Streaming Services Making More False Promises

Consumers seek an elusive one-stop-shop for media content.

The recent announcement of Disney Plus has been greeted positively. As an absolute media giant, Disney owns a vast empire of content production properties.

Its namesake Disney channel and movies, the ABC broadcast network, the A&E Networks, ESPN, Pixar, Marvel Studios, Lucasfilm and the Star Wars franchise, and most recently, 21st Century Fox.

Access to all of that content could create an irresistible proposition, not just for cord-cutters, but for anyone who’s spent much time watching movies or television over the past 50 years.

However, I’ve used the word could rather than will, because per the recent announcements, that isn’t what’s happening.

Moving Away from One-Stop Media Shopping

Much has been said and written about the splintering of the online television space. There’s already too many TV apps, and on the horizon are many more.

Netflix’s content offering was once limited only by what they could fit in a warehouse, rather than licensing deals and streaming rights.

During their DVD era, Netflix earned a reputation for having everything; they could and did stock any physical DVDs that were in-demand, regardless of the studio behind them, and boasted a much larger selection than their competitor at the time, Blockbuster Video. But in the streaming era, that perception is falling away. A complex network of licensing agreements and distribution contracts have always limited what can be streamed online and where. And now traditional media companies are actively shunning Netflix as a competitor.

The “Netflix has everything” assumption lingered, but cord-cutters eventually came to rely on a threesome of Netflix, Amazon Prime, and Hulu, which for several years, comprised most of the online television market.

From a one-stop-shop, to a three-stop-shop, we’re now moving towards a market in which every content provider has their own figurative “stall”. Disney will have an SVOD service of their own, as will Time Warner, NBC Universal, and others, in addition to the established players like Netflix and Hulu.

Fragmentation Squared

As if this trend towards fragmentation wasn’t confusing enough for consumers, there’s yet another layer to it, as the titans of the media industry begin to get serious about OTT.

While a theoretical Disney streaming service could pack an astonishingly wide breadth of content, the service, or rather, services that we’re actually getting, even from a single corporate parent, will require multiple accounts, subscriptions, and payments.

In addition to Disney Plus, the Walt Disney Company will also offer a separate ESPN Plus streaming service, and will also own between 70% and 100% of Hulu, yet another streaming service with a different library of content.

AT&T, following its merger with Time Warner, is also a corporate parent with multiple distinct streaming products in its lineup.

Other large media companies follow suit. Time Warner (now owned by AT&T) has distinct streaming products for HBO, DC Entertainment, and a rumored upcoming ‘WarnerFlix’ streaming service that will encompass another subset of the company’s massive media collection.

CBS has CBS All Access and a Showtime streaming service. Rumors never cease about a CBS-Viacom merger, which will more than likely result in a Viacom streaming service being offered under the same corporate umbrella.

Aggregators Come Into Focus

This extreme level of fragmentation is something that FreeCast has foretold for almost a decade now.

I talked about the coming challenges facing then-OTT-frontrunner Netflix back in 2014.

Again, in 2017, FreeCast was sounding the alarm.

Now, years later, as the online media marketplace reaches critical mass, it’s become a crisis for consumers, and by extension, for media companies who depend on those consumers’ media budgets.

Suddenly, the aggregation is a hot topic. Once under-the-radar and not well understood, the entire industry is coming to the realization that there’s an important role for aggregators to play.

FreeCast isn’t just a provider of that solution, we quite literally invented it.

And now, having spent the better part of the past decade working on this problem that we saw coming, FreeCast is in a position to offer what consumers most want, and what multi-billion dollar media companies aren’t able to give them: one service that can give them everything, a true one-stop-shop for online media.

Why a small startup is able to do something a massive media giant cannot is a topic for another time.