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Comment by vertoc | Hacker News Reader

> Disney+ kicked off the streaming wars. Which is going to be fantastic as a consumer... :(

It actually is going to be fantastic as a consumer. Since people are cutting cable and going to Netflix, the money for content has to come from somewhere - it’s not sustainable to get unlimited quality content for everyone for $12/mo. If new streaming services didn’t appear, the only new content we would eventually have would be Netflix Originals - and if that’s all you want, you can continue just subscribing to Netflix! With Disney+ and others, it gives companies incentives to create great new content. There’s no chance we would have gotten say, the Mandalorian, on Netflix

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My primary is the lack of central distribution. I agree, $12/mo is probably too low to provide new content. I would generally be fine with paying more.

What I dislike is playing whackamole with what service I can get certain content from. Is this show on Hulu? Or is it Netflix? Oh, right, Disney pulled it from Netflix and now it's on Disney+. Continue ad nauseam. Getting notifications that new content from a series is available is likewise disparate across platforms.

There needs to be a central management point. Similar to how Amazon aggregates physical goods from many vendors, offering me a central and familiar interface to provide search, discovery and payments. They then handle distributing payment and providing the actual content.

Amazon's Fire TV provides me with some of this (i.e. I can say "play such and such show" and it will provide me with an interface that lets me open a provider that has the content), but the fact that it's not available on my computer and that it doesn't manage the subscriptions is somewhat painful.

Not if you like just one show on each streaming platform. Pay five times and navigate between five different interfaces. And they will have different scroll directions and organizational paradigms.

And the ability to cancel anytime is not a perk. For people with ADHD it's a nightmare.

There needs to be a Spotify for entertainment.

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