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.
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…
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
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.
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. 🙃
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
If they made the media realistically affordable (a couple bucks a movie or like 5 bucks a season of show) many people would just pay that bill and be happy.
I often end up downloading stuff I already have access to on streaming, that way it’s just all in one place.
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
Imagine federated streaming platforms
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)
