The Clutter of OTT Services Makes Me Miss the Simplicity of Cable

Jun. 9, 2024

Remember the time when you used to come back from school on a hot summer afternoon and your mom served you lunch while you powered up your CRT Television, with a nice and reliable cable network to watch Phineas and Ferb? This was replaced by OTT services like Netflix, Disney Plus, etc. even before we could realize it. However, even though streaming services were meant to make things more convenient for us, in recent times, there has been a huge saturation resulting in a massive clutter which makes me miss those simpler times and I’m here to talk about it.

What OTT Was Supposed to Be

When Streaming services came into being with the release ofNetflixin 2007, it was thought to revolutionize how the world would watch television. People could now choose what they wanted to watch from a vast catalog of content and watch it ads-free at a fraction of the price you paid to have a cable connection installed at your.

This exclusivity and the overall ease of use made OTT platforms a massive success, a part of which all the big entertainment companies wanted to have giving birth to a plethora of platforms similar to Netflix.

Now to have all the new content coming out at our disposal, we need to manage an overwhelming number of accounts and pay each of these sites money individually amounting to way too much money being spent on these subs. This factor alone had people drift away from streamlined OTT platforms. Seeing this, big media companies likeDisney launched their bundleswhich brought people the services of Disney+/Max/Hulu all in one place at a much cheaper price. However, there was a drawback to this as well.

These bundles, even though good, overlap each other. For instance, if you want entertainment services, you can go for the above-mentioned Disney+ bundle, but if someone in your family wants to watch sports, you will have to either go for a Disney+/Hulu/ESPN+ bundle or an ESPN/Fox/Warner Bros/ Discovery bundle for which you will have to pay even more money which is like using Cable TV all over but paying way more money that we did earlier. So overall, what’s the point of it?

So, now that we have talked about the problems, what could be the possible solution to this? If streaming services are going back to how cable TV used to be, why not incorporate the good parts of it? media giants can launch a service pack that includes all the content ranging from content incorporated for kids, sports, entertainment, infotainment, etc. Just like various Cable TV distributors used to do.

Another solution I have in mind is creating a wall that lets us select the kind of content we wish to watch or the catalog we need from a particular streaming platform creating a custom payment plan for us based on what we want to watch. This would prevent us from paying money for things we don’t even watch

With all this being said, the lines between the exclusivity of OTT and Cable have been blurred out and as things have gotten so messy and cluttered, it really makes me miss the simpler times when all we had to do was punch in the channel numbers on out remote and we got what we wanted to watch. Yes, the ads and the long wait were annoying, something OTT platforms claimed they would eliminate but at last, became the very thing it swore to destroy.

Shashank Shakya is an Entertainment Writer and has completed his Bachelors(Honours) with English Literature. He is a published writer. He boasts incomparable knowledge about the Marvel and DC universes along with other branches of entertainment with substantial experience in the field of writing.