Nolte: Begun the Streaming TV War Has

If you’ve been reading Breitbart News over the last decade or so, you know we’ve been way ahead on the streaming TV story.

While Hollywood pretended it wasn’t happening…

While the sycophant entertainment media helped Hollywood pretend it wasn’t happening…

Here at Breitbart we predicted it — we laid out the stats to back up that prediction, and pointed and laughed at the idiots who predicted otherwise, or who put their heads in the sand.

And now it’s here… everything television is moving to streaming.

This was inevitable, and anyone with half a brain and an open mind knew it. Without a DVR, you can watch whatever you want whenever you want to watch it. There are no commercials, or at least nowhere near the punishing 20 minutes per hour cable TV pummels you with. And streaming is cheaper than cable TV — wait, let me rephrase that: streaming is waaaay cheaper than cable TV…

How could streaming TV not succeed, how could it not take over the way we consume TV and knock cable on its spoiled, entitled, greedy backside?

But Hollywood didn’t want to face the prospect of losing its precious cable (and satellite) TV business, because cable TV is the most lucrative con game ever devised by any business this side of Al Capone.  For some 40 years, Hollywood convinced a hundred million American households to pay through the nose for a bunch of TV networks, most of them left-wing, we never watch.

A hundred million households forking out over a $100 a month to pay for a half dozen networks we do watch and 250 we hate.

Man, what a racket; and what stupes we were, especially with TV still free — FREE — over the airwaves. Hey, until three years ago, I was one of the stupes.

And then along came Netflix streaming and some of us immediately saw the future… It cost a tenth as much as cable with no commercials…

Oh, my, yes — this had to be the future.

But Hollywood said no and the Hollywood press went along. The American people, however, were not fooled and what had been 100 million households dropped to something closer to 80 million as Netflix exploded, and now…

Begun the streaming TV war has.

A few years ago, I predicted that Netflix’s success would eventually force the studios into what I called the vicious cycle —  an unwinnable position where the reality of cord cutting (those who cancel their cable and satellite TV subscriptions) would force Hollywood to create its own streaming packages, which would in turn create a vicious cycle where the allure of these packages would incentivize even more people to cancel their cable subscriptions. The “vicious” part is that cable subscriptions are much more lucrative for the studios than any streaming channel.

And this is what is now happening…

Imagine this…

Disney is about to offer Hulu, ESPN+, and the upcoming Disney+ for just $12.99 a month. Once that’s available, a whole lot of people are going to cancel their cable subscriptions where Disney, through its various offerings, probably makes close to double that $12.99 per cable customer. In other words, the reality of streaming TV has forced Disney into a position where it has to offer an incentive (a streaming package) that cuts it own cable TV throat. One of the good guys in the entertainment media, Paul Bond, has an excellent piece on this over at the Hollywood Reporter.

But it is not just Disney waking up. Viacom and CBS are re-merging for one reason and one reason only — because they need content to compete with Amazon, Disney, and Netflix. CBS already has a streaming service, but only a few million subscribers. The problem is content. We are going to need more than a woke Star Trek spin-off and a woke Twilight Zone reboot if we’re going to pay for one more subscription service, and with Viacom comes all that content from Paramount Pictures, MTV, Comedy Central, etc. Showtime will fit in there somewhere.

Using its mighty assets, AT&T snatched up Time Warner — and again, that is all about streaming, all about being able to compete content-wise with the kahunas.

And with the streaming war comes all those vicious cycles, and with those vicious cycles comes the end of cable TV, and with the end of cable TV comes the end of basement-rated, left-wing networks currently being subsidized by us stupes — the end of CNN, of MTV, and maybe even MSNBC — which is imploding now that their three-year Russia Collusion Hoax has been exposed.

So welcome soon to a world of choices, real choices, where there is actual competition between the major studios for your entertainment dollar because they can no longer funnel all of us into a once-size-fits-all cable TV package that killed competition because cable made them all filthy rich whether we watched their garbage or not.

Begun the streaming war has, and you have no idea how good this news really is.

 

Follow John Nolte on Twitter @NolteNC. Follow his Facebook Page here.