It doesn't bother me if everyone subsidizes my entertainment or not.
For people like me, entertainment is fungible. I can enjoy myself watching football, playing a game from Steam, reading Mr. Money Moustache, streaming something from Netflix, or renting from RedBox. The game has changed. There is literally more high-quality entertainment than I have time to consume. Of course there is going to be downward pressure on prices.
If any of those things cost too much to be worth it (like non-local-market NFL games and non-event films in theaters), I'm going somewhere else with my money.
If the economics don't make sense for Hulu to entertain me for cheap (the number of commercials are pushing it already), no skin off my nose. There are probably some books I haven't gotten around to reading anyway.
So, for me, the supply of entertainment is high, my supply of attention and my budget for entertainment are both rapidly shrinking. So for me, and I suspect more people every year, paying a large monthly fee for cable (or even streaming services) is absurd.
A lot of entertainment for a lot of people ISN'T fungible.
The reason being social. If I wait a year or two for a show to appear on Netflix, my friends aren't talking about it, people aren't speculating about it... the buzz is gone. It's falling out of the zeitgeist.
It's true that if my only goal is to sit in front of a screen and amuse myself for a couple hours, it's very fungible. A $8/month netflix account + a $50/mo (or less) internet connection lets me do that.
But I want to be in tune with the culture. I want to be able to talk to my friends/family about that crazy play in the game on Sunday. I want to be able to read all the [spoiler alert] postings when they are current. I want to be able to play whatever game online with my friends while they are still interested in it.
I'm not sure if it's just my group of people or not but, since most of us are "cord cutters", we tend to discuss things that recently came available or had new seasons on Netflix/Hulu so it's new at that point in time to us. There's a few we miss out on (Breaking Bad, Game of Thrones) but the rest we're perfectly fine waiting for.
Well, social circles and taste are what they are, but this is certainly a long-tail situation.
If some entertainment for some people isn't fungible, then producers like HBO and ESPN will certainly have some sort of market capture. But their respective captures will probably overlap less and less as time goes on and interests diverge.
And that really doesn't detract from my point, which is that I don't require subsidized entertainment, and I believe fewer and fewer people do. Between that and the ever-increasing supply of top-notch entertainment, I don't see people affording relatively expensive cable packages, movie tickets, AAA games, and pay-per-view events as much.
Keep in mind that I'm talking about trends, not anecdotes, so there may be exceptions for certain periods of time, certain producers, and certain indrustries.
They do overlap less and less, and the big package model starts to seem less and less tenable.
That being said, it's still not fungible. I want to watch what my friends are watching - it's not at all the case that "any content will do". Maybe my group of friends watches Game of Thrones, maybe they only watch How I Met Your Mother, it doesn't matter.
Though one interesting thing that happened was the Netflix release of Breaking Bad saw a significant group of my friends suddenly watching it. If none of my friends have cable and everybody waits for the Netflix release, I will too.
As content creator Nina Paley put it "Attention is scarce. Information is not. Do the math."
I do take issue with the TFA, though, even if it is sarcastic: I don't think it's the sports fans who are getting screwed in cable deals; wasn't there an article a while back that described (or at least the comments did) in detail how all the non-sports fans are being forced to subsidize ESPN by not being allowed to opt out of it?
Comments
It doesn't bother me if everyone subsidizes my entertainment or not.
For people like me, entertainment is fungible. I can enjoy myself watching football, playing a game from Steam, reading Mr. Money Moustache, streaming something from Netflix, or renting from RedBox. The game has changed. There is literally more high-quality entertainment than I have time to consume. Of course there is going to be downward pressure on prices.
If any of those things cost too much to be worth it (like non-local-market NFL games and non-event films in theaters), I'm going somewhere else with my money.
If the economics don't make sense for Hulu to entertain me for cheap (the number of commercials are pushing it already), no skin off my nose. There are probably some books I haven't gotten around to reading anyway.
So, for me, the supply of entertainment is high, my supply of attention and my budget for entertainment are both rapidly shrinking. So for me, and I suspect more people every year, paying a large monthly fee for cable (or even streaming services) is absurd.
A lot of entertainment for a lot of people ISN'T fungible.
The reason being social. If I wait a year or two for a show to appear on Netflix, my friends aren't talking about it, people aren't speculating about it... the buzz is gone. It's falling out of the zeitgeist.
It's true that if my only goal is to sit in front of a screen and amuse myself for a couple hours, it's very fungible. A $8/month netflix account + a $50/mo (or less) internet connection lets me do that.
But I want to be in tune with the culture. I want to be able to talk to my friends/family about that crazy play in the game on Sunday. I want to be able to read all the [spoiler alert] postings when they are current. I want to be able to play whatever game online with my friends while they are still interested in it.
I'm not sure if it's just my group of people or not but, since most of us are "cord cutters", we tend to discuss things that recently came available or had new seasons on Netflix/Hulu so it's new at that point in time to us. There's a few we miss out on (Breaking Bad, Game of Thrones) but the rest we're perfectly fine waiting for.
It's funny in these discussions, and for me personally, there are three reasons to have cable: 1)Breaking Bad 2)Game of Thrones 3)Football
It's really no wonder that they hold on to Game of Thrones like it's their crown jewel. It is.
Well, social circles and taste are what they are, but this is certainly a long-tail situation.
If some entertainment for some people isn't fungible, then producers like HBO and ESPN will certainly have some sort of market capture. But their respective captures will probably overlap less and less as time goes on and interests diverge.
And that really doesn't detract from my point, which is that I don't require subsidized entertainment, and I believe fewer and fewer people do. Between that and the ever-increasing supply of top-notch entertainment, I don't see people affording relatively expensive cable packages, movie tickets, AAA games, and pay-per-view events as much.
Keep in mind that I'm talking about trends, not anecdotes, so there may be exceptions for certain periods of time, certain producers, and certain indrustries.
They do overlap less and less, and the big package model starts to seem less and less tenable.
That being said, it's still not fungible. I want to watch what my friends are watching - it's not at all the case that "any content will do". Maybe my group of friends watches Game of Thrones, maybe they only watch How I Met Your Mother, it doesn't matter.
Though one interesting thing that happened was the Netflix release of Breaking Bad saw a significant group of my friends suddenly watching it. If none of my friends have cable and everybody waits for the Netflix release, I will too.
As content creator Nina Paley put it "Attention is scarce. Information is not. Do the math."
I do take issue with the TFA, though, even if it is sarcastic: I don't think it's the sports fans who are getting screwed in cable deals; wasn't there an article a while back that described (or at least the comments did) in detail how all the non-sports fans are being forced to subsidize ESPN by not being allowed to opt out of it?