The Golden Age of Streaming Services

Arnav Paul
Nov 4 · 2 min read

Last Friday, Apple unveiled its brand new streaming service, Apple TV+ to the public. This comes just months before Disney’s new streaming service, Disney+, and NBC’s new streaming service, Peacock. Unfortunately, these additions to the streaming market don’t necessarily bode well for the average customer — Let The Streaming Wars Begin

Photo from Android Authority

Netflix is widely regarded as the company that revolutionized streaming services. At the time, the idea behind Netflix was simple — introduce a service that gives you constant access to a growing catalog of movies and TV shows, for a monthly subscription. Netflix’s success was owed to its customers’ want to stop paying for multiple channels, just to access certain TV shows. The single fee that you paid Netflix every month greatly simplified the movie and TV watching process, and put its customers’ minds at ease. The years between Netflix’s launch and circa 2015 were the golden years of streaming — Netflix had access to thousands of titles, and essentially had a monopoly over the streaming market. Unfortunately, with this massive success, came the numerous other streaming services. Amazon Prime, Hulu, Crunchyroll, HBO Now, and more recently, Apple TV+ and Disney+ are slowly saturating the streaming market. These numerous other streaming services are now pulling the streaming rights of multiple of their other shows from other platforms (like Netflix), to put on their own platform. A famous example of this is the TV show Friends — while Friends has been available to stream on Netflix for the last few years, WarnerMedia confirmed that the series will depart Netflix in 2020 for a new home on HBO Max, WarnerMedia’s own (still forthcoming) streaming service.

This saturation of streaming services has brought the movie and TV consumption market back to square one — a market where if you want to watch your favorite TV show on-demand, you would have to subscribe to a whole new service.

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