No Stupid Questions

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 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.

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.

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

If the content was a commodity like oil or food it would mean all movies and series would be available to all streaming co. Then you could save money and choose the one that best serves your needs.

Since it's not the case it's more like worst case monopoly: if I want Star Trek I must suffer the bad experience that is paramount plus. If I want mandalorian I have no choice but to engage Disney Plus. Etc etc.

So not only you pay more, but there's no incentive to pick the best ones and improve experience of the bad ones

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 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.

Because the services are still only owned by a handful of corporations.

Disney owns Disney+, Hulu, and ESPN+.

Amazon owns Prime Video and MGM+.

Warner Bros Discovery owns Max and Discovery+

Those three companies own 7 of some of the largest streaming services with a little over a half a billion subs between them. Netflix is the only exception to that trend, being independently founded, but they have their own issues regardless.

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.

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).

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.

As others have pointed out, the rules of competition don't apply since there's exclusive content at play.

As a metaphor, It's not like one restaurant serving a popular type of food vs multiple restaurants doing so. It's having one Italian, one Thai, one Chinese and one American restaurant being the only ones in 100 miles. Look! There's competition, 4 restaurants! Unless you only want some pad Thai.

So now instead of fixing cables issue of $60-100/month, they made it more complicated by paying $60-100/month to 3-5 different companies instead of one.

As a real life example. If you have kids, or are a big Star wars/marvel fan, 9/10 you need Disney+. It may as well be a Monopoly now so they can raise their prices as much as they want. Parents and nerds will pay through the nose for it.

Source: am a parent and a nerd (but I pirate all my stuff anyway)

Imagine federated streaming platforms

Sounds like they don’t sail the high seas

Because they are "competing" with content exclusivity instead of quality of service, if every show was on every stream we would actually have competition.

There could be 1 service that carries all the content and the companies that produce that content can still be paid without having to subscribe to 10 different services to get all the content you're looking for. Like how Netflix worked before everyone decided to make their own platform and took damn near everything off Netflix.

There could be multiple services with the same content that compete on pricing or other services/features instead of holding content hostage.

Since they all hold different things hostage, you really do not have a choice where you watch the show/movie you want; it's only on a specific service that has it.

I literally torrent everything like a normal person

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 don't know man, it was awesome when you had pretty much what you wanted in Netflix then when they started to focus in their "original stuff" and losing content (and the competition rising) I stopped to bother with this trend and downloaded all my stuff with Softwarr

Nowadays all my streaming needs are very well covered with a single subscription, Real Debrid, which is cheaper than any streaming service and surely has more content than all of them, even combined... I use it along with Stremio and Kodi, which both offer a better UI than most streaming apps lol.

Because people are idiots and will complain about everything.

They'd hate one single central screamer site even more