Nearly everybody in the US has subscribed to a streaming service at this point, and why shouldn’t they: It has movies of every kind, and TV shows, and best of all, no ads! At least until recently, because in 2022, several streaming services, including Hulu, Disney+, Prime Video, and others, began implementing ads in their movies and TV shows. However, they are also making bundles, so all your favorite streaming services can come together, like Hulu and Disney+, or Prime Video and MGM.

In the early 2000’s, nearly everybody in the US had Cable TV, and why shouldn’t they? It got you free access to movies and TV shows of every kind. You could also bundle your favorite channels, and…wait a minute! Did the streaming services just go full circle from Cable TV?

Cable TV is a system that uses cables to connect to different channels, which people could watch. When introduced in the 1990’s, it was a game changer, as it rendered analog TV, where antennas are used to see what was on, obsolete. On top of that, there were also bundles, where several channels are bundled together. It was very effective, and, by the 2000’s, most of the country had Cable TV. However, there were still problems, such as the fact that Cable was expensive, and there were ads interrupting all sorts of programs.

In 2007, Netflix, the first streaming service, was created. Netflix had movies and content, which could be accessed via internet. And, you could also choose what movie or TV show you might want to watch at a given time, unlike TV show’s, where it just showed what was on the program. All that, and it was still pretty cheap, and there was no ads! So, during the 2000’s and 2010’s, Netflix started gaining more and more subscribers, while more people left Cable.

With the decline of cable, other streaming services started popping up, wanting a piece of the pie. In the early 2010’s, Amazon, the online shopping website, decided to make their own streaming service, Prime Video, to compete with Netflix, and partnered with MGM to make the streaming service, and content for it. On top of that, Warner Brothers made HBO Max. Other notable streaming services started to pop up, like Paramount Plus, Peacock, Apple TV, and Hulu. But biggest of all, in 2019, Disney+ was released, which had all sorts of content, from just Disney, to Pixar, to Nat Geo, to Marvel and Star Wars. And with the Covid 19 Pandemic, all of these streaming services gained millions of subscribers, and Cable TV was stuck in the past, along with the Analog TV that preceded it.

Now that the streaming services had almost complete control over the TV industry, they decided they could earn more money. So, they began implementing ads in the middle of their programming, that continued to increase in duration. On top of that, although streaming services started out cheap, they began skyrocketing their prices, not unlike Cable. This would be especially evident with Disney+, where the company began churning out content that was just for Disney+, even if it wasn’t that good, so they could compete with Netflix, and charged high prices for it. Finally, several streaming services made bundles, so people could watch even more content, with Disney+ and Hulu, or Prime Video and MGM+, and HBO Max and Discovery. This was just like the bundles on Cable TV. With this, people began realizing that streaming services went full circle from Cable TV. Finally, so many streaming services, it is just all of them, just like the TV channels from before, competing for watchtime.

So, despite being created to challenge and take on Cable TV, recently, Streaming Services had just gone full circle from Cable. Because of the ads, bundles, and high prices, Streaming Services had just become cable. And, most of all, they are competing all, like the TV Channels from the last decade, for your watch time. Like Obi Wan said to Anakin(On Disney+), they had become the very thing they sought to destroy.