Discovery and Disney Entertainment have announced a Disney+, Hulu, and Max bundle.
The cable jokes aren’t so funny anymore.
Theyre just gonna accidentally create cable again.
Thats been a frequent joke about the streaming landscape in media circles of late.
CBS All Access and Showtime synthesize into Paramount+.
HBO becomes HBO Max and then becomes Max.
Hulu and Disney+ are suddenly one and the same.
The joke works every time because its not a jokeits a prophecy.
The cablefication of streaming was always going to happen.
And now it has.
This week, Warner Bros.
So, you know: cable.
Some two decades later, precisely no one has made real money in the streaming space.
Like all work stoppages, there were many disparate reasons for these strikes.
That shrinking began, not coincidentally, with the dawn of the streaming era.
A return to that status quo will likely be beneficial to viewers as well.
The streaming era has blended the concepts of film and television into a gray content sludge.
In a streaming context, each medium often takes on the unfavorable aspects of the other.
Movies feel smaller and TV series abandon episodic storytelling.
Its telling that basic cables competent but unremarkable legal dramaSuitsbecame a streaming phenomenon last summer.
All of these, of course, describe entertainment media before streaming.
We all knew that the arrival of cable-style bundles was the only way this very silly era could end.
The tragic part is that it took so long for the powers-that-be to realize that.
And in their haste to fix something that wasnt broken in the first place, they caused irrevocable damage.
