This is the right answer. It's in Disneys best interest to keep the market fragmented and force you to subscribe and pay for multiple services. The cord cutter dream of a la carte being cheaper and easier to control is dead.
That's exactly what "a la carte" means. It seems like what people really want is the opposite of "a la carte" service--a one-stop-shop for everything, like cable, except over the Internet.
I think that one of the great ironies of on-demand media is just how much stuff is locked up by rights holders and is unavailable. The Disneys and Netflixes of the world make remarkably small catalogs available. You should see some of the libraries that tv stations have sitting on the shelf.
Maybe it's just that a serious change in format and/or delivery always loses 90% of the previous material. It's funny how few LPs made it to CD.
You're absolutely not alone and the fragmented ecosystem companies are building will accumulate interest. A lot of potential viewers will never be exposed to content due to fragmentation, and without a critical mass of subscribers, "must-see" content will never grow organically.
Choice only drives priced down when it is choice between options which are actually substitutes for each other. What is instead happening is that the uniquely attractive franchises that people are interest in and not willing to substitute for something else are getting distributed over more different offerings, which isn't really competition in the sense that drives down prices much.
You can rotate your National Amusement(Viacom/CBS/Paramount), Disney/Fox/Hulu, Comcast/UniversalNBC, Sony, ATT/DirecTV/WB/Turner/HBO, Netflix accounts. They arent a contract. You have the incumbents (Disney, NA, Sony, Comcast, ATT, Verizon) vs the tech giants (Netflix, Apple, Google, Facebook.) One thing to notice is that Sony, Disney, and NA are now the odd ones out not owning an ISP. You buy one for a month each, cancel, switch to the next one.
It ends up being a LOT cheaper than cable if you rotate, and probably more expensive if you decide you need all channels at all times. The ability to rotate through them is a huge plus over cable/satellite.
Shame that they're going to be totally separate ones. Seems purely branding, especially around "disney app" being more family friendly than a "Hulu app with just disney package."
In reality I think most people's dream is access to everything ever made under one app for < $20 akin to Spotify.
Yes spinning the same content out into more services with smaller catalogs that each cost as much as the old large-catalog service is a verion of a la carte, but its a version that illustrates (rather than contradicts) that the vision of a la carte as cheaper is dead (or perhaps more accurately was always a pipe dream.)
No, individual streaming service prices are mostly constant or edging up over time as catalogs shrink and more content owners set up their own exclusive siloed services.
I personally don't think they are even comparable services but I have not had cable service in ~15 years so things might have changed considerably.