The Future Of Streaming TV: More Pointless Mergers And Making It Harder To Cancel

Major TV providers lost another 5 million paying TV subscribers last year, as users increasingly jump from fat and expensive cable bundles, to streaming. At the same time, a lot of the executives and bad ideas that plagued the traditional cable TV sector are coming along for the ride, resulting in a streaming sector that looks more and more like the kludgy cable sector.

Thanks to industry consolidation and saturated market growth, the streaming industry has started behaving much like the traditional cable giants they once disrupted. As with most industries suffering from “enshittification,” that generally means steadily worse service at higher prices as it tries to appease Wall Street’s demand for improved quarterly returns at any cost (even long term company health).

Netflix has started acting like password sharing, something it advocated for for years, is a dire cardinal sin. Amazon decided it would be fun to increase the number of ads it runs, charging Amazon Prime users even more money to avoid them. Consumers are paying more for streaming than ever as layoffs abound, streaming catalogs shrink, and the underlying products steadily get worse.

In response, customers are starting to be a little smarter about their shopping habits, increasingly cancelling streaming services when they’re not watching them. According to the New York Times, more than 29 million U.S. consumers — about a quarter of all domestic paying streaming subscribers — cancelled three or more streaming services sometime in the last two years:

“Among these nomadic subscribers, some are taking advantage of how easy it is, with a monthly contract and simple click of a button, to hopscotch from one service to the next. Indeed, these users can be fickle — a third of them resubscribe to the canceled service within six months, according to Antenna’s research.”

The reduced revenues from people cancelling for months at a time will create new pressure on streaming giants to deliver Wall Street those sweet quarterly returns. Streaming profitability was already a challenge (NBCUniversal’s Peacock lost $2.8 billion last year). In other words: improving service quality and expanding catalogs won’t be at the top of the executive menu.

So now the race will be on to thrill Wall Street and goose revenues in other ways. That means more price hikes, more pointless mergers (see: the whole AT&T Time Warner Discovery mess), and more bizarre restrictions. I’d also suspect they’ll soon take another terrible cue from traditional cable: cutting corners on customer service, and making it increasingly difficult to cancel service without headaches.

That’s not to say that streaming still hasn’t been a dramatic improvement over traditional cable television. But if the industry isn’t careful, and there’s no indication it wants to be, it’s going to be repeating the same exact trajectory and create openings for disruption of its own business models.