Of course. Here is an article on the topic.
The Streaming Wars Are Over, and We All Lost
Remember the promise? It was a beautiful, simple dream. For a single, reasonable monthly fee, you could cut the cord on your bloated, expensive cable package and step into a digital utopia. No more channel surfing through endless ads, no more paying for 150 channels you never watched. Just a clean, on-demand library of movies and shows. It was a revolution, and for a glorious moment, we, the viewers, were winning.
That moment is over. The Streaming Wars, the frantic, multi-billion-dollar arms race for our attention, have reached their endgame. There was no decisive victory, no single service planting a flag on the corpse of cable TV. Instead, the exhausted combatants have called a truce, looked around at the rubble, and realized the most profitable path forward is to rebuild the very same fortress they just spent a decade trying to tear down.
The war is over. And we, the subscribers who funded it, have unequivocally lost. The dream of a la carte freedom has curdled into a nightmare of fragmentation, rising costs, and resurrected annoyances. We’ve ended up with Cable 2.0—just with better branding and a dozen different apps.
The Death by a Thousand Subscriptions
The primary casualty of the war was simplicity. The initial appeal of Netflix was its role as a one-stop-shop. But as every media conglomerate clawed back its intellectual property to launch its own sovereign streaming state, our digital paradise became a fractured map of walled gardens.
Want to watch The Office? Peacock. Friends? Max. The Marvel Universe? Disney+. That one buzzy new show everyone’s talking about? It’s on Apple TV+, or maybe Paramount+, or was it Hulu? Keeping track of what’s where requires a Ph.D. in content logistics and a spreadsheet that would make an accountant weep.
This fragmentation led directly to the death of affordability. The low, single subscription fee that felt so liberating has been replaced by a constellation of smaller fees that, when combined, often exceed the cost of the old cable bills we so gleefully escaped. A subscription to Netflix, Disney+, Max, and Hulu can easily run you $50-$70 a month, and that’s before you even consider niche services or live sports. The revolution wasn’t televised; it was monetized into oblivion.
The Return of the Old Gods: Ads and Bundles
Perhaps the most cynical betrayal of the original streaming promise is the triumphant return of advertisements. The ad-free experience was a core tenet of the revolution. It was the serene, uninterrupted bliss that made streaming feel like a premium product.
Now, almost every major service has introduced a cheaper, ad-supported tier. But it’s a bait-and-switch. This new, lower-cost tier is a psychological anchor to make the standard, now-more-expensive ad-free plan feel like a luxury you have to pay up for. We are now paying a premium for what was once the standard.
And in the ultimate irony, the industry has rediscovered the magic of the bundle—the very thing we were trying to get away from. Verizon offers you a Netflix bundle. Disney pushes its Hulu/ESPN+ package. Warner Bros. Discovery and Disney are even creating a super-bundle of Disney+, Hulu, and Max. The companies have realized that fighting for individual subscribers is exhausting. It’s far easier to join forces, lock customers into bigger packages, and recreate the inescapable, all-or-nothing model of cable.
The Library That Isn’t
The final, bitter pill to swallow is the erosion of the very concept of a digital library. We used to believe that when a show was a “Netflix Original” or an “HBO Max Original,” it would live on that platform forever. We were paying for access to a permanent, growing collection.
That illusion has been shattered. In a brutal display of corporate cost-cutting, streamers like Max have begun purging their own original content. Shows like Westworld and Minx, and even nearly completed films like Batgirl, were vanished from the platform, often to be used as tax write-offs.
This move fundamentally alters our relationship with these services. We are no longer subscribing to a library; we are renting access to a revolving door of content that can disappear without notice based on a calculation in a quarterly earnings report. The sense of ownership and reliability is gone, replaced by a new, gnawing anxiety: watch it now, before it’s gone forever.
The Streaming Wars promised us control, choice, and value. What we’re left with is chaos, cost, and compromise. The battlefield has fallen silent, and the new world order looks suspiciously like the old one. We have more logins to manage, a higher collective bill, and commercials interrupting our shows. We’re paying more to get less convenience and zero permanence.
The revolution is over. The new boss is just the old boss with a slicker user interface. Welcome to Cable 2.0. We hope you enjoy your subscription.
