Traditional cable companies are already losing the battle for your living room, and things are only getting worse as the companies that kicked them out of customers’ houses and the media production entities at the root of the entire process begin to fight amongst themselves. Unfortunately, with the way things are going now, consumers will see more fragmentation and higher overall cost to get the products that they want. Some cable providers are fleeing for greener pastures, as seen with Comcast’s XFINITY Mobile, while others, such as Time Warner and AT&T, are working together to try to either combine the two movements or all but force consumers to continue subscribing to costly packages where they’re stuck paying for a lot of things that they don’t consume.
Decentralization is taking hold in the streaming industry, and while consumers may in time be able to pay for the shows and types of content they want on an a la carte basis, the reality for now is that a lot of content producers are gearing up to compete directly with streaming services and traditional cable entities, pushing consumers to subscribe to a wider range of services in order to get what they want. One of the biggest examples of this is Disney, who has said that it will soon be taking a wealth of its beloved content from Netflix in order to offer it exclusively on its own streaming service. Using this move as an example, a customer who loves Disney movies and Stranger Things would previously have paid for Netflix and called it a day, but this new model will see them adding on a subscription to Disney’s app. If that same person happens to love Game of Thrones, there’s another subscription.
To address the elephant in the room, so to speak, this movement in the industry is almost certainly going to cause a spike in piracy, which is already at problematic levels for the industry. While most consumers will likely continue to take the lawful approach, just one or two people per neighborhood deciding that they’d rather set up a network-attached storage unit in their home and get into torrenting could set a trend for the industry that could threaten to make the entire current movement backfire. On the other hand, if all goes as planned, all parties involved could end up forced to lower prices by consumers who refuse to pay more than they were before for the same content, and things could even out. Whatever happens, consumers are in for a bumpy ride as content producers, cable companies, networks, and streaming services all butt heads to try to figure out what their collective industry should look like.