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