How do you see this playing out when there have been so many big investments by traditional players to put forward new streaming services?
The major players went from Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon and have now added Disney+, HBO Max, Peacock, Apple TV+, and Paramount+, with more on the way.
Untangling all the licensing deals is quite confusing as well and starts to get into the innards of production. I always associate Friends and Seinfeld with NBC, yet they aren't on Peacock, they're on HBO Max and Hulu, respectively. That and content shifting from one platform to another constantly, makes the web even more confusing and it's hard to determine which services you really want.
The major players I expect to be around after the streaming wars ends is: Netflix, Amazon, Disney and Apple. I expect most of the other platforms are going to end up as premium channels that you can subscribe to and watch on the other platforms, which you can do already in AppleTV+ and Amazon Prime.
HBO and Hulu will be around as long as they have exclusive content they can't stream on other platforms. I don't expect HBO's content & licensing strategy of limiting it to higher margin cable services will last. In Australia you can only watch HBO through Foxtel which I'll never do, basically anything that's not accessible from Netflix, Prime, Disney+ or AppleTV+ doesn't exist for us.
If the platforms were banned from producing their own content I expect it would dramatically favor platform owners like AppleTV+ where most iOS users would use to watch their content on as they can do now. Owning the UX would make them like Amazon.com storefront for 3rd party sellers, giving them unilateral power over the discovery of content, e.g. over time they could favor their own content, which is behavior I'd expect from Amazon, for Apple I think they'd be happy to just own the streaming platform as another lock-in & drawcard for iOS users.
Now you can search for what you want to watch, follow the prompts, and it shows you the price, and you agree or disagree. And then you cancel if you do not want it anymore. Some of the purchasing flows can surely use more work, but it’s leagues better than it used to be.
But it's definitely still structured to kinda slightly force your hand towards a subscribtion, and then towards maybe forgetting to cancel it in a couple weeks etc.
Pricing and UX?
But even though some companies are incapable of making good UIs, UX isn’t much of a moat.
At the same time, differentiation through pricing leads to races to the bottom and unsustainable / worthless markets (and, in our case, probably diminishing content quality).
Major personal gripes:
1. No watch history. Have to visit the web, dig into account settings to view it, having to click through 5 items at a time!
2. Content added to your list is displayed randomly, not by date added. No option to sort with various standard parameters such as aforementioned date added, popularity, year released, genre, etc.
3. Licensed content disappearing with not so much as a "we know you saved this to watch at some point but it's no longer available". Instead you're left second guessing yourself as to whether you suffer from dementia or not. (I get the business aspect of this, but still!)
4. Suggests content you've already watched and/or rated multiple times. At times recommends said show or movie immediately after watching/rating it.
5. Originals have trailers. Other content sometimes has trailers but most licensed content does not despite said trailers being available elsewhere for free. Most (all?) content used to show trailers but that's recently changed. (My guess is trailers convert better so you're more likely to watch original content)
6. No ratings history. Tangential to #1 I guess.
7. Can't click through to 'Coming Soon' titles to explore synopsis, trailers, cast, etc. Even for shows with prior seasons available; have to first search to access. To exasperate frustration, releasing soon titles are shown in searches where you can't do anything besides stare at a thumbnail.
Pretty sure I have other issues with their UX but these are the most irritating.
Broke up recently. What do I do with my former girlfriend’s profile?
Delete it and make her loose her watchlist and where she was in some shows?
Keep it and get that awkward moment when I invite someone over and we want to watch something?
Give her my account and lose my profile?
Ridiculous
We will complain about it, mock it, but rare are those willing to pay more for it (or even merely change products), unless the advantage is significant (ie Netflix vs P2P & streaming websites)
Regarding Netflix, honestly, their UX is a mess.
There's nothing stopping production companies from producing content, if it's compelling enough they'll still be able to license it out to the big players.
When everything's online the primary drawcard to different video subscriptions is exclusive content, which the giants are funding the production of themselves. Can't see how you could impose a law banning them from producing their own content, if they did and all content is licensed to everyone, there will be nothing distinguishing the different services.