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 want 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.

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.

The problem is exclusive rights.

If you wanna watch 3 different shows but they are all on different platforms, then you gotta go and pay for all 3. You can’t just watch the Netflix version of Loki, or the Disney+ version of Ted Lasso.

You mentioned monopolies but the problem is that each platform holds hundreds of monopolies, each for one specific show/movie.

In a perfect world, there would be some sort of law or agreement against exclusive rights, where every service can show any product they bought the (non-exclusive) rights to.

In that scenario, streaming services would have to compete by being the cheapest or offering the best service.

But alas, this is not a perfect world

If the content was a commodity like oil or food it would mean all movies and series would be available to all streaming co. Then you could save money and choose the one that best serves your needs.

Since it’s not the case it’s more like worst case monopoly: if I want Star Trek I must suffer the bad experience that is paramount plus. If I want mandalorian I have no choice but to engage Disney Plus. Etc etc.

So not only you pay more, but there’s no incentive to pick the best ones and improve experience of the bad ones

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The issue with too many streaming services is largely the same as not enough streaming services

An average person will have a wide variety of favorite shows. Let’s say there’s 25 of them. For this example; Access to each of these 25 shows are non-negotiable to you and you feel you MUST have access to them.

If Service A and Service B are the only options; they both get to set the price. So to get access to a “complete” collection of content that you want you’re paying both of them $50 each. It’s most likely that half will be available only on A and the other half on B.

Now imagine that there are 10 different services. Each service is owned by one of the big ten networks that makes your 25 favorite shows. We will call them by their number from 1 to 10. Now each of your 25 shows have 10 places they could be.

On average; each network is likely to have 2.5 shows you like. Maybe a few have made some sweet deals with others; but no one place will have even 7.5 of your favorite shows…because these deals are costly and nobody wants to make less money per view.

Now each service; because they’re struggling to compete with each other will settle on a price of $10 each. But you still end up being forced to subscribe to all ten of them because no single provider has everything you want and no combination of less than all of them can provide complete access to all that you want to watch.

Even worse; any one of these ten can raise their price arbitrarily because they’re tired of competing and can’t break even. This means your total spend could be up to $500 eventually as they each creep towards demanding more money like a cable provider.

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.

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.

It killed the promise of affordable content we had for a decade. When Netflix was the only game in town, you paid less for it and got more.

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.

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).

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)

Cable was expensive as hell and to let you record stuff and watch when you want you had to pay even more for a DVR. Enter Netflix streaming, a service that had shows and movies for cheap.

As time went on, more services existed and each only had a portion of the content. Prices rose as well. Nowadays to get access to everything you’re basically paying cable prices like you were before. If everything was on one service (or if every service had everything) then it would be cheaper and people wouldn’t complain.

Imagine federated streaming platforms

Because they are “competing” with content exclusivity instead of quality of service, if every show was on every stream we would actually have competition.