Are Streaming Services Out of Control?
We are entering the year 2024 and the continued discussion about streaming services is still a massive talking point for entertainment fans. Each year another service pops up and offers an appealing price that continues to add to the serious of increasing costs. Today, I am going to look at what are the major problems with a service. I understand it is a business model that is created to offer a lot more than any previous time, but the number of services is getting out of control.
For this, I am going to focus more on the UK streaming services, than the worldwide services.
Are Streaming Services Out of Control?
The Free Services
We are going to look at all the services throughout this piece, but I want to start with something positive. The Free Services. Most of the time they require you to sit through adverts, which is the price you pay for free. Some people accept this, others won’t it isn’t the end of the world to save a little bit of money. There are currently 17 available free services including the following. More 4, Freevee, Funimation, UKTV Play, My5, STV Player, Revry, Plex, Filmzie, Hoichoi, W4free, Paus, Pluto TV, Yupp TV, Runtime and Crunchyroll. A lot of these are not as known as others and do offer a paid upgrade to remove the adverts.
Make Tubi Worldwide
Tubi is one of the best streaming services for independent filmmakers. It is a free service that offers a platform for people to see their movies and for some unusual reason, it hasn’t ever been made available in the UK. Tubi is a place for genre fans to enjoy countless more movies of their favorite genres and is easily one of the best movie-based services out there.
Out-Dated Television Licence
In the UK you must have a Television Licence which helps fund the BBC. This is required to watch and record live television on any network. The point of this service is to provide a publicly funded service for everyone, but it has started to become hugely outdated. It is a good idea, but now with so many services out there, people would rather use other apps or services and to punish people to purchase another service to watch sport isn’t fair. I also personally believe they don’t produce enough quality content to demand their few compared to other services. This isn’t just my personal choice, they have some highly recommended shows that I don’t like, but they just don’t produce enough different material.
The Cost
The biggest problem with streaming services is the cost. They add up when you start putting them together, forcing people to pick different options and missing out on others. When you start breaking them down, Amazon Prime’s offer might well be the best because you also get access to the delivery services. They also offer discounts for the first couple of months on a few other services. Netflix puts a lot of focus on their television shows, which draw massively and usually have brand-new films each week. Disney Plus draws the family audience by having the backbone of major franchises.
With the core selection already taking up a large monthly cost, it leaves very little opportunity for anyone to consider the others. The other service could offer massive material with Apple TV, Shudder and Paramount Plus to mention of few. The monthly cost to have all the services flies well over £100 which isn’t acceptable in a modern world.
Spotify Alternative
When you look at how most music is contained within a Spotify model, it is a one-time monthly payment. This would cover the same as buying a new CD each month and makes a lot more sense. So, the question becomes, why can’t we have something similar for the streaming model? If you step back a few more years, Sky became the option for more content before streaming services and now that costs more and offers less.
Physical Media
One of the largest debates is physical media vs streaming. It has seen people standing up for one side for years and leads to endless debates. On the side of safe spending, you can clearly see streaming is superior. However, on the physical media side, you would always have access to something you own. This side tends to win a lot of discussions because certain films or TV series are no longer available on any streaming service. I understand it falls into rights ownership, but it feels like some of the content needs to be placed on these services.
Conclusion
After looking through the series of points you can see how the streaming services are starting to get out of control. There are far too many of them to pick between and leaves us with the choice of picking between them. Everyone has different priorities in life, meaning some work better for different households. Sadly, this means people are going to miss out on different services from around the world. This could also lead to shows not getting the audience they deserve and ending too quickly. It is a shame because there are so many enjoyable content with amazing creative minds which get ignored.