While I’d love that, unfortunately the business and unit economics can differ wildly. Some shows may be cheaper to acquire if there’s promotion in the interface (due to tie-ins or newer content like sequels in cinemas), subscribers may churn more regularly if not shown specific things, making marketing less effective and therefore more expensive.

It’s like how a TV with no smart features would have to cost more, because there’s no post-sales revenue. We’d love them. But they’d have to cost more, so most people wouldn’t buy them.

> Some shows may be cheaper to acquire if there’s promotion in the interface

Something I would gladly pay to live without.

A Netflix subscription is ~$20. How much would you pay for that without the promotion/etc?

It might need to be $40/m to be profitable on the marketing. Now add in the extra resources to sell direct content access, price for the fact that the market is vanishingly small, and it could easily be 10x the price. Would you pay $500/m? Now it's so expensive you're way more likely to churn, and actually they need to make back money much quicker to sustain it. Would you pay $2000/m for Netflix? What sort of experience and support would you expect for $2000/m, now Netflix needs a new sales and support org, and it costs a huge amount to keep them around. Would you pay $5k/m for Netflix?

Obviously these numbers are all entirely made up, but Netflix is built on a large subscriber base and very low touch sales and support, with expensive engineering amortised across hundreds of millions of users. All that works in the opposite way, so I don't think these numbers are the wrong ballpark.

There aren't many people who would pay $5k/m for effectively the same service as they can get for $20/m.

In this way it's all quite different to my TV example. There you're paying $500 for a $700 TV because they'll make $300 from you on average. Just not including the smart TV functionality might only cost a little more, and then the TV might sell for $1k and a fair number of people would buy it.

> There aren't many people who would pay $5k/m for effectively the same service as they can get for $20/m.

But as you said, you completely made up that number. You could just as easily have made up the number $20.01.

Let's face it: that amount would be low. The costs are around $10/month for Netflix, and less for HBO and Prime. People already complain about rising costs of streaming. Paying for another graphic shell over the same content won't be worth much more than 1$/month. Of that 1$, some, possibly quite a lot, will have to be paid to the streaming service. You need to offer considerable benefits for mass adoption. Suppressing promotions is not enough to achieve that, IMO. Perhaps a better recommendation system would be a more attractive option.

Note that the provider of this UI would be bound completely to the terms dictated by the streaming service(s). E.g., it might look interesting to have all your streaming services in one app, but Disney or Netflix or Amazon or HBO can simply forbid that option.

How else will I know which movies to avoid because they're passionless trash?