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.
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.
I’ve had similar thoughts, and I don’t have a great answer for you.
On the one hand, it seems like we consumers are really spoiled. On the other hand, a lot of these platforms only have a small number of offerings people find worthwhile.
I’m not as disciplined about it as I should be, but I try to limit how many I have at one time. I will regularly unsub from ones I haven’t watched in a while.
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.
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.
