"One interesting wrinkle in this march towards consolidated annoyance is the streaming sector’s interest in driving more users toward ad-based tiers, where profits can continue to skyrocket:"
Ah, but one must remember, we are in the streaming situation we are in now because the consolidation already happened. Netflix was The Streaming Service. But the content providers to Netflix looked at Neflix's profits and said, "Hey, we could have a larger slice of the pie if we ran our own services." So they went off and made their own. And, yes, they discovered they were wrong.
But even if they consolidate again, it's just the nature of a MBA-executive in a content producing company to look over at the consolidated streaming service and say, once again, "Well, my predecessor couldn't make it work last time, but I'm sure that I can get a larger slice of the pie if I just make my own service. And look, customers will flock to my service because according to my numbers we can charge them a mere $9.99 a month whereas the consolidated service is $109.99."
Streaming service consolidation requires all the MBA-executives to humbly submit to the idea that they have no effective choice but to fork over control of the revenues to the consolidated streaming service. Who will, of course, be taking full advantage of their position to squeeze the content providers and push them as hard as they possibly can in the direction of the economics of running their own service making sense again.
I don't know that there's a stable solution to this. If there is I don't think it's the naively obvious consolidation solution.
Ah, but one must remember, we are in the streaming situation we are in now because the consolidation already happened. Netflix was The Streaming Service. But the content providers to Netflix looked at Neflix's profits and said, "Hey, we could have a larger slice of the pie if we ran our own services." So they went off and made their own. And, yes, they discovered they were wrong.
But even if they consolidate again, it's just the nature of a MBA-executive in a content producing company to look over at the consolidated streaming service and say, once again, "Well, my predecessor couldn't make it work last time, but I'm sure that I can get a larger slice of the pie if I just make my own service. And look, customers will flock to my service because according to my numbers we can charge them a mere $9.99 a month whereas the consolidated service is $109.99."
Streaming service consolidation requires all the MBA-executives to humbly submit to the idea that they have no effective choice but to fork over control of the revenues to the consolidated streaming service. Who will, of course, be taking full advantage of their position to squeeze the content providers and push them as hard as they possibly can in the direction of the economics of running their own service making sense again.
I don't know that there's a stable solution to this. If there is I don't think it's the naively obvious consolidation solution.