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.
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)
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.
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…
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
Because they are “competing” with content exclusivity instead of quality of service, if every show was on every stream we would actually have competition.
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.
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.
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.
Because people are idiots and will complain about everything.
They’d hate one single central screamer site even more
