The Messy, Confusing Future of TV? It’s Here<br />If you’re like me and the millions of other Americans who have canceled a cable television subscription<br />over the past few years, you’re probably familiar with the phenomenon I’ve started calling “the hunt.”<br />It goes like this: First, you decide to watch one of your favorite shows — HGTV’s “Fixer Upper,” in my case.<br />Disney, which has built an enormously profitable business<br />that includes movie ticket sales and cable revenue from ESPN, is betting that a significant number of customers will pay $10 or $20 a month to watch “Frozen” and keep up with their NBA teams, above and beyond what they’re already shelling out for Netflix, Hulu and Amazon Prime subscriptions.<br />To navigate all of this, a few third-party services have popped up to replace the TV Guides of old — like Can I Stream It?, a search engine<br />that will tell you which streaming platform hosts your favorite show — but there’s no industrywide solution, and no simplification in sight<br />On the surface, these seem like very different strategies — selling premium video to an existing audience of fans,<br />versus giving away premium video in an effort to sell hyper-targeted ads and attract a network of amateurs.<br />We were told that the internet would usher in a golden era of streaming video, and<br />that incredible shows and movies would be a click away through low-cost, easy-to-use services.
