For a moment, it seemed like the streaming apps were the things that could save us from the hegemony of cable TV—a system where you had to pay for a ton of stuff you didn’t want to watch so you could see the handful of things you were actually interested in.
Archived version: https://archive.ph/K4EIh
At this point, the best way to go (besides sailing) is to subscribe to one or two services at a time, cancelling others month-to-month based on what you want to watch.
We need an app that lets you search for content across all platforms and easily cancel and start subscriptions - queueing them up and helping you easily limit the amount you’re paying monthly.
But with these prices, it’s worth doing that manually.
Here’s how that will go:
Each streaming service will release their own aggregator app. Each of these will have a fee associated with them. Each of these will have certain services they don’t work with because the lawyers are still fighting over things. Each of these will eventually reduce their search coverage and promote their own content. “You searched for Star Trek, would you like Star Wars instead?”
Even if an open source third party wrote something that did this, companies would change their API pricing or authentication to break it so people don’t leave their walled gardens.
Companies are incapable of making a service that doesn’t eventually enshittify.
A third party app can just scrape catalogues, and then direct you to the platform’s website through an integrated browser to manage each account. They can push notifications when a subscription is about to be renewed just by remembering when you subscribed, and send reminders to cancel and subscribe to the next service in your queue.
The streaming companies won’t hide their catalogues because that’s how many people find what they want to watch through simple web searches, e.g. “Where to stream Barry” or “when does the new season of x come out?” The app could pull metadata from other sites for graphics and info like many already do.
It wouldn’t be as convenient as flipping a switch which would require proper API and probably login info, but seeing everything and managing it from one place would still help a lot.
I think a bigger danger would be platforms countering by requiring phone calls to cancel, or contracts, or slow-dripping content over months to keep you subscribed (some already do the latter.) IOW continuing to become more like cable.
Apple TV and Plex both do this already.