The New Cable: How Video Streaming Services Have Devolved
Written by Alex Fisher
Photo by Shutter Speed on Unsplash
Streaming services have become the primary means of viewing video content for a lot of people, and for good reason: they are incredibly convenient, and host countless hours of quality content. For students in particular, it can be comforting to put on a favourite show while studying, or rewarding to unwind after an exam by watching the latest blockbuster in your own bed. Such services can even be used for watch parties with your far away (or nearby) friends, something we touched upon in a previous article.
These services have changed over time, of course. Shows and movies have been added or removed, and anyone who has used video streaming services for long enough will have noticed how their costs only seem to keep going up, or the trend of series being cancelled when they underperform compared to the often astronomical expectations of the producers. Both of these examples highlight how, as many of these streaming services have evolved, they have grown to become more and more like the old cable television that they have largely replaced.
Netflix launched its video-on-demand service, now more commonly referred to as video streaming or simply streaming, in early 2007. It was the first of its kind (barring YouTube, which hosted an entirely different type of content), allowing people to stream movies and TV shows from their couch without ever having to leave their house and pick up a rental—though it started with a rather small catalogue of only one thousand titles. Three years later, with the company continuing to grow, Netflix’s main competitor, Blockbuster, filed for bankruptcy and shut its doors for good. A short few years later, in early 2013, Netflix unveiled the first of its original series—now a staple of the platform, and setting the standard for future content.
During this time there were other competitors that arose, including Hulu in late 2007 and Amazon Prime Video in 2011. While none of them were quite able to keep up with Netflix, all of them grew as cable TV began to plateau and lose subscribers. Skip ahead to 2024, and now there are over 200 different video streaming services available for movies and TV, each one trying to carve out its niche and attract subscribers in an increasingly crowded market. It has gotten to the point that some services are even being offered in “bundles,” similar to how cable TV channels would often be offered in “packages.”
The overabundance of streaming services is combined with prices that only continue to trend upwards, even after being adjusted for inflation. Matt Horne, with tech site AndroidAuthority, found that Netflix’s “standard plan” had gone up in price by 94% over twelve years, and their “premium plan” had also gone up by 92% over ten years. Adjusted for inflation, these increases come out to 39% and 42%, respectively. Even accounting for increased server and bandwidth costs, as well as the costs of Netlx’s production studio, this seems like an excessive price increase given their ever-growing subscriber base.
Similarly to Netflix, other streaming services have also upped their cost over time. Max (formerly HBO Max, and still not available in Canada) increased two of their price tiers by a dollar each in June of this year, and Disney+ just saw its third price hike since it became available in 2024. Apple TV+ also saw a massive price increase, coming out to an extra four dollars in Canada, and Prime Video has introduced a new with-ads tier at the same cost as the ad-free tier used to be, while the ad-free tier was bumped up by three dollars.
Having a “with-ads” tier and an “ad-free” tier is not exclusive to Prime. In fact, Prime Video is rather late to the party, as most of the major streaming services now have a cheaper, ad-free plan that you can opt in to. The massive price-hikes mentioned before may, in some cases, even be a tactic to drive consumers towards using these services with ads. By introducing ads into their services, these companies stand to make billions of dollars more than they would have without them. While these ads are admittedly far shorter than their cable counterparts, some wonder for how long that will remain true. The decisions for various streaming services to start running ads have unsurprisingly angered many people, and as Alexis Benveniste wrote it for BBC, “streaming consumers will be back to square one—stuck with the commercial breaks they were eager to jettison, and likely subscribed to multiple streaming outlets at collective prices that rival cable TV packages.”
Another criticism of streaming services is their tendency to remove content that does not perform well. While it is understandable for companies to stop paying licensing fees for content that is not earning them anything, it becomes more questionable when these companies remove content that they have produced and released, such as when Disney+ recently removed the show Willow from the site, among others, less than six months after its first and only season finished. Dozens of Netflix Originals have similarly been removed from Netflix, and many of them have not been made available anywhere else.
More and more often, this content removal is being done as a way for companies to write off their own content as losses, allowing them to save billions of dollars. The companies that own these services are the only ones who benefit from this process, as the people who create these shows and movies can no longer make any money off of them, and they lose the ability to use them as examples of their work when trying to find future jobs. Not to mention that it harms you, the consumer: akin to a cable TV channel phasing out old, no-longer-profitable shows, you may one day log into Netflix to find that your favourite movie has suddenly disappeared with no way to ever watch it again.
It is especially baffling for these companies to remove their own original content when it can often be one of the main reasons a streaming service is successful. Though that in itself is another flaw with streaming services: how sequestered their content has become. You can only watch Stranger Things with a subscription to Netflix, while Game of Thrones is strictly limited to Max and cult-hit The Expanse can only be found on Prime. If you want to watch all of the new shows that interest you, and especially if you want to keep up with what’s currently most popular, you can only do so by subscribing to numerous streaming services, which can quickly add up to be as expensive as cable, if not more so. (Though several of these services do offer student discounts, which you should always try to take advantage of!)
From the increasing costs to the increasing ads, it’s clear that streaming services are moving towards becoming the new cable. Bundles allow you to save, but the content you want to watch might still be split up amongst six different services, quickly bringing the bill up even if you stick to the cheaper plans. Even then, the content you love may disappear sooner than you’d think. Even ongoing shows aren’t safe, and are always under threat of cancellation if they don’t perform up to (often arbitrary) standards. While we all have our favourite shows or movies that we would certainly miss, it’s up to us how and where we spend our money, and what practices we implicitly support by spending that money.
Let us know your thoughts on our social media pages: what streaming services do you use? Do you believe that they are becoming more like cable as the industry evolves?