Graeme McMillan, writing on The Verge, claims that “Netflix, Amazon Video, and Xfinity are accidentally re-creating cable TV.”
His thesis:
“Since the advent of streaming online video, industry insiders have wondered what impact it would have on the future of television. As more companies move toward launching their own proprietary subscription streaming services, the future hasn’t been entirely decided yet, but new clues are emerging, pointing toward a potentially surprising answer: all this disruptive new media is just gradually re-creating familiar old-media models.”
As evidence, he points to a recent deal by Comcast’s Xfinity X1 digital cable service to carry Amazon Prime Video, alongside Netflix, YouTube, and Pandora.
This highlights a growing problem for viewers:
“The digital landscape is already fragmented, and it’s continually fragmenting further, as content creators choose to become content providers. In the process, it’s beginning to resemble cable television. Each new app or content library looks like a different channel to consider, and each one is essentially a premium cable offering that requires a separate subscription to view. Services that previously acted as content aggregators are losing outside content with the launch of each new service. Instead, they are creating their own content to maintain value in a crowded marketplace.”
Graeme asks:
“If streaming is, indeed, just New Television — or, perhaps more accurately, Old Television Again But Arguably More Expensive And More Complicated — then what benefit does that actually have for the end-user? The material has migrated to platforms where the audience already exists, but in a more unwieldy fashion that all but eliminates the free-view option of broadcast television, limiting its potential audience and penalizing low-income customers.”
He concludes: “Is it possible that, after all of this change and innovation, the future of television is just… television?”
My take: this is to be expected. See this Harvard Business Review article on the Consolidation Curve. Two years ago, there was an inkling already that there were too many “over-the-top streaming live-TV replacement services.” I suspect the only reason people are tolerating the proliferation of streaming services is rampant account sharing, which lowers fees.