Online entertainment has played an essential role in the day to day lives of many over the past couple of years, as online gaming has become very popular for players recently particularly with online games of chance, online music and podcasting continued to grow rapidly, and online movies really taking off with the change for box office releases directly to online platforms, it has been an exciting change. Despite this, there has been growing disappointment when it comes to online streaming platforms as libraries grow stale and newer releases are few and far between, but what does this mean for the biggest streaming services?
For some, it’s a period of time akin to the cable cutting movement that has been taking place over the past few years as many individuals re-evaluate exactly which streaming services are of value and which can be let go. With so many individual services having launched, there’s a large gap in content as each tries to outbid the others in order to get the latest content on their own platform which leads to a bidding war that tends not to work in favor of the end-user as new releases become limited or time-gated.
Suggestions have been made through the years to see some of the bigger services collaborate, but it’s unlikely that this will ever be a true possibility as each service tries to fight to win over a new audience. There is room for all to succeed together, at a time where both Netflix and Amazon Prime were at their biggest, Disney+ was able to bring in over 100 million users in just 16 months, but all three would soon suffer shortly after with numbers dwindling over time as the catalogs become further exhausted and there had been little to differentiate between them.
It did seem like there would be a period of change with box office releases moving to streaming platforms, but that had only been a temporary adjustment and doesn’t look like it’ll be a permanent change – instead what looks most likely is users will continue on the same path of only being subscribed to a service for a small period of time, enough to explore new releases or recurring series and then once that has been consumed to cancel and move on to the next service. Currently, there are no restrictions to doing so either, and as such it does make sense to choose this method but don’t count on it being a permanent solution as there may be further changes yet, or other gates like that of Disney+ restricting content behind a premiere paywall in the initial stages of release.