It's because the shape was due to licensing and contracts by content producers, not the technology of distribution.
Online distribution licenses were underpriced and differently packaged for a while because producers didn't know what revenue to anticipate or which horse would be the best to bet on. But as the industry matured, stuff evened out again and it's mostly back to normal.
Many conveniences of the new technology are nice, though.
Tech giants have successfully transformed live TV, simply by killing it completely. No one under 35 subscribes to any kind of live TV service today other than to watch sports, and in another decade that will be fully online as well (look at the inroads Amazon and Apple are already making in that space). Some of the best new TV content is increasingly owned by Netflix, Amazon, Apple and the like. Cable TV and any kind of non-sports/special events broadcasting is going to disappear as a concept within our lifetimes.
36 and haven't paid for TV since... well, since I moved out of my parents' actually.
I pay for a frankly stupid amount of sports streaming services though. I wish there was a way I could watch everything I want without paying for FuboTV, DAZN, TSN+, and probably others I'm forgetting.
Apart from pirating, the only way to watch, say, NFL Football, your local baseball team and say Division 1 College Football games is gonna be with one of those $70/mo+ packages.
I would love to just pay directly for the sports/leagues I care about, but that’s just not an option.
Take a league like MLS, for instance. Their Apple TV deal is worth about $250M/year.
To hit that revenue number on, say, a hypothetical $90/year ($10/month for 9 months) standalone league pass subscription, they'd need about 2.8M subscribers. And that doesn't figure in the distribution costs of either rolling their own live sports streaming service or more likely whitelabeling one.
Most MLS matches broadcast on cable have fewer than 400k viewers. Many have fewer than 125k. It's hard to imagine that 3M people would consistently fork over $10/month for that.
Providers will almost always pay more for some degree of exclusivity (and more stably — the MLS deal is for 10 years) than consumers will bear on their own. It's ultimately a marketing expense for providers banking on subscriber growth, something consumers aren't willing to shoulder directly for a standalone league service.
Where streaming passes have worked are on the team level for those with global brands, where they can provide exclusive content to diehard fans. But again they tend to be expensive marketing arms and not the team's primary revenue stream, which is still league TV/media contracts.
How much of comercial settings will be eaten up be online shopping? I can’t remember the last time I went to a brick and mortar store to buy something.
AFAIK, and I'm with you on this, that bars that have tvs have to at least pretend to pay the rights holders for playing sports on their tvs, which in turn brings people in to spend money on drinks and/or food.
I can't imaging having to train every new employee on how to use the streaming-only custom set up you'd end up with without using a cable box, which, well, everyone probably already kind of knows how to operate ... at least for now.
It does make me wonder how long until the new employees won't have a clue how to use a cable box due to never having used one ever.
Netflix did transform TV. Cable subscriptions are shrinking. Many people have switch to a streaming on demand service vs a linear service. You can watch most TV without ads.
That used to be the case couple years back. Now they are bringing ads to these streaming services. And you have 10 different streaming services what you need to buy separately. Soon there will be bundling streaming service and we are back to cable tv pricing and ads.
Yeah we're definitely seeing a slow return to "this is on-demand cable". And all I see is that independent content (like YT videos) will continue to grow. I can definitely say that I watch probably one tenth as many shows and movies now as I did 7 or 8 years ago, simply due to how fragmented streaming services have become.
I keep a Netflix subscription running for my parents, get the free few months of Apple TV every year or so from buying a new device, and beyond that I just watch more and more YouTube in my free time and go to the cinema maybe twice a year.
Sure, YouTube doesn't really have any blockbuster/high-budget/studio-level content, but there's simply so much and so many niches that it keeps me entertained just as well as anything else, so I subscribe to YT premium and that's it.
Ad-supported plans are more profitable per user than ad-free plans.
"Disney, Netflix and Warner Bros. Discovery have recently said the ad-supported versions of their streaming platforms generate more money per user than their ad-free counterparts, as the advertising revenue more than offsets the lower subscription cost." -- https://www.wsj.com/business/media/netflix-price-increase-ac...
You can still buy non-ad services and the amount of content you can get at one time has increased incredibly. I would also say the new format has increased the quality of content. In my personal opinion, tech has really changed the industry and how we watch tv.
Content is king. And you can't even neatly excise sports content from everything else. If you can live without most live content, you really do have good, albeit fragmented, alternatives. But it does require giving up live TV.
That is extremely rare above a certain age. It may be more common today, especially if you make a point of avoiding sports, but there are a ton of situations in which people gravitated to live TV until very recently (when some don't now have it).
Unless there is true change, both in delivery & content, most everything reverts back to the way it was. Music delivery seems (semi-)permanently changed, as it is nigh unimaginable for the album as it was known to make a comeback, market-wise. No similar change has happened or been allowed to happen on the TV-heritage side of things, & so we get new, shiner versions of the Old Ways.
You’re think of YouTube. The business model of television, especially live television, wasn’t really ever going to cost significantly less than it did. The inverse relationship between advertising and number of outlets would necessitate higher costs to the consumer, not lower costs.
Anyone willing to create content at extremely low cost has flourished under the YouTube paradigm.
> Anyone willing to create content at extremely low cost has flourished under the YouTube paradigm.
That idea won't stand up to close scrutiny. Especially the 'Anyone' part. YouTube undoubtedly enriches itself on their efforts. If most 'Anyone's have 'fluorished' at all it's because of their viewers; most of the 'channel' owners that I've watched regularly for years rely on Patreon for support.
I very much doubt that refusing ad-blockers will change any of that.
'Disruption' is a marketing tactic these days. Netflix keeps hiking prices even though they're not paying usurious amounts to license other networks' content. Uber now isn't any cheaper than the stodgy taxis they replaced.
I hope mlb.tv someday offers all games (without blackouts) and no commercial breaks. Just leave the cameras in the field and crowd between innings. I'd pay good money for that.
MLB could offer a super pricy option to skip all the ads, but they wouldn’t because they can’t tell advertisers that their richest customers aren’t gonna be part of the audience. Advertising distorts the market for everyone.
Fortunately I pay 1/3 the YTTV cost by sharing with a friend so the cost isn't too bad. But it's too much content for my needs, and I don't prefer sharing access.
