My current strategy is account hopping and ad blocking. I pay for Amazon Prime but I'm happy to pay less and have Firefox clean out the ads. I've cancelled my Netflix subscription for the third time. I'm soon going to re-enable Apple TV; probably for 1 or 2 months. And apparently HBO Max and Disney+ are now finally entering the German market. I will never pay for all of those at the same time. The more this market fragments, the smaller the pie gets for all of them.

What baffles me in this market is that there is all this unmonetized content that remains exclusively locked up in archives that is still very watchable earning almost next to nothing. The notion of cross licensing content between these networks seems controversial.

Take Game of Thrones for example. Exclusive to HBO. Some people in Germany may or may not have pirated that back in the day. Because HBO was not available in that market and there was no way to watch that legally even though world+dog was talking about that. Now it's old news of course. But Germany is probably full of people that might have payed for watching that when it wasn't old news yet. There are decades worth of high value series that you can buy (in some cases) but not stream. And I bet sales aren't all that great. Judging from the lack of marketing.

In the same way the BBC is sitting on decades of quality content. Same for most public broadcasters. Very hard to get your hands on any of it. Why are there no multi billion deals with Amazon, Netflix, Apple TV, etc. being closed about that content. Netflix is back filling their catalog with cheap Korean action movies and other filler crap instead. And they are cutting the budgets of the exclusive content that made them big.

Another example is that movie studios have been publishing 3D blockbuster movies for about 15 years now. These are almost all very expensive movies that only ran for a short time in cinemas. 3D only kicked off with the first Avatar movie. None of the big streamers offer any 3D content whatsoever. What's wrong with content publishers that they are allowing a good investment to go to waste like that? It's not a technical problem. TV makers have been trying to flog 3D tvs for ages. But without any content (not counting obsolete things like blue ray) there never was a reason to buy those.

It is very sad the the entire BBC archive, or most of it anyway, isn't available to paying customers in the UK