Part 5: Streaming breaks TV

TV used to be simple: A few buttons to switch channels, a guide button to pop up the channel guide (with a few dozen choices), if you have a DVD player, a slot to pop in a movie, and if you had a DVR, a button to select from a few dozen recordings.

Now users have to deal with a million choices (excluding the ten billion or so on YouTube or TikTok), with the same antiquated remote control (some filled with buttons that don’t do anything, or do something bad) designed for a world of (at most) 100 choices.?

Meanwhile we’ve replaced simple and quick channels with complex and sluggish streaming apps, most commonly Netflix, Disney+, Hulu, Prime Video,? YouTube, and a live TV app, all doing similar things somewhat differently. The result is a mess:

• Users who spend hours every day touching/mousing, typing, tabbing, scrolling, swiping, shaking/undoing, and sleeping/unsleeping intuitively on their phones and PCs can’t do any of these on their archaic ‘smart’ TV remotes. $1000 dollars TVs are controlled by $5’s worth of plastic buttons. We click, we wait, we lurch. It’s like controlling a Sony PS5 with an ancient joystick.??
• Finding shows is a pain. Text search using a remote control is so slow, and voice search is often confused. If the show is on another service you won’t find it. If the show is in your spouse’s or friend’s profile, even if you find it, it won’t play the right episode. Good luck if you don’t remember where it is, or who watched it.?
• Unlike news feeds, feeds in Smart TV apps are brain dead. They have many odd suggestions and recommendations, endlessly repeated, over which we seem to have no control.?
• Despite just one main function, playing video, playback is laggy and there’s no intuitive (analog) controls for video scrubbing or speed.? Game developers solved lag long ago (prefetch and buffer).??
• Services have begun to use autoplay, but in a herky jerky way, and instead of simply playing the show, they play the same trailer over and over. That might make sense to do once, but it’s annoying the second time or if you’ve already started to watch the show. Worse is when the trailer includes spoilers.?
• And services have started to imitate old fashioned TV with over 1,000 low budget FAST channels, for a much bigger mess.?

Everything, everywhere all at once is a lot

While Apple, Google and Amazon can easily spend billions on content to boost their platforms, media companies, like Netflix, must be profitable. As overall long form media consumption slowly declines, Netflix’s long form competitors must cut costs, raise prices, or get acquired.?

During the cable monopoly Americans were spending roughly $100 per month per household on video, $75 for cable, $20 on premium channels, and $5 on video rentals. But now you can switch to Netflix, Disney+ and WBD (Max) and spend just $33/month and still watch $70 billion (per year) worth of content! If consumers cut their spend on video from $100/month to $33/month, the video entertainment industry must (eventually) cut their costs by 66%! Does anyone want to lose most of their favorite shows??

Actually, the big cuts would hit new show budgets hardest. The incumbents have vast libraries of content which they can stream at low cost. While streaming isn’t a lot cheaper than broadcasting, the difference is that with streaming everything can be available simultaneously, instead of just one show per channel. So now the incumbents are creating hundreds of FAST (free, ad supported TV) streams to leverage their libraries.

Whether we pay by watching ads or paying directly, the more we pay, the more and better shows we’ll be able to watch. The less we pay, the less quality and choice we’ll have. Since the average household in the USA is 2.5 people, with 11 devices, services need a tiered model; a cheap ‘basic’ rate for a single person, and higher rates for more people and devices, with password sharing restricted. Expect the cost of streaming to gradually increase to match the cost of peak cable, $100/month for a household of 3. At 3 hours a day per person that’s only $.33/hour, to watch tens of billions of dollars worth of entertainment!??

Next: Part 6 - Franchises Rule!