I think
some of what we are seeing is a normal market rush and then inevitable high failure rate. For every amazon.com, you're going to have a lot of pets.coms. Of course, Amazon isn't making any money, and never has, and Netflix (I agree probably the most popular one out there) isn't setting the financial world on fire either.
What I don't like is the current trend of disaggregation from streaming services. More and More of them are deliberately preventing aggregation progs like MC from being able to browse and play their content. I want one UI to provide a combined view of all my content regardless of if it is local or "cloud" based. We seem to be going down a path of MC for locally stored path an individual apps for each of the streaming services.
I think
this (and an established content marketing and delivery industry fighting the future tooth and nail) is what is holding streaming services back.
The future of media is apps?
I don't know about that. With a typical, cheap consumer TV, you have to deal with a crappy, buggy, often poorly-thought-out UI design. But, you only really have one or three of them to deal with in your house. And the "cable box/DVR/whatever" (with its crappy UI) dis-intermediates a lot of the interface anyway. In any case, it is a
single platform for delivery of all the television content you want. The UI may be crappy, but you only have to learn one or two of them, and just barely enough to get your job done. And that's now, we're coming from a place where the UI was a channel dial (and then an up/down arrow control).
But a future where HBO has its app, and Warner Brothers has its app, and Disney has its app, and ESPN, and some content is aggregated (and silo-ed) over in Hulu, and some in Netflix, but only sometimes and vanishes other times that don't fully make sense (and shift over time anyway)? And now you're learning and dealing with categorizing 30 apps and their idiosyncrasies? Some of them will be great, but most of them will be terrible, or at-best, mediocre.
That is... Well, it is their problem.
I remain unconvinced. I think the Internet has a much bigger, and more fundamental, destiny as a content delivery platform. We don't really
need these services with their walled gardens to middle-man between us and the people creating the actual content.
The problem is it needs a unified platform, search, and discovery. And, a way for the content makers to reliably generate revenue directly from the users. Then you don't need "Networks" (which become essentially banks fronting loans with marketing departments attached), because they can sell to us directly. The real "Content (App) Store", where you or I can submit something as easily as JJ Abrams.
But, I guess I want to believe, that the reason these things fail, is that content is, to consumers, fundamentally different from "software". An app only "goes" with a particular phone (or tablet, but only mostly), so it is one thing to tie the "thing you buy" to the device vendor in a walled garden. But it is entirely a different thing for a song, or a TV show. The consumer doesn't care about your excuses why it can't be all in one place on all of their devices that have a screen, or speakers, or bluetooth. They don't care. With that analogy, we're in the AOL and CompuServe "phase" of the evolution of the disruption of entertainment (and news) media by the Internet, with walled gardens everywhere.
So, the model I hope that evolves out of it, must be much closer to the model of the Open Web. Where you can pick your "web browser" but it is still the web, and anyone can put up a web server and serve some content. We need that, but for entertainment media content delivery, funding and/or purchase, and playback. I think it will happen, but it is going to be an interesting road.
The alternative is dour, because it almost certainly means we end up with a Facebook of media, and one company controls it all. And that, since this includes essentially our modern freedom of speech and of the press, is...
Not the result I'm pulling for.
