>>10858603Why would Peacock (Comcast) merge with Paramount+ (ViacomCBS)? They're competitors.
The studios/networks already tried to pool their resources to compete with Netflix once before: that's what Hulu was (a partnership between Comcast, Disney, and Newscorp, with TimeWarner also holding a 10% stake from 2016 on). What happened? The partnership fell apart when Disney bought 20th Century Fox from Newscorp, acquiring a majority stake in Hulu in the process. AT&T (which had recently bought TimeWarner) and Comcast both pulled out to do their own things rather than be tied into a platform controlled by a single competitor. The main reason why it even still exists is that Disney hasn't finished paying Comcast for its stake. Once that's done, Hulu will probably be folded into Disney+, or else reduced to a zombified status similar to that of Discovery+ relative to Max: a $5/mo. dumping ground for reality shows that's only preserved for the sake of holding existing subscribers in the hopes of eventually enticing them to the more expensive sister service.
The current meta is for every major studio, with the notable exception of Sony (which has just the anime-only Crunchyroll), to have its own streaming platform. It's not sustainable, because none of them have the critical mass of content needed to operate profitably on their own. But we've already seen that a cooperative model like Hulu can't last, either. Meanwhile, Netflix, Amazon, and Google would each like nothing more than for everyone in the world to stream through their platform. More consolidation will have to come somehow, but it will bring more rate increases with it. If we ever get to the point where there is one place to stream everything, it likely will cost as much or more than cable (and will probably have to be regulated as a monopoly). Thus we could easily end up with something even worse for customers than the cable model, which is what some of us have been warning cord-cutters for over a decade.
