Post 3 - Yet Another Streaming Service

28 Jul 2025 15postsin30days · media

“You know, I watched a great movie yesterday; it was called The Movie That Can Never Be Watched.”

“Oh, cinema-in-cinema. That sounds interesting. Where did you watch it, was it on Netflix?”

“No, I think it was on BagelsForLife.tv.”

“Oh, I don’t have an account on that one.”

“Tough luck! You’ll have to wait until the streaming contract for this movie expires in 4 years and it moves to yet another streaming service that you don’t have an account on.”

If you can relate to this story, you should keep reading.

Once upon a time, there were no movies. Then, someone discovered a method to record moving pictures, and someone else figured out that recording people doing interesting things and showing it to other people would be a great business. Thus began show business. Showing movies to hundreds of people at once was efficient, so people did that. If someone told you about a movie, you would be able to watch it for a short period of time, or if the movie ever got “re-released.” If the movie was still showing at a theater near you, all you had to do was ask your friend, “Where did you watch that movie?”, book a ticket, and watch it the next day. Simple.

Then, someone invented a television. Showing a movie to millions of people through a television was even more efficient, so people started doing that: They would ask TV channels to broadcast movies, or they would make tapes containing the movie available for purchase. Soon, a company decided that mailing these tapes to people would make people want to watch even more movies, because who wants to leave their house anyway? Then, someone invented the Internet, and everything became a hundred times easier and better in an instant: Pay for a single subscription, and you get access to every movie that has ever existed. Wait a few months and even new movies are accessible. Perfection.

The wheel of progress is never-ending though: Soon, the companies that were producing movies realized that while a few hundred thousand people would watch their movies in a theater, millions were watching it at home through a subscription service. The subscription service was making money from their content and they could not stand it: So, they decided to make their own subscription service: Every single content creator decided that their content belongs on their own streaming service. So, we got Prime, Plus, Protein, and Peacock. Content started getting fragmented and we were back to the age old question: “Where did you watch that movie?” “Yet Another Streaming Service,” would come the answer.

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The “where is that movie streaming again” question has become a constant companion in my life. I am asking everyone, all the time. Services like JustWatch.com have tried to catalog this information, but in my experience, it either does not have data for the movie I am looking for, or the data is out-of-date. Even if you know which service has the movie, you may not be able to access the movie due to geographic restrictions, content restrictions, not having a subscription, etc. I have not kept count of the movies that I would like to watch but I have not been able to because of paywalls, the service not being available where I am living, or not having a credit card that the service would accept.

Shockingly, this has even bled into sports events: Sports events live on advertisements and the more people who watch a sporting event, the higher the advertisement revenue from that event. There is no point in locking down sports content, right? Isn’t this why cricket matches are always playing for free in the store windows of appliance stores in India? If people can watch an event for free, that’s good for the advertisers and great for the network that is broadcasting it.¹ Somehow, streaming services have broken this business model.

My pessimistic assumption is that TV networks spent too much (well beyond their means) on streaming services. Now, they had the infrastructure to stream content, but they were running losses. Put two and two together: the temptation of actual money from subscriptions was greater than the potentially higher advertising revenue they could get but were not seeing materialize.

There is another facet to this: The implementation of streaming video is not easy and requires a lot of optimization and clout.² Notwithstanding this simple realization, every single television and media company has jumped heads first into this segment with below-par results in most cases. This is obviously not going to work: The amount of optimization required to get glitch-free video streaming is too high for a new company, which has just landed the rights to broadcast a big event. The fact that a service lands a big event deal could often spell the end of its likability because that is the first time people actually use the platform; they are probably immediately annoyed by the video quality (bad) or the amount of buffering (worse), and promptly get off the platform once the event is over. The VC-spirited “get users first, revenue second, and profit third” does not work in most cases; it certainly does not work if you don’t have a great product when you acquire³ the users for the first time.

I have no idea what is going to happen; the total number of people who subscribe to streaming services appears to be constant to me: No one will pay for multiple streaming services; rather choosing to rotate between various streaming sites over the year. There is a counter-trend towards reconsolidation with ISPs and cellphone service providers now attempting to bundle network access services with streaming, convincing the user that they would be paying less for both as a bundle, than they would if they signed up to either of them separately. This might work for a while, but bundling rarely works long-term. Right? There is even the crazier business model of streaming services within streaming services: A big streaming service which allows people to watch content from multiple streaming services without leaving the site, through even more subscriptions.