Today is a half-ranting, half-questioning the order of things type of day. Ars Technica today has a story about Netflix losing the Warner Bros. portion of it’s catalog as WB plans to move forward with it’s own streaming media service. This is a very mixed bag to me, and here’s why:
On one hand, I am holding on to all hope for the day that HBO Go becomes unshackled from the chains of cable/satellite subscriptions. If I could pay HBO $4.99/mo to stream HBO Go without cable, I would ditch cable in a heartbeat. That would be, to me, as or more valuable then the few bucks I give to Spotify every month. Conversely, despite no longer being a Netflix subscriber, it irks me when content producers and publishers pull shows from content distributors to make their own service. This splintering of availability can only be seen as a money-grab and really weakens the whole of the ecosystem. (For the record, I feel this way about the video game industry as well, and wish awful things upon EA for being forced to use Origin when Steam would be better)
So, while I wish for a day when I can ditch cable entirely (it’s coming), I don’t necessarily want everything truly à la carte; I just want things better. Hulu Plus and HBO Go (and previously Netflix), as well as game services like GameFly, are where I want things to go. I just want them to also stay there once they land.