717
Netflix officially removes Basic - the cheapest ad-free tier
(m.gsmarena.com)
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
In their defense, they didn't fuck it up (at first), media publishers saw there was money in streaming and decided that they wanted a bigger slice of the pie. When everyone is trying to take the whole pie for themselves, no one ends up with any pie.
However pretty much every move they have done in the past 5 ish years has been fucking it up.
No they screwed the pooch hard in the beginning. They could have bought up rights to basically everything for pennies compared to what it is worth now because of the leverage they had before any of those media publishers had options elsewhere.
Netflix was literally in the position to tell them what the price was back then and now they have nothing to bargain with because the market is saturated.
That's basically what Netflix did in the beginning. The challenge for Netflix is that the media companies they were licensing content from weren't dumb, so the licensing agreements were time limited. The media companies caught up and built their own streaming platforms and now Netflix is at the receiving end of disintermediation.
But wouldn't them buying all the rights to "basically everything" incentivise them more to jack up prices and include ads since the user base has no legal alternatives ?
We will never know considering what they did instead.