It’s all happening in streaming right now, Loads of new services, from the likes of NBC and HBO, rumours of a Facebook service, Amazon launching a free ad supported product as YouTube offers a ad free premium service. While in the wings Apple gets ready for a world wide launch of its streaming service, while not up to Netflix standards Apples rumoured budget for original programming is in the low $ billions. I can see the drive by the studios. Why share profits with the likes of Netflix when we can ring fence our content into our own world, with our own ad revenues, it’s just that the small matter of poor customer satisfaction does creep in a tad.
The recent activity in streaming services reminds me of the early days of MP3s around the time of the iPod3 launch, 2003, remember? ‘In Da Club’? ‘The Cheeky Girls’? No? anyway what was happening at that time was a proliferation of download services, some ad funded, some clean. The reason so many didn’t make it was under funded, rushed services leading to a combination of clunky UX and limited content selection. We are now witnessing a similar headlong dash into streaming rich media content. I do shudder slightly when NBC claim they can harvest $5 a month ad revenue from its users, potentially because they are still struggling with the menu system and click on an ad by mistake.
Sure in time like the multitude of music download sites of the past, there will be mergers and consolidation into a market leader who can afford to develop the UX and buy original content, but that will take a few years yet. In the meantime the consumer is left with a multitude of fee based options and an ever more desperate advertising model behind it.
2019 seems to have been the year we lost the wonder of pretty much all the content we want in one place. Toggling between Amazon and Netflix is just about ok for most but once HBO, Disney and the others all pull their content off into closed worlds, what of affordable choice? Sadly that looks to be sooo 2018
