Every month, some combination of the following probably shows up on your bank statement: Netflix, Disney+, Amazon Prime Video, Apple TV+, Now, Hayu. Each of these streaming platforms offers viewers access to a particular library of films and TV shows, and keeping up with them feels impossible. If you want to watch the latest season of The Bear, for example, you’ll need to introduce Disney+ (£4.99 with ads, £7.99 standard, £10.99 premium) to your roster. That is, the roster that already includes Netflix (£4.99/£10.99/£17.99), which you just reinstated in order to watch the new episodes of Bridgerton. In fact, if you invested in all of the streaming apps at once, in a few months’ time you would probably find that you could have afforded a luxury minibreak for the same amount of money you had spent to sit inside and watch the telly.
Managing these streaming services feels increasingly like a complicated juggling act, and it seems as if new streamers are constantly coming to the table. This month, Rupert Murdoch’s Fox Corporation launched Tubi, a free and ad-supported streaming app. The marketing materials say it will feature, among other shows, the Twilight films (that is, the same Twilight films that used to be on Netflix until the licensing agreement ran out) and Happy Gilmore. The selling point is that Tubi is free, funded by ads for all, in a streaming landscape where you’re paying at least a fiver a month for each service. But even though Tubi doesn’t charge, I can’t say I welcome its arrival.
Streaming is another prong on the back-scratching fork of convenience – you watch Netflix while you order a burger on Deliveroo and then send for a Gopuff delivery of bog roll and a can of Fanta Lemon an hour later – but at some point it just gets boring. I think it makes us incurious, and sometimes when I am doing the infinite “what shall I watch” scroll across my many streaming apps – and often landing on nothing at all – I think of the way I approached TV and films as a teenager. I would merrily scour Tumblr for clips and images that tickled my brain, and then I’d seek out the shows and movies that they came from, usually watching them via dodgy Putlocker links. This dubious type of streaming has been largely killed off by apps such as Netflix, much to the delight of the many parents whose family desktop computers were ravaged by pop-ups, all because their teens were torrenting Anchorman 2.
That was, in fairness, when the internet was more like a fun scrapbook than an overstimulating “look at everything ever all at once” affair, but in those moments when I am lying on my sofa deciding what to watch, I do miss that more proactive, personal approach. I don’t think I’m the only one. Recently, particularly where the music streaming giant Spotify has been concerned, users have complained about being fed the same songs over and over again, usually by major label artists such as Sabrina Carpenter and Billie Eilish, via its autoplay function. This started to annoy me recently, too, and my solution was to listen to the radio. It worked: via stations such as Do!!You!!! I ended up discovering artists I’d never heard before, and getting into others that it reminded me I liked.
Streaming feels particularly inadequate in the face of the big, real-time television experiences we get from terrestrial TV. When England play in the Euros, for example, you get the feeling there are millions watching at the same time, and that you’re one of them, which feels integral to the spirit of television. Although traditional channels don’t offer infinite choice, at their best they do give us a sense of immediacy and connectedness that streaming can’t really achieve. IRL movie-going, increasingly, does the same thing: think of the buzz created by the Barbenheimer phenomenon, for example, which saw filmgoers flocking to the cinema, keen to be part of something bigger than merely watching a screen alone at home.
The arrival of Tubi, for some, will be a boon among the many other pricier streaming services, especially given the rising cost of living. I’m sure on one of my knackered scroll sessions, I’ll browse through it too. But as streaming becomes more and more saturated, we shouldn’t be surprised if audiences grow restless with the inertia it can encourage, and return to more curated or collective ways of consuming culture – it’s more fun that way, after all.
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Lauren O’Neill is a culture writer