In one of my classes this week, we were required to watch a movie as part of an assignment, and in the middle of one of the most tense parts of the film, an advertisement popped up on the screen. My professor sighed, stating that she indeed pays for the streaming service that we were using, yet she is still hit with advertisements in the middle of movies and television.
It felt strange to go back to watching a serious film after seeing advertisements for feminine hygiene products or insurance. There is a level of world building needed to suck an audience into a movie, and that is ruined if the audience is subjected to random interruptions at the worst-placed times to sell products to users. The entire class would often still be laughing at a joke made in an ad when the film would return to its grim subject material, making it hard for all of us to focus.
The inclusion of advertisements in paid streaming services is extremely unfair. Users are spending their hard-earned money to have access to their favorite media, and they are punished for not being able to afford a premium subscription by paying for advertisements. Ultimately, having another paywall behind a platform that is already paid for is discriminatory to people who may not be able to afford $17 dollars a month for a service on top of their other bills, or those who have multiple streaming services.
Everyone that I know feels like they must have streaming services to function as a member of society, including me. I am an avid sports viewer, including WWE, which has its flagship show, Monday Night Raw, exclusively streamed on the platform. I recently had to purchase my own Netflix subscription to sidestep Netflix’s newly implemented household password rule. For those not aware, Netflix will sign you out of your family’s Netflix account if you are not signed into the app on your household’s Wi-Fi for at least two weeks. This made watching WWE extremely difficult for me during my freshman year, as I had to keep sidestepping the password block until I couldn’t access Netflix anymore.
Now I have my own account, and I pay for the subscription on my own, but I am still subjected to advertisements. During Netflix’s live broadcasts of Monday Night Raw, even though all viewers must pay for Netflix to watch the show, we still are bombarded with at least four minutes of advertisements every half hour. If the program was still broadcast on cable television, this would not be such a big deal, but now everyone must pay for the show and still are forced to watch ads.
This issue is not exclusive to Netflix. Every major streaming service like Hulu, Paramount+, Disney+ and HBO Max have subscriptions you can purchase, but all but the top tiers will include advertisements in your programming. The prices have become steeper in recent years as well, making it harder for customers to afford no advertisements.
Ultimately, the decision to put advertisements on streaming services comes down to one thing- corporate greed. When streaming started, all services had one price that gave you access to all the platforms had to offer with no interruptions. Since the explosion of the streaming wars, however, times have changed. Every service charges more than the one that came before it, and they hardly have anything to show for it.
Ultimately, streaming should go back to the way it was, while it never will. Since streaming is such a big part of pop culture in our modern age, it would make sense to have everything accessible to the public, but money is money and so is our time and attention. It seems like until the end of time we will be seeing advertisements, whether it be in the form of product placement or in the form of interruptions of our favorite media.
