By Alex Cranz , deputy editor and co-host of The Vergecast. She oversaw consumer tech coverage at Gizmodo for five years. Her work has also appeare

Streaming is cable now

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2024-05-10 15:30:35

By Alex Cranz , deputy editor and co-host of The Vergecast. She oversaw consumer tech coverage at Gizmodo for five years. Her work has also appeared in the WSJ and Wired.

Disney Plus, Hulu, and Max are teaming up for a new bundle this summer, Netflix is focused on the WWE and celebrity boxing, Disney Plus is getting ESPN, and Bloomberg reported earlier this week that Max could get a price hike. A familiar refrain emerged around all this news: streaming is becoming cable TV all over again and getting crummier in the process.

And it's true! When streaming first emerged, it was a beautiful alternative to piracy, which was very convenient and very illegal, and cable, which was festooned with ads and weighed down by channels you were paying for and didn’t want. Streaming gave you a world of content on demand for a fraction of the cost of cable.

But that experience was never sustainable. Content costs money to make, and companies are apparently obligated to “increase revenue” and “make profit.” This means Netflix spending billions of dollars a year on content isn’t necessarily sustainable unless it’s adding new users and monetizing them through some combination of ads and increasing subscription fees for stuff that used to be free, like sharing an account or streaming in 4K.