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 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.
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
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 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.
