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Comment by fc417fc802 | Hacker News Reader

Do you think we've made it to the point that a broker for streaming services would be viable? You pay a 10% premium and they connect you with the media you want to watch without you needing to maintain a monthly subscription to 15 different services.

Would probably be worth it even if just to have a consistent UI across services.

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That would be nice, but I think it is just a licensing issue and the companies that hold the licenses don’t have any incentive to try and simplify things—they’d prefer we subscribe to every service and then watch, like, one show on each.

It would be interesting to see data on this. How many people subscribe to multiple streaming services, vs the opportunity to license the content to an aggregator and sell to those that miss a lot of content because, like me they don’t want multiple services. I refuse to subscribe to all the services that have the content I want to watch: Netflix, Apple, Prime, HBO Max, Discovery… the high seas become an inconvenient option at this point.

I agree (and would also like to see that sort of info if it existed). But, I’m pretty sure the same folks who were in charge of cable when it became insufferable are now in charge of streaming. So, less-annoying business models… I’m not hopeful.

> vs the opportunity to license the content to an aggregator

Isn’t this what Netflix used to be

Exactly. And the whole reason all these other services popped up is the IP holders realized they could make a lot more money with their own service vs licensing to an aggregator. I think it worked out pretty well for Disney+, because they have a huge back catalog of very popular IP. Not sure if anyone else is really making money with this new model, but they still don’t want to go back to ceding all control to Netflix.

Account pooling? Sign up to a pool that distributes your account to others when not being used, in return gives access to multiple streaming platforms on demand...

I’d be shocked if that wasn’t a ToS violation for most services.

Amazon Prime Video is already this. You can subscribe to Max, Peacock, Crunchyroll, etc. from within the Prime Video app, and watch content normally exclusive to those services.

We could go back to the olden days when everything was on Netflix instead :)

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