Once again, Ken and Austin are out of town

at IFA in Germany, so here I am.

The Minecraft Let's Play is coming, I promise,

and as soon as Austin gets back in the country,

I'm making him do it.

Over the past 10 years or so,

we've been living through the cord cutter movement.

Millions of people fed up with the big cable companies

have canceled their expensive subscriptions

in favor of far cheaper streaming services.

But have we reached a point

where we officially have too many services to chose from?

Just off the top of my head there's Netflix, Hulu,

Amazon Prime, HBO, YouTube TV, Spotify, Apple Music,

Tidal, Disney+, Apple TV+,

Sling, Crackle, CBS All Access,

I mean the list goes on and on.

Now I think we can all agree that streaming video

is pretty awesome.

I mean back in my day you had to go to Blockbuster,

spend an hour trying to pick out a movie you wanted

then you had to go to the counter to pick it up

because all those VHS cases

were actually just empty displays.

And then only to find out that they were all out of Shrek

and then you had to start that whole process over again.

But now if I want to watch something

I spend that hour just trying to figure out

what platform it's on.

I mean, Stranger Things is on Netflix,

Game of Thrones is on HBO,

The Boys is on Amazon Prime.

And I need a paid subscription to each of these

to get to get all that content.

Or, you could just do what we did before streaming platforms

and just pirate it.

First of all, let me be clear,

we are not endorsing that everyone go out

and just pirate a bunch of movies.

However, the way the streaming platforms

have fragmented the market,

it almost feels like we're being pushed back into piracy.

I mean we're already starting to see it.

Game of Thrones season 8 premiere was pirated

over 55 million times in the first 24 hours alone.

And HBO only had only around 16 million paying viewers

at the time.

Back in 2007 when Netflix first started streaming content,

to be honest the experience kinda sucked.

Their catalog wasn't all that full,

it was consisting mostly of older movies

and internet speeds really weren't fast enough

to even stream video at higher resolutions.

It was way better to just hop over to KaZaa

or The Pirate Bay and just download a movie or 12.

I did have LimeWire as well, I did prefer KaZaa,

that was just my preference.

Not only could you get the most popular movies

but since they were rips of DVDs,

they were often a higher qualities

than what you could stream,

even if the movie had that little DIVX logo

watermarked in the corner.

There are of course gambles with torrenting content.

Like is it a virus or is it even actually

what it says it is.

I mean you think you're downloading Shrek 2,

it takes all night to download and then bam!

It's actually just two Shreks having fun with Fiona.

But I mean like hey, it's free, right?

I remember trying to download all these songs from KaZaa

and I would constantly get this fake song

that was actually just a guy pretending to be Bill Clinton,

and be like,

- [Bill] My fellow Americans.

But at the end of it it would be like an advertisement

for some sketchy website.

I don't know if anyone else ever downloaded this

but it happened to me like a ton of times.

However as Netflix grew they expanded their catalog

and streaming technology got better and better.

And a lot of people started to realize

that they would just rather pay for the convenience

of something like Netflix

instead of going through the hassle

of trying to pirate something.

It use to be easy to choose Netflix over another platform

because the quality of their original content

was just so much higher than anyone else.

But now, pretty much every company

has super high quality shows.

And now as these companies keep producing

more and more of their own original content,

they're no longer just platforms

but now they're more like a TV network.

The problem here is that all the other networks

like NBC and CBS have realized that there's a lot more money

to be made by having their own streaming platform

and completely eliminating Netflix or Hulu as middle men.

But of course you have to have a catalog of content

in order to justify that service.

Our good friends over at Snazzy Labs did a great video

on why Apply TV Plus will fail

because they only have five shows at launch.

And that's why NBC is taking back The Office

for their up coming service,

that's why Disney is taking back all of it's content

for Disney+.

I mean soon Netflix will consist solely

of it's own original content.

For as long as I can remember,

people have said the same thing about cable.

That's it right there.

Now I can't believe I'm about to say this,

but in defense of the cable companies,

it is not entirely their fault for the high prices.

But they still do some real sketchy,

(child grunts)

When cable companies such as Spectrum or Comcast

make deals for airing networks,

those networks usually come as a package.

Take Disney, the owners of ABC and ESPN,

obviously the cable companies wanna carry

those massively popular channels.

But Disney will also push to include

one of their less popular channels as well,

like Freeform or ESPN8: The Ocho,

in a package with their more popular ones.

While technically gives viewers more options,

it also drives up the cost of cable.

And I mean let's be honest,

nobody's watched Freeform since Pretty Little Liars ended.

So here we are full circle,

we finally have an a la carte option.

But for most people it's just not feasible

to have subscriptions to each of these services.

Personally, I canceled Netflix a couple months back,

but with all this amazing content locked in behind paywalls,

I may need to find a new way to watch all these great shows.

Thank you so much for watching this episode of This Is.

You could check out a couple of our other episodes here,

be sure to hit subscribe, ring that notification bell

because if you do, I'll finally be able to afford

all these subscription services

and I won't have to pirate all my content.