Netflix, Apple TV+, and Peacock will soon come together to offer a streaming bundle. This comes the week after the Disney Grooming Syndicate announced its own streaming bundle with Hulu and Max.
“Comcast is prepping a ‘StreamSaver’ bundle that will include Netflix, Apple TV+, and Peacock together for a cheaper price than if purchased separately,” reports PC Magazine. The bundle will launch later in May and is expected to “come at a vastly reduced price to anything available today.”
Currently, you can pay anywhere from $7 to $23 for Netflix, $8 to $14 for Peacock, and $10 for AppleTV+. This new bundle will likely offer different tiers at different prices, depending on your tolerance for commercials.
So what’s going on here…?
Streaming is not working out well at all for left-wing Hollywood. Whereas cable/satellite TV was a cash cow that forced everyone to pay a fortune for a hundred channels they never watched, that’s not how streaming works. With streaming, you pay for the content you want to watch. Therefore, streaming is merit-based. With cable/satellite TV, you are forced to pay for a whole lot of junk you don’t watch. Therefore, cable/satellite TV is left-wing affirmative action for multinational entertainment corporations.
Without this affirmative action, along with dozens and dozens of other networks, CNN, MTV, various Disney channels, and Comedy Central would not exist. Not enough people watch to earn the advertising dollars necessary to make a profit.
Because streaming is merit-based, most streaming outlets are losing billions or barely breaking even. Simply put, there are not enough people out there willing to watch Hollywood’s shit. So…
The Hollywood goal is to bring the cable/satellite affirmative-action program to the world of streaming. In that world, we will subscribe to streaming outlets we never watch to gain access to the one or two streaming outlets we do watch.
We’re not there yet. You can still subscribe to each streaming outlet separately. But the endgame here is to turn streaming TV into cable TV, where your only options are overpriced packages. That’s how cable TV works. If you want Fox News and Turner Classic Movies, you are forced to fund (directly through your cable bill) outlets that hate you, like Disney, CNN, Comedy Central, and MTV — not to mention sports. Streaming, however, is still à la carte, where you can subscribe to the ones you actually watch.
Hollywood will soon try to kill that option.
What Hollywood really hates is what’s called “churn,” where you subscribe to, say, Disney+ for two months, watch everything you want to watch, cancel Disney+, and then subscribe to Paramount+ long enough to watch everything you want to watch, and then cancel, and on and on.
There are two reasons you can’t do that with cable. The first is that à la carte is not an option. The second is that, unlike streaming, the TV shows you want to watch are not stored and available to watch at any time.
As cable TV dies, you will see Hollywood do the following with streamers: 1) force you into bundles, and 2) start removing shows and movies so you can’t skate along and binge stuff before you cancel.
My suggestion? Stop paying for streaming and cable TV today and use the money you save to build your own home video collection of DVDs and Blu-rays. You will own something, and no one can take it away from you. Eventually, you will own a library of tried and true entertainment. My collection is now big enough that I never lack anything to watch, and what I own isn’t woke or gay or emasculating or dogmatic. Instead, it’s art, like Citizen Kane, The Seven Samurai, The Maltese Falcon, Red Dawn, Death Wish 2, and The Green Berets.
Plus, there are a ton of free streaming services that offer all kinds of great programming. Check out Pluto, FreeVee, Tubi, and the Roku Channel, just for starters. Only suckers pay for streaming,
John Nolte’s first and last novel, Borrowed Time, is winning five-star raves from everyday readers. You can read an excerpt here and an in-depth review here. Also available in hardcover and on Kindle and Audiobook.
