Streaming mergers are Hollywood’s last hope. Thanks to lousy, hyper-political movies, the box office is cratering. Thanks to streaming, the cash cow racket of cable/satellite TV is dying. Thanks to lousy products, almost every standalone streaming service not named Netflix is losing billions.
All that’s left is for Hollywood to try and recreate the racket known as cable/satellite TV through streaming mergers.
In other words, the entertainment industry intends to use these mergers to try and con the American people into paying a ton of money for content they never watch.
As I’ve explained for over a decade, the cable/satellite TV model propped up a dying entertainment industry for decades. Over 100 million households paid something like $100 a month to their cable/satellite provider. Through those astronomical payments, those households subsidized dozens of channels they never watched — like CNN, MTV, and Comedy Central. But now, due to cord-cutting as people move to streaming, that 100 million number is closer to 60 million, which has cost Hollywood untold billions. And that household number keeps right on shrinking.
Streaming will not save Hollywood. Unlike cable/satellite TV, streaming is merit-based. We only subscribe if we want to watch the content. Since most of the content sucks, we don’t subscribe. So what’s Hollywood going to do…?
Well, it sure as hell isn’t going to produce better content. Hollywood hates normal people and has no desire to entertain us. What gets it off is insulting and offending us. And even if Hollywood did want to make better content, the talent is no longer there. Generations of in-breeding have produced an industry full of freaks, fetishists, and weirdos lacking anything close to the common touch.
So, we are going to get massive mergers…
Paramount is already talking to Comcast about a streaming merger between Paramount+ and Peacock. Currently, depending on your tolerance for commercials, you can subscribe to both for anywhere from $7 to $13 a month. If they merge, you will almost certainly lose those price points. In other words, if the only reason you subscribe to Paramount+ is for Star Trek, after this potential merger, instead of paying $7 to $13, you will have to pay $13 to $18. This merger will force Star Trek fans to pay for Peacock whether they watch Peacock or not. This is the cable model come to streaming — a rigged setup where if you want Fox News and Turner Classic Movies, you have no choice but to pay for CNN, MSNBC, Comedy Central, and ESPN.
Sports fans are about to get gouged big time when ESPN, Warner Bros. Discovery, and Fox create a single streaming sports juggernaut that corrals about 85 percent of sports programming. This is a terrible deal for sports fans. For example, if you only enjoy a single sport (like baseball), you will have no choice but to pay $50 a month to subsidize a whole bunch of sports programming you don’t watch.
What’s the answer?
There is none for sports fans other than to stop being sports fans.
For the rest of us, there is the past that offers higher quality programming and mostly comes free through free streaming services like Pluto and FreeVee. Most of you can purchase a $25 antenna and receive all kinds of free channels, including broadcast networks.
You gotta be a real sucker to pay for the crap Hollywood’s producing these days. The biggest suckers of all will accept the price gouging that comes with these mergers.
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