10 Things Everyone Hates About Modern TV
4. The Streaming Wars
The brutal, bitter irony of the "Streaming Wars" is that it's basically just repeating the same mistakes of cable TV.
When streaming started to pick up momentum around a decade ago, we all cheered the ability to "cut the cord," abandon our linear TV packages, and never look back.
Except, undeniably exacerbated by the pandemic keeping us all at home, the last few years have seen every capable network launching its own paid streaming service.
The result? Paying to subscribe to all your favoured services - Netflix, Amazon, HBO Max, Disney+ and so on - ends up costing a massive monthly amount, and perhaps no less than what you were shelling out for satellite or cable TV in the past.
The sensible solution is probably to just subscribe to certain services for periods of the year where you're most likely to use them, but for a lot of time-strapped people that's a huge faff they could do without.
We all thought streaming would offer a utopian, egalitarian future away from the constraints of the traditional TV model, and though streaming certainly wins on the accessibility front, you're probably not much better off financially, if at all.