Won’t Subscribe

> your post boils down to "we should be glad it isn't as bad as it used to be".

It doesn't. I responded to the complaint that there are now many competing subscription services.

> That doesn't at all imply that the current state is desirable.

I don't see any problem with there being multiple competing subscriptions, and you've not pointed any out. Your other complaints are valid but are on different topics.

> Depending on where you are globally, it might not even be possible to gain access if you subscribe to every available streaming service.

I wasn't commenting on this, but I agree it's long overdue to fix these region peculiarities. It's a market failure of a sort. An example from here in the UK: there's no way to buy episodes of The Simpsons on any streaming service.

> The license holder gets to choose whether I'm fed the "one episode a week" bullshit or whether I can watch episodes at my own leisure

That's not necessarily anti-consumer. For a show like Game of Thrones, releasing an episode a week is important to enable 'water-cooler conversations' about the show, which many viewers enjoy.

> whether to limit streaming to a limited time period or a limited subset of a series' seasons

Those limitations may be due to licensing/syndication agreements. The streaming provider might only have paid for a limited time window in which they're authorised to stream certain content. I don't think Netflix ever remove content that they own outright.

> obscuring quality ratings, limiting discoverability

These are both annoying, but streaming services don't have a monopoly on recommendations and reviews. Personally I put very little stock in their recommendations anyway, so I don't much care when they mess about with them.

> not allow viewing of shows because subtitles aren't yet available

Guessing here but that might be done in the name of inclusiveness. Adding subtitles improves disabled accessibility of the service. A strong policy of all shows must have subtitles might be a good thing; deaf users can then use the service in the knowledge that all available shows are accessible to them.

> We have the payment infrastructure to allow target audiences to access your content and pay a variable price based on what they watch.

The point of the subscription model is that you pay the same monthly rate no matter how much you watch. If you want to buy a la carte, you already have that option too. I don't see any problem here. If you mean to say you think the prices are too high, that's a different matter.

> rent-seeking, "engagement"-driven, anti-consumer walled gardens of crap.

It's not rent-seeking. Shows are costly to produce. (I happen to support radically reducing copyright durations, but that's not the same topic.)

I agree engagement-driven ecosystems can be very troublesome, but it's more an issue on YouTube (pushing people to watch politically toxic garbage), not so much with paid subscription services.

What do you mean by walled garden in this context?

News is informative in the best case, but often it’s useless noise, and at worse deceptive and manipulative. Netflix has documentaries and informative shows as well as entertainment (I suspect that watchers of The Patriot Act are generally well informed, for example). There’s more to life than the latest outrage.

Personally I’ve decided that books are the best way become more informed (just like when I was a child!); news and internet sources are largely clickbait and nonsense. You feel like you’re engaged and informed, but you’re not.

Why re-think what is already working? Because it will give us the ability to reach new customers?

That, unfortunately, doesn't add up. Many low-value customers is not what we need.

We need (and have) predictable revenue from stable base of customers we know and trust. (And who trust us.)

We need (and have) reliable sources for new long-term customers.

We don't need lots of (random) people paying us $1 or $2 every couple of months. Frankly, that sounds like an awful business to be in.

For one, there was no China section. Now it's a manor section. Another thing that old time readers would remember is the risque photos they used to have. It's a British journalism thing - or used to be.

It's not like this is being advertised when you are subscribing to some service. "Subscribe now and if you ever want to cancel, we'll make you pay! PS. We know where you live."

What could the consumer do apart from relying on word of mouth to avoid such services?