I'm frankly annoyed that so many people call this a problem. Sure, I understand the surface level inconvenience of this fragmentation, but I think we're getting a little spoiled here.
Dial back all these streaming services and you'd have less content back then. And virtually no say in what to watch when, plus shitty ads. To watch anything specific, you'd have to go to the movies or go for a rental.
Now you have a huge amount of freedom of choice, with no ads, much more convenience, at fairly reasonable prices. The exceptions you mentioned are just that, exceptions. So that's my first point, we seem to be perpetually unhappy, no matter how rich an offering is.
Second, I consider this semi-fragmented landscape a solution, it's healthy. Services are fiercely competing with each other for your eye balls. That means they're in a race to produce good content and it suppresses prices. This is actually happening. When Netflix dominated, they had advanced plans for major price hikes. The arrival of Disney+ stopped this in its tracks. Do you really want this industry to be consolidated into 1-2 players? With a price monopoly? With producers being squeezed, creatively constrained? Just so you have to press one less button?
Third, the idea that you could combine the production value of hundreds of billions of $ worth of material into a single affordable streaming service for the masses is a delusion. The math simply doesn't add up.
Fourth, most people just vegetate after work for an hour or two. They need something watchable. They don't need 17 subscriptions, it's not a common need.
I also do not understand why people complain about having the choice to not pay for things they do not want to watch.
I can turn on the TV, press the microphone button, say the name of the media I want to watch, and usually a screen pops up letting me know if I have already paid for it, and if not, how much it will cost. And a couple buttons later, I can be watching it, or doing something else with my time.
Much more convenient than watching media in the 1990s and 2000s.
> I also do not understand why people complain about having the choice to not pay for things they do not want to watch.
This description works if you skip straight from the age of cable packages to the current day. That's missing a lot though. From the point of view of someone who hasn't made a quantum leap forward, publisher specific streaming services drove adoption by taking things away from viewers.
If I used to be able to watch something on Netflix, but now I can't because $company pulled all their content to their own streaming service, there's no world in which that's a win for me.
100 companies producing tons of filler content to try to make their own $10/mo service valuable isn't a good trade off for "you need a new paid app to watch the thing you used to watch in this app you already have."
The Netflix you want was never sustainable. Shows were heavily subsidized by cable before. Once people started moving to streaming, prices followed. Look at how Netflix continues to raise prices even with less content they have to pay for from others. Because now they're actually paying for production of content, and that costs more than a $8/mo subscription can afford.
Exactly. I think the unrealistic expectation regarding media accessibility comes from many places but one I want to explicitly mention: torrents.
I'm from the Netherlands where for about 20 years, it wasn't even illegal (today it is). We'd pay a "media tax" on empty discs (like 0.10$) and this would clear you to make "home copies". Of anything, without paying for the original.
Anyway, this legal anomaly has created a culture where media that costs a shit ton to produce (movies, series) is valued at: nothing. zero. Not by some dark tech-savvy internet lord, it's valued at zero by society as whole. People are even proud to showcase the many ways in which they dodge paying for content.
Now people project this learned behavior (have it all for near-zero costs) on the entire streaming market.
The work of many people on this forum can be infinitely copied and resold. Are they being paid inordinate amounts? If so, how much should they be getting paid?
>but art should be for everybody
A shorter copyright term accomplishes this, while also leaving intact the incentive system to create content that can be infinitely copied and resold.
I think what everyone wanted and briefly had, was a few streaming services for basically all content, without ads.
Before the more recent Cambrian explosion, it was just Netflix, HBO (via HBO Now), Hulu, and Showtime. Yes, there are some smaller players too, but these were the big ones.
Everything else was licensed out (typically to Netflix) and in some instances was perhaps only available on cable. People got alot of content for sub 60 USD, for the most part.
Then everyone started clawing back their catalogues for their own streaming services. I think the 2017-2019 period was the "golden age" of Netflix streaming in terms of sheer good content availability, and people really liked it.
At least Apple TV+ is original content and not re-selling the rights that used to be on a different platform. They're a genuinely new entrant into the space.
Netflix had a good run. Massive investments in content, no competition, maximizing the network effect by tolerating the sharing of accounts, real "growth hacking". But we all know what happens next in such trajectories: the squeeze. They were about the cash in on their market dominance.
Competition stopped that. You should be happy about it. I know I am. Let the explosion happen, let them compete for our money. The minor inconvenience of occasionally jumping in and out of a secondary service is worth it.
> I also do not understand why people complain about having the choice to not pay for things they do not want to watch.
Are you a sports fan? Because sports fans don't have the choice to not pay for things they do not want to watch. If you want a sports package, you usually have to buy it as an add-on to the base package, even if there's not a single show you want to watch on the base package.
Not enough to want to jump through the hoops that sports organizations require today.
I would be willing to watch if it involved going to the official website or app and pressing a few buttons to pay. I am not interested in learning about blackout regions and various packages or contracts with stipulations.
Yeah, if watching sports involves so much expense and hassle, it's time to realize that it's just not that important, and find something else for entertainment. There are many alternatives.
The problem for me is discoverability, and also international availability. It would be different if (say) the first 2-3 episodes of every show were available for free on a central platform with adequate categorization and user ratings. Then I’d have no problem with “okay, to continue watching this, I need to subscribe to service X”.
But streaming services want to build a brand, and want consumers to like and become loyal to the brand, so they don’t want you to be discovering shows from other services. This has the effect that cross-service discoverability is actively being designed against. The issue for the consumer is that there’s no strong correlation between brands/services and the particular shows a given person likes.
I've seen that very thing in Prime Video. There was a show where the first episode was free, but after that had to subscribe to (I think) Paramount+, which you could do via Amazon.
> I'm frankly annoyed that so many people call this a problem. Sure, I understand the surface level inconvenience of this fragmentation, but I think we're getting a little spoiled here.
The problem as I see it is done of the companies are selling the product that the consumers want. With individual companies all trying to maximize the revenue generated by what they control, the industry as a whole has become hostile.
It seems it will stay hostile until the big players get squished by the gigantic players, or consumer protection groups get stuck in and things get regulated. For a while it looked like consumers would get what they wanted, which is a monopoly provider of all content at an affordable price, from Netflix or Amazon or both. But now we have this mess of content producers and legacy platforms all fighting for the same slice of pie.
At the very least, it highlights the problem for the broadcast companies and demonstrates why AMC / AMC+ is struggling.
People don't need 17 streaming subscriptions. There are only so many households to sell to.
How many of those households are going to pay for a subscription so they can stream Interview with the Vampire if that's the only show they're interested in on the service? Maybe if they're a die hard fan, but they won't attract casual viewers.
Since there are fewer ads on streaming services - I won't say "no ads", because already, many of the services are including them, or at the very least, including disruptive trailers for their own shows - how do those households know that Interview with the Vampire exists as a show? On the cable TV model, AMC would run a commercial advertising the show during the airing of another show with a similar audience, drawing interest and viewers. Now it's not so simple to cross pollinate. (Anecdotally, I have a friend who is obsessed with Anne Rice and had no idea this show existed.)
You say combining the production value into a single affordable streaming service is mass delusion, I say that's the only reason it worked in the first place. The popular shows buoyed up the fringe.
> Do you really want this industry to be consolidated into 1-2 players?
There has to be some happy medium between the two extremes. Sure, the pre-streaming era sucked but I don't think having multiple subscriptions with maybe 2 good shows per channel is utopia either.
I think you and the GP have summed up the problem. People who were paying for a bundle of those channels via cable, have maybe 1-2 monthly streaming services and then dip into another for a single month. Meanwhile production costs for prestige TV are going up. Spending more money to please fewer customers is rarely a good business model when marginal costs are near zero.
As a Packers fan living in California, the NFL thing particularly bothers me. It is impossible for me to legally stream all the games. The only option to watch every Sunday game is NFL Sunday Ticket, which has a streaming option but it's not available for my address—They force you to buy DirecTV satellite if it's available in your area.
Contrast that with the NBA, where for a surprisingly reasonable $15 a month I can stream every game on YouTube TV.
Apparently DirecTV's exclusive NFL contract is expiring, so I'm hoping next season will come with new streaming options.
Also an NFL fan in a different market than my team. This year I ended up paying for Sunday Ticket, Peacock, Paramount+, and Fubo to actually watch my games. Each week there was some wrinkle that made a game unavailable on ST.
Next year, screw it, I’m just not watching the games. Maybe I’ll hit a bar for one or two. It’s not even the money, which is annoying, it’s the hunting for each game and what service to watch it on. That was really aggravating.
I was fine watching my out-of-market team in the evenings on whatever the non-live option was called (it had like 6 names while I was doing it). Prices kept going up though; when it hit $100 per season, I stopped renewing. I'm a baseball fan before I'm a football fan, so had to set my priorities.
>Apparently DirecTV's exclusive NFL contract is expiring, so I'm hoping next season will come with new streaming options.
Prepare to be impressed by the rumored prices of the live stream package.
As an aside, especially on the west coast, if you are willing to be patient and wait a few hours after the game's over, I can strongly recommend NFL+ for replays.
NBA is way better than the NFL but the NBA League Pass is not perfect. However I've found YouTube TV's basic package at $65 a month (basically just cable) plus the league pass at $15 gets you basically everything you want.
NFL is impossible, I'll catch the game on "regular TV" but otherwise it's pirate or nothing.
Except the NBA league pass excludes your home team at the behest of cable providers. So for me, who doesn’t have youtubeTV, there’s no reasonable way to watch the NBA.
Which is I suppose OK since I just go to sports bars, but they’re losing $15/month from me.
We'll just bundle a bunch of them together, and offer a slight discount over the cost of paying for them all individually. Maybe offer the most niche ones as add-on packages.
We can even put in some ads in exchange for the convenience and...
Cable was bad because of forced ads, forced bundles, no on demand, and long term contracts. None of those are seen in the streaming industry. This "streaming is cable 2.0" meme doesn't make sense to me.
These things are becoming a reality for streaming.
As the prices go up, and the content becomes broken up between more and more services, 2 things happen:
* The idea of a bundle that saves you money, adds convenience and leaves you less caught out when licenses change hands compared to 20+ individual subscriptions becomes more and more tempting
* The 6-month and 12-month plans for these services are much cheaper and become more appealing.
Back when it was only netflix at $7, there was no need for a bundle or a 12-month plan.
But when it's all these services at $15 each, a 12-month long bundle would save a lot of money in the long run.
Bundles may not exist yet, but they will. Mark my words.
I'm not sure that I would be willing to pay for it separately. It has some good shows but not an astounding amount.
The interface is hot garbage that tries to upsell additional pay-for content and streaming services like Starz. Unless you know what you're looking for and go in with surgical precision, you get bogged down in a morass of upcharges.
They also started intermixing free-with-ads content and making it difficult to distinguish. My kid has started a couple movies only to get lambasted with ads every 15 mins and becoming thoroughly upset.
They recently made Amazon Music worse (you can't skip songs in playlists / radios), to force you into upgrading to Music Unlimited.
I also haven't watched a show on Amazon Video in years (Man in the High Castle was the last one).
Yet they continue increasing the cost of Prime citing those other "benefits". I wish they'd offer an a-la-carte Prime, we only make use of the free shipping one.
Idk why anyone would pay for prime anymore. They have 1 mediocre but popular show (The Boys) and pretty much nothing else relevant. There’s a decent old movie selection, but most are rentable a la cart for $3.
And the shipping is never 2 days. I’m not even convinced it’s faster than non-prime shipping.
And certainly no one is doing it for the music service.
The big question is what is the solution to all this that doesn't involve 3 big players buying out all the rest? Is it even possible to get these guys to all play together in some kind of shared space.
Like you know... how your local store was allowed to sell you VHSs of the Terminator and you didn't have to pay subscription to Warner Bros store (which only existed in swamps of Florida) to get it? And how you could then give it to another person without restriction or tax to the said corporate lord?
Monopolization and integration of multiple markets into single corporate entities always hurts the consumers. Maybe it's time for US government to pull thumbs out of their bums and take out their cartel breaking hammers?
It's remarkable how there are still industries that don't know how to take advantage of the internet to give a great user experience, and whose greed only hurts their bottom line.
It's very simple: I want to watch any content from wherever, whenever, and however I like. Make it cheap and high quality, and I'll pay you for it. Screw this up, and I'll get it from somewhere that offers this experience instead.
Yeah. There should only be a few distributors. They should be something like a common carrier. Why should AMC, et al. duplicate streaming infrastructure? Focus on content and let someone else deliver it.
These companies would have a lot more of my money if they let me pay them for *.mkvs a la carte. I still pay the subs for a couple of them but my default is to just pirate the file, even if it's on a service I pay for. I'm not claiming this is a solution, but it would definitely earn them more money from my end.
Piracy is generally really quick and frictionless, but even so I do have to wait a couple minutes sometimes before I've found enough peers to start streaming something. If I could pay a couple bucks to just get the file off a fast CDN I absolutely would.
Yep, if I could buy the highest quality in one click without having to search through crap on torrent indexes I would. Then after transcoding if I ever want the highest quality I just go back to the site where I bought it. Nope, they aren't gonna offer that.
And I'm not wasting my time storing and ripping Blu-Rays, I'm just gonna acquire it through Sonarr/Radarr. I know it's probably not important to 99% of users, but it would be so convenient to be able to just buy and download the movie/tv at it's highest quality in a few seconds. The closest I have found to that is the *-arr stack I am using with Jellyfin which is super automated and really great.
Regulation might be able to fix it: Prevent streaming companies from owning content production. Split up companies that already exist like this (e.g. Comcast, Netflix, Disney, et al) then the content creating entities will be forced to pick the highest bidder for exclusive access or try to maximize profit by syndicating their content across as many platforms as possible.
I would go further and require content producers to sell to all buyers at the same price. Or even that content producers must sell to all buyers at the same reasonable price. Since the dawn of mass media, media has formed part of our shared shared culture. And that means that the consumers have some claim of ownership over it too.
Why would adding a middleman make anything better?
If society wants more people to be able to watch more TV, then society should just give people cash so they can buy access to more streaming services. Or reduce copyright terms to something reasonable like 10 years.
> Why would adding a middleman make anything better?
Because market competition is what makes capitalism a liveable social order for most people. Adding market competition makes everything better. Command economies (corporate or socialist) don't.
This isn't middlemen providing no value. If any streaming service can pay Disney to serve Disney content, that means two might start doing it, and then people who want Disney can go with the one that manages lower prices and/or better service—more reliable, fewer compression artifacts, apps on more platforms, plays nicer with aggregators, et c, lots of ways one might be better than another. Lots more room for competition on business models and service quality.
Right now, if you want Disney content through a streaming service, you have one option. If it sucks, well, that's too bad for you, take it or leave it. And same for HBO, for Paramount, for all of them. Splitting up distribution and production creates a better competitive environment, given the existence of copyright.
I guess I never saw any difference between streaming service quality, at least using Apple TV. Though I’m not a TV aficionado either, all I is I press play and things usually start playing in sufficiently high quality.
The video quality is generally fine, but the quality of the apps is vast.
Anything that doesn't use system-provided UI elements is simply constitutionally bad. It's incredible that things that can't scroll smoothly pass basic QC.
And as far as I can tell, the only people fighting to keep car dealerships separate from car manufacturers are car dealership owners. I would like to be able to just order a new car online and have it be delivered directly from the manufacturer.
The TV app on iOS and macOS already has a unified search and discovery mechanism. The only content seller missing is Netflix, because Netflix chooses not to participate.
I'm not sure there is one. There are some potential wrinkles like the way Amazon Prime offers add-ons like Starz. But even that is analogous to the cable world where you had premium channels like HBO. There's also the potential for some content to just go a la carte only sales through a purely distribution platform but I have to believe that ship has mostly sailed.
ADDED: But per another comment, things are better than the cable world, much less the pre-cable world that I actually grew up in. So some combination of fragmentation and consolidation is fine for me.
One can have a service which buys up a bunch of subscriptions to these streaming services and then licenses to customers for an appropriate cost. Everyone doesn't have to watch everything at the same time. Still, they get access to all the content. Things can be queued like in the library or submitting sw jobs.
You couldn't do this with tv on cable since it was not on demand but if one can schedule properly, more customers can be supported with fewer licenses.
Netflix started producing content for two main reasons. The first was that Disney and others decided to start their own streaming platforms and make their content exclusive. Second, it's an asset that Netflix can syndicate.
In countries where Disney+ doesn't exist you can watch it on Netflix.
When Netflix streaming was just starting they had a lot of great content from Starz, HBO, and their Anime selection was extensive. Gradually all that content was removed and locked behind different paywalls.
AMC is one of the more aggressive stations in not letting its content out to other streamers. You can't watch... oh I don't know, Interview with the Vampire anywhere else, other than having AMC on linear TV or having access to their associated video-on-demand. I remember having to cast around to find the (pretty good) John le Carre adaptation The Little Drummer Girl anywhere after having missed its initial broadcast: I ended up getting the free trial of Sundance Now, which is more or less AMC+'s predecessor... or something like that.
But: most of what people most want to watch is stuff that's on legacy deals, or that they're letting out older seasons of, or just don't control. Like, Better Call Saul is on Netflix, but not the current/final season. I feel like the era of them really jealously guarding their shows to try to make AMC+ work has coincided with a bunch of stuff people aren't that interested in seeing (and maybe the stuff people do want to see they don't fully control).
Lodge 49 is cool (but ultimately quite niche, I think), but they don't have an audience clamoring to stream Low Winter Sun or whatever.
What? Disney+ and Prime are much worse. You can't find a single show anywhere else. I would say AMC is one if the better in this regard considering both BB, MM, BCS and TWD can be watched on a plethora of other services.
AMC is basically trying to act like it's Disney+ or Netflix, or whatever you prefer, for its own content. Their issue is just that the stuff from them people actually want to see in big numbers is more or less that list you mentioned. They don't actually control Breaking Bad, Mad Men or Better Call Saul. The Walking Dead and Fear the Walking Dead seem to be on legacy contracts that give all the "back" seasons to Netflix and Hulu, respectively.
They haven't had anything new that people actually care about enough to notice its exclusivity. The newer Walking Dead spinoffs would be about it, I guess.
The article mentions that AMC does not actually own the rights to several of their most well-known shows (Mad Men is owned by Lionsgate and Breaking Bad is owned by Sony).
That's the problem with Hollywoo. Too much fragmentation as a result of everyone chasing after the power vacuum created by streaming. Every small outfit thinks they can win.
Consolidation will happen as clear winners emerge and failures continue to materialize.
(I have that sticker on one of my old laptops. Also a "Hollywoo" sticker on one of my current laptops. I love it because my startup is in that space.)
* Amazon Prime
* Disney+
* HBO Max
* Netflix
* Hulu
* Paramount+
* Peacock
* AMC+
* Apple TV+
* ESPN+
* Shudder
* Sundance Now
* Youtube TV
* Tubi
* Crackle
* Roku Channel
* Discovery+
Want to watch the old Newhart show? Even with all these options, you're out of luck. Try your library. Streaming is a nightmare.
Want to watch every game your favorite NFL team plays this season but you're not in their broadcast area? Try to suss out this mess.
https://www.nfl.com/ways-to-watch/