Lets face it. Streaming was never going to be the panacea that people made it out to be. There are economies of scale at play, and it has the same content owner structure which cable had to deal with.
Live TV streaming services (like YouTube TV, Sling, Hulu Live TV, etc), will have carriage fee disputes with the channels/networks they wish to carry, just like cable.
Stand-alone streaming services need content to keep eyeballs, so they have to make or buy stuff which costs money, the more they make or buy, the more they need to charge subscribers, just like paid TV channels. Small streamers can’t compete with with larger streamers. Studios (like Disney) with a large back catalog have more content but they still need to bring in new stuff. Acquisitions can bring new content, so Disney buying Fox Studios, or the Warner/Discovery merger, etc. allow them to offer more content.
And most consumers don’t want to pay for multiple services, adding up to what they paid for when they had cable. And they don’t want to remember what content is on what streamer.
Consolidation solves the content issue, and it solves the “what service was that on again??” issue for the consumer, at the cost of the streaming service now raising their price to cover the cost of the acquisition and new content, and the entitlement due to "hey look how much content we have!'.
I will be curious what happens with Discovery, CNN, and such, because they are not part of the Netflix purchase. So will the Discovery programming on HBOMax move to Discovery+ ?
