Too Many Streaming Services

Photo by Piotr Cichosz on Unsplash

The Oscars last night commemorated Hollywood's annual celebration of itself. Over the last year, the entertainment industry has faced an implosion of its traditional distribution model, an 80% plunge in box office revenue to its lowest level in 40 years, and persistent criticism for its lack of diversity. The industry's apparent answer to these woes? STREAMING!!

The mere act of finding the Oscars broadcast was an ironic reminder of how convoluted modern entertainment has become. I’m old enough to remember a time when all you needed to do was turn on the TV and flip the knob between your three choices of channels (4 if you counted PBS, which nobody did). Then there was the cable TV era, which added remotes and set-top boxes and thousands of channels, but everything was at least still in one place. I know I sound curmudgeonly when I say this, but watching entertainment today requires a dual PhD in astrophysics and computer science.

The first trepidatious question, as I fumble through the steps of simply turning on the TV, is usually “which of the dozen streaming services is what I want to watch even on?” Netflix? Hulu? Amazon Prime? Disney+? Something called the Peacock?? Switching between services requires logging in... waiting... selecting a user profile... waiting... navigating an unfamiliar and inconsistent UI in order to search for your show by one of two methods: the hunt-and-peck, on-screen keyboard that takes about 20 minutes to laboriously enter each word and eventually results in you throwing your remote at the TV; OR the so-called “voice recognition” feature which you unsuccessfully attempt several times, shouting into your remote like a deranged lunatic, before going back to the hunt-and-peck keyboard... and then throwing the remote at the TV, if you can figure out which of the seven remote controls to throw.

As if the struggle for intergalactic streaming domination didn't cause enough confusion for mere mortals just trying to find VH-1 not split an atom, another battle for our attention exists between companies vying to be the “gateway” to this tangled morass of services — mainly Apple, Google and Samsung, with the tired old guard of Comcast, Charter, DirecTV and others trying to fight them off like wounded hippopotami on the Serengeti. Thanks to modern technology, I can log in to Netflix from my Samsung TV, my Apple TV, my Google Play device, my Xfinity box, my Xbox, my iPhone, my iPad, my MacBook and my neighbor’s refrigerator. Thank God the next time I’m borrowing a cup of sugar, I can login and stay up-to-date with my shows from my neighbor’s kitchen. I mean… what did we ever do before refrigerator streaming? Am I right??

Of course, the prerequisite to roaming this blissful nirvana of infinite streaming choices is that I haven't heard the five most dreaded words in the English language: "Dad, the internet is down.” This happens approximately once every other day, forcing me to become our household IT guy and start unplugging modems, rebooting wifi mesh networks, checking the network settings of all 72 devices we have in our house, and spending the better part of an afternoon getting us back online. By the time we are, whatever live sports event we were trying to watch is already over, so we end up watching “The Crown” while I tremble in the corner of the couch trying to recover from IT PTSD.

Is this what we really wanted? "More choice" is always propped up as an implicitly self-evident statement of goodness in the world. But more choice in devices (remotes, TVs, smart phones, etc.), to access more choice in gateways (cable, satellite, mobile apps, etc.), to access more choice in services (Hulu, Vudu, Tubi, Fubo, etc.), to access more choice in programming introduces such combinatorial complexity that it makes doing your own taxes seem like a relaxing way to spend an afternoon. As observed by NYU professor Scott Galloway "Choice is a tax on your time and attention. Consumers don’t want more choice, they want confidence in the choices presented. They want someone else to do the research and curate options for them."

The only problem is that a simple menu of curated choices is never going to happen in entertainment. Thanks to a pervasive, decades-long, anti-regulatory doctrine, vertical integration in entertainment is now ubiquitous, with the traditional entertainment fiefdoms trying desperately to hold the technological interlopers at bay. Programming is the carrot each service uses to try to get us to subscribe. Millions of dollars are spent promoting new shows so that we are compelled to add yet another streaming service with recurring monthly payments to our credit card. And without movie tickets and Milk Duds to shove down our throats, entertainment providers are desperate for the triple-dip revenue model of their streaming services. The other night I logged into a streaming service which charges me a monthly fee, in order to pay $2.95 more for a 30-minute episode of a show, and then had to watch a commercial before it started. It's not enough just to have your hand in my wallet via a recurring subscription? You need to subject me to a pay-per-view fee AND ads on top?!?

The whole convoluted mess is enough to make you relinquish TV entirely and take up basket weaving. But in the wreckage of Hollywood, that's the war and those are the weapons. For all the pomp and circumstance of the people on that Oscars stage last night, as an industry they only generated $2.3 billion in movie ticket sales last year. Facebook alone makes that in 10 days — Google in four, Apple in three, Amazon in two. The entire entertainment industry is so dwarfed by Big Tech, that it makes you wonder how many more years the Academy Awards will be able to maintain the myth that it matters.