Streaming wars: Why Disney and Apple rivalling Netflix is good news for fans of great TV

In 1982, my dad saved up £90 of his hard-earned teacher’s wage and spent it on a video. The film was Raiders of the Lost Ark, and it came in a bulky box, Indiana Jones smiling and snapping his whip on its cover. It might sound insane now but back then, at the dawn of the home entertainment revolution, it felt like a bargain. Before the rise of VHS and Betamax, movies existed in cinemas and only in cinemas. Once they left multiplexes, you had no way of rewatching them, let alone watching them again and again, pausing and rewinding at will from the comfort of your own sofa. After films left cinemas, they became like memories of an exotic holiday long ago, growing hazier as time drifted on, unless a theatrical re-release came along. Then arrived home video, a new concept to film fans: for a premium price, you could take Indy home with you. You could saviour every swish of a lightsaber in Star Wars, relive the peril and panic of Jaws, and travel through time with Marty McFly, time and time again.

Not everyone was quite as mad as my dad, a man who inexplicably owns three copies of the Adam Sandler comedy Big Daddy on DVD. But to a sizeable audience of film lovers, to whom the idea of home entertainment was a radical new frontier, £90 represented a pretty good deal: 1.4 million people are estimated to have bought Raiders on VHS before 1987. As the Eighties went on, prices eventually came down and before long home video was a booming enterprise, with audiences racing to own or rent their film favourites. A key moment came in 1987 when Paramount struck a multimillion-dollar deal with Pepsi to include an ad at the beginning of all VHS copies of Top Gun. This allowed the studio to cut the price of a VHS copy to just $25 (or roughly £20) in the UK, kickstarting a new era of affordable home entertainment. By 1990, 50 per cent of British homes had VCRs, and releases such as Disney’s Lady and the Tramp were selling in excess of 3 million copies. The format peaked a few years later in 1995 with The Lion King, which shifted 32 million copies worth a total $520m faster than you can say “hakuna matata”.

I bring this up as a reminder that there was a time when audiences were happy to pay for the privilege of having great entertainment at their fingertips: during the VHS era and the DVD boom of the Noughties that followed it, film fans would gladly shell out £20 for one film. In 2019, £8.99 buys you one month’s access to an almost infinite content library on Netflix – but to many, streaming still doesn’t offer good value. This year is set to see streaming services launched by Disney (packing must-see new Marvel and Star Wars shows) and Apple (boasting exclusive shows and movies from the likes of Steven Spielberg and JJ Abrams), both eyeing Netflix’s crown as king of the streamers. Amazon’s continued investment in Prime Video means audiences need to pay for that service too, unless they want to miss hit shows like The Marvelous Mrs Maisel and Good Omens. WarnerMedia is also launching a service that’s likely to house the Harry Potter movies, Friends and all things HBO. And that’s before we get to BritBox, the new venture from ITV and BBC. Already, audiences are fretting. Streaming all the content you want to watch is about to get extremely expensive, a Guardian story warned last week: “Make no mistake, we’re the ones likely to get stiffed here,” the article concluded. “The golden age of television may be going strong, but the golden age of streaming is dead.”

Is it really, though? If you subscribed to all of those services, it’d come to roughly £45 a month, based on rumoured launch prices for the upcoming services and current subscriber costs for the existing services. That’s about £1.45 a day, or half the price of one Indiana Jones movie on VHS in 1982. Is it really so outrageous to ask audiences to pay for the age of peak TV we’re currently living in? No one’s forcing you to subscribe to all or indeed any of them, and most offer family plans, meaning you can basically share logins with your friends and loved ones and split the cost of one subscription between four or five people.

That Guardian piece echoed the sentiments of many, and a wider feeling of entitlement among subscribers to streaming services. Last week, when Netflix announced the hugely popular sitcom The Office would be leaving its American platform in August, the streaming service was inundated with thousands of angry tweets. A petition was launched that quickly amassed more than 50,000 signatures. Problem is, it’s not Netflix’s decision: The Office, owned by NBC/Warner and licensed to Netflix, is being taken back by NBC to feature on Warner’s upcoming streaming service. You’ve seen the meme of Michael Scott screaming “NO, GOD NO!”? The Office’s fans reacted with a similar ferocity of despair, presumably oblivious to the fact that all nine seasons are available to buy for a total of $30 on DVD if they wanted, roughly the price of three months’ Netflix subscription.

We live in an age of peak TV that streaming helped facilitate. In Wall Street Journal writer Ben Fritz’s excellent The Big Picture, a book exploring how franchise films, cinematic universes and companies like Netflix are forging a new future in Hollywood, he outlines how streaming and binge culture, introduced by DVD box-sets then sent nuclear by the likes of Netflix, have allowed for exciting new storytelling possibilities.

“Netflix changed ‘binge watching’... into the default mode for viewing,” he writes, going on to explain how previously, with most shows, every episode had to feel like a self-contained story, comprehensible to someone stumbling across that series for the first time. The rise of DVR, DVD then streaming services ushered in an age of TV series designed to be binged from the ground up. Seasons of shows like Stranger Things, which returns this week, are essentially 10-hour movies, structured as a continuing story broken into episodic chunks. Last year’s smash-hit Netflix horror series The Haunting of Hill House would have made no sense to someone discovering an episode halfway through the season on a traditional network while flicking between channels. On demand, though, they work brilliantly, becoming immersive stories that can continually evolve because showrunners know their audience is watching in marathon sessions, not tuning in here and there.

In 2019, we seem to expect more from the entertainment we enjoy, and to pay less for it than ever before. It’s not a problem limited to film and TV entertainment. The internet age has raised a generation, me included, used to getting things for free, or close to it: music, news, communication tools. For streaming services, the era of peak TV probably isn’t sustainable unless viewers embrace that creating great art involves coughing up for it. Netflix is expected to spend £11.5bn on creating original shows this year to fend off Apple and Disney+, both rumoured to be investing just as heavily. If paying a little extra means seeing the Star Wars universe expand in Disney+ show The Mandalorian, finding out what It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia’s Rob McElhenney’s got in store with his new Apple comedy, and continuing to enjoy experimental animations like BoJack Horseman that might not exist elsewhere, then I’m in. The golden age of streaming might, in fact, just be getting started.