Think streaming services and in the music industry Spotify and Pandora immediately come to mind. In less than nine years, Spotify has secured over 100 million users. With over 30 million songs available it has been incredibly successful in creating a one-stop shop for all of your music needs (with a couple of notable exceptions such as Taylor Swift’s protest boycott). Not bad for circa $12 per month.
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What Apple first started way back in 2001, Spotify has pushed to the next level where a small monthly fee gives you access to all the music you could ever possibly need. If no new songs were added to Spotify and you started listening immediately to the entire playlist, it would take you over 170 years to hear every song if you listened around the clock.
The music industry has progressed very quickly, video streaming services are not quite there yet. While Netflix has been around longer than Spotify and is the largest video streaming provider, more specialty channels are constantly popping up. Just recently we saw the emergence of a new channel – Love Nature. This channel claims to have the largest library in the world of 4K wildlife and nature documentaries.
All of that sounds nice for nature lovers what I want to see in the video streaming industry is the equivalent of Spotify. There is no one catch-all channel that covers every channel. By the time you subscribe to Netflix; Stan; Hulu; Amazon Video; YouTube and a range of others, it is quite easy to chew up over $60 per month on the supposedly cheaper option of streaming video.
Our grandkids will laugh at us when we tell them we used to turn on the TV at a time that was decided by someone else to watch our favourite show – or try and work out the complexities of the video recorder to watch it later.
When the millennials of the world choose what to watch and when to watch it they don’t expect to see advertising cluttering up their viewing pleasure. Advertisers are quickly realising that running ads on TV is not the best way to reach that demographic. Even news outlets are finding that this group of people tend to find out their ‘news’ from social media rather than from traditional TV news.
This is a challenge for all traditional media outlets and maybe there is potential for a catch-all video streaming service to be created that delivers some news along the way. History has proven that people generally want a single service that gives them everything.
The various phone and power companies are going down this path with their billing as they understand the human desire to have single billing.
None of that helps me over Easter – at the moment I just want the one video streaming service. Who knows, maybe next Easter.
