Will There Be Packaged Streaming Services?

[BluRayHiDef]

The competition between cinema and home video has become increasingly favorable toward the latter due to the advent of online streaming services such as Netflix and Hulu. The number of attendants for movies released theatrically has fallen consistently year after year for the last decade or so, and the only category of movies that has consistently performed well and that has kept cinema afloat is blockbusters, specifically those based on comic books. In response to this, many entertainment corporations are increasing their libraries of content with the intent to launch their own online streaming services, such as Disney, which has recently purchased most of the entertainment properties of 21st Century Fox; CBS, which launched CBS All Access back in 2014; and Starz, which launched its own service back in 2016 to compete with HBO's HBO Now.

In light of this, there will come a point at which the cost of multiple streaming services per month will be too great for the average consumer to afford in order to watch all or most of the shows that they like. Hence, I predict the birth of a market via which multiple streaming services will be packaged together for a cost that will be cheaper than what it would cost to subscribe to each service individually. Hence, each "packaged" service will be like a cable television subscription by which each individual streaming service will be like a channel (e.g. a "channel" for Netflix, a "channel" for Hulu, a "channel" for Disney's streaming service, etc). Otherwise, the market of individual streaming services will cannibalize itself such that most of the individual services will die; conglomeration will be the only solution for survival, particularly for the services besides Netflix, Hulu, and Disney.

What say ye?