It’s weird for me to be posting another football-related item, but here we are: I watched some of the football broadcast on Netflix today (Christmas Day) with the family. The quality seemed great, except one thing: the commercials. We were watching on the full-priced, normally-no-commercials plan, and yet there they were. People in the room made excuses like “this is probably more expensive for them”, or “the NFL probably already has deals in place and Netflix didn’t have a choice”, or something similar.
I remember when I had to pay higher cable rates to include expensive sports channels like ESPN, even though I didn’t watch them and certainly didn’t want to pay a premium for them. The apologists then went on about how most people did want them, so it was spread out for everyone to make it work.
Mark my words, this is how the enshittification of streaming—and Netflix in particular—progresses: people get used to commercials during sports broadcasts, and slowly, surely, the cancer spreads to the rest of the programming, until we’re watching commercials and paying top dollar for it.