People (including me) complain about monopolies all the time for various reasons. At the same time, I’ve noticed a ton of complaints about the existence of multiple streaming platforms. But isn’t that a good thing at the end of the day? If streaming platforms consolidated into 2-3 companies, there wouldn’t be much stopping them from raising prices even more.

  • EmoDuck@sh.itjust.works
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    4 months ago

    The problem is exclusive rights.

    If you wanna watch 3 different shows but they are all on different platforms, then you gotta go and pay for all 3. You can’t just watch the Netflix version of Loki, or the Disney+ version of Ted Lasso.

    You mentioned monopolies but the problem is that each platform holds hundreds of monopolies, each for one specific show/movie.

    In a perfect world, there would be some sort of law or agreement against exclusive rights, where every service can show any product they bought the (non-exclusive) rights to.

    In that scenario, streaming services would have to compete by being the cheapest or offering the best service.

    But alas, this is not a perfect world