Streaming Sector Continues Its Steady Transformation Into Boring Old Cable TV

Culture

from the humpty-dumpty-back-together-again dept

Streaming video still provides some meaningful advantages to traditional cable: it’s generally cheaper (assuming you don’t sign up for every service under the sun); customer satisfaction ratings are generally higher; and users have more power to pick and choose and cancel services at a whim.

But the party simply isn’t going to last.

Thanks to industry consolidation and saturated market growth, the streaming industry has started behaving much like the traditional cable giants they once disrupted. As with most industries suffering from “enshittification,” that generally means steadily worse service at higher prices to appease Wall Street’s demand for improved quarterly returns at any cost (even long term company health).

As a result, Netflix has started acting like password sharing, something it advocated for for years, is a dire cardinal sin. Amazon now thinks would be fun to increase the number of ads it runs, charging Amazon Prime users even more money to avoid them. Consumers are paying more for streaming than ever as layoffs abound, streaming catalogs shrink, and the underlying product quality gets worse.

Companies are also increasingly chasing tax cuts and stock bumps via pointless megamergers. Early consolidation is having some somewhat superficial advantages, such as a growing number of bundles where users can sign up for multiple streaming channels under one price point. Something that sounds increasingly like, you know, cable TV:

“Disney and Warner Bros. Discovery recently announced that they’ll set aside their competitive impulses and team up, Avengers-style, to offer a super-bundle of their streaming services: Disney+, Hulu, and Max.”

Disney recently spent $8.6 billion to buy Comcast’s share in Hulu, so it’s not really “setting aside their competitive impulses” as much as it is just consolidation. Hunting and pecking through numerous streaming competitors to find who currently owns the rights to your favorite show certainly can be annoying. But the industry’s solution is generally going to be, over time, mergers and consolidation:

“But if bundles are back, why did we ever give up cable in the first place? That question stares me in the face every time I find myself in a hotel, enamored with the nostalgia of flipping from late-night talk shows to Family Feud to The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City to whatever Adam Sandler comedy is playing on Comedy Central.”

At this point, most of the same executives who ruined cable TV are now working in streaming. And they’re being driven by the same underlying motivation that ultimately destroyed cable TV: Wall Street’s insatiable need for impossible quarterly growth at any cost. It will likely do the same thing to streaming as it has done to countless other U.S. publicly-traded sectors (air travel, banking, insurance, telecom, etc.)

As the streaming industry consolidates and competition among streaming services wanes, you’ll likely see petty stuff like making it harder to actively cancel your streaming services (see: AOL, the Wall Street Journal’s online subscription, or cable TV). You’ll see weird new restrictions. You’ll see layoffs. And you’ll most certainly see a lot of completely and very broken mergers (see: AT&T Time Warner Discovery).

You’ll also, like in airlines and in telecom, see weird efforts to funnel you into higher and higher price points if you want the user experience you used to have.

I suspect most customers will still generally find streaming a better, more flexible value proposition than cable for the next few years. But all the financial incentives point in fairly twisted directions, driving bad decisions made in the pursuit of the impossibility of unlimited growth at preposterous scale.

Which will, in turn, annoy consumers, making streaming vulnerable to disruption by either resurgent piracy (something that’s already happening), or other services. And the cycle repeats.

Filed Under: bundles, cable, competition, mergers, streaming, tv, video