> It will most will likely consolidate to 4 major players so we're looking at 4 subscriptions to watch most new content.
How do you see this playing out when there have been so many big investments by traditional players to put forward new streaming services?
The major players went from Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon and have now added Disney+, HBO Max, Peacock, Apple TV+, and Paramount+, with more on the way.
Untangling all the licensing deals is quite confusing as well and starts to get into the innards of production. I always associate Friends and Seinfeld with NBC, yet they aren't on Peacock, they're on HBO Max and Hulu, respectively. That and content shifting from one platform to another constantly, makes the web even more confusing and it's hard to determine which services you really want.
Hulu is majority owned by Disney who'll likely want to keep it running as a separate subscription service like ESPN in order to charge multiple content subscriptions.
The major players I expect to be around after the streaming wars ends is: Netflix, Amazon, Disney and Apple. I expect most of the other platforms are going to end up as premium channels that you can subscribe to and watch on the other platforms, which you can do already in AppleTV+ and Amazon Prime.
HBO and Hulu will be around as long as they have exclusive content they can't stream on other platforms. I don't expect HBO's content & licensing strategy of limiting it to higher margin cable services will last. In Australia you can only watch HBO through Foxtel which I'll never do, basically anything that's not accessible from Netflix, Prime, Disney+ or AppleTV+ doesn't exist for us.
If the platforms were banned from producing their own content I expect it would dramatically favor platform owners like AppleTV+ where most iOS users would use to watch their content on as they can do now. Owning the UX would make them like Amazon.com storefront for 3rd party sellers, giving them unilateral power over the discovery of content, e.g. over time they could favor their own content, which is behavior I'd expect from Amazon, for Apple I think they'd be happy to just own the streaming platform as another lock-in & drawcard for iOS users.
This kind of confusing experience is certainly advantageous towards extracting more from the viewer. It’s like shopping malls being designed to be difficult to get out of.
It’s a far less confusing experience than it was pre streaming services. You basically paid for an unknown item - you did not even know which content was going to be available or when it would be available.
Now you can search for what you want to watch, follow the prompts, and it shows you the price, and you agree or disagree. And then you cancel if you do not want it anymore. Some of the purchasing flows can surely use more work, but it’s leagues better than it used to be.
Oh yeah definitely. It's all a matter of perspective and possibility enabled by the technology.
But it's definitely still structured to kinda slightly force your hand towards a subscribtion, and then towards maybe forgetting to cancel it in a couple weeks etc.
How do you see this playing out when there have been so many big investments by traditional players to put forward new streaming services?
The major players went from Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon and have now added Disney+, HBO Max, Peacock, Apple TV+, and Paramount+, with more on the way.
Untangling all the licensing deals is quite confusing as well and starts to get into the innards of production. I always associate Friends and Seinfeld with NBC, yet they aren't on Peacock, they're on HBO Max and Hulu, respectively. That and content shifting from one platform to another constantly, makes the web even more confusing and it's hard to determine which services you really want.