Remember when Silicon Valley was gonna be "disruptive"?

How's that workin' out for ya?

I got an e-mail today from Harry's, purveyors of razors (at first) and then all kinds of things:  soaps, shave creams, lotions, face cleansers, dopp kits, other shaving related paraphernalia (but not shaving brushes?).  I like Harry's.  I've been buying their stuff for six years (!  Time flies!).  Now they are being bought out by somebody I've never heard of, and I can only hope the products I like, especially the new ones, will still be offered, and won't go up substantially in price.

So much for "disruption."

And in the entertainment field:

All of NBCUniversal’s shows that are currently on Hulu will stay on Hulu, for now.

In a year, NBCUniversal can also put its shows like Saturday Night Live and This Is Us** on its own streaming video service, which hasn’t launched yet but is supposed to be up and running in 2020.

In three years, NBCUniversal can pull its shows from Hulu completely and put them on its own service.

The Comcast/Hulu divorce will be complete by 2024.

(All of this is separate from Hulu’s deal to license NBCU’s programming for its Hulu Live service, which essentially works like a cable TV bundle that you get online. All of that stays in place and probably will for a long time.)

Shorter: In a few years, the NBCUniversal shows you used to watch on Hulu will have moved to another service. You’ll have to either have a pay TV subscription to watch that service or subscribe to it separately.

AT&T Warner Media is starting a streaming service at some point.  Disney will debut Disney+ in November.  And where does that leave consumers?

But just because the big media players think this is the way to go doesn’t mean that consumers have to play along: You might be someone who thinks it makes sense to subscribe to Netflix and Hulu and WarnerMedia and NBCUniversal and Amazon Prime and whatever Apple eventually launches — along with other services from CBS, HBO, Showtime, etc. 

Buying cable, in other words, a network at a time.  The idea of the cable "bundle" originally was economies of scale:  you got a lot of channels cheap, paid a bit more to go without commercials (some channels), and a lot more to see lots of female nudity (I've streamed some HBO and Showtime stuff on Netflix.  There seems to be a minimum amount of naked female breasts per hour that viewers expect for their subscription fee.).  And then that got ridiculously expensive and nobody wanted to pay it (or could, according to the media approved millennial stereotype) and cable companies are now going the way of the dodo.

That latter in part due, too, to the rise of Netflix, once an irritant, now a behemoth.  And, according to Vox, Disney and Comcast and ATT are responding to the "disruption" of Netflix by trying to get big enough to each BE Netflix.  Because Netflix still stomps all over Amazon Prime (what was the last original show on Prime you read about?  Quick, now.) and Disney can't get any subscriptions without Marvel Studios (CBS, for all I know, is running its new Star Trek series 24/7.  What else does it have except the poorly-received reboot of "Twilight Zone," which Netflix got to first (and better) with "Black Mirror.")*  When elephants fight, the grass gets trampled, and eventually we can expect the companies to stop scrambling for eyes, and start consolidating into one provider (or maybe two, like Apple and Microsoft for operating systems), and then the gouging of the customer can begin in earnest!

Seems like all this "disruption" is just creating more consolidation.  And if it ruins my shower just when I was getting comfortable with it, somebody's gonna hear from me.


*In the interest of full disclosure, I discarded cable many years ago.  Broadcast TV, thanks to digital broadcasting, now offers over 50 stations in my area alone, of which, like cable of yore, I only watch 2 or 3  But I don't pay for the other 47, so I don't care.  This offers me channels that specialize in Boomer-friendly reruns, so I'm happy as a pig in slop.  Netflix still holds up its end, but I've also found I can buy old TV shows like "The Avengers", paying a pittance (about $0.40 an episode) for the seasons I want to watch, and once paid for, I don't pay again.  Disney will sell the MCU movies I want to see more than once, so I don't need their streaming service.  But it's a lesson in the power of culture that all these "disruptive" or, as we said in the '60's, "revolutionary" movements, end up adding to the status quo, rather than overturning it, or even really shifting its course.

Maybe it is not Thanos who is inevitable, but culture.  Or capitalism.  Or capitalistic culture.  Pieces in cups!

Are we killin' it, or what?