I remember it so clearly: the sheer joy, the unbridled freedom that came with cutting the cord.
Traditional cable, with its endless channels I never watched, its restrictive schedules, and its exorbitant monthly bill, felt like a relic of a bygone era.
Then came Netflix, soon followed by Hulu, and the promise was revolutionary: watch what you want, when you want, all for a fraction of the price. The novelty was intoxicating and I, like millions of others, embraced this new digital frontier wholeheartedly. It was a golden age, a liberation from the tyranny of linear television and perhaps most appealingly, it was significantly cheaper.
My, how times have changed.
Today, as I tally my monthly entertainment expenses, I can’t help but ask myself: are there simply too many streaming services? And more importantly, have we somehow circled back to a reality that’s arguably worse than the cable bills we so eagerly abandoned?
For a long time, the answer to the first question seemed obvious. More choice, more content, more competition – surely that was a good thing for the consumer? I envisioned a future where I could seamlessly hop between a handful of services, each offering a distinct library of shows and movies, all ad-free, all affordable.
Netflix and Disney+ were just the beginning. The low price point, often around $10 per month, with no commercial interruptions, felt like a gift. We were paying for convenience and quality, and it felt like an undeniable win. At that time, we were consuming content for hours on end because it was new and the novelty seemed worth it.
But then, the floodgates opened.
Every major studio and media conglomerate decided they wanted a piece of the streaming pie. HBO Max, Peacock, Paramount+, Apple TV+, Starz, Showtime, AMC+, Discovery+… the list became dizzying. (I wrote this on Monday, and on Tuesday, both Roku and Fox announced new streaming platforms.)
Each new service arrived with a fresh batch of exclusive content, often pulling their beloved shows and movies from the very platforms that had made them household names. Suddenly, that vast, seamless library I once enjoyed on Netflix was fragmented, scattered across a dozen different digital silos.
This fragmentation brought with it a creeping sense of financial dread.
What started as paying $10 per month for one service soon became three, then five, then seven. Each individual subscription still felt relatively inexpensive on its own – a manageable sum for the specific shows I wanted to watch. But the cumulative effect began to tell a different story.
I found myself subscribing to a service for one, maybe two, highly anticipated shows. An exclusive series here, a must-watch movie there. When you break that down, I'm essentially paying $10 (or more) per month to watch a single show that might release only six or seven new episodes in an entire season, spread across several months. Is that truly value for money?
To add insult to injury, the very foundations of the original streaming promise began to erode. Once, the premium price (as low as it was) meant an ad-free experience. That was a non-negotiable perk. Now, many services have introduced ad-supported tiers at prices that were once considered the ‘premium, no-ad’ rate. If you want to escape the commercials, you have to pay a significantly higher price.
So, not only am I juggling multiple subscriptions, but I'm also often paying more to endure interruptions, or paying even more to avoid them. It feels like a bait-and-switch on a grand scale. The convenience I once cherished has been replaced by financial calculations, a constant mental ledger of which service has which show, and whether it’s worth activating (or reactivating) a subscription for a limited run.
The irony isn’t lost on me.
The primary motivation for cutting the cord was to escape the spiraling costs and restrictive nature of traditional cable. Yet, as I look at my monthly bank statement now, the total expenditure for my array of streaming subscriptions often rivals, if not surpasses, the cable bill I so gleefully bid farewell to years ago. It’s almost cheaper to simply get regular cable again, perhaps supplemented by some free ad-supported streaming or YouTube for specific content. That thought, once anathema, now seems like a practical, almost nostalgic, alternative.
Our parent company is in the entertainment business. They still have traditional cable. When I head over to their broadcast studio (across the building from us here in Buff Loft), they have just as much on-demand programming as the streamers. Why? Because that cable bill includes access to the streamers -- sometimes free of charge. For example, Disney+ -- and by extension Hulu -- are included free with the cable subscription. Plus, a bunch of those classic movies featured on Netflix or Disney+ (such as Austin Powers or Dumb and Dumber or Mrs. Doubtfire or Office Space), are still in the on-demand library of the cable company.
The streaming landscape, once a beacon of consumer empowerment, has evolved into a labyrinth of choices, each demanding its pound of flesh. The novelty has well and truly worn off. What was once heralded as the future of entertainment, a paradigm shift for the better, has become a fragmented, expensive and increasingly ad-laden experience that, in many ways, has replicated the very problems it set out to solve.
I’m left wondering: did we escape one costly trap only to fall headfirst into another, arguably more insidious, one? For me, the answer is a resounding yes. The dream of on-demand freedom has, regrettably, become a very expensive, fragmented and frustrating reality. And guess what it's had me do: walk away and endure less screen time while I enjoy the real world.