Occasionally, when people can’t find their way to streaming that content, Lazenby finds himself in a different role — the guy helping people figure it out.
“I’ve been asked a few times [where to find things],” said Lazenby, whose own viewing habits include a mix of streaming and physical media.
Whether or not you look to on-screen stars to answer your where-to-watch-it questions, it seems the more things you want to stream, the more services you need.
And while consumers may complain about increasing outlays for these services, industry watchers say they likely won’t be getting any cheaper.
That means the people at home must consider what they really want to watch and what they’re willing to forego.
“Consumers really have to decide where they spend their time and where they spend their money,” said Dan Rayburn, a streaming analyst who has followed the industry for years.
More choice, but more bills
The world of streaming is increasingly fragmented with consumers having many services to choose from — even though costs add up, when successive subscriptions are carried together.
Netflix began offering its streaming services to the Canadian market in 2010 — originally at a price of $7.99 per month. It has since drawn millions of subscribers, though today’s streaming market has a lot more players vying for customers. (Mike Cassese/Reuters)
For Sandy Reynolds, the realization she was paying roughly three times what she originally did for her Netflix subscription was part of a decision “to step back,” and assess what streaming services she really needed to be paying for.
“When they’re around $20 a month, you don’t think about it that much,” said Reynolds, noting the monthly bills can add up if you have a few subscriptions on the go, as she did.
Beyond the costs of subscribing, Reynolds said it’s also a question of the value that you get from these services.
“At the end of the day, how much time do you have to watch these services and how much do you need?”
However, Ricard Gil, an associate professor of business economics at the Smith School of Business at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ont., said that some consumers may also weigh the cost of these services against the alternative — such as the cost of going to the movies — and conclude they are not necessarily overpriced.
Streaming providers and media companies seem reluctant to share their subscriber numbers, though news reports and public statements give a partial glimpse of where some bigger players stand.
Netflix reported having 74.3 million paid memberships across the U.S. and Canada as of its most recent quarter. The California-based company declined to provide a Canada-only figure to CBC News. (David Ruvic/Reuters)
Amazon could presumably count a large number of Canadian streamers, as it provides Prime Video to anyone paying for broader customer membership privileges. A spokesperson, citing corporate policy, declined to share subscriber figures.
Crave, seen here being accessed on a phone in 2019, now counts 3.1 million subscribers, according to the latest quarterly report from BCE. (Graeme Roy/The Canadian Press)
CBC’s Gem counts 5.5 million downloads of its app, according to figures published online. The app is free to download and has several levels of membership — one of which carries a monthly fee. Chuck Thompson, the CBC’s head of public affairs, said in an email that CBC “doesn’t publicly share our subscriber numbers as we believe the most important metric is how many Canadians are accessing our service.”
The Corus-owned STACKTV has “been growing year over year” since its 2019 launch, said Vanessa Obeng, publicity manager for Corus Entertainment, without providing an overall total. In 2020, Corus said 200,000 subscribers had signed up for the service.
Higher content costs?
With so many companies fighting for customers, there’s a lot of money being thrown around to capture content and consumer loyalty.
Netflix says it will soon prevent customers from sharing accounts unless they pay an extra $8 per month. The streaming service says account sharing hurts its bottom line in an increasingly competitive market.
Queen’s University’s Gil said the acquisition of marquee content of this nature is something Netflix can bank on helping to both drive and maintain subscriber interest.
“This actually helps them with attracting new customers, but also with retention,” Gil said, noting the streaming giant could even have justified spending “much more money” to secure those sequels.
But more generally, streaming and media companies have faced rising costs for content, said Daniel Shear, an investment analyst who covers the media and telecom sectors for T. Rowe Price.
Some of those came from the challenges of trying to produce content during a pandemic, when TV and movie projects had to deal with COVID-19 concerns and related production delays.
But he said these companies are facing broader cost increases for content, including higher costs that result from the competition for key talent that creates that content.
Consolidation? Aggregation? Maybe not.
With so many players now in the streaming game, it raises the question of whether the industry will see a day where consumers will be able to see more with less effort.
Rayburn, the veteran streaming analyst, does not see mass aggregation happening — at least, not in a manner that would allow the viewing of most media across single platforms.
“Is there ever going to be a bundling where all these services get together in what we call aggregation? No, this is not going to happen,” said Rayburn, arguing it’s not beneficial for the streamers to do so.
Seeing large players consolidate their operations may also be unlikely due to the inherent complexities of combining organizations, the money involved and possible regulatory hurdles, said Queen’s University’s Gil.
He sees consolidation being something most likely to occur in the event that a particular platform shuts down, leaving “content to be bought that otherwise would not be exposed to customers.”
NEW YORK (AP) — Teen smoking hit an all-time low in the U.S. this year, part of a big drop in the youth use of tobacco overall, the government reported Thursday.
There was a 20% drop in the estimated number of middle and high school students who recently used at least one tobacco product, including cigarettes, electronic cigarettes, nicotine pouches and hookahs. The number went from 2.8 million last year to 2.25 million this year — the lowest since the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s key survey began in 1999.
“Reaching a 25-year low for youth tobacco product use is an extraordinary milestone for public health,” said Deirdre Lawrence Kittner, director of CDC’s Office on Smoking and Health, in a statement. However, “our mission is far from complete.”
A previously reported drop in vaping largely explains the overall decline in tobacco use from 10% to about 8% of students, health officials said.
The youth e-cigarette rate fell to under 6% this year, down from 7.7% last year — the lowest at any point in the last decade. E-cigarettes are the most commonly used tobacco products among teens, followed by nicotine pouches.
Use of other products has been dropping, too.
Twenty-five years ago, nearly 30% of high school students smoked. This year, it was just 1.7%, down from the 1.9%. That one-year decline is so small it is not considered statistically significant, but marks the lowest since the survey began 25 years ago. The middle school rate also is at its lowest mark.
Recent use of hookahs also dropped, from 1.1% to 0.7%.
The results come from an annual CDC survey, which included nearly 30,000 middle and high school students at 283 schools. The response rate this year was about 33%.
Officials attribute the declines to a number of measures, ranging from price increases and public health education campaigns to age restrictions and more aggressive enforcement against retailers and manufacturers selling products to kids.
Among high school students, use of any tobacco product dropped to 10%, from nearly 13% and e-cigarette use dipped under 8%, from 10%. But there was no change reported for middle school students, who less commonly vape or smoke or use other products,
Current use of tobacco fell among girls and Hispanic students, but rose among American Indian or Alaska Native students. And current use of nicotine pouches increased among white kids.
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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
WASHINGTON (AP) — An Alabama man was arrested Thursday for his alleged role in the January hack of a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission social media account that led the price of bitcoin to spike, the Justice Department said.
Eric Council Jr., 25, of Athens, is accused of helping to break into the SEC’s account on X, formerly known as Twitter, allowing the hackers to prematurely announce the approval of long-awaited bitcoin exchange-traded funds.
The price of bitcoin briefly spiked more than $1,000 after the post claimed “The SEC grants approval for #Bitcoin ETFs for listing on all registered national securities exchanges.”
But soon after the initial post appeared, SEC Chairman Gary Gensler said on his personal account that the SEC’s account was compromised. “The SEC has not approved the listing and trading of spot bitcoin exchange-traded products,” Gensler wrote, calling the post unauthorized without providing further explanation.
Authorities say Council carried out what’s known as a “SIM swap,” using a fake ID to impersonate someone with access to the SEC’s X account and convince a cellphone store to give him a SIM card linked to the person’s phone. Council was able to take over the person’s cellphone number and get access codes to the SEC’s X account, which he shared with others who broke into the account and sent the post, the Justice Department says.
Prosecutors say after Council returned the iPhone he used for the SIM swap, his online searches included: “What are the signs that you are under investigation by law enforcement or the FBI even if you have not been contacted by them.”
An email seeking comment was sent Thursday to an attorney for Council, who is charged in Washington’s federal court with conspiracy to commit aggravated identity theft and access device fraud.
The price of bitcoin swung from about $46,730 to just below $48,000 after the unauthorized post hit on Jan. 9 and then dropped to around $45,200 after the SEC’s denial. The SEC officially approved the first exchange-traded funds that hold bitcoin the following day.
Google, Meta and TikTok have removed social media accounts belonging to an industrial plant in Russia’s Tatarstan region aimed at recruiting young foreign women to make drones for Moscow’s war in Ukraine.
Posts on YouTube, Facebook, Instagram and TikTok were taken down following an investigation by The Associated Press published Oct. 10 that detailed working conditions in the drone factory in the Alabuga Special Economic Zone, which is under U.S. and British sanctions.
Videos and other posts on the social media platforms promised the young women, who are largely from Africa, a free plane ticket to Russia and a salary of more than $500 a month following their recruitment via the program called “Alabuga Start.”
But instead of a work-study program in areas like hospitality and catering, some of them said they learned only arriving in the Tatarstan region that they would be toiling in a factory to make weapons of war, assembling thousands of Iranian-designed attack drones to be launched into Ukraine.
In interviews with AP, some of the women who worked in the complex complained of long hours under constant surveillance, of broken promises about wages and areas of study, and of working with caustic chemicals that left their skin pockmarked and itching. AP did not identify them by name or nationality out of concern for their safety.
The tech companies also removed accounts for Alabuga Polytechnic, a vocational boarding school for Russians aged 16-18 and Central Asians aged 18-22 that bills its graduates as experts in drone production.
The accounts collectively had at least 158,344 followers while one page on TikTok had more than a million likes.
In a statement, YouTube said its parent company Google is committed to sanctions and trade compliance and “after review and consistent with our policies, we terminated channels associated with Alabuga Special Economic Zone.”
Meta said it removed accounts on Facebook and Instagram that “violate our policies.” The company said it was committed to complying with sanctions laws and said it recognized that human exploitation is a serious problem which required a multifaceted approach, including at Meta.
It said it had teams dedicated to anti-trafficking efforts and aimed to remove those seeking to abuse its platforms.
TikTok said it removed videos and accounts which violated its community guidelines, which state it does not allow content that is used for the recruitment of victims, coordination of their transport, and their exploitation using force, fraud, coercion, or deception.
The women aged 18-22 were recruited to fill an urgent labor shortage in wartime Russia. They are from places like Uganda, Rwanda, Kenya, South Sudan, Sierra Leone and Nigeria, as well as the South Asian country of Sri Lanka. The drive also is expanding to elsewhere in Asia as well as Latin America.
Accounts affiliated to Alabuga with tens of thousands of followers are still accessible on Telegram, which did not reply to a request for comment. The plant’s management also did not respond to AP.
The Alabuga Start recruiting drive used a robust social media campaign of slickly edited videos with upbeat music that show African women smiling while cleaning floors, wearing hard hats while directing cranes, and donning protective equipment to apply paint or chemicals.
Videos also showed them enjoying Tatarstan’s cultural sites or playing sports. None of the videos made it clear the women would be working in a drone manufacturing complex.
Online, Alabuga promoted visits to the industrial area by foreign dignitaries, including some from Brazil, Sri Lanka and Burkina Faso.
In a since-deleted Instagram post, a Turkish diplomat who visited the plant had compared Alabuga Polytechnic to colleges in Turkey and pronounced it “much more developed and high-tech.”
According to Russian investigative outlets Protokol and Razvorot, some pupils at Alabuga Polytechnic are as young as 15 and have complained of poor working conditions.
Videos previously on the platforms showed the vocational school students in team-building exercises such as “military-patriotic” paintball matches and recreating historic Soviet battles while wearing camouflage.
Last month, Alabuga Start said on Telegram its “audience has grown significantly!”
That could be due to its hiring of influencers, who promoted the site on TikTok and Instagram as an easy way for young women to make money after leaving school.
TikTok removed two videos promoting Alabuga after publication of the AP investigation.
Experts told AP that about 90% of the women recruited via the Alabuga Start program work in drone manufacturing.
