Thursday, July 16, 2020
Modern Cable: Going Forward in Digital Media, Going Backwards in Execution
It's amazing that we have gotten so far in terms of digital media to the point where we can stream any movie or TV show directly to your phone, tablet, or even smart TV. We have come so far from the out dated days of cable TV and the cable boxes that came with them, we have gone past the days of cable TV packages that over charged us for channel packages only to watch a certain TV show... oh we haven't moved past that at all. This is how we haven't moved past the age of cable at all, Netflix was the first company to start the wave of digital streaming and started the quick death of physical media and DVD shops starting with the media giant of Blockbuster. Netflix took the world by storm and allowed people to view any movie or TV show they would want whenever they wanted, a far cry from the days of having to wait and sometimes miss the TV show or movie they wanted to see, years later we see media giants like Disney and HBO do the same but they now fracture the digital space by allowing exclusives on their platforms like Disney being the only platform to be able to view Marvel movies or HBO not releasing their shows to other platforms. We have gone back to the age of packages because we are forced to buy all the packages at their price just to be able to view all our favorite shows. Is there no way out of this endless cycle or are we just going to have to bite the bullet and purchase each streaming service just to get what we want?
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This business plan will never change no matter how far technology goes because it is the most profitable option for them. Why release your hit show to all your competitors when you could just make it exclusive to you and get all that sweet revenue from all the fans of the show who now have to buy your streaming service. From their perspective, they are basically giving money away. This is unfortunately a side effect of having streaming services owned by the same companies that make those shows in the first place. Capitalism was never meant to have giant blobs of corporations suck up all the stages of production so that they could have unfair advantages against competitors and abuse the consumer. Capitalism has gone too far in prioritising the money over the people, and this is one of those examples. Sure stuff like Netflix or Hulu Originals is fine, but when things like the entire Marvel Extended Universe becomes exclusive to Disney+, that's when there's a problem. So until streaming services become separate from the companies that make the shows themselves, we will never be free of our 6+ subscriptions, each for a different specific show.
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