The Harry Potter Films Are Now Exclusive To Comcast, And The Streaming Sector Remains Oblivious To Piracy's Looming Resurgence

The rise of streaming video competitors is indisputably a good thing. Numerous new streaming alternatives have driven competition to an antiquated cable TV sector that has long been plagued by apathy, high rates, and comically-bad customer service. That's long overdue and a positive thing overall, as streaming customer satisfaction scores suggest.

But as the sector matures, there's a looming problem it seems oblivious to.

Increasingly, companies are pulling their content off central repositories like Hulu and Netflix, and making them exclusive to their own streaming platforms, forcing consumers to subscribe to more and more streaming services if they want to get all the content they're looking for.

Want to watch Star Trek: Discovery, you need CBS All Access. Can't miss Stranger Things? You'll need Netflix. The Boys? Amazon Prime. The Handmaid's Tale? Hulu. Friends? AT&T. This week it was Comcast's turn in announcing that the Harry Potter films would now be exclusive to Comcast's new streaming service, Peacock. Of course it's not as simple as all that. The titles will appear and disappear for the next few years, being free for a while... then shifting to a pay per view model for a while:

"According to Frances Manfredi, president of content acquisition and strategy for Peacock, the Potter movies will play on the service during multiple windows between October and March. The first window will last for a month, with the movies then airing on NBCU’s linear broadcast and cable networks (and, potentially, their websites). They’ll then return to Peacock early in 2021. It seems likely that Peacock and HBO Max could continue to share custody of young Mr. Potter and his friends through 2025, though as of yet, no deals have been worked out for future shared windows."

No, AT&T and Comcast probably aren't going to "share" the Harry Potter films, meaning that to watch them you need to embrace the Comcast ecosystem. And while superficially you can easily understand why companies would want to lock down massive droves of exclusive content to drive subscriptions as the streaming wars heat up, there's a certain myopia going on in terms of the impact. There doesn't seem to be much of an awareness of that while competition is certainly good, having too many cordoned off exclusivity silos and too many content licenses shifting under the feet of consumers could generate confusion and drive more people to the simplicity of piracy.

In fact, there's some early anecdotal evidence this is already happening, and a few studies predicting it will get worse as every broadcaster and their moms jump into the streaming space. A 2019 Deloitte study found that nearly half (47 percent) of US consumers already suffer from “subscription fatigue,” and 56 percent were frustrated by quickly changing licensing deals.

Yes, some of this will settle slightly as "me too" competitors are shaken loose by competition. And yes, unlike traditional cable, it's great that you can cancel and restart these services at any time (though like AOL or Wall Street Journal digital subscriptions, history suggests they'll make cancellation harder and more cumbersome as companies lock down their share of the pie). The problem also creates a wonderful opportunity for folks to design better platforms that help aggregate all available content and subscriptions in a way that's not an annoying nightmare.

So it's not like this is a problem that impossible to navigate. But the problem remains that most cable companies, broadcasters, and tech giants are all rushing toward the streaming trough without really appreciating that they risk driving users to piracy if they forget to focus on simplicity and cost. And in a few years when piracy rates soar, if history holds, most of these executives will wind up blaming everybody (people just want stuff for free!) and everything (VPNs!) but themselves and their obsession with siloed exclusives.