The moment my neighborhood got broadband fiber-optic internet, I opted in and had it connected to the house. It was $76.99 a month. I then added YouTube TV at the crazy cost of $64.99 a month. Comcast had been charging me well over $200 for a cable package and internet, so the financials checked out.
I was paying $20 a month for Netflix, which seemed reasonable. Fast forward to today, and I’m paying a lot more for Netflix and the other streaming services I can’t live without, plus all the other subscription services I need for music, audiobooks, podcasts, passwords, cloud storage, writing, editing, reading, and, now, large language models.
For just my audio and video services, I’m paying way more than $200 a month. It’s gotten a little out of hand.
What I keep getting stuck on is that I canceled cable to escape exactly this predicament. In the 2010s, the problem was that the bundle was the enemy. Bundles forced you to pay for what you didn’t want. The future was à la carte. The future was choice. The post-Tivo/DVR world let me watch a show whenever I wanted to. Scheduled air times and network lineups were a thing of the past.
Not counting my internet provider, I have eleven different bundles now. Sigh.
This week, Warner Bros. Discovery shareholders approved a $111 billion merger with Paramount and Skydance. If regulators sign off (Federal probably, but the states are going to sue), one company will own CNN, CBS, HBO, two of the five biggest movie studios, a piece of TikTok, and who knows what else. It will essentially be the largest concentration of media power in U.S. history. They will be able to set a ridiculous price point that many people will pay. The cable bundle is reassembling itself in front of us. The pieces are smaller. Now they individually bill you instead of bundling in one place. Still, the architecture is essentially the same.
As much as it fell on deaf ears, the Comcast salesperson wasn’t trying to trick people. She was telling the truth. Bundles exist because all-you-can-watch is what most people want most of the time, and because nobody is going to log in to seven different apps to find a movie they sort of feel like watching. The bundle was correct. No one wanted to hear it. I know I didn’t.
So we got what we asked for. We got choice. And what we discovered is that “choice” is not a feature. It’s a job. It’s a tab open in your browser. It’s a shared family Netflix login that a dog sitter from two years ago is somehow still using. It’s wanting to watch that awesome movie or TV show you heard about that everyone needs to watch, and spending hours trying to figure out which service has it.
A byproduct of this streaming era is that it has trained me to watch less. With cable, I’d flip through channels and land on something. Some of my favorite movies came to me that way, by accident, on TBS at 1 a.m. with the commercials cut in funny places. Now everything is searchable, sortable, and queueable. I know what’s available. I have it all. Everything everywhere all at once.
And don’t get me started on the subscriptions I have on YouTube Premium that I can easily scroll through and kill an evening without even trying.
I don’t think any of this is going to get better. The bundles will reassemble. The mergers will close. The streaming economy will solve for what it’s always solved for: making your money disappear and your decisions automatic. The next iteration will be smoother. I’m sure I will pay for them.
There are people who sign up for services for one show and sign out when they are finished. They are constantly keeping up to date with their streaming packages. Maybe, if I were single and living alone, I could do that. Today, ain’t nobody got time for that.
This current landscape of streaming services has also brought back something I thought might actually be dead — piracy. Not that I have tried to download a whole season of, I dunno, Game of Thrones lately, but it is super easy to do so.
What I want is something smaller. I want fewer apps. I want to know what I pay for. I want to easily find the movie I want to watch and not have to search all my streaming services to find it. I want one bill. I want to lose track of an evening because something good was on, not because the algorithm correctly predicted my mood and tucked me in.
I’m pretty sure I’m not going to get what I want.
Be seeing you.
