> Consolidating streaming services down to a handful of offerings will make price competition more fierce because they'll have richer catalogs to do battle with.

this is not how markets usually work.

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smallerfish 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Correct, but the current market is not working. 15+ streaming services is terrible for consumers. Catalogs are compromised. Bigger services can push prices up because they have more stuff. Clearly if there are too few players then there's less competition and no price pressure, but there's a sweet spot between what exists today and that.

	▲	dangus an hour ago \| parent [-]
		This makes zero sense. Can you name another scenario where consolidation helped the consumer? Where a sweet spot involved more consolidation? Did Breyer’s ice cream get better when it was purchased by Unilever? Did your local grocery store chain get better after it was acquired by Kroger or Albertsons? Did the smartphone market get better when Microsoft acquired Nokia and HP acquired Palm? What about Hashicorp? Sun Microsystems? Dark Sky? Red Hat? Slack? Nest? Any of these product markets get better post-consolidation? I struggle to think of a single example of a product category that got better with industry consolidation.