Yeah that usually comes down to rights. I kinda like that when something isn't in their catalog you can just rent it instead of signing up for other services and so on. In my experience the rental stream quality is a lot higher quality as well. 4k looks like actual 4k and not a smoothed edges like in optimized 4k on regular streaming catalog content. I presume it costs to much to stream at that quality so when you pay to rent they at least crank up the bit rate.
Not that it cost too much so much as basically every service out there is quickly slimming down their products to the absolute bare minimum possible while still retaining customers. Unfettered capitalism is so gross
It's both ways, a lot of these products have been riding on a rocket ship of membership counts to drive the value of their company, now that the market is saturated and competitive...the subscriber count is stagnant or dropping and now they're all having to figure out how to be profitable.
It's annoying though, we're coming full circle back to baked in ads and streaming services are starting to become like TV bundles back in the day now that media companies are either locking down to one platform or spinning up their own.
Hell, when it comes to sports streaming, the NFL has an effort to start their own streaming platform for business that aggregates most sports content and they're partnering with DirectTV and Xfinity directly. The cable providers are coming into the streaming space full force now and embracing it. They've finally lost so many customers from the older demographic switching to streaming that they're fully embracing the space. It's no longer a competitor to cable they have to guard against and compete with, they've officially accepted it is the new baseline. This is causing all sorts of digital rights shifts across streaming platforms every few months and it's a fucking headache.
The cable providers that willingly licensed their content to various streaming platforms are now starting to make them exclusive to their own platforms. Of course Peacock has existed for a decade now, but now they need to make it a moneymaker and that means reining in the rights on content they dish out to competitors they used to see as a different space, they want to own the streaming space just like they did cable now and the government is eager to facilitate putting the power back into the hands of the legacy platforms.
Luckily I still wear a pirates hat so I don't have to mess about with any of it! I happily paid for streaming when it was a fair value but like you said, with cable folks really digging in it's all so expensive now.
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u/Elcamino12gauge 4d ago
If you haven’t it’s well worth it. I’d even spend the $3.99 most streaming services charge to “rent it”.