Remember when you used to come home from school on a hot summer afternoon and your mom would serve you lunch while you turned on your CRT TV, 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. But even though streaming services were supposed to make things more convenient for us, lately there has been a huge saturation that has resulted in a massive mess that makes me miss the simpler times and I'm here to talk about it.
What is OTT and how does it work? Over-The-Top explained
When streaming services came into being with the launch of Netflix in 2007, it was thought to revolutionize the way the world would watch television. People could now choose what they wanted to watch from a huge catalog of content and watch it ad-free at a fraction of the price you paid to have a cable connection installed in your home.
This exclusivity and overall ease of use made the OTT platforms a huge success, part of which all the major entertainment companies wanted to create a plethora of platforms similar to Netflix.
But as time passed and the number of streaming platforms started to rise to more than you can count on your fingers, the competition between these platforms also increased, leading to an uneven distribution of content across these OTT platforms. For example, if I want to watch movies from DC Studios, I need a subscription to HBO MAX, but if I want to watch content from Marvel Studios, I need to buy a subscription to Disney Plus. However, if the content listed on these sites remained static, it wouldn't be a problem, but content keeps shuffling from one platform to another like Friends being removed from Netflix and added to Max and Hulu.
