It’s been a confusing couple weeks for people who just want to watch TV. First, there was the January 30 news that Paramount+ and Showtime, two separate streaming services owned by the same entertainment conglomerate, would merge and become the clunkily named “Paramount+ with Showtime.” Then Netflix accidentally revealed (and quickly took down) new rules designed to curb password sharing. Now the Wall Street Journal is reporting (and a spokesman has confirmed to Vanity Fair) that despite the planned merger of Discovery+ and HBO Max, Discovery+ will remain a stand-alone service—though, bear with me here, a new super-service combining programming from both brands is still expected to hit the market later this year.
Streaming was supposed to make watching your favorite shows easier, and for a while, it did. Gone were restrictive (not to mention expensive) cable contracts; in their place was a smorgasbord of bingeable content, all available with the click of a button. But somewhere along the way, things got complicated. In order to watch all the programming that you used to get from a single cable subscription, you now need at least a half dozen streaming memberships that get more expensive every year. Ongoing change in Hollywood—consolidation, layoffs, worries about the financial success of these services—means that things will probably only get worse before they get better.
Take, for instance, Netflix, which for most of its history as a streaming service didn’t care much whether users shared their memberships with family, friends, or their ex-boyfriend’s roommate. In 2017, Netflix even tweeted from its official account that “Love is sharing a password.” But last year, after facing its first subscriber loss in over a decade, executives at the streaming giant began to rethink that carefree stance. Last week, the company updated its US Help Center web page with restrictive new password-sharing rules—including requiring subscribers to use the Netflix app from their home at least once every 31 days. After some hubbub, the company retracted the changes, claiming that they had been posted accidentally and were only applicable in Chile, Costa Rica, and Peru. On Wednesday, Netflix issued a password-sharing update for Canada, Portugal, Spain, and New Zealand that excluded the 31-day rule.
And of course, a Netflix subscription alone is no longer all you need to stream the films and TV series you want to see. To watch Friends, you now need to sign up for HBO Max. The Simpsons is on Disney+. The Office is only available via Peacock. The process has become so complicated that users may well need spreadsheets to keep track of all the choices—and things aren’t getting any simpler. Consider this: “Paramount+ with Showtime” will host both Yellowjackets and Tulsa King. Yet the company’s biggest hit, Taylor Sheridan’s Yellowstone, airs on a completely different channel—the Paramount Network—and streams on NBCUniversal’s Peacock.
In his first earnings call since returning as CEO of Disney, Bob Iger assured that, even though streaming has entered its awkward phase, things are still better for consumers than they were before. “The impact of technology is basically creating a huge authority shift from the producer and the distributor to the consumer,” he said. “It gives the consumer so much more authority than they ever had.” It’s true that cable subscriptions continue to decline year after year, and the demand for a never-ending stream of new programming is only growing. Still, wouldn’t it be nice if it wasn’t so hard to watch TV?
#Streaming #Complicated
