Streaming Providers Dead Set On Becoming The Shitty Traditional Cable TV Companies They Once Disrupted

Culture

from the meet-the-new-boss dept

Every few months a media outlet will get a staffer to write an inane story about how if you subscribe to every streaming service in existence, you’ll unsurprisingly wind up paying almost as much as you’d pay for cable TV. The underlying message is usually that we haven’t actually made real progress and that gosh, you probably should have just stuck with your old cable TV subscription.

That’s almost the undercurrent of this Financial Times report, which “discovered” that if you subscribe to a long list of streaming video services, you’ll almost pay as much as if you’d stuck with cable:

“A basket of the top US streaming services will cost $87 this autumn, compared with $73 a year ago, as Disney, Paramount, Warner Bros Discovery and others have raised their prices in response to pressure from Wall Street to end the profligacy of the streaming boom. The average cable TV package costs $83 a month.”

For one, notice how the Times doesn’t bother to mention which streaming services they’re talking about. Or that the two products (live television service with ads versus a catalog of streamed content) aren’t really the same. Or that you can subscribe, binge, and cancel streaming services without too much hassle. Or that streaming generally has way better customer satisfaction and service ratings that traditional TV.

For all its faults, streaming still represents a better, cheaper, and more flexible option to cable (outside of live sports, which is also slowly shifting).

That said, streaming companies are clearly headed down the same path that created the giant, shitty cable companies Americans rank as some of the worst companies in any industry (think about the effort that requires in a country where airlines, insurance companies, and big banks exist).

As things get more competitive and the market saturates, streaming companies (like the cable giants before them) have increasingly found new, annoying ways to please Wall Street. That usually involves layoffs, customer service cuts, and price hikes, but also making the underlying product worse (see: Time Warner Discovery) while imposing ever greater restrictions (see the Disney and Netflix push to crack down on password sharing).

The problem for streaming giants is they’re imposing these sometime bi-annual rate hikes and new restrictions at the same time that they’re running out of new content thanks to the writers’ strike and these companies’ refusal to pay their creatives a living wage:

“[Disney] is asking more and more of the customer . . . while the amount of new content on offer will likely decline,” said analysts at media consultancy Enders, who warned of “a negative spiral and real consequences” if the strike drags on. “Lack of fresh content, particularly for Disney+, will increase churn,” they added.

Like most major outlets the Financial Times goes out of its way to avoid laying the blame on Wall Street greed, outsized compensation for incompetent high level executives, or pointless mergers and consolidation that generate endless debt. But that’s what ruined cable, and it’s working overtime here.

Most consumers still find streaming to be the better value over traditional TV. That’s why streaming topped traditional cable TV viewership last year for the first time ever.

But the underlying apparatus that destroyed cable TV and gave us Comcast (Wall Street obsession with growth at all costs, mindless consolidation, unfair treatment of labor, outsized compensation for bumbling high level executives) is, of course, hard at work trying to ruin streaming. In turn spawning another new round of disruptive innovation from better companies as the cycle starts anew.

Filed Under: cable tv, competition, password sharing, price hikes, streaming, television, video