The golden age of the cut of the cord is over. Now what?



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The golden age of the cut of the cord was finished almost from the beginning. On Tuesday, WarnerMedia unveiled the name and programming details for its upcoming streaming service, HBO Max, which is expected to launch in the spring of next year. The announcement was associated with the news that friends-in the same way Office, would be one of the two most popular shows Netflix – would be leaving his temporary home, where a new generation of young viewers had become attached. Office, The company that the studio is the producer has recovered, because the Comcast NBCUniversal aims to create its own service. It no longer makes sense to lend one's content to someone else, regardless of the amount of the premium, when businesses can reap profits.

The bursting of Netflix and the rise of competitors to deep pockets signify the end of an era and the rise of a new generation noisy and unpredictable. Netflix's advance length can never be fully erased, but much of the early success of the service can be attributed retroactively to a lack of credible rivals, plus marriages of convenience (with Officewith friends) who finally reach their limit. Now that other entertainment giants, even technology hubs, are benefiting from setting up their own service, it does not make sense to grow some cash cows – even if part of what makes them cows milk was in the first place their availability on a cheap, accessible, almost unique portal.

The entire same Netflix subscription of mid-2010 may never be duplicated. In its place, a whole series of new services are competing for a slice of the pie, each with their own flashy costs and benefits to help them win some of the television viewers' finite entertainment budgets. While the number of services required to cope with soaring pop culture soars, the dream of a simplified alternative to a heavy cable fee is quickly doomed to failure. With no less than four major services to deploy over the next year, the question is whether one of them can replace Netflix rather than what represents the best chance of reducing its market share – and to which point a slightly weakened Netflix can keep. We reviewed Disney +, Apple TV +, HBO Max and the still-unknown NBCUniversal service to evaluate their selling points, their secret weapons and, most importantly, their potential to gain a place in the growing portfolio of broadcast options. consumers continuously. .


Disney +

Scheduled launch date: November 12
Price: $ 6.99 per month or $ 69.99 per year
Asset: All of your kids' favorite movies, including the Marvel Film Universe

Will people pay? Disney is already exercising almost total domination the company, but the company will not rest until it has the same monopoly on home viewing. As part of this notorious backup system, Disney has consistently exercised a power of observance over fans' ability to access beloved classics from its multi-year history. With the inventive name of Disney +, the mouse is about to open the floodgates, shifting from artificial scarcity to an apparently unbeatable selection of touchstones among Aladdin at The beauty and the Beast (but not particularly Southern Song), all for less than the price of an average movie ticket.

Disney + will pair its archive, including all slices of Marvel's Cinematic universe, in sets of 23 copies, to an original series that will extend its IP address to the era of streaming owned and operated. Along with the Marvel films themselves, Disney + has also sold its property to Marvel, eclipsing uncomfortable children, such as Iron fist with spin-offs for MCU characters like Scarlet Witch, Hawkeye and Loki. Star wars will benefit from the same treatment, starting with Pedro Pascal The mandalorian and snowball with Diego Luna's Cassian Andor.

Now that Disney also owns and operates Hulu, the idea is that Disney + will serve as a one-stop shop for families, while Hulu will serve adults. (The children are probably not listening to The servant's tale.) But families are the backbone of Disney, which in turn is the backbone of a culture that is increasingly driven by the tastes, loyalties and buying habits of younger kids. For some parents, the cost of having access to so much entertainment for children is a ransom, albeit a relatively small one – for now. Do not be surprised if Disney + is seduced by an overwhelming crush of subscribers with its opening price, then gradually gradually increase its balance sheet over time.

Apple TV +

Scheduled launch date: Fall 2019
Price: To be determined
Asset: … not clear, which can be a problem

Will people pay? Apple has tackled its incursion into entertainment with the same well-kept secret that has always surrounded its technology, a strategy designed to fit poorly with the stormy and talkative culture of Hollywood. For example, we are theoretically only a few months away from a trillion-dollar company that begins its opening salvo in the uninterrupted wars, and we still do not know when it will arrive or how much it will happen. will cost.

Yet, Apple is attracting a lot of attention just by being Apple. The manufacturer is certainly more experienced in the construction of screens than in providing consumers with content to watch. compare its silence, for example, with Disney's confident opening offering of the world's most popular franchises for a pint of Ben & Jerry. Apple's counter-offer is the variety and power of the stars. In March, Tim Cook and his deputies were able to distract viewers from the relative lack of detail with a procession of brilliant objects, including Reese Witherspoon and Jennifer Aniston (from the first dramatic film). The morning show), Oprah (of Oprah, Inc.) and Steven Spielberg (of Amazing stories). Sofia Coppola, Ronald D. Moore, Kumail Nanjiani and Damien Chazelle are also part of the training. A platform in which the Oscar winners count for the second half of the chain is really formidable.

But we live in a time when writers and celebrities are derisory in relation to intellectual property, and Apple TV + hardly boast of intellectual property (unless you count the history of life as a whole. Emily Dickinson, a teenage version of which Hailee Steinfeld will play in a comedy). Is a story-driven, adult-focused service enough to entice customers to bet on a brand new streaming player? We will know because Apple has the funds to throw a lot to the wall and see what remains in place.

HBO Max

Scheduled launch date: Spring 2020
Price: Over $ 15 a month, the current rate for HBO, HBO Now
Asset: friends

Will people pay? WarnerMedia's newly named service is a strange hybrid, combining the prestige of HBO with the comfort of sitcoms waiting for Warners' studio branch with a series of original series, based on an adaptation of Station Eleven to an animated Gremlins show to a dune spin off. Even with the HBO brand, the choice is odd: confusing the product with more restrained options such as HBO Now and not impress customers the sheer breadth of a company that controls Warner Bros. and great classics such as The prince of Bel-Air as well as the high quality credit of HBO.

Some expertise may be needed for audiences who do not have the same kind of associations with WarnerMedia – a relatively new composite of different AT & T-owned brands – that they maintain, for example, with Disney . But HBO Max has friends in his corner, a series so essential to the Netflix base, the service tweeted an official mourning, with his "us" collective. People who bought Netflix almost exclusively for friends do the same thing for almost double the price? Are Greg Berlanti's teen movies, for which HBO Max has commissioned at least four, a sufficient added value?

NBCUniversal Streamless Streaming Service

Scheduled launch date: Mid-2020
Price: Free, with ads
Asset: Office

Will people pay? Technically, NBC has an uneven track record with internal services; The specialized comedy platform Seeso struggled to break through before its parent company disconnected after less than two years. Equally troubling, CBS All Access, another network-owned network, is best known for smothering emissions by sequestering them behind a paying wall rather than allowing them to succeed. CBS itself seems to be waving the white flag by giving shows like The good fight a second visit to the network itself, hoping to increase their audience.

However, the streaming service of NBCUniversal – the entertainment hub owned by Comcast, which includes NBC, USA, Bravo and the Universal movie studio, among other sub-entities – seems to correct the mistakes of its predecessors. Rather than specialize in a particular genre, the service will be more of an omnibus, drawing on its collective mass and its formidable archives. And the most intriguing, in an increasingly subscription-based culture, a version of the service will be available for free for cable cutters99 – with advertisements, of course. (CBS All Access offers ads in exchange for a discounted rate, but everyone has to pay.)

This means that NBCU is not looking for the money of the viewers, but only their eyes – a much lower demand than that of its competitors, even though the advertisers' earnings are no longer as reliable as before. It can be said that the bet of NBCU is that advertising is not dead; it can be reactivated by transplanting the model on the Internet. It's a question of place, not work. And NBCU already sweetens a good deal using Office as a lure – an already beloved broadcast, massively popularized by the younger audience by Netflix. NBCU takes advantage of this success by recovering its resurrected success (expect classic sitcoms like 30 rocks get the same treatment once their current offers are exhausted). Giving more for less sure does not seem to hurt.


These four streaming services compete to become the new Netflix – but the circumstances that created Netflix at the base are thwarted by the existence of so many viable candidates. Disney, Apple, WarnerMedia and Comcast are driving Peak TV to ever-increasing heights, with a paralysis of choices that plagues modern viewers. Every imminent service has its own arsenal of little secret weapons during the war to get its attention; However, the truth is maybe there is no real miracle solution. Nothing can fully replicate the 360-degree experience of a cable package, with the exception of the unimaginable resurgence of cable as a solution to the problems of cable cutters. And the illusion of a complete entertainment package for a fraction of the price has turned out to be exactly that.

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