What would it take to get you to sign up for a new streaming service?
It’s been a tumultuous week for streaming services. Netflix officially entered the publishing world, Disney announced it’s pulling its content off Netflix and launching its own service to stream the company’s content, and NBC revealed that it’s shutting down its struggling comedy streaming service SeeSo. Put those three stories together, and they underline a trend we were seeing even before Netflix entered the content-creation business back in 2013: streaming services are expanding, proliferating, and competing, making it increasingly hard for anyone but the biggest industry leaders to sign on a big enough audience to survive.
The splintering of the streaming market makes sense for everyone but the consumer. It’s logical for studios to...