Yes, and with the proliferation is only going to get worse with Disney next up, followed by others. Even if you 'buy' stuff on Amazon beyond the Prime stuff you aren't guaranteed to hold the rights to rewatch it if licensing agreements change. T here will be, I suspect, a limit to how many services people will subscribe to but it may well take a little time to have a settling down. Indeed I'm not sure that the current model will apply in 5 years time, and I am not sure what will replace it.
It's difficult for the BBC, and to a lesser extent ItV to have a working strategy here. The iPlayer is very good but it's never decided what it wants to do about the archive. So unless you regularly search through the content, you can easily miss stuff they put up. A couple of years ago, they had Civilisation in its entirety but I only discovered that by accident, and posted a heads up on here. I've watched quite a lot of stuff on YouTube that I'm sure isn't paid for, and often disappears.
ITV 's problem has often been that (a) the ITV Hub has been a fairly useless piece of kit, and (b) the franchise system has often meant that stuff in different franchises isn't available so I've ended up running the STV hub and the ITV Hub seperately, and the STV hub for a couple of years appeared to have the bandwidth of a piece of string.
The idea seems to work much better as a brand abroad since people shouldn't be able to access the iPlayer and Hub (of course there are ways around that), and in particular for the U.S. where PBS has shown content from both for many tears. I might well dependent on what content they want to put up subscribe for a few months to watch some stuff that I particularly want, but after that I suspect my mind will be saying but you pay a licence fee. I am also unsure of what sort of original content they would put up that wouldn't make me feel that it should be on terrestrial because I pay a licence fee. I don't mind when they put up a whole series on iPlayer at the start of the first episode because that just feels like an alternative way to watch.
Not sure if anyone outside Scotland will have noticed, and many in Scotland probably have not, but we got a new BBC channel this week, starting in Sunday. It mimics BBC 2 till 7pm and then had a few hours of specific content. The big draw was the start of the final series of Still Game, and indeed overall on Sunday it was the 3rd most watched channel in Scotland after BBC1 and STV, and for some of the time it was in front of STv. It has a relatively minuscule budget of 32M which is about .8% of the money generated by licence fees, nevermind any other revenu e. But to be honest other than a PR exercise, I am at the moment unsure what it is for.
I think in terms of what stuff will be in place of in 10 years, the aphorism Till am Goldman wrote about the film industry applies 'No one knows anything'
