Here’s a little parable, something I hope never happens.
It’s January, 2027. After all the streaming mergers were done, there was only one service left. Called “Zaslav,” it was formed from the bones of Netflix, Max, Peacock, Disney+, Paramount+, and Apple TV+. It costs $400 a month and it has more commercials than today’s pay TV packages. Roughly 90% of the content is some variant of house hunting show and the rest is reruns of Green Acres.
The service claims 12 billion subscribers and yet it’s still losing money. Why? Because in truth, no one uses it. Most people use the latest version of Kodi, an open source program designed to find and pirate content. It’s full of malware and that’s been a big problem. At one point the entire government of France stopped functioning for a week because someone wanted to watch a rerun of Le bureau. (Run it through Google Translate if you don’t get the reference.)
All major sports have collapsed because no one could find a legal way to watch the game. This has led to gangs of former lacrosse players roaming the streets while someone (for some reason) shouts “goooooooal!”
It’s gotten so bad that teenagers have started reading books.
Is it really that implausible?
OK so that sounds a little far-fetched. But is it? The latest wave of mergers in the streaming business has already gone too far. In a world filled with terrorists and criminals, it’s made the head of a television studio one of the most hated men in America. Think about that for a second. Things have to be pretty bad in streaming-land for you to even know the name of a studio executive, let alone hate them.
For years, I forecast what I called “streampocalypse,” where content would disappear, prices would rise 30% or more, and whole streaming apps would just shut down. In 2023, it all happened. And let me tell you, I take no pleasure in being right. All we can do is hope that the worst of it is behind us.
Speaking of Paramount
Yes, it seems like there may be one more major merger as Paramount+ is reputedly up for sale. It’s hard to know who a buyer would be, though. Disney and Comcast would seem to be a bad fit since the US government would never allow a merger that caused two broadcast networks to be owned by the same company. Or would they? Considering how powerful companies like Sinclair have gotten, I suppose it’s a possibility.
The whole world (with the possible exception of Zaslav’s mother) seems to think that Warner Bros. Discovery buying Paramount would be an exceptionally bad idea. I tend to agree. But bad ideas turn into realities all the time and it would be one step closer to that vision I had at the beginning of this article.
What are you willing to pay for good content?
That’s the real question, isn’t it. For about a decade, we’ve all been spoiled as a tidal wave of great content came to us for a couple of bucks a day. Complain as we do about the high cost of streaming, and argue as we do about how much it really costs, there’s one thing you can’t argue about. It costs more for a family of four to see a first-run film and have snacks than it costs to stream a whole month full of entertainment. Hopefully that continues to be the case.
I hope that what we see in 2024 is that production dollars are spent smartly and that streamers can actually afford to hold the line on prices. It doesn’t have to mean less content and it could actually mean better content. It’s a sad commentary that good writing costs a lot less than eye-popping visuals. It could just be that low budgets are just what we need in order to get better movies.
As I write this, we’re already inexplicably about 8% into 2024 and it’s still hard to gauge the trends. But let’s all cross our fingers and hope that for once in the last few years, things actually get better.
