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I go to watch a new show with my friend, and oops! It’s only on Disney Plus. I want to see a new movie, but it turns out it’s a Netflix exclusive. Darn. I try to find an old show from my childhood that I liked and turns out it’s on Max. What even is Max? Ridiculous.
At some point in the last couple years, every big media business decided that they wanted a piece of the streaming pie and all jumped in on it, and now when you want to watch something new there’s a pretty good chance it’s on some obscure platform called Quibi or Fubo or Glumbo (two of those are real) or whatever and it is inaccessible to the majority of people. The worst part of this business practice is that the central point — if there is one — of creating art, like movies and television, is for those things to be seen, and this strategy of squirreling away content in the deepest corners of the internet behind a $10 to $15 paywall is anathema to that.
There is a TV show that I personally really enjoyed called Mythic Quest, a workplace drama at a video game developer studio and it is very enjoyable! Except, it’s on Apple TV. How many people have Apple TV? According to the All Things Streaming report by Moffet Nathanson, only 11% of US households have Apple TV, while Netflix sits at near 50%. Art is being obscured by all these services — and the monetary benefits are questionable, too. According to Forbes, Disney Plus has lost $11 billion dollars from the service, and The New York Times asserts that Netflix had borrowed up to something in the range of $16 billion to stay in business. They all seemed to have tricked themselves into thinking that this is their best, most profitable option. It is not.
Big businesses are not where all of this ends. Earlier this year, the YouTube channel Watcher announced that they would be moving all of their content to a private, paid subscription service. This caused a bit of a stir among online communities because all of this content was completely free on one of the most accessible platforms and now it would be hidden behind a paywall asking for six dollars a month, alienating a large portion of their audience who could not or would not pay. The reason for the channel’s switch was fair enough, they wanted a platform unrestricted by advertisers and YouTube’s content guidelines, but as we see with corporate subscription services, the issue is inaccessibility.
Of course, I would be remiss if I did not mention Dropout, a sketch- and improv-comedy-based service that had its origins as CollegeHumor on YouTube, and began to offer more content on a largely successful subscription service. But what it did differently was stay on YouTube and not hide all their content exclusively behind a paywall. Where other platforms were killed by inaccessibility, Dropout stayed relevant with inclusivity. The problem is clear.
So what do we do? I don’t know. But if there is anything to do, it’s to shear off the excess and stop making new streaming platforms. Netflix was fine. Let’s keep it to that.