If you hadn’t noticed, it’s not just good enough for a publicly traded company to provide an excellent, affordable product that people like. Wall Street demands improved quarterly returns at any cost, which, sooner or later, causes any successful company to begin cannibalizing itself to feed the “growth for growth’s sake” gods. Mergers, price hikes, offshored labor, whatever it takes.
While high level executives and some shareholders benefit from this enshittification, there’s just an endless list of casualties from this process, whether it’s product value, quality, customer satisfaction, customer support, employee pay, jobs, or even the long-term health of the company itself.
As the streaming market saturates and competition grows, enshittification has come to the streaming video sector in a big way. Products once heralded for low cost convenience now see relentless price hikes at the same time there’s been an erosion in quality and convenience. All to a backdrop of striking workers, many of whom say they were never paid a living wage during the sector’s heyday.
Netflix, as we’ve well documented, seems intent on charging more and more money for a lower quality product, while it demonizes the kind of password sharing it once praised for contributing to its success. Disney now seems intent on following suit on password crackdowns, as Hulu, Disney, and all the other streaming giants race each other to impose sometimes biannual price hikes.
On many fronts, streaming was a notable improvement to the traditional cable TV model, which mandated that consumers purchase massive bundles of largely unwatched channels. Or pay their cable company a ridiculous monthly fee to purchase a dusty old cable box. The problem: a lot of streaming’s novelty and innovation obfuscated many other long-percolating problems in the sector, including unchecked media consolidation and attacks on labor.
The Enshittification Of Streaming Accelerates With Price Hikes, More Password Sharing Crackdowns