It seems like everyone these days is launching their own streaming service. In addition to the familiar Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon Prime Video, we’ve now got BBC, HBO Max, Disney+, Pluto, Crackle, Freevee, Peacock, Quibi, Plurgi, and Xohowi (Ok you got me, the last two were made up). Apparently there are over 200 streaming services, wow! This trend leads to the fragmentation of content.

People don’t want to pay for 3 services just to watch the stuff they want. They might end up paying for one of their favorites, but then feel bummed out whenever something they do want to watch is available other places. For those who feel inclined to be generous to the large studios that own movie copyrights, they might rent it from a service. For those who don’t, they might return to the practice of torrenting shows and movies illegally.

So how might we solve this?

The proposal

Streaming-as-a-service would provide one unified platform for publishers to host and users to stream movies and TV, allowing content owners to earn revenue based on their IP.

There are multiple ways of splitting revenue: with a flat monthly fee, distributed as a percentage of total content the user has watched (like Spotify) or with various plans that are priced differently and unlock different provider’s content (similar to premium cable channels or premium content on Prime Video). I would heavily favor having one flat fee and getting access to content from all providers.

A startup could try this approach, and try to build out better features faster than the in-house investments of all the platforms I listed above, and license to them. Or it could be a joint venture between some major studios and tech companies. Tech companies have generally shown an openness to collaboration, unlike many other industries, even on technologies close to their core business models, largely due to the influence of open source on software development. However, these are generally software components that are not visible to users. I’m not aware of any consumer-facing products/platforms that are collaboratively run/built by tech companies.

Pros

The benefits to users are pretty obvious:

• All content in one place; less hassle and confusion
• You’re paying less?
• There’s one organization to yell at when the service goes down/you want new features

The benefits to the companies are maybe less so:

• Cut down on in-house developers - outsource the tech to the service (they might still be paying for devs to maintain it though)
• Stop duplication of work: Think about how many things go into streaming
  • CDNs for actual content
  • High availability APIs for - logins, payments, ratings, recommendations
  • VPN blockers
  • Licensing/distribution rights based on location
  • DRM
  • Support staff
  • DMCA/censorship by various jurisdictions/legal issues
• Maybe companies want to trench it out and fight over users, possibly getting into price, promotion, or feature wars with each other. I bet they would rather not
• Third-party/indie filmmakers could also submit content and get paid

Cons

There are a few issues:

• Could this enable monopolistic behavior by all these content-owning companies?
• Why would a streaming “tech” company want to do this — give up all their hard-earned tech IP? Then their competitive advantage goes down the drain. Because this probably will happen at some point without them (e.g. between 3 big movie studios)
  • Because then they can start working on lean content production

However, instead of allowing anyone to upload independent movies, they probably will have a certification process. The big studios don’t want an indie movie to be able to go up and make money for free b/c then what does anyone need a studio for? They just become banks for movies, investing in a project, but then the production company figures out how to distribute it.