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.
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.