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 wont 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.

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.

when a specific show is only available on one of them, it is a monopoly in that regard though.

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.

I don’t mind multiple streaming platforms as long as all they do is stream content

My issue is each and every streaming platform produces their own exclusive content or they sign exclusivity contracts so only one platform streams a particular show or movie at once.

If Netflix and amazon video had the same content, you would just have to choose the service that is cheapest and has the best benefits like great user interface, customer support, features, and other stuff like that.

When there are 12 different platforms which each have their own library with barely any overlap you have to sign up for multiple all at once, and some that have terrible customer support or user interfaces if you want to watch one of their shows.

Because each of them are charging you $15-$20 per month to access their platform that realistically only has one or two things that actually provide you the value for what you spend.

So now, instead of spending the $100 or whatever it was with your cable TV company to get access to all those channels (which, while you couldnt pick what was on when, they were all included together), now you have to spend like $150-$200 to be able to access the same kind of content as before.

And to make it worse, you used to be able to buy a Laserdisc/VHS/DVD/etc of a movie you really liked. One time purchase, not a monthly subscription. And you didn’t have to think about what youre going to do when the streaming service decides to remove your purchased content from their servers (spoiler alert, they almost never will refund you or give you a copy, it just disappears along with your money you spent to buy it).

If there was an aggregator of sorts that would charge let’s say even $25 to watch whatever I’d pay happily. That’s what Netflix kinda was before other streaming services started popping up and each asking for a hefty fee.

They don’t compete with the same content but different features or pricing… they compete by forming fiefdoms of exclusive content. So the user still only has one option per show - not a real choice.

As others have pointed out, the rules of competition don’t apply since there’s exclusive content at play.

As a metaphor, It’s not like one restaurant serving a popular type of food vs multiple restaurants doing so. It’s having one Italian, one Thai, one Chinese and one American restaurant being the only ones in 100 miles. Look! There’s competition, 4 restaurants! Unless you only want some pad Thai.

So now instead of fixing cables issue of $60-100/month, they made it more complicated by paying $60-100/month to 3-5 different companies instead of one.

As a real life example. If you have kids, or are a big Star wars/marvel fan, 9/10 you need Disney+. It may as well be a Monopoly now so they can raise their prices as much as they want. Parents and nerds will pay through the nose for it.

Source: am a parent and a nerd (but I pirate all my stuff anyway)

It’s a matter of convenience. If you wish to ethically watch various shows then you have to either pay for many streaming services or finish some content on one, cancel, and switch to another.

There could be 1 service that carries all the content and the companies that produce that content can still be paid without having to subscribe to 10 different services to get all the content you’re looking for. Like how Netflix worked before everyone decided to make their own platform and took damn near everything off Netflix.

There could be multiple services with the same content that compete on pricing or other services/features instead of holding content hostage.

Since they all hold different things hostage, you really do not have a choice where you watch the show/movie you want; it’s only on a specific service that has it.

Because what people really want is an iTunes like service that just has everything for a single price rather than 14 streaming apps that have content overlap but also exclusives and rotating temporary content licenses costing $20+ each with ads.

There was a period of time when I gave up pirating because Netflix+prime was good enough to watch just about everything, and on-device search easily searched both platforms and provided a unified search/watch experience. It wasn’t worth the effort of finding and storing content yourself.

Fast forward to today, you search for something, it belongs to some fucking random service you don’t currently pay $17.99 a month for and then halfway though a season, it drops from the platform and goes to another streaming service you also don’t pay for. It’s just endless bullshit and nickel&diming now.

I’d happily pay $60 a month for a single service that just had everything and saved me from all this bullshit, instead I’d be forced to spend $300 a month for 23 services I barely use just to have access to the catalog of content I want.

Another example of this done well is steam- I just want my whole library in one place, I don’t want 5 different game libraries each with their own crap. Consequently I’ve spent thousands of dollars on steam over the years because of the unified experience.

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.

I literally torrent everything like a normal person

People went from paying for cable and addon channels, to having a consolidated service, to having that service split and paid for addon channels again.

Not to mention keeping track of when they pay, since they’re all different dates unless you do it on specific days all at once.

Then there’s self hosting and having everything in one spot. Phew, nothing like it.