It’s difficult to not personalise it when you are the single, solitary person with such a dogmatic view that only streaming television can survive while linear channels - despite still being a popular method of both distributing and consuming television -
must disappear.
To address epsilon’s valid point however I’ll add the following.
Quote:
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Originally Posted by epsilon
I wonder how he thinks it will be funded.
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Fundamentally OB has, for some years now, mistakenly viewed streaming as something more than a different method of consuming television. To that end, streaming services represent a subset of the television market. Subscription streaming services (themselves a subset of the pay-tv market) aren’t meaningfully increasing the size of the pot - they’re only trying to claim a greater share of a limited pot.
Neither Roku (nor Amazon) are taking responsibility for retailing the vast majority of packages on their devices - he knows this - but conflates this with the relationship Sky/Virgin have as a middle man and assumes (incorrectly) that there’s a place for someone in the streaming market for a “gatekeeper” platform.
There isn’t. The whole point of the exercise is to gain market share at the expense of other participants. Why would anyone want a third party to decide what prominence they have (if any) on consumer devices while trying to retail direct to consumers?
And none of this - absolutely none - has anything to do with the economics of a channel maintaining a linear presence in addition to steaming as the BBC, ITV and Sky do now. Nobody feels dogmatic about this bar OB as he presents this as a one way street. The reality is that fewer linear channels existing causes the remaining ones to become more prominent near the top of EPGs.
Almost all of us envisage a future with far fewer linear channels - some content lends itself to it. News, sports channels that place magazine programming (adverts essentially) between live programming and content where people are active on social media while viewing live (X Factor type programming for example). ITV aren’t going to give up prominent access to every household and television in the country to join a jumble sale menu.
However when on the ropes the goalposts move and OB expects that nobody will follow him down the rabbit hole.