Gary SteelThe advent of picture-perfect streaming television seemed like a dream come true, until it didn’t. In the introduction to a series detailing the pros and cons of the streaming platforms available in NZ, GARY STEEL asks: What went wrong?
When Lightbox (now known as Neon) became the first ad-free streaming television service to launch in New Zealand in 2014, I just knew I was going to love the convenience, the freshness of the offerings and the sheer number of shows and films I could access for the fairly modest monthly charge.
Sure, there were glitches. The internet was achingly slow ADSL or broadband at best, as fibre was still about five years away, and quite often, a show would go all glitchy or start showing the episode you’d already just watched. By 2016, however, things were getting slicker, having been nudged along by American streamer Netflix, which arrived the year before with its advanced technology.
For a brief moment in time, streaming TV seemed like the answer to all my televisual dreams. I’d grown up watching the family’s fuzzy, interference-prone black and white TV back in the mid-‘60s. There was only one channel, and it was strictly appointment viewing: we had to watch what we got given. And despite the proliferation of ads, the government charged an annual fee for having a TV, even driving around in vans snooping on naughty TV owners who hadn’t paid their bill!
By my young adulthood, there were two channels (amazing!) and colour transmission had arrived, but the selections were still stiflingly narrow and often censored. With the advent of affordable video recorders, by the mid-‘80s, I had set up a regime. Refusing to accept appointment-viewing, I timed the VCR to record the programmes I wanted to see, and watched them when I wanted, fast-forwarding past the unwanted and obtrusive ads. It wasn’t perfect, but it was a solution. I ended up with boxes full of bulky VHS video cassettes (which I have lugged obsessively around from one residence to the next in the hope that one day I might find the time to digitise the worthy ones).
Then Sky came along in the ‘90s, and despite extortionate monthly prices, it became a huge hit, and the populace quickly adopted the service because it enabled a wide selection of programming and, of course, access to live sports events. Eventually, it became possible to record from Sky, too, although rain fade could botch transmission. The visual and audio quality wasn’t the best, though, so when the internet started to get good and go faster and wider, TV streaming services were an inevitability.
The first streamer locally was TVNZOnDemand, but it was so glitch-ridden that watching it could be an ordeal. Even after Netflix arrived in 2015, it felt like TVNZ wasn’t taking its streaming service seriously. I remember my way through a drama series where ads would break in unexpectedly, and then it wouldn’t go back to where the show had left off. That was a great way to build up a head of frustration and I swore I would never go back, free or not!
The first year or two of Netflix in NZ was a revelation. It worked perfectly most of the time, it was easy to navigate, it always remembered where you’d stopped the night before (or whenever) on a programme so you could take up exactly where you’d left off, and it had a seemingly limitless selection from which to choose. All for “free” if you paid your monthly subscription, which was a mere $9.99. The quality and ease of operation made it the perfect service. All you had to do was choose a show, and then you could be a total glutton, and even stay in all weekend to make your way through all the episodes (or seasons) of a favourite.
But all that changed around 2019, when the price went up to $11.99 for its bottom tier. Six years later, the same tier (standard) costs $17.99, while the top tier will set the viewer back an eye-watering $33.99 per month.
Since Netflix came to market, Lightbox (formerly owned by Spark) merged with Neon (which is owned by Sky) and, through its parent resources, has gained the rights to stream some of the best TV brands available, including HBO. This complicated things. HBO revolutionised television drama with shows like The Sopranos, and personally, I’d be sad not to have access to shows of that level of quality.
More recently, a raft of other streaming platforms became available here as well. These include big fish like Prime Video (owned by Amazon), Disney+, Apple+, along with comparatively small fry like AMC (a handy combo of BBC-type drama and horror)/Shudder (horror)/Acorn (BBC-type drama), Mubi (film festival), DocPlay (documentaries) and even more specialist services like anime outlet Crunchyroll. There are now also a growing number of free-with-ads services like Plex, Brollie and Tubi. And TVNZOnDemand has rebranded as TVNZ+, now offering a rather hefty catalogue of shows to watch and channels within channels.
It’s all a bit overwhelming, really… and yet underwhelming at the same time. In the early days of TV streaming, just about everything was available through either Netflix or Neon, but with Disney+ and Prime Video coming to New Zealand, many of the films and shows formerly available on those two services have gone west. The upshot of this is that to see all the shows and films you really want to see, you now have to subscribe to multiple streaming services, all of which have put their prices up way ahead of inflation over the past few years. I used to gag at the sky-high prices of Sky, but to subscribe to all the relevant streaming platforms, you’d be looking at a monthly sub total of at least $100, in addition to the obligatory all-you-can-eat internet deal to allow for all that HD or 4K televisual consumption.
In addition to that passion-killer is the fact that several of the streaming platforms have now added lower-cost tiers that take us back to the bad old days of appointment TV viewing: obligatory interruptions by ads. And in the case of Prime Video, many of the shows and films previously available now have to be purchased in addition to the monthly subscription fee. I think it’s a RORT, and I can see why so many lower-income families resort to illegal downloading.
Much has been written about the paltry sums that music streaming platforms pay back to musicians, but one thing they’ve done right is to make EVERYTHING available. The content of Spotify, Tidal, Qobuz (etc) is pretty much identical, which means that the essential differences between the platforms come down to factors like usability, whether they offer hi-res playback or have some video content or offer shared playlists. It’s a great pity that the TV streamers haven’t taken a leaf from the music streaming platforms, because ultimately, they’ll do themselves out of business. This idiotic situation is like a re-run of the moronic regional encoding that was forced on us in the DVD era, when naughty NZ/Australian consumers were forced to buy players that wouldn’t play DVDs from the US and some other territories. Ultimately, it’s going to do no one a favour.
There’s also so much being produced in terms of televisual entertainment that it’s almost impossible to even get to watch the most highly rated shows on each of the platforms, let alone check out some of the great stuff that inexplicably gets panned by critics or fans on aggregator sites like Rotten Tomatoes.
It’s a frustrating situation and personally, something of a dealbreaker. Why would I pay upwards of $100 a month just to get access to the TV shows I want to watch? We don’t even get to keep a download if we cancel a subscription, so it’s a view-only fee.
I totally get the appeal of streaming TV, and it beats having to go to the video rental store to thumb through a poor selection and choose one video/DVD for $5 to be watched that night and returned by a certain time the next day, or face a penalty fee. Streaming TV is a wonderful idea, but I think they’ve botched it.
Our family have cut right back on our streaming TV subs, because we just can’t afford it. The kids love Disney+, but they recently put their standard price up to $16.99, and their 4K offering is sky-high. I love the film festival streamer Mubi, but once again, $14.99 per month for a service I probably use once or twice a month, if that? It had to go. Prime Video? It was never a beacon of quality but had a deeper well of great old shows and films than Netflix, but now they’ve locked a lot of their offerings, we’re waving goodbye to that as well. Apple+ has a nicely curated selection, but for $14.99 per month, there’s just not enough there to justify the expense, so bye-bye.
Ultimately, the only three streaming services I couldn’t do without are Neon, Netflix and DocPlay. The documentary platform is cheap as chips and has a fantastic selection of quality docos. Neon might have a smaller overall selection than Netflix, but the ratio of quality to trash is much better. And I get Netflix through a discount from my internet provider, so it’s a no-brainer.
+ What do you think of streaming TV and how many of you are paying out vast sums to subscribe to the different services? Let us know in the comments or on Witchdoctor’s social media pages. This is the first in a series where we’ll outline the pros an cons of the various streaming television platforms available in NZ, so keep an eye out for those.
