I don't see what would be wrong with a world where businesses just satisfied themselves with providing employees with a reasonable living, contributed to the communities they were in, and provided a good or service that was needed. Sitting under a tree and reading a book sounds better than watching the world burn in your name-brand clothes and 5 bedroom 2.5 bath house.

I mean, they don't HAVE to, but if they choose not to, the board of directors will push for a change in CSUITE personnel

If the board doesn't maximize profit, the shareholders can sue them, so functionally they do have to.

TBF small businesses do this too on average. There's some that don't, but then there's also some that straight up do crime, usually against employees.

To solve this, you either want a well-regulated market, or no market (however that would work).

I keep telling my friends this. It was incredibly simple to do. And you can start with only a couple smaller 1 or 4 TB drives and still end up starting a decent collection

These owners forgot that media is 100% discretionary spend AND has superior alternative that can be had close to free and a bit of labour....

I know owners thinks we are all brain dead and only able to consoom... Is we tho?

Pretty much the only one i'm still happy with is crunchyroll. They don't fuck around despite being basically the only game in town.

Netflix I pay for begrudgingly but if they raise the price substantially or add mandatory ads EVER they are gonna be gone. I'm already pissed they are axing Kaos, like so many other good shows before it.

Already axed prime last year due to them adding ads, I don't even miss the expedited delivery because all the big box stores deliver for free, some even same day, at equivalent prices.

Disney recently boned me out of account sharing, so my plex server is getting pimped out. $1000 buy gets you substantial NAS storage for 6-7 years. That's ~$14/mo if you replace nothing for 6 years. By the time drives start dying the sizes double and you can expand your raid as they die off one by one.

Anywho, Plex servers (and other FOSS alternatives now) usually have no problems transcoding and serving multiple 1080p and 4k streams concurrently. Plus you can download media for offline play within the respective server's app on all kinds of devices, and for plex the server owner doesn't need to license guests. That being said, non-plex options are what i'd go with because they are as good or better without any license cost. I just use plex because I bought a lifetime sub before the alternatives were mature. It's nice having a library that only grows, never shrinks. No temporary licenses or content runs so I can have a massive backlog and not worry if I don't get around to it for years. Just a lot of wins, no downsides that I know of.

Only use torrents if you know what you're doing. In the developed world, this usually ends with a very expensive letter in your mailbox.

TBH it has been working so far...

About once a year, we get a Netflix subscription for about two months. Catch up on everything we want to watch, then cancel it.

After 6 months, Netflix forgets about you. Does that mean we count as a new subscriber every year? How many people like us are inflating their new subscriber number?

Until it stops increasing profits.

I don't know about you but content has gotten better for me.

Ranma 1/2, Squid Games, Super Mario Bros Movie, new season of Arcane. I felt like every 1-2 months, there was always something interesting.

Also note that I don't pay for Netflix. I do own stock.

BUY MORE NETFLIX SUBSCRIPTIONS..

Just idea that they expect growth where there is none is strange. This business are at the limit and have no way to grow faster than economic situation of many people around the world gets better.

Sad part is fir them it is better to destroy service trying to increase growth in meaningless ways, than to just find a way to keep the business that is working.

Idea of infinite growth is ruining us.

They’ll call it a “fair use policy” and the exact limits are secret

*if you're paying for a TV license