From the Editor’s Desk: Silos in the Stream, That is What We Are ⭐

Our kids were home over the holiday and our son Mark approached me on Thanksgiving morning with a familiar question: Did we have a way for him to watch the first of three football games that would air that day? We do not, we don’t pay for YouTube TV or any other live TV service. I will temporarily sign back up for the Christmas and New Years holidays, when the kids are here again for a longer time and there’s more of a need for that.

I suggested that he just go over to my sister’s house if he wanted to watch the game. We were all heading there later for Thanksgiving dinner anyway, and her husband and son, like my son, are sports fanatics. So it would be going all day. He decided not to bother, as it was the least important game of the day to him. And so I figured that was it.

But the next day, there was yet another football game on TV, it never ends, but this time my son had figured out a way to watch it: This game was on Amazon Prime, to which we subscribe. But once again, he approached me for help. He had the game going in the app on his phone, but he couldn’t figure out how to cast it to the TV in the living room.

As we walked up to the TV, my son observed that you’d have to spend $1000 a month to watch every game of every sport you liked, and while that’s an exaggeration to make the point, he’s right. Thanks to the enshittification of sports, games are no longer “on TV,” each can be on any of several networks or streaming services, and each comes with a price tag. Just finding where a game is played can be difficult. But then you have to pay for it too. This game, at least, was free (to him), as we pay for Prime.

Mark uses an iPhone and we have an Apple TV on our TV, so this would be easy, I figured. I mean, this is where Apple shines, right? But looking at the little football game unfolding on his iPhone, I could see that Amazon, which is still technically part of the Android ecosystem, has Google Cast capabilities. And while tapping that button in some apps does bring up AirPlay and other compatible speakers on Apple devices, it did not in this case.

No problem, it’s still an Apple device, I thought. And while I’m not exactly an Apple guy, I use these things enough to know to drag the Control Center down from the top right corner of his iPhone’s screen, locate the AirPlay, um, control, and then use that to find and select the Apple TV from the list of available speakers and TVs.

I will admit to feeling pretty good about myself in that brief moment. I was just fulfilling my fatherly duties and solving problems. But if you are an Apple guy (or gal), you may already know the hilarity of what then happened. The football game did not cast to the Apple TV. The sound did. So we could hear it coming out of the HomePod speakers attached to the Apple TV. But the game was still playing on Mark’s iPhone.

Last resort time. Mark and I both knew there was some way to mirror the iPhone screen on another Apple device but neither of us could remember the name of this feature. Screen … something. So we looked in Settings and came up empty before finally scrolling through the list of available controls for Control Center. Where we found it. It’s called Screen mirroring. How unexpected. Apple usually brands everything with a name as nonsensical as something you’d find at IKEA, but this one was so logical we didn’t even see it coming.

Screen mirroring “works” in the sense that Bluetooth “works.” Meaning, he was able to watch the game, so that was good. But it also took over his iPhone, essentially, so every text message, every sound, every whatever was happening on that phone was mirrored onto the screen. It’s why something like AirPlay exists, not just for lock-in but because it solves a problem. But then that’s why Amazon wasn’t using it, too. If there’s one thing Big Tech has taught us, it’s that interoperability is not part of their respective strategies.

Mark got lucky that day: He had experienced a rare example of overlapping enshittification, an enshittifying force multiplier in which big companies were not just at odds with the consumer but with each other. This is like two giant dinosaurs fighting each other to the death. You don’t want to get caught underfoot.

But why should Mark or any sports fan need to be lucky? The game was being broadcast on Prime Video, which we pay for as part of our Amazon Prime subscription. He was trying to watch it on his iPhone, also paid for, and his property. This is what these Big Tech walled gardens do, that’s why. We’re just collateral damage in their internecine ecosystem wars, watching helplessly as they take more from us and charge us more for it. If this market worked correctly, these companies would be serving our needs, not theirs.

The kids drove their separate ways after the holiday was over, both got home safely, and I put this minor technological issue behind me. Until Monday morning, that is, when I was going through my tech news feeds over coffee and saw a headline about Netflix quietly killing a feature that let customers cast its content from the Netflix app on their phone to a smart TV. (Laurent wrote about it that day as well.)

When it comes to enshittification, you have to understand intent. And liars always have an excuse at the ready. In this case, Netflix is presenting this change as customer-centric, as modern smart TVs have remote controls and that’s a much better experience than casting from a phone.

But I knew immediately why Netflix was really doing this. This company has grown at a heady clip, and it has saturated a market that is already saturated with competition, slowing that growth. And so it has followed the enshittification playbook to the letter, as if it were predicted by Nostradamus, by taking away features, inserting more and more ads, buying lower quality content wherever it can find it, and raising prices continuously. Netflix used to be the no-brainer in streaming video, the one service anyone sane would keep if they were forced to get rid of the rest. But not anymore. Today, we have a toxic relationship with Netflix. And it’s not us, it’s them.

And Netflix has determined that their customers are a big part of its problem. A key part of Netflix’s strategy these days is about choking off any way in which its customers can share its content with others. And that’s all this is: One person with a Netflix account and a phone could get together with friends at someone else’s house, and they could enjoy Netflix content even though the homeowner wasn’t paying for the service. This is “banality of evil” stuff, plain and simple.

I wasn’t done reading the headline about the Netflix casting restriction in my feed before I thought of several reasons why this feature needs to exist. The most obvious being that people travel and it doesn’t make sense to sign in with an online account on a TV in a hotel room, Airbnb or other vacation rental, or wherever else. And so many people rely on this functionality, and use it to access a service they pay more and more for each year. (This is similar to pairing your phone with the Bluetooth in some rental car and then forgetting to unpair it when you return the car. Wait until Netflix, or Spotify or Audible, or whatever, prevents that connectivity.)

Netflix also plays a role in the enshittification of sports noted above because they are one of the many entities vying to pay big bucks to broadcast live sporting events. This is another enshittification force multiplier. Netflix is really good at this game.

Granted, this one change, taken in isolation, is a small thing. But that’s the point, just as it’s part of the strategy: That’s how enshittification gets you. It’s not a sudden wave of terrible so shocking that we all start looking for alternatives, it’s tiny forays to see how much they can get away with. It’s death by a thousand cuts. And it just keeps happening. And adding up.

When will you be pushed one time too many? When do you just say no?