People (including me) complain about monopolies all the time for various reasons. At the same time, I’ve noticed a ton of complaints about the existence of multiple streaming platforms. But isn’t that a good thing at the end of the day? If streaming platforms consolidated into 2-3 companies, there wouldn’t be much stopping them from raising prices even more.
The issue with too many streaming services is largely the same as not enough streaming services
An average person will have a wide variety of favorite shows. Let’s say there’s 25 of them. For this example; Access to each of these 25 shows are non-negotiable to you and you feel you MUST have access to them.
If Service A and Service B are the only options; they both get to set the price. So to get access to a “complete” collection of content that you want you’re paying both of them $50 each. It’s most likely that half will be available only on A and the other half on B.
Now imagine that there are 10 different services. Each service is owned by one of the big ten networks that makes your 25 favorite shows. We will call them by their number from 1 to 10. Now each of your 25 shows have 10 places they could be.
On average; each network is likely to have 2.5 shows you like. Maybe a few have made some sweet deals with others; but no one place will have even 7.5 of your favorite shows…because these deals are costly and nobody wants to make less money per view.
Now each service; because they’re struggling to compete with each other will settle on a price of $10 each. But you still end up being forced to subscribe to all ten of them because no single provider has everything you want and no combination of less than all of them can provide complete access to all that you want to watch.
Even worse; any one of these ten can raise their price arbitrarily because they’re tired of competing and can’t break even. This means your total spend could be up to $500 eventually as they each creep towards demanding more money like a cable provider.
It killed the promise of affordable content we had for a decade. When Netflix was the only game in town, you paid less for it and got more.
Because each of them are charging you $15-$20 per month to access their platform that realistically only has one or two things that actually provide you the value for what you spend.
So now, instead of spending the $100 or whatever it was with your cable TV company to get access to all those channels (which, while you couldnt pick what was on when, they were all included together), now you have to spend like $150-$200 to be able to access the same kind of content as before.
And to make it worse, you used to be able to buy a Laserdisc/VHS/DVD/etc of a movie you really liked. One time purchase, not a monthly subscription. And you didn’t have to think about what youre going to do when the streaming service decides to remove your purchased content from their servers (spoiler alert, they almost never will refund you or give you a copy, it just disappears along with your money you spent to buy it).
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I used to subscribe to Netflix, prime video, and HBO max. I realized that I’m only consuming less than 5% of the contents they offer and I felt that I’m just wasting money. So I unsubscribed and went back to the high seas.
If they can offer one service for all the contents I’d gladly pay for the service.
Imagine federated streaming platforms
It’s a matter of convenience. If you wish to ethically watch various shows then you have to either pay for many streaming services or finish some content on one, cancel, and switch to another.
I literally torrent everything like a normal person
If the studios were smart they would put out there own high quality torrents and just charge a couple bucks a movie and send people a bill. I bet a lot of people would pay it. I would.
I wouldn’t. I torrent to get stuff for free
People went from paying for cable and addon channels, to having a consolidated service, to having that service split and paid for addon channels again.
Not to mention keeping track of when they pay, since they’re all different dates unless you do it on specific days all at once.
Then there’s self hosting and having everything in one spot. Phew, nothing like it.
I’ve had similar thoughts, and I don’t have a great answer for you.
On the one hand, it seems like we consumers are really spoiled. On the other hand, a lot of these platforms only have a small number of offerings people find worthwhile.
I’m not as disciplined about it as I should be, but I try to limit how many I have at one time. I will regularly unsub from ones I haven’t watched in a while.
I dont think multiple streaming platforms is a problem. The problem is exclusivity. I dont want to pay for every subscription service to watch popular things. I want to watch any show I want on one platform that I choose. Much like I do for music. But no, with TV shows everyone has their own walled garden of exclusives. Fuck that.
I could only imagine if each record label had their own streaming service. People would go nuts.
Yeah, that’s something I’ve long been worried about - Warner Music, and Sony Music, and so on. I’m really glad I kept all my old CDs!
No, they’d pay because they’re suckers. It’s fine. Those of us who have the willpower to say no, go to the high seas and get what we want when we want it and in the format we want. And we have no apologies to make because the greedy gluttons have wrought it upon themselves.
No, they would put on a pirate hat and hit the seven seas again.
I mean, that is basically where we are coming from. And the record companies still remembering this is the reason we still have usable music streaming services. Might change again as time passes though…
Its a fine line. I try to offer a (legal) ad free experience for my son as a matter of principal. But he asked to watch Naruto and it was only available on crunchyroll.
I signed up and the crunchyroll PlayStation app didn’t seem to have a functional search, recently played or favorites list. The best we could so was pick “all titles” and then scroll page by page alphabetically until we get to “N” then we had to remember which episode we were up to and the navigate to that season/episode. Then it would occasionally crash so we would have to repeat the process to resume playback. It probably only took a few minutes by it felt like an eternity of busy work. Needless to say we canceled that shitshow and torrented, if they are a major publisher and they can’t beat the convenience of casual privacy they are in trouble.
Personally its the convenience and UI that does it for me. I’m not using anything fancy but I have a USB HDD plugged into my home router this is accessible as an SFTP and UPnP media server any device on my network. It won’t transcode or anything but for >95% of content it will play fine on any PC/TV/phone/tablet in the house. The biggest issue is tracking viewing progress which can be an hassle is we do it manually instead of having Netflix/amazon/whatever track it for us. If crunchyroll can’t do that much then they don’t offer any advantage over their free alternatives and not worth an $x per month fee.
Your description fits, though.
Back to the old, but still very true quote:
“Piracy is a service problem.”
“Piracy is a service problem.”
Yeah, I agree with that. I just found it disappointing that Sony could buy themselves a monopoly on anime in the western market and fail to provide a competent app for their own platform. Its a classic example of an own goal.
For keeping track of what episode you’re up to, maybe try plex or something
Thanks. Yes, something like the music app world be ideal.
I don’t mind multiple streaming platforms as long as all they do is stream content
My issue is each and every streaming platform produces their own exclusive content or they sign exclusivity contracts so only one platform streams a particular show or movie at once.
If Netflix and amazon video had the same content, you would just have to choose the service that is cheapest and has the best benefits like great user interface, customer support, features, and other stuff like that.
When there are 12 different platforms which each have their own library with barely any overlap you have to sign up for multiple all at once, and some that have terrible customer support or user interfaces if you want to watch one of their shows.
Like Netflix shoving mobile “games” in my face when I sit down to watch a show. 🙃
They don’t compete with the same content but different features or pricing… they compete by forming fiefdoms of exclusive content. So the user still only has one option per show - not a real choice.
The problem is exclusive rights.
If you wanna watch 3 different shows but they are all on different platforms, then you gotta go and pay for all 3. You can’t just watch the Netflix version of Loki, or the Disney+ version of Ted Lasso.
You mentioned monopolies but the problem is that each platform holds hundreds of monopolies, each for one specific show/movie.
In a perfect world, there would be some sort of law or agreement against exclusive rights, where every service can show any product they bought the (non-exclusive) rights to.
In that scenario, streaming services would have to compete by being the cheapest or offering the best service.
But alas, this is not a perfect world
Cable was expensive as hell and to let you record stuff and watch when you want you had to pay even more for a DVR. Enter Netflix streaming, a service that had shows and movies for cheap.
As time went on, more services existed and each only had a portion of the content. Prices rose as well. Nowadays to get access to everything you’re basically paying cable prices like you were before. If everything was on one service (or if every service had everything) then it would be cheaper and people wouldn’t complain.
