Making Sense of the Flood of Streaming Apps
Credit: Marvel Studios
The COVID-19 pandemic has fueled the online streaming industry and content options.
With an increasing abundance of entertainment apps, traditional television and new streaming platforms, it’s getting harder and harder to keep track of and keep your subscriptions under budget.
The options for online video streaming are getting increasingly fragmented and complicated to track. AT&T (WarnerMedia and HBO), Viacom, Comcast (NBC Universal/Peacock) and Disney all have launched their own streaming services. And YouTube and TikTok are increasingly competing for viewers’ attention.
The amount of money Disney generated from streaming Black Widow simultaneously with its theatrical release prompted Scarlett Johansson to sue and for investors to get excited about new possibilities of streaming. The lawsuit is likely to have an impact on the future of movie releases and streaming for the whole industry.
As we’re still trying to decipher the future of streaming, I’ve been curious about ways to deal with and navigate the seemingly endless array of options.
Personally, I usually rotate memberships and follow the shows that I find interesting at the moment. (If everyone did this, this would spell disaster for these platforms’ business models.) When The Queen’s Gambit arrived last year, I subscribed to Netflix. In the spring, I renewed my Hulu subscription just in time for the last season of The Handmaid’s Tale.
This doesn’t seem to be a very efficient system. Now the new season of Miracle Workers (TBS) has arrived, the only way to watch it is to pay $20 for the whole season. I have zero platform loyalty, but this freedom apparently has a price.
Many platforms themselves are beginning to bundle their offerings to stand out from the competition. Most recently, Disney launched its bundle of subscriptions that includes Disney Plus, Hulu and ESPN Plus.This bundle includes Hulu with advertising, which is $14 a month or a bundle with ad-free Hulu at $20 a month.
While the online streaming market may seem really fragmented with new entrants popping up all the time, the space is still largely dominated by a handful of early entrants.
Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime Video, Apple TV+, HBO Max, Disney+ and YouTube make up 75% of the market, Nielsen data shows.
Still, more people watch cable TV than all of the streaming services combined according to Nielsen’s study last month, with streaming only making up 26% of total viewership time.
As streaming space matures and evolves, a separate cottage industry of ‘sorting apps’ has evolved, helping viewers to track their subscriptions, discover new shows and movies as well as free content across all these platforms.
Below sites do not include Google TV and other built-in video streaming navigation features that your TV devices may already have.
Struum
Struum, which is founded by former Walt Disney and Discovery Networks executives, offers over 50+ services with a $5 monthly subscription.
TechCrunch called it a “ClassPass” for video streaming, with each user getting 100 credits to sample content across different offerings.
Struum is only available on iOS and the web, and is planning to expand to Android, Apple TV, Android TV, Amazon Fire TV and Roku this summer.
Yidio
Founded in 2008, Yidio helps you search and discover movies. It has a pretty nice interface and allows you to search for free TV shows or movies.
Yidio also keeps track of new releases on all platforms. It’s also a free service.
Reelgood
I was most intrigued by Reelgood, which is a free service. It compiles trending shows and movies from all platforms. It also has ‘recommended lists’ like Emmy Nominees, Women in Film & TV and Assassin Movies.
Reelgood allows you to input the subscriptions you have and then search by genre to choose what to watch, and yes you can also discover what is streaming for free on which platforms.
While plenty of people are still addicted to traditional television, younger viewers are less and less interested in it. Also fewer people tune in for mass events like the Olympics, which are drawing the lowest viewership in over three decades.
As any new medium, the rules of the new streaming universe will require winning platforms to offer quality curation as well as maintain credibility and respect of their subscribers.
Filmmaker Martin Scorsese recently lamented how the streaming platforms “have come to overtake the moviegoing experience, just as Amazon overtook physical stores.”
“The best streaming platforms, such as the Criterion Channel and MUBI and traditional outlets such as TCM, are based on curating—they’re actually curated,” he noted.