Howdy’s dated $3/month ad-free streaming service said to have 1M subscribers
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Recently cancelled Netflix after their last price increase. May also cancel Disney+ and HBO here soon, once the current series of shows we are interested in have run their course. Will also take a look at Howdy.
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Howdy, Tubi and Pluto are the three-legged stool I stomp on while holding that basket full of paid subscriptions. I don't care how limited their list is, if I watch one movie per month it paid for itself.
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Call me a pessimist but this just sounds like we're a few weeks away from introduction of Howdy's new ad-supported plan for $5/mo and a new ad-free "Doody" tier for $9/mo.
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It seems like a really nice business model. The B-tier picks of 19XX-2015 are better than the high-budget garbage that the current premium services are putting out, anyway.
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Sure, great now to capture mindshare and momentum but only a matter of time until they enshitify it.
Plus, Roku.
The guys who patented a plan to bake ads into your HDMI feed.
Plus, Roku.
The guys who patented a plan to bake ads into your HDMI feed.
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I think there is definitely a niche for a streaming service that basically is just a bucket of all of the IP whose rightsholders know isn't valuable enough to shuffle between competing platforms indefinitely.
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Raw Deal is such a great movie. "The system gave him a Raw Deal. No one give him a Raw Deal".
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That's literally ALL I could think while reading this...
"and how how long 'til theY ruin it by raising it to $5...then $7...and then $10."
the cable companies are licking their chops right now as the subscription services keep raking in the last of the good will they're receiving from subscribers. Well...at least, until they finally can't put up with the now regular, often anticipated price increases for no good reason other than to test the public's willingness to pay more money for nothing.
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Wouldn’t “Doody” be the, err… crappier tier?
I’ll show myself out…
It will be, because they'll call it ad-free while throwing in a few non-skipable "plugs".
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yeah no joke. I'm OK with older content, vs the pure dreck that seems to be drowning Netflix and Amazon.
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There is a 7-day free trial of Howdy available if you have Amazon Prime and you look to add it as a subscription channel.
I just signed up for the trial, since I figure if the selection is even decent-ish I don't mind $3 a month, that's getting water instead of soda with dinner. And unlike Tubi / Pluto, these won't be the censored versions of movies (Tubi and Pluto generally have the files of movies that don't sanitize the language too much but tend to blur nudity and cut around gore).
I just signed up for the trial, since I figure if the selection is even decent-ish I don't mind $3 a month, that's getting water instead of soda with dinner. And unlike Tubi / Pluto, these won't be the censored versions of movies (Tubi and Pluto generally have the files of movies that don't sanitize the language too much but tend to blur nudity and cut around gore).
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I’m old enough to remember when Netflix streaming came as a free afterthought to their disc service, and it had new episodes of current shows like 30 Rock the day after they aired. Truly a wild time!
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Have they actually done this? I use a a Roku stick with my dumb TV and have literally never seen an ad, presumably due to pfBlockerNG on my firewall.Sure, great now to capture mindshare and momentum but only a matter of time until they enshitify it.
Plus, Roku.
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Oh, those halcyon days of Netflix Instant Watch, and password sharing, and fussing with Silverlight plugins, and Watch Parties on Xbox 360, and next-day episodes, and the occasional streaming movie that had been sourced from a laserdisc so it was at like 540p, and weird library shit that you hadn't thought of in 20 years but suddenly remembered and loved, and a streaming library that wasn't Balkanized so horribly that even eastern European historians look at today's streaming landscape and say, "What the fuck?"
Yeah, those were the good days.
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You only dine out for dinner once a month?
I'm pleased that no one else gradually ratchet up prices after building a user base the way Netflix did. From free to 20 USD $ / month.
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I'm single, I live alone (unless you count my cats) and I make $17 an hour in my current job.
So, yeah, it's exceedingly rare for me to go out to eat.
They didn't need to ratchet up prices, because Netflix already set the market. Disney+, HBO Max, et al., all launched at or above what Netflix was charging at the moment.
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This will be the future sans real-time Sports and Reality TV. Just like the Video store, you pay $1 for the older releases. With not all that much amazing content coming out, folks will just want to kick back and watch /something/ ... Blockbuster_v2
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1M x $3 x 12 = not a lot of money left, when you remove infrastructure costs, software costs, and licenses.
How many people are working for those guys ?
How many people are working for those guys ?
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I'd pay good money to have a service that had ALL movies that were, say, 10+ years old. I feel like every time I get a hankering to watch some movie from years past, I can't find it on any service. Lots of places to buy, but as a rule, I don't "buy" things I can't "own" (ie, remove DRM and store locally).
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It's an imprint of Roku, which had its first profitable year last year and is due to announce its Q1 earnings any day now.
An additional $36 million a year in incremental revenue (minus whatever cut they give to Amazon for being a Prime Channel) is nothing to sneeze at.
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The best part was that to watch streaming on PS3 you had to use a special Blu-ray disc.
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Roku is so frustrating... I have a Roku still and genuinely prefer it over my Apple TV (touch pad controllers can go die in a fire...), BUT the huge caveat there is that I block all of the Roku shit with a pihole and VPN. If I didn't have those, I imagine I would have thrown it out years ago.Sure, great now to capture mindshare and momentum but only a matter of time until they enshitify it.
Plus, Roku.
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I find it very funny when offers like this net out to ridiculously low benefits, especially when their side of the offer is recurring.
I know it's more to push people who are already tempted into actually signing up but it always makes me think like this:
"How would you like this service for $3/mo?"
Hmm... I don't know that it's worth it.
"What if we gave you a week for free?"
That's a 75 cents value, I can't pass that up, of course I'm in!!!
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More like:
"What if we gave you a week for free?"
Well, I have this Friday off and I'll be looking for stuff to watch after work on Saturday and Sunday and Monday night, so that's more than enough time for me to evaluate if the service has enough on it for it to be worth my dollars, so I'm in.
I believe the Wii required one, too.
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It might just be a hangover from an earlier draft, but it felt strange that Free Ad Supposed TV got the acronym FAST, despite never being said again in the article.
Nit-picking aside, I reckon the high subscriber count has a lot to do with the low price. Low enough to forget about and not bother cancelling.
Nit-picking aside, I reckon the high subscriber count has a lot to do with the low price. Low enough to forget about and not bother cancelling.
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Those that think they'll just raise the monthly fee need to think more insidious. They don't have buy in if that's all they do. First they'll start adding more recent movies in the recommended feed not clearly marked for purchase at 'low prices'. Then after a planned number of people get large enough libraries they stop all investment in improving the platform. Only then do they get to the juicy bit of jacking up the subscription rates.
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Prices will have to rise on everything eventually, because inflation is an actual fucking thing and it's getting really old that people pretend it isn't.
That being said, I'd love for a streaming service to say "we will raise or lower our prices every year according to inflation -- but no more than that". Then again, that may be far too complicated for most to digest or calculate.
That being said, I'd love for a streaming service to say "we will raise or lower our prices every year according to inflation -- but no more than that". Then again, that may be far too complicated for most to digest or calculate.
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So would I, and I'd pay for that service forever (so long as it remained ad-free). By definition, that would have a lot more great films than a service that concentrates of recent releases, because it would have a lot more films, period! I'd rather watch something wonderful from 1930 than something terrible from 2026.
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With the massive caveat that they have ads, Youtube has quite the selection of free movies. For your average Arsian this is probably not an issue. But the 2nd caveat is that many are only available in 480p. Fine for 2nd-monitor type watching, not so much on a TV.
So with that preamble, Howdy sounds like a really solid deal. I haven't heard of it since we replaced our Roku TV and now I have a Shield, but it might be worth a shot. But like others have pointed out, it won't be long til $3 is $5, at least. No company can avoid turning the screws after they get enough buy-in.
So with that preamble, Howdy sounds like a really solid deal. I haven't heard of it since we replaced our Roku TV and now I have a Shield, but it might be worth a shot. But like others have pointed out, it won't be long til $3 is $5, at least. No company can avoid turning the screws after they get enough buy-in.
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Yeah, not gonna happen. We love watching obscure (and often really, really bad) movies from 1980-2010, and a LOT of them are, if at all, usually only available on Prime for $3.99 TO RENT. That's how utterly insane the landscape is right now. They will, without blinking, ask you for $4 for 24 hours of access to a 1989 B-movie.
And then they get really, really surprised when people start pirating the absolute snot out of everything and jacking it on a local NAS.
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