If you grew up watching broadcast TV, you’re familiar with commercials - short videos trying to sell you something between your regularly scheduled programming. Whether you loved them or hated them, you were forced to sit through them - save for those who were able to expertly time their bathroom breaks while someone from the other room yelled, “It’s back on!”. They were inescapable. But then one day someone thought, what if you could watch your favourite shows WITHOUT the commercials? When Netflix shifted from mailing out DVDs to housing a variety of series and movies all in one convenient, online platform, they created a whole new way to consume content and completely changed the game. The dawn of streaming was upon us. Hundreds of movies and TV shows available to watch on-demand without the inconvenience of being interrupted by those pesky commercials, all for a monthly fee lower than what the cable companies were charging. For many, it was a dream come true, and more and more companies followed suit. Eventually, Netflix was met with some competition and streaming platforms became the way of the world. Cheaper than cable AND no commercials? It was almost too good to be true!
Cut to today. Streaming platforms are plentiful and are all competing to get users hooked on their original content, but creating this content is increasingly expensive. Their solution? Introduce ads into the bottom tier and upcharge users to escape to a tier that remains commercial-free.
Users are now faced with the decision to pay more to maintain the ad-free experience that they initially contracted for, or stay in their current tier and watch the ads to save money. This is essentially what author, blogger and journalist Cory Doctorow, an astute observer of network and systems behaviour, has coined as “enshittification.” (Watch his full lecture here.)
According to Doctorow,
“It’s my theory explaining how the internet was colonized by platforms, and why all those platforms are degrading so quickly and thoroughly, and why it matters - and what we can do about it. We’re all living through the enshittocene, a great enshittening, in which the services that matter to us, that we rely on, are turning into giant piles of shit. It’s frustrating. It’s demoralizing. It’s even terrifying.”
He goes on to describe the three-stage process leading to enshittification:
Stage One: Platforms are good to their users.
Stage Two: Platforms screw over their users to prioritize their business customers.
Stage Three: Platforms screw over everyone to take back value for themselves.
It’s hard to deny that this great enshittening is upon us. When it comes to streaming platforms, we’re solidly in stage two - our experience as users is seemingly suffering (being infiltrated with commercials) in favour of keeping business customers (advertisers) happy. First, they started cracking down on password sharing, then they started pushing us towards the ad-supported tiers by making it the most affordable option and increasing the prices of every other option. The revenue potential from advertisers is far greater than users alone, and at the end of the day, the goal of these services isn’t to provide the best product possible for its users, it’s to make money.
Now that they have the users AND the advertisers hooked, according to Doctorow, all that’s left is for them to withdraw surplus, leaving just enough residual value to keep end users and advertisers around, and giving every extractable penny back to the platform’s shareholders. In the case of Facebook, what this looked like was user feeds becoming diluted with ads and pay-to-boost publisher content, and increased prices for advertisers with low anti-fraud enforcement.Unfortunately, enshittification of companies (especially of tech companies), seems to be inevitable. To once again quote Doctorow,
“Tech companies, like all companies, have conflicting imperatives. On the one hand, they want to make money. On the other hand, making money involves hiring and motivating competent staff, and making products that customers want to buy. The more value a company permits its employees and customers to carve off, the less value it can give to its shareholders.”
Are streaming platforms like Netflix heading into what Doctorow calls terminal enshittification, when a platform turns into a pile of shit? What will it take for the masses to abandon them entirely? Are we on their hook for life?Only time will tell, but we can make some predictions on what the future holds for streaming. There have already been talks of merging certain platforms in the future as the space has become overly crowded and users have limits to the number of services to which they’re willing to subscribe. Whether this will increase or decrease subscription costs has yet to be determined, and it’s unclear as to how this will affect advertisers. We can likely expect to see even more elements of cable or traditional broadcast TV like pay-per-view for premium content and live-streamed sports and other events. And it seems safe to say that the commercials won’t be going anywhere anytime soon.
When the reputational cost to a client paying to be on an enshittified platform or service equals or outweighs the benefit it reaps, it’s perhaps time to have that client make some decisions.
Sources:
https://doctorow.medium.com/my-mcluhan-lecture-on-enshittification-ea343342b9bc
https://www.communication-generation.com/enshitification/
https://www.vox.com/2019/1/16/18185174/netflix-price-increase-subscription-chart-original-content-streaming
https://flixed.io/netflix-price-hikes
