Ahh, I thought you were talking about that black friday deal for a year of Hulu+ads for $10. Sorry for interjecting.
If $10/year is overpriced, $5/month with ads is obscenely so.
A meta thread for video streaming services - Netflix, Hulu, Disney, HBO, Warner, Prime, AppleTV, etc
Here’s the deal in question now: Looks like it’s $25 now.
However, note that it is 15 months for $25 WITH NO ADs. CBS All Access aka Paramount +.
@ArmandoPenblade, I can’t remember if you got that or not. If not, jump on it!
I guess I got lucky to get in for $10 for the 15th months!
Now I just need a good deal for HULU without ads. They’ve got a bunch of stuff coming out in March/April/May that I want to watch.
Just signed up. If you go to cancel your Sportsline sub they’ll throw in another 6 months for free extending it out to August 25th. It’s not $10 but I can live with $1.39/mo.
Ok I started binging El Cid (Amazon).
The budget seems pretty good. The battles are very large, lots of people and horses! They look better than shaky-cam dark nonsense in game of thrones or the dumb ass tactics in Last Kingdom.
The politics in the first episode are too difficult to parse, my suggestion is ignore them, the only thing that matters gets explained later. I was struggling at first and wanted to look for a map to see all the various factions. There’s even throwaway mentions of viking incursions, and Normans.
edit: Ok ! Finished! This is totally the Crusader Kings 2 1066 starting date.
Just saw that Sony is getting out of the on-demand video sales and rentals game due to the consumer preference for streaming services.
So this is effectively the announcement that an ad-supported tier for HBO Max is coming. I’m going to guess $8.99/month.
I wonder how they’d do ads for movies? Just at the beginning?
I’d say “so maybe you could charge less just overall since literally your only competitor that’s priced anywhere near you is Netflix?” but then again they have way more content I care about than anyone else except Netflix.
It’s also interesting because they’re one of the few services that have a lot of content that was not designed for ads. The Sopranos and most other HBO shows, for example, were not written with ad-break style segments. David Chase even said he could have easily written for ad-breaks, he knows how to write for television that way, and that it wouldn’t have changed the show all that much.
The ad-breaks in Hulu are never quite right. I mean I don’t mind commercials for things that clearly were designed for it. I spent years dealing with commercials but it’s obnoxious with the way the apps handle it.
Same, but remove “except Netflix” from that last sentence. At the rate they’re going I’m liable to keep HBO year-round, which would be a first outside of Amazon Prime (which I keep for the shipping, the streaming’s just a nice bonus). I’m perfectly content to pay a little more to avoid ads, though.
A lot of HBO shows that are licensed in other countries were shown with ads.
Brits are often surprised that HBO doesn’t have commercials. They watch HBO shows with commercials on Sky Atlantic and such.
Over 100 million subscribers to Disney+. It feels like they’re on to something.
I wonder if this is the fastest growth for a subscription service of any kind.
Oh, and Netflix, Disney thinks your one new movie a week promise is amateur hour. How about 100 new titles a year?
Chapek said—as the company has previously—that this includes a goal of more than 100 new titles on the platform each year from Disney+ properties, including Marvel, Star Wars, and National Geographic.
I wonder what the breakdown is of full paid vs discounted vs free. They gave away a ton of free time up front as well as the 3 year deal and bundles. And when the free trials or discounts dry up they’re going to lose some of that base. Not that the service or content are bad, from what I’ve seen.
Being only $7/mo helps too. Just saw that’ll be going up to $8/mo in a couple weeks - which is still comparatively a bargain compared to the other streamers.
Titles presumably includes TV shows, and Netflix is also releasing a lot of those. I’d be very surprised if Netflix were doing less than 100 titles a year and I suspect more.
In this game it’s all about getting as many subscribers as possible. Especially more than your competitors, because Wall Street is going to punish the small frys first. Once they get whittled down, you can get their content and increase your mass.
I got an email from South Park studios that there’s a new episode on Comedy Central tonight. I wonder what that means for streaming?
It’s seems like HBO Max currently has their whole back catalog of South Park episodes. But Paramount+ is usually the one that has the Comedy Central shows now. I wonder which one will get South Park’s new episodes.
I think the deal HBO struck predated the CBS Viacom merger, so likely only on HBO for the duration of that contract and not after.
Netflix’s 2019 output was 370 titles
Edit: 2020 was about the same (no growth in production due to the pandemic)
Ad-supported HBO Max makes a lot of sense. It actually doesn’t matter how many ads they run-- it could be 2 ads before a 90 minute movie and it would still make sense.
HBO Max’s problem is it costs too much. It can’t cost less than HBO from your cable company. This is a solution to that.