For a moment, it seemed like the streaming apps were the things that could save us from the hegemony of cable TV—a system where you had to pay for a ton of stuff you didn’t want to watch so you could see the handful of things you were actually interested in.
Archived version: https://archive.ph/K4EIh
This line stands out to me:
I don’t think the writer intended this, but it sounds like it’s setting up the consumers vs. the artists divide. Like, we should have been thankful for what we had and the executives and shareholders, lacking any agency themselves, are now forced to pay less to artists because consumers don’t want to pay for content. No one wants to work and no one wants to pay for anything, or so they say. And, yet, the multi-billion dollar industries keep on keeping on.
And as more people refuse to pay and pirate, studios enlist copyright trolls to chase down piracy as an avenue of compensation. That is until a new game-changing service that disrupts the industry (the way Netflix first did by offering a single solution at a reasonable price), followed by copycat services fragmenting access to media at price increases, and the cycle repeats.
Such is the disgusting routine cycle of capitalism and greed.