The Evolution of Streaming Services
Streaming started out as an affordable alternative to cable or other traditional paid broadcast services, but over the years, fragmentation, inflation, and perhaps even a touch of greed has made streaming no less expensive than what it supposedly replaced.
So it’s perfectly reasonable to look for cheaper alternatives, and that’s where free streaming services seem like a great solution. The thing is, even if you’re not paying money up front, you’re paying in other ways that may be more costly than simply putting up the cash,
Nothing Online is Ever Really Free
For some types of online service, there always seems to be a perception that it should be free. Whether it’s YouTube, email, or indeed a website with articles like this one. The thing is, it costs real money to create, host, and distribute content. If your audience isn’t willing or able to pay for the content directly, you need to find some way to pay for everything.
So what can you offer? Data, attention, and sometimes a lower-quality service. “Free” streaming services and even paid but ad-supported tiers of a service have to continuously monetize you to make a profit or just stay afloat.
Your Data is the Real Currency
So, how can data about you be worth real money? First, I have to make it clear that even paid premium services also collect your data and use it, but the incentives might be very different. A free service is incentivized to sell that information for real cash, while a premium service is incentivized to use its data for its own benefit. For example, Netflix might use the data it collects about your watching habits to decide which shows to license or how to attract and retain subscribers.
When your data is sold, it’s used for targeted advertising by sharing it with third parties. Using that data, and combining it with other sources of data, it’s possible to build a detailed personal profile of you that follows you around from one website to another.
Credit: Sydney Louw Butler / How-To Geek | GPT-4o
Ads Aren’t Just Annoying—They Reshape What You Watch
If you remember what it was like to watch movies or TV on broadcast services, you’d generally see three or four adverts in a typical episode or half-hour of a movie. Old shows still have cuts built-in for adverts, which becomes obvious when you watch them on an ad-free service today.
Cable and other broadcasters carefully balanced the advertising load with programming to prevent people from changing the channel. However, it seems that there’s a constant rate of inflation with advertising on free and ad-supported streaming services. It’s getting to the point where it feels like 50% of my time watching free streaming content is just advertising.
Not only does this mean your own time is being wasted (and it’s worth something!), but the content that keeps you watching even through all that advertising will be favored. Not content that is inherently better, more diverse, more useful, or more entertaining. It doesn’t matter why something keeps you watching through all the ads. It just matters that it does.
This is one reason free services are more likely to have lots of trashy clickbait-style reality TV content. It’s not just that this content is cheap to procure for the service, it’s that it’s toxic slop that hooks you in without providing any real value.
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The Quality Trade-Off: Bitrate, Features, and Ownership
I’ve already frequently bemoaned that even the best premium streaming service simply doesn’t offer audio and video quality that’s good enough for anyone who really cares about their entertainment. These are the worst ways to first experience a show or movie, and the whole streaming system is set up in a way to incentivize offering you the lowest quality they can get away with.
On a free service, that incentive is much stronger, as the cost of processing and transmitting video over the web becomes a key factor. So don’t be surprised if your free streaming service looks worse than VHS, even when the little number in the corner says you’re getting an HD stream.
Credit: Sydney Louw Butler/How-To Geek|GPT-4o
The Real Cost: Control, Choice, and Permanence
It’s already a problem that many of us have to rely on premium, paid streaming services to gain and maintain access to the shows and movies we love. However, at least when you’re the one paying directly for service, it’s in the interest of that service to listen to what you want and try to make you happy.
With a free service, it’s not about what makes you happy, but what’s affordable and how you can be monetized. So you have to trade your time and data for a service with less choice, less catalog stability, and a disinterest in your specific needs, because you are not actually the customer. You’re part of the product.
