A couple of weeks ago, former Hulu and WarnerMedia CEO Jason Kilar pitched a novel idea for solving the TV industry’s struggles.
In a New York Times story about the “future of streaming“—one that was mostly bereft of new thinking from Hollywood’s captains of industry—Kilar called for a model inspired by the music business.
Instead of competing directly for subscribers, studios would contribute an ongoing catalog of movies and shows to a unified streaming service, getting a share of the revenue in exchange.
“I’ll call it the ‘Spotify for Hollywood’ path, where a large number of suppliers and studios contribute to a singular experience that delights fans,” Kilar said. (He previously wrote an essay for Variety describing the vision in more detail, describing it as an “everything product,” but gave no indication that anyone’s actually working on such a thing.)
Kilar has a knack for ideas that consumers love and Hollywood hates—see, for instance, new movies on HBO Max at the same time as theaters—so the concept is at least worth entertaining on a slow news week. But after thinking through how such a service would work, I suspect that a concept is all it’ll ever be.
A Spotify for TV would be expensive
How much would it cost to combine every major streaming service into one big bundle? Adding up the price of Netflix, Amazon Prime, the Disney+ and Hulu “Duo” bundle, Max, Paramount+, Peacock, Apple TV+, Starz, and AMC+, you’re at $77 per month with ads or roughly $108 per month without.
Several of those services are losing money or barely profitable as-is. Even if we assume a discount for bundling them all together, the price of this theoretical package would only increase over time. An everything bundle might be convenient, but it’d be pricier than the status quo that lets you pick and choose.
Not every streamer needs it
Imagine subscribing to Spotify only to discover it didn’t have Taylor Swift, The Rolling Stones, or your favorite artist. The streaming music model only works because you don’t have to think about a song’s availability or sign up for extra services to plug the gaps.
That approach doesn’t translate well to streaming TV, where several top streaming services are already doing fine on their own. Netflix is profitable and still growing. Amazon Prime Video plays an important role in selling Prime memberships even if it’s not yet profitable by itself. Same goes for Apple TV+, which is a key piece of Apple’s ecosystem-enhancing subscription bundles. YouTube is the most-watched streaming TV service in the United States and already has its own successful subscription offering.
Maybe there’s a scenario where Hollywood studios team up to compete with these tech giants, but the result won’t be anything like Spotify’s unified offering.
Sports will ruin everything
Kilar’s longer essay on the Spotify for TV model also glosses over one inconvenient truth: The cost to secure sports broadcast rights has exploded since cable’s heyday. The NBA alone is on the cusp of tripling its annual revenues from new rights deals, and the NFL nearly doubled its revenues with new deals in 2021.
Many of the biggest sporting events remain tied to traditional cable and broadcast channels, and pay TV packages keep getting pricier as a result. An “everything product” with complete sports coverage would be astronomically more expensive than the major streaming services I listed earlier, and it’d be unappealing to folks who don’t care about sports. Requiring everyone to shoulder the cost of live sports is a big part of why the cable model is imploding to begin with.
It’s too late for the cable model
The fundamental problem with an “everything product” is in the name itself: It is no longer possible or even desirable to consume everything.
For better or worse, the internet has ushed in an age of content abundance. Even with access to every movie, TV show, album, podcast, book, or video, you will consume but a fraction of those worthy of your time and attention. As I’ve said before, the best you can do is drink from the firehose, managing subscriptions according to your time and budget.
It’s taken a while for folks to catch up to this reality, in part because cable once offered the illusion of everything. But now that it’s here, there’s no going back, even if the TV industry desperately wishes it could.
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