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 is, there isn’t any real competition. I for example like to watch sci-fi series and there is exactly one streaming service that has Star Trek, one who has Star Wars, one who has The Orville… Similarly the newest Lord of the Rings series is exclusive to one service. And there always being “one” isn’t competition. It’d be if I were able to watch any of that on multiple services.
I mean if I go shopping, it’s not like oranges are sold exclusive in one store, bread in another and butter in a third and I have to drive to 5 different stores to get breakfast and they all want a membership fee from me. There, nobody can have a monopoly on oranges… Yet in the streaming world there is a monopoly on Disney content, and lots of other small monopolies on franchises.
So you’re right in complaining. Having more monopolies isn’t better than having a small amount of them.
Because what people really want is an iTunes like service that just has everything for a single price rather than 14 streaming apps that have content overlap but also exclusives and rotating temporary content licenses costing $20+ each with ads.
There was a period of time when I gave up pirating because Netflix+prime was good enough to watch just about everything, and on-device search easily searched both platforms and provided a unified search/watch experience. It wasn’t worth the effort of finding and storing content yourself.
Fast forward to today, you search for something, it belongs to some fucking random service you don’t currently pay $17.99 a month for and then halfway though a season, it drops from the platform and goes to another streaming service you also don’t pay for. It’s just endless bullshit and nickel&diming now.
I’d happily pay $60 a month for a single service that just had everything and saved me from all this bullshit, instead I’d be forced to spend $300 a month for 23 services I barely use just to have access to the catalog of content I want.
Another example of this done well is steam- I just want my whole library in one place, I don’t want 5 different game libraries each with their own crap. Consequently I’ve spent thousands of dollars on steam over the years because of the unified experience.
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.
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.
If there was an aggregator of sorts that would charge let’s say even $25 to watch whatever I’d pay happily. That’s what Netflix kinda was before other streaming services started popping up and each asking for a hefty fee.
Id even settle for a “master” app that just lets me log all my accounts into it and lets me search for whatever I want and if it isnt on something I have tells me what service its on.
You may already have this. FireStick does this, Apple TV so does this, I’m pretty sure Roku does this …… my problem is the opposite: I want to search only the content accessible with what I already pay. I’m tired of search being an upsell
Yeah we need Spotify-like video streaming services already. Let them compete over features and price rather than exclusive content.
And yet even Spotify has started having exclusive content in the form of certain podcasts. Only a matter of time before they do it with music too.
I would be happy to use a service that auto subscribes for a month when I play content but also auto cancels renewal.
I’m happy to pay for them when I use them but if I don’t happen to use one for a month it would be great to skip that bill.
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
Because people are idiots and will complain about everything.
They’d hate one single central screamer site even more
I sure would. I don’t want a site to scream at me.
Sounds like they don’t sail the high seas
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.
Because they are “competing” with content exclusivity instead of quality of service, if every show was on every stream we would actually have competition.
It’s probably because they can remember how convenient and cheaper it was to see any movie or show that could be streamed. Streaming was supposed to disrupt TV by eliminating ads and allowing you to choose whatever you want to watch. Nowadays, in order to get the same amount of choices, you need to spend about as much as you did for a TV subscription and now many platforms have ads.
I think it’s more a frustration at what we lost than anything else.
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Because the service is worse with multiple streaming services?
Everything is not in the same place, it’s more expensive, and it’s less convenient.
It used to be cheaper with one. It’s more expensive with multiple.
Piracy has become more convenient than streaming platforms. As least all the media can be consolidated to one place, one frontend.
Yeah, you rarely hear people complain about music streaming apps because they don’t have (as much of) an exlueitivy problem. Apple/Google/Spotify/etc. Are competing on service/cost/features.
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
