I imagine we will be hearing about the rise of piracy again in the next 6-12 months.
I’m definitely not interested in paying 20/mo per service as is the direction we are heading.
It will be interesting to see which streamers win and which fail then get bought up. In 5 years, we could see consolidation get us back to a reasonable number of services rather than the current situation.
In reality, ad free streaming will likely be the first casualty. And we will be back to cable tv.
Disney/Hulu/peacock/espn dominate market due to historical and current content. Disney first cuts off Netflix from any and all owned content. Disney buys netflix. Disney removes adfree plan. Disney raises prices back to cable tv levels. Piracy surges. Netflix 2 comes out and we repeat the cycle.
I’m partially kidding, but it’s also true that if I can’t rent or buy a show/movie a la carte off Amazon or whatever, I usually just skip it. As a result, I watch less TV, which is probably good for me.
But I'm ready to admit that my position may be fringe. As far as I'm concerned we could just stop making movies and shows tomorrow and I'll be perfectly happy. There's enough quality content to occupy many life times.
I’m definitely not interested in paying 20/mo per service if it is for 14 services that barely cover my needs.
As to payment, old shows and movies have been paid for. It must be a case of getting what you can for them. Used to be DVDs.
Streaming's original premise was cheap content in Netflix. People were fine waiting 2-3 years to watch a show when it came to Netflix (Breaking Bad, anyone?)
But when Netflix became more than just reruns with a good interface and became original content, and then a race to have more original content among all the players, it was obvious that we'd eventually be back to paying the same overall as we did for cable
Cable companies and traditional media companies could've easily prevented all of this by not getting so greedy on pricing and actually caring about the customer experience. Shitty cable boxes and $250 a month broke the system.
In many ways streaming is actually worse (broadcast of high def video is way more efficient than point-to-point individual streams, aggregation of all content into one UI was better than now having to bounce between apps) but in many ways it's better (Rokus and Apple TVs are lightyears better than 15 year old recycled cable set tops, and even if the total of all streaming ends up not being that much cheaper at least you can pick and choose what you get instead of a bundle)
Rolling subscriptions are the best way to handle the current streaming fragmentation. We frequently cancel services to see if anyone in the household notices. If someone does, it is easy enough to resub and cancel again.
That said, I fully expect the step after "No more ad-free streaming" to be "12 month contracts minimum" or $120/mo for month by month or just $600 per year, charged monthly at $49.99.
But yeah, the paying ones are not.
Netflix content alone can’t sustain the platform, imo.
They're also adept at funding international content at a fraction of the price of US content. Assuming AI doesn't take over filmmaking I can see a future fairly soon were Netflix are making a ton of English language content in Africa/India/Eastern Europe. Or they are making international content and using AI to generate English vocals and lip sync.
But that's exactly the point, isn't it? Netflix is popular today because it used to be the place where you could stream almost anything. Now you can only watch Netflix shows and movies, and some other low quality content or older shows and movies. Can Netflix keep up with more established media behemoths in producing enough content to keep its user base from flocking to Disney when they have all the most popular series and blockbusters?
That said, there would need to be a host of manager/reviewers who knew how to wrangle the right "answers" at various steps.