> I have mixed feelings about this one because rightsholders essentially have a monopoly on their content. 5+ video streaming platforms is bad for consumers, and this exists because rightsholders are allowed to control their content.
I find this to be sort of self-contradictory. On the one hand, monopolies are bad, but on the other, having 5+ platforms is bad. Which is it?
My (perhaps unpopular) opinion is that having more and more streaming platforms ("balkanized", to use your term) is extremely good for consumers. The low barriers to entry and the near-zero marginal distribution costs make this the perfect industry for competition (and as a result, consumer welfare).
It's a common misconception that having N streaming platforms necessarily means that consumers spend N * subscription cost dollars per month, but that's not a sensible user pattern. Nobody consumes from every single streaming service at the same time. Instead, we have a sort of TDMA style consumption of media that allows us to constantly subscribe/unsubscribe/resubscribe from services as we chew threw our respective TV show backlogs. Savvy consumers have benefited the most from this reality, and it's only a matter of time until we see subscription management products that extend this benefit to un-savvy consumers in seamless ways.
One day, streaming services will look to consolidate so as to be able to extract monopoly rents. These are horizontal acquisitions that would be terrible for consumer welfare, and those are the kinds of acquisitions the US FTC would likely police.