The rise of streaming services is certainly going to be looked at as a major turning point in the entertainment industry. Netflix, Amazon, and Hulu are about to be matched against HBO Max and Disney+ in a battle for whose content makes that monthly subscription worth it. That’s a difficult call for a lot of people to make, however, with digital walls coming up around each media company’s respective intellectual properties, one has to wonder about what this will do for people’s exposure to potentially great shows and movies. Personally, I can see myself paying for maybe three of those five services each month, so there will undoubtedly be “pop culture moments” that I will miss out on (unless we went into a discussion on password sharing which is just too much of a mixed bag to start). Already, I don’t pay for Amazon Prime and have not been able to watch The Boys, and I’m arguably one of the ideal consumers for that kind of a show. I do not know if there will be a full point to this article, but I wanted to throw out some thoughts on the barriers that are beginning to rise for people on a *very* real budget who simply can’t afford to pay for every single streaming service that is bound to come onto the market in the next couple of years.
I’ll begin with the positive: the competition that this phenomena will create between streaming services is bound to lead to some of the best shows in television history. As people weigh the value of each service, they are going to look foremost at the content that is available exclusively on that service. Disney+ has the advantage of mining decades of content and franchises to create the best portfolio possible to convince people that they cannot afford NOT to pay for their service. Netflix and HBO have both led the way for years on groundbreaking original series that are exclusively available on their platforms, and, in order for them to remain competitive, they are definitely going to continue to crank out attention grabbing new programs. As people decide on what they can afford to skip in order to save money, it would be disastrous for any of these services to take their foot off the gas for even a short time and allow people to make the decision to cancel their current subscriptions.
Next I’ll ask a question: what is going to happen to network television? Every day I seem to see someone post about how they are looking to cancel their television plan and switch exclusively to Wifi, with apps like Roku and Fire TV Sticks being available. Of course, popular network programs can find new life on streaming sites, but will the network system crumble and become obsolete to advertisers once enough people make the switch to streaming-only entertainment? Television ratings are important indicators to advertisers about the value of placing an ad during certain time slots and on certain networks, so as ratings fall from people simply not having cable plans, will the lower value of the ads be able to support a network’s full range of programming? This is definitely going to be something to watch and I could either see smaller networks finding some way to adapt to the times or dying off from the shrinking viewership.
Finally, I’ll look at the sad: creative content is becoming a luxury item that not everyone is going to be able to enjoy and become inspired by. I may sound idealistic with this point, but let’s look at this week’s event with Spiderman. While not directly connected to streaming, Disney and Sony have demonstrated the mindset that places intellectual properties as bargaining chips for fans, starting a heated internet war over which studio deserves to have access to Spiderman. Bringing this around to streaming, the exclusivity of having a paid subscription to one site, but not all, and missing out on cultural conversations happening for a show on another site is a little sad. Of course, those who can afford to pay for all of these services will be fine, but those people who will be forced to choose certain subscriptions over others will potentially miss out on some of that incredible content I talked about earlier. It’s a reality of the situation and the industry that has been created, however the implication of those digital walls feels more corporate than creative.
Once again, I don’t know if this article had a definitive “point” to it, but I wanted to float out some ideas and see if people had any strong thoughts or opinions on the coming rise of streaming services. Let me know in the comments!