TV - Everything Old is New Again
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Remember advertising on TV? That all went away with streaming, right?
Wrong.
Companies (like Netflix) are discovering that they make more money with cheaper (or free) plans than with more expensive ad-free plans.
Tubi, Pluto, etc are retiring us to the days of the 1950s, when you watched "what was on." The difference is that there's a lot more "on" than we had back when the Wright brothers were still bike-smiths.
https://www.theverge.com/2023/4/29/23702827/free-streaming-services-tubi-pluto-roku
In its place, there’s a new thing booming in streaming. Free ad-supported platforms are the fastest-growing part of the streaming business right now, and services like Tubi, Pluto, and The Roku Channel are starting to assert themselves as power players in their own right. Many of these platforms have been around for years, quietly amassing big content libraries and millions of users. And now, as users look for cheaper ways to get their entertainment and studios look for better ways to monetize, they’re starting to make more noise.
The future of TV is free, it has ads, and it involves a lot of channel surfing. It’s a lot like the TV business of old, really. That’s actually kind of the point.
When we talk about free streaming services, we’re really talking about two things. Both have silly acronyms. The first is FAST, which stands for Free Ad-Supported Streaming Television — these are programmed always-on streaming channels that run 24/7 and are roughly analogous to the broadcast channels you’re used to. The second is AVOD, or Advertising-Based Video On Demand, which refers to a library of content you can watch whenever you like. (Netflix and Max and the like are SVOD, Subscription Video On Demand.) For our purposes, we’re just going to combine FAST and AVOD into free streaming.
The appeal of free streaming is right there in the name: it’s free! An increasingly large percentage of streaming subscribers say they’re already spending more than they’d like to on their services, and a Deloitte survey last fall found that 44 percent of people had canceled at least one paid service in the last six months. Deloitte also found that 59 percent of users were happy to watch a few ads an hour in exchange for a cheaper, or even free, subscription.
That’s why you’re seeing more and more of the SVOD services start to dabble in ads, too. Netflix has already discovered that it makes more money per user on its ad-supported plan — $6.99 a month with a few ads an hour — than it does from pure subscriptions. Disney Plus has an ad-supported plan now, too. So does the new Max service, Peacock, and increasingly, the rest of the industry. Ads are the future of the entire streaming market, it appears.
Still, there’s something uniquely powerful about the truly free streaming service. Because the free streamers don’t have to try and convince you to part with $8 or $10 or even $20 every month, they’re free to think about their product differently. And in many cases, they land somewhere better. Companies like Tubi and Pluto make money every time you watch something, so they have only one job: get you to watch as many things as possible.
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They're greedy, though. Too many commercials.
One they didn't mention was FreeVee. IMDB had started an ad supported streaming service that Amazon bought and added more content. At least the commercials seem to be a bit less.
Another is YouTube. I think YT may have a couple of hundred (or more) movies streaming for free on its YouTube Movies channel. Not quite as many commercials as Tubi. And many of the individual channels on YT will have older content...But again, I've noticed more and longer ad breaks across the board.
