The Great Rebundling is coming. It's a bad idea

> Between the increasing cost of high-speed internet and the proliferation of streaming subscriptions — Netflix, Hulu, Disney Plus, HBO Max, Apple TV Plus, the Criterion Channel, YouTube, Shudder, Paramount Plus, Peacock, etc. — costs haven’t really gone down all that much. People wind up paying a little less, maybe, but at the cost of having radically fewer choices. What’s interesting about this is how little most folks really seem to mind the trade-off.

What the author misses is that people are so saturated with content that they don't need to subscribe to everything.

I don't have the time to watch everything that I am interested in on just Netflix. What is the point of subscribing to another service, that I won't have time to watch?

It wouldn't matter if they all merged into one giant streaming platform. I don't have the time to watch everything.

That is a fairly shallow history of TV. It did not go from 3 channels to cable bundles to streaming. There are about 4 decades in there that just got glossed over. And those 4 decades included serious market constraints, from the early days of cable where you got only one choice of provider because cable TV companies contracted with the city for exclusive franchises. That opened up later, but cable was and still is dependent on what physical wires come to your house and who owns them.

Then we got satellite options, so you can choose from your physically connected cable providers, or a satellite, or the old broadcast channels. More choice, but still limited.

Why does it matter when looking at streaming? Because we've removed a layer. Before streaming, your cable/satellite company contracted with content providers then packaged it up into deals they thought you would like and sold them to you. Today, we contract directly with the content providers. Maybe bundles of providers are a bad idea, maybe not - but we are now directly in control of which services get our money, so we can "vote with our dollars" in a way that we never could under cable TV or satellite.

Allow deeplinking TV buttons into smart TV apps (should be easy to provide) and let me use smart playlists to put together flow experiences that I can assign as channels. Solve my decision paralysis, let the playlist be supplier agnostic, and solve the bundling paradox as well.

A pretty shallow analysis.

I wouldn't call merging Discovery Plus and HBO Max into one service a "great rebundling".