I'm about to set up a PC here to finish ripping our collection of hundreds of DVDs to hard drive so that I can use Kodi to access our entire library of movie titles. Even if we started today, we'd never be able to watch them all before we shuffle our mortal coil so I think we'll likely be able to kick all these VOD services to the curb once that's done.

Why do companies have to ruin everything that's good? Greed is alive and well, still wrecking the nice things we have on a daily basis I guess.

Carpe Diem folks!

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