> I don't think anyone saying "I want one service" means "I hope to be locked in to one provider"

It's a thin line, is what I'm warning.

> I want one easy interface

Definitely this.

We have various non-standardized interfaces currently for home entertainment with machines running their own enterprise software. The playstations, xboxes, apple TV, smart tvs, etc have their own mediocre ways of cobbling things and allowing you to rent / buy / stream.

Perhaps an open-source alternative is what's needed, but that's often so late to the game.

Definitely worth a comparison to the audio streaming market...

My Spotify subscription is £9.99 and gives me access to unlimited music from all artists (within reason - it’s very unlikely I find something not on there).

I’m willing to pay more for a video subscription that gives me access to unlimited tv and movies.

But to get everything on streaming I have to buy: - Amazon Subscription - Netflix Subscription - Apple TV subscription - Disney+ Subscription - Now TV - TV licence (iPlayer)

And after I have subscribed to all of these, there are still loads of movies and TV shows not covered.

I would pay for one subscription that had the content mixed in. It would be better to have a single £25 contract and get everything rather than this crazy fragmentation where you pay for 80% of the content 4 times and have to get an additional subscription if there is one series you want to watch on a different service.

DRM and walled gardens are the obstacle to open source media players. See above re control.

> Perhaps an open-source alternative is what's needed, but that's often so late to the game.

The problem is that the software part of it is comparatively easy; a perfect platform from the point of view of code, robustness, and useability means nothing unless you can get the rights-holders to agree to make their content available on it.

Is this actually a hurdle considering we can access all this content right from the browser? It could just be a container pointing to the content, I don't think it's necessitated that there be native launchers such that they aren't really "on" it.

> Is this actually a hurdle considering we can access all this content right from the browser?

Right, that's sort of what I mean—accessing it isn't the point. Once you've paid for and subscribed to every different streaming service today, and checked that there aren't a few more that have sprouted up overnight, then access is a solved problem, in the browser or prettified on the desktop. The hard part, and what I think people mean when they speak of wanting one service, is not having to curate, seek out, and pay for all those different streaming services in the first place.