The Messy, Confusing Future of
TV?
It’s Here
By KEVIN
ROOSE AUG. 13, 2017
Cord-cutters often find themselves confronting a jumble of
on-demand services that, added up, cost more and often offer less than the old
cable bundle. CreditDan Goodman/Associated Press
If
you’re like me and the millions of other Americans who have canceled a cable
television subscription over the past few years, you’re probably familiar with
the phenomenon I’ve started calling “the hunt.”
It
goes like this: First, you decide to watch one of your favorite shows — HGTV’s
“Fixer Upper,” in my case. You plop down on your couch, turn on your TV and
boot up your streaming device. Then you shuffle from app to app, trying to
remember which of your half-dozen streaming services has the program. Was it
Netflix? Hmm, no. HBO Go? Nope. Hulu Plus? It has the first three seasons,
which you’ve already seen, but not the fourth.
You
finally find the fourth season on Amazon, but it’s not included free with Prime
Video. It costs $2.99 per episode. The hunt ends with a whimper: You sigh, suck
it up (those kitchens aren’t going to renovate themselves), and fork over
$19.99 for the entire season.
What
happened to the glorious, consumer-friendly future of TV? We were told that the
internet would usher in a golden era of streaming video, and that incredible
shows and movies would be a click away through low-cost, easy-to-use services.
The $100-a-month Time Warner cable packages that required navigating a
byzantine menu of third-rate channels would be a distant nightmare.
Instead,
we’ve rushed headlong into a hyper-fragmented mess, with a jumble of on-demand
services that, added up, cost more and often offer less than the old cable
bundle. There are lots of great shows and movies being made, but finding them
has become harder than ever.
I felt another twinge of cable nostalgia last week, when
both Disney and Facebook —
very different companies, but united in their desire for your attention —
announced big steps in their next-generation video strategies.
Disney, which controls some of the world’s most valuable TV and
film franchises, shook Hollywood last week by announcing that it was ending its
distribution deal with Netflix and starting two new stand-alone streaming
services. One, an ESPN-branded streaming sports service, will be available
early next year, while the other, focusing on Disney movies and shows, will go
live in 2019.
A day later, Facebook announced Watch, a tab inside the main
Facebook app that will soon host a slate of professionally produced video
series. The company says people will be able to enjoy premium fare like
“Returning the Favor,” starring the “Dirty Jobs” host Mike Rowe; a reality show
about tiny houses; and “Bae or Bail,” which Facebook describes thusly:
“Unsuspecting couples put their relationship and wits to the test as they’re
thrown into terrifying scenarios.”
Disney, which has built an enormously profitable business that
includes movie ticket sales and cable revenue from ESPN, is betting that a
significant number of customers will pay $10 or $20 a month to watch “Frozen”
and keep up with their NBA teams, above and beyond what they’re already
shelling out for Netflix, Hulu and Amazon Prime subscriptions.
On the other hand, Facebook — which makes its money from
advertising — is giving its shows away free. Their theory is that the more time
Facebook users spend watching video, the more ads they’ll see. Facebook doesn’t
have a huge library of popular content like Disney, but it does have a treasure
trove of data about the personal tastes and preferences of its more than two
billion registered users, and presumably plans to use that data to target ads
at exactly the people companies want to reach.
A demonstration of Facebook’s Watch, a tab inside the main
Facebook app that will soon host a slate of professionally produced video
series. CreditFacebook, via Associated Press
More than $70 billion per year is spent on traditional television
advertisements, and as that pile of money shifts to digital video, Facebook
presumably wants to make sure a hefty chunk ends up in its own pockets. It also
very likely wants to replace YouTube as the home for amateur creators who might
not produce professional-quality shows, but still have large and loyal
audiences.
On the surface, these seem like very different strategies —
selling premium video to an existing audience of fans, versus giving away
premium video in an effort to sell hyper-targeted ads and attract a network of
amateurs. But they’re both part of the same seismic change. As the decline of
traditional TV creates a gold rush for ad dollars and consumer attention, every
tech and media company seems to be heading to the mine, pickax in hand.
Consumers, meanwhile, are forced to contend with (and often pay
for) an ever-expanding group of services. There are already Netflix and Hulu,
single-company services like CBS All Access, and “skinny bundles” such as
PlayStation Vue and Sling TV, not to mention the endless amateur video
available from Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.
To navigate all of this, a few third-party services have popped up
to replace the TV Guides of old — like Can I Stream It?, a search engine that will
tell you which streaming platform hosts your favorite show — but there’s no
industrywide solution, and no simplification in sight. Facebook says that Watch will be personalized to
show you videos based, in part, on what your friends are watching, but finding
the right videos may still take digging.
“One of the barriers to entry for the consumer right now is simply
confusion,” said Paul Verna, the principal video analyst at eMarketer, a media
research firm. “The more of these services that are out there, the harder it’s
going to get for people to make rational, informed decisions about what to
subscribe to.”
A reason for all this chaos is that cord-cutting is accelerating
faster than media executives expected. Last quarter, nearly a million Americans
dropped their pay-TV subscriptions, according to an estimate from Craig Moffett, a media
analyst with MoffettNathanson. (Netflix added roughly that many new subscribers
in the United States in the same time.) Young people, a group particularly
coveted by advertisers, are moving away from TV especially quickly. The amount
of time people under 35 spend watching traditional TV has been cut in half since 2010, according to
Matthew Ball, the head of strategy at Amazon Studios.
Numbers like these have created an industrywide panic and set off
dozens of efforts to replace the revenue seeping out of the old cable model.
Disney’s streaming service won’t be the last of its kind; pretty soon, you’ll
be forced to choose from an overwhelming menu of streaming apps and services,
each of which will have its own price tag, interface and ever-changing libraries
of shows and movies.
An enterprising entrepreneur might someday be tempted to package
some of these new services and sell them for a single price, essentially
remaking the old cable bundle for the internet. But industry experts say that
such cooperation between the industry’s giants is unlikely, given the enormous
sums at stake.
“There’s no chance of that happening,” said Dan Rayburn, who
analyzes streaming media for Frost & Sullivan. “Companies will do what’s
best for their bottom line.”
The post-TV world “will not be orderly or neat,” said Dave Morgan,
the chief executive of Simulmedia, a marketing technology company. “No one is
sitting back and saying, ‘What’s the perfect way the consumer wants to come at
this?’ Everyone is arming up.”
In other words, the hunt will only get harder.
