Now that subscriber growth has slowed, streaming TV giants have taken the predictable turn of making their services shittier and more expensive to deliver Wall Street (impossibly) unlimited quarterly revenue growth.
That means higher prices, annoying new surcharges, greater restrictions, more layoffs, more cut corners, worse customer service, and a lot of pointless mergers designed specifically to goose stock valuations and provide big fat tax breaks.
The king of said “growth for growth’s sake” consolidation was of course the AT&T–>Warner Brothers–>Discovery series of mergers, which resulted in no limit of brand degradation, layoffs, and absolute chaos in the empty pursuit of unlimited scale (aka “enshittification”). The dumb merger already killed Mad Magazine, HBO, and countless television shows, driving millions of subscribers to the exits.
But Max executives clearly aren’t done with ham-fisted efforts to make stocks go up. This week Max executives decided that they’d make John Oliver’s Last Week Tonight harder to watch by no longer making show clips available on YouTube the next day:
The goal was to apparently drive subscribers to the Max streaming service. But because they’re apparently too cheap to pay residuals and hosting costs, Max also no longer lets users watch old seasons of the show, meaning that only the last two seasons of the show are available. In short: the quest for unrealistic quarterly growth sooner or later creates perverse incentives to cannibalize brand quality.
Again, this is all par for the course for an industry that learned absolutely nothing from the scale-chasing disaster that ultimately was traditional cable TV. They’re going to continue on this path until they see a dramatic subscriber exodus to cheap or free services (whether that’s TikTok and Twitch or, more obviously, piracy), at which point they’ll blame everything but themselves (VPNs! China!) for the self-inflicted wound.
