I think it is pretty obvious that we seem to be heading toward paying new masters for our video entertainment addictions. In my younger days you either went to a movie theater or you watched broadcast TV which was supported by advertisements. In the 1970s cable TV began to be available in the larger cities and towns in my geographical location, and if you chose that route it cost you money, and a new master of entertainment was born: Big Cable. They dominated the way we viewed video entertainment. At long last we had something other than the handful of local broadcast TV stations to watch and we could now view content from all over the planet, but at a price.
Eventually in the 1980s, or perhaps a bit earlier, the satellite services started popping up to compete, but in the days of huge 8 foot dish antennas that had to be manually rotated to receive signals from multiple satellites, they were not much competition. At least not until they shrunk the dish down to about 2 feet and made manually moving the dish unnecessary and managed to have the same style of content and channels as cable. Now a days we can call then Big Cable and Big Satellite.
But then in the 1980s we saw the introduction of VCRs and their ability to watch what you wanted when you wanted for a price. Then we saw the advent of huge video rental companies like Blockbuster. Overtime that morphed into CDs and Blu-Ray, and the companies like Blockbuster got stomped into the ground by companies like Walmart who started selling videos. Then toward the end of the video rental heyday we saw companies like Netflix who would gladly mail you a video CD to watch for a price.
Eventually the internet caught on, smartphones and tablets along with computers could then view videos well enough to be enjoyable and technology improved until the internet services were good enough to stream video, for a price. So Big Cable and Big Phone began to switch their business model to include streaming high speed internet to us. Netflix had to change its corporate diaper and start streaming video to survive, and of course other services have built up a huge industry around streaming video entertainment. The way in which we receive and view our video entertainment is constantly changing. We have gone from OTA broadcasts with advertisements to paying our addiction masters Big Cable/Big Satellite, then paying video renting masters, then paying Big Phone and Big Cable for high speed internet to stream our video entertainment.
The current trend is the most depressing of all. We can no longer simply turn to Big Cable/Big Satellite nor live TV streaming services like DirectTV Now and Hulu to get a one stop addiction fix via multiple channels. Now there are multiple streaming services who don’t even focus on TV channels. Instead they focus on a few TV shows and/or movies. And the Big cable channels are now wanting to hold back some of their prime video entertainment unless we pay them a monthly subscription on top of what we already pay Big Cable and/or streaming services. There are dozens of such channels using that business model like CBS, MotorTrend, etc. It simply doesn't make sense to me to pay as much for video entertainment addiction per month as I do for my house payment and home insurance. The video addiction industry has become way to greedy. I don’t know how they will fair in the future, but surely we will get to the point where for many of us it is just too expensive to pay our addiction managers any more.
I keep hoping the video entertainment industry will self regulate and change for the better as more and more people refuse to pay so much for their services. DirecTV Now is said to be bleeding out fast. Other streaming services are supposedly struggling too, as are Big Cable/Big Satellite. I doubt legislators will won’t to force regulations, so the best hope will be the industry figures out a business model that people can live with and are able to afford. However, I’m very skeptical that the industry will do that, and many of us will eventually be priced out.
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