Streaming Wars is a weekly opinion column by IGN’s Streaming Editor, Amelia Emberwing. To read the last entry, check out It’s Time For You To Watch Interview with the Vampire.
Recently, Disney and Warner Bros. Discovery made the announcement that they would be teaming up to create a bundle that brings viewers Disney+, Hulu, and Max. They shined it up real pretty to ensure consumers would feel like it was a big win, and made sure to highlight that both ad and ad-free options would be available for the bundle. They did so, of course, while notably leaving out just how much the new bundles would cost. Weird move when your whole release is tied to the word “value” (one that is used four times in a brief, 246-word press release, but hey I’m just an editor). But the partnership and the subsequent announcement are actually interesting to me for a different reason: catalogue curation. Especially while both companies’ existing curation has only gotten worse with the addition of Discovery+ and Hulu on their core platforms
And yes, before we get into the meat of the issue, all of the plucky jokes about sprinting back towards what is basically cable all over again are very funny and relatively true. Still, at least cable told you exactly when and where you’d be able to watch your favorite show. When something used to move time slots, it’d be a big deal! You’d have 40 commercials leading into the premiere telling you when and where to watch your shows. Now? Things just get added to the database to die. And maybe, just maybe it’ll end up at that top carousel to remind viewers that it’s happening.
It’s not that they’re reinventing cable, it’s that they’re squishing together all the worst parts of both. The ability (or inability) to find titles when they drop is one thing — one, big, annoying thing — but it gets even harder after the fact. Why? Because curation on most streaming apps is abysmal (get it together, Max and Prime Video), and even platforms that do an OK job like Disney+ could also do way, way better. If you specifically know what you’re after, you can spend time painstakingly typing it out on your remote — gods help if you if it’s Apple branded — or hope it’s big enough to end up somewhere on the main page without digging too deep, but that lends absolutely nothing to discovery, which has half the fun of digging in and finding what to watch. The key here is that viewers don’t have to dig too deep, and shoddy curation is a surefire way to end up in an endless scroll or giving up all together.
Cable definitely shares the same curation issue, sure. But the problem that it does not share is volume. Disney+ which, as mentioned, does an alright job with curating its platform compared to competitors, struggled a bit with the addition of Hulu to its platform. Meanwhile, HBO Max — whose curation was all but unusable already — became notably worse after becoming “Max” and absorbing all of Discovery+’s content (except for, of course, all of the shows and movies it wrote off or cancelled). And that change didn’t just break the carousels and overall curation. I don’t know about you, but new episodes of shows I’ve already been actively watching don’t just not show up now, but the show itself is inexplicably removed from my keep watching carousel entirely. Which takes us right back to the dreaded search function. And no, I won’t be buying a keyboard for my TV/PlayStation just so I can easily use my damn streaming services. This is my line in the sand!
And sure, maybe those issues are limited to a few people! Or maybe people don’t mind digging through a bunch of Discovery’s reality swill while trying to find their stories. The point is, merging content catalogues hasn’t looked too pretty so far. How bad is it going to get when it’s two completely separate companies (and three services) trying to collaborate, and how deep are we supposed to dig into our pockets for what will undoubtedly be a worse user experience for an indeterminate amount of time? Will they fix their current curation issues, or will all of their content just remain on separate apps?
The “separate app” solution seems the cleanest way to go, and would give them time to fix their existing curation issues. But it also feels like it kinda defeats the point of the partnership?
I don’t know, y’all! The “reinventing cable” tidbit is certainly annoying — especially while we don’t know the price point on all of that “value” just yet — but for now I’m more worried about no one being able to find anything on any of the platforms and the overall user experience going down the tank thanks to too much content in one system and two companies with different goals trying to fit square pegs into round holes.
What do you think of the partnership news? Is your outlook brighter than mine? Let’s talk about it in the comments!
