Everything Reverts to Cable Eventually
There was a window—maybe five years, maybe six—when streaming felt like a genuine solution to something. Ten euros a month and you had access to most of what you wanted, legally, in decent quality, without navigating the torrent sites and pop-up hellscapes that came before it. Netflix had cracked something real. It was too clean to last.
Disney announced in 2017 that they’d pull their content from Netflix and launch their own service. At the time it landed as a warning still a couple of years away from mattering. Disney+ arrived in 2019, and with it went the entire catalog—Frozen, the Marvel films, Star Wars, Pixar, all of it locked behind a separate subscription. ESPN and live sports got folded in later, because apparently one reason to subscribe wasn’t sufficient.
The domino logic held. HBO launched Max. Paramount launched Paramount+. Apple TV+ materialized from nowhere with prestige programming and a price tag. Peacock. Discovery+. Each major studio arriving at the same conclusion: we spent years building value for someone else’s platform and we want it back. That’s a rational business decision with a boring inevitability to it. What it meant in practice was five different subscriptions to reassemble the one subscription we’d had before, plus a new round of piracy for everything that didn’t fit neatly into any of them.
The original Netflix promise—everything in one place, cheap, legal, frictionless—was a temporary side effect of studios not yet understanding what they’d signed away. The moment they understood, the unbundling began. And now we have cable again, essentially. Different channels, different monthly fees, different logins to manage when you can’t remember which service has the film you’re looking for. We went all the way around the dial and landed back at the beginning.
The only real difference is that we can each cancel individually when a service has nothing we want for three months. That’s the freedom we ended up with. A spreadsheet where the line items are entertainment.