I find this to be sort of self-contradictory. On the one hand, monopolies are bad, but on the other, having 5+ platforms is bad. Which is it?
My (perhaps unpopular) opinion is that having more and more streaming platforms ("balkanized", to use your term) is extremely good for consumers. The low barriers to entry and the near-zero marginal distribution costs make this the perfect industry for competition (and as a result, consumer welfare).
It's a common misconception that having N streaming platforms necessarily means that consumers spend N * subscription cost dollars per month, but that's not a sensible user pattern. Nobody consumes from every single streaming service at the same time. Instead, we have a sort of TDMA style consumption of media that allows us to constantly subscribe/unsubscribe/resubscribe from services as we chew threw our respective TV show backlogs. Savvy consumers have benefited the most from this reality, and it's only a matter of time until we see subscription management products that extend this benefit to un-savvy consumers in seamless ways.
One day, streaming services will look to consolidate so as to be able to extract monopoly rents. These are horizontal acquisitions that would be terrible for consumer welfare, and those are the kinds of acquisitions the US FTC would likely police.
The problem isn't that there are 5 platforms; it's that they don't have the same content.
Having multiple platforms have different content is not all that different from having multiple TV channels have different content, except now I'm not forced to subscribe to a giant bundle of channels when I only realistically use 2-3 at any given time.
It’s their content and they can do what they want; but you can’t stop piracy
And Amazon Prime Video is quite good. Certainly HBO stuff was never available elsewhere (except for purchase or physical rental). Yes, Disney siphoned some stuff off the other services, but again much of that wasn't available for subscription streaming pre-Disney+ (which at current pricing is actually a pretty good deal).
I really can't be bothered with piracy unless I really want to see something and just can't find it elsewhere.
On the other hand, it is their content.