Will Herrington, Campus Carrier staff writer
When looking to subscribe to a streaming service today, consumers have a wide variety of choices. The most popular ones are Netflix, Hulu and the newcomer Disney Plus. Most of these services have plans that usually cos within a range of $5-15 a month. Most people often subscribe to multiple services to watch shows only available on a specific streaming service, which has become a selling point. Shows like Stranger Things on Netflix and The Mandalorian on Disney Plus are those platforms’ selling points. But it can become difficult to have more than one of these services on a budget, especially for students. This can be a problem, due to most of these services losing their variety of TV shows and movies. Recently more companies have seen the success of their shows on existing services and have started their own streaming services. This makes it difficult to get a wide range of shows and movies on one specific streaming service. So, most of these services end up with libraries of their original programs with various lesser-known shows and movies.
Comparing Disney Plus and Apple TV Plus shows this. Disney Plus has a wide variety of shows and movies that are under Disney’s ownership. With Disney owning lots of properties, it’s easy for most people to find multiple programs they enjoy on the service. And even though Disney Plus is only for Disney shows and movies, this wide ownership keeps a wider variety on the service.
Apple TV Plus is Apple’s first attempt in the television business. As of now it only has original shows, such as The Morning Show and For All Mankind. Only being a dollar cheaper per month than Disney Plus, Apple TV Plus doesn’t have much to offer in comparison. People will only subscribe to it if they want to watch any of Apple TV Plus’s original shows.
The two biggest streaming services, Netflix and Hulu, have their pros and cons. Netflix has a great variety of movies and original content but is losing a lot of good TV shows that aren’t Netflix originals. Hulu has a great library of TV shows and some original shows but lacks a strong movie library. Both Netflix and Hulu don’t have good libraries of both TV shows and movies. Netflix used to have a vast library of TV shows and movies, but in recent years due to the massive popularity of shows like “The Office” on Netflix, more companies have stopped licensing their shows to Netflix and instead decided to create their own streaming services. With these popular shows being a selling point for those services, companies use them to entice people to subscribe to their service.
This is why streaming services tend to lose their variety. If this continues, the market of services available to consumers will overflow. Then people will have difficultly finding one specific streaming service that can give them a variety of programs. A simple solution would be to increase the licensing fees to streaming services from networks and studios. But if companies can’t agree on fees or continue to take licensing away, the ability to subscribe to one service for a wide variety of content will no longer be available.