Once upon a time, Netflix used to send out DVDs through the mail. Then, Netflix slowly started advertising a newfangled option: Members could watch movies online.
Fast forward to today: Netflix has giants like Martin Scorsese directing movies for it. Netflix has award-winning series, too. Plus all the movies you can eat popcorn to.
Netflix has changed the online entertainment game, but it's also changed itself. It used to be just a service that viewers could use to watch television shows and Hollywood movies--until it started making its own content.
And now every media company under the sun has figured out it can pull its content off Netflix and start its own streaming service to get customers who are willing to pay $7-$10 a month for it. Take NBCUniversal for example. The company holds the license for Netflix favorites like Friends and The Office. And it's getting ready to pull them.
Consumers have grown used to spending $10 a month and having one centralized service. But now that companies are pulling their individual shows away to start their own streaming services, consumers are becoming frustrated.
The market is fracturing, and consumers are going to have to subscribe to more services and spend more money to watch what they want. It's essentially cable television reinvented on the web, only the "channels" are individual streaming services like CBS All Access and Apple TV+.
But the other day Netflix announced yet another deal to delay the inevitable. The streaming service has picked up Seinfeld, yet another 1990s television series that just won't stop.
Disney+ launches this year, HBO is supposed to get some kind of revamped streaming service and Apple's new service launches soon. Every media company seems to be thinking, "We can take all the shows we have licenses for, make a new series or two, and blend it all together into a new streaming service!"
The hope is these companies will get millions of subscribers willing to fork over $10 a month like Netflix has done. Whether they'll be successful, and consumers won't grow aggravated at the splintered market, remains to be seen.
For now, the streaming wars continue. We get the feeling that, as a war leader named Churchill once noted, we're not at the end, nor the beginning of the end, but perhaps the end of the beginning.
Editorial on 09/18/2019