Re:Disney Assumes Full Control of Hulu in Deal with Comcast
by basch on Tuesday May 14, 2019 @01:22PM
(#19911471)
Price should stay down if you look at it as substitutes.
You can rotate your National Amusement(Viacom/CBS/Paramount), Disney/Fox/Hulu, Comcast/UniversalNBC, Sony, ATT/DirecTV/WB/Turner/HBO, Netflix accounts. They arent a contract. You have the incumbents (Disney, NA, Sony, Comcast, ATT, Verizon) vs the tech giants (Netflix, Apple, Google, Facebook.) One thing to notice is that Sony, Disney, and NA are now the odd ones out not owning an ISP. You buy one for a month each, cancel, switch to the next one.
It ends up being a LOT cheaper than cable if you rotate, and probably more expensive if you decide you need all channels at all times. The ability to rotate through them is a huge plus over cable/satellite.
Choice only drives priced down when it is choice between options which are actually substitutes for each other. What is instead happening is that the uniquely attractive franchises that people are interest in and not willing to substitute for something else are getting distributed over more different offerings, which isn't really competition in the sense that drives down prices much.