The Streaming Wars Intensify

The early days of streaming services were a godsend for the vast majority of consumers who had grown tired of cable. No longer were we forced to pay $60 or more per month to access maybe 15 channels we actually watched. Streaming services like Netflix or Hulu gave us what we wanted at a fraction of the price. 

Well now, as seemingly every media company in the world is launching or will soon launch a subscription service, the average consumer will have to pay as much as — if not more than — they were paying for cable in order to consume all the entertainment they enjoy. That’s because as more companies launch these services, the content will become even more fragmented; there’s no “all-in-one” streaming service anymore, sadly. 

Case in point is Disney, which announced it would launch its own service, and shortly thereafter pulled all of its content from Netflix. Now it won’t even allow Netflix to advertise on its own Disney service. Pretty soon, we’ll have to subscribe to 10 different streaming products to get we want, and will be no better off than when cable companies dominated everything.