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Apple, MGM and Acorn are getting much better.

MGM is now owned by Amazon.

My first biggest problem with streaming is that it has so segmented the audience that movies and shows are not available to most of the potential audience. This undercuts the scalability that incentivized studios to take risks, invest in quality and swing for the fences. In the olden days of linear tv, we had to live with commercials but viewers could just turn the dial and watch anything on offer from any network. Movies in theaters were in the public forum; man up, buy a ticket, and go watch whatever. There was universal access (leaving aside the freepers holed up in bunkers in Idaho). Now if you get wind of a project that interests you, it's a snipe hunt to find it -- and you often don't even hear of good stuff that might interest you because it's siloed away somewhere to which you don't subscribe.

All of this undercuts the potential viewership -- and it's no accident that the streamers treat their real viewership numbers like state secrets. The dirty little secret is that in a highly segmented marketplace, viewership for most movies and shows is embarrassingly low. And that undercuts the incentive for the studios to invest in quality, because there is very little growth potential if most potential viewers are quarantined.

The idea when the streaming craze hit was that movies and shows would drive subscriptions. That hasn't happened, and it is especially hard for original movies and shows to build the buzz that can lead to big breakouts. That in turn pushes the studios into prequel/sequel/spinoff/tentpole disease, so they can milk large fanbases of legacy franchises developed back before streaming poisoned the ecosystem.

My second biggest problem with streaming is that the streamers know that most of their audience is NOT paying attention. Casual couch potato viewers are crosstalking, doomscrolling, hopping up for refreshments and bathroom breaks, texting, etc. rather than focusing on the show. Sure, some viewers will turn off their phones, concentrate on the movie or show, and watch with rapt attention. But they are a tiny minority and the streamers know it.

So the streamers are telling their writers and directors to dumb things down. Simplify. Switch from show don't tell to tell, and tell again, and tell again, because if you don't tell audiences what is going on every ten minutes, they'll lose the plot and switch to something else. Pick up the pace because the audience needs something dramatic, violent or sexy to happen every ten minutes or it switches to something else.

Meanwhile, back in the real world, people are finding that older movies and shows are better than most things made today. Even young people spend most of their time binge watching older shows, if they're not watching YouTube or TikTok. The reason is that older movies and shows were made for audiences that were paying attention, and the streamers are abandoning that part of the audience.

Movies made for people who are paying attention are very different from movies made as background noise for people who are NOT paying attention.

What do the streamers spend big bucks on? Sports, because sports are live events. That creates urgency, and urgency drives subscriptions. Secondly, they are spending big bucks on buying each other, because an industry caught in a qualitative race to the bottom will want to reduce competition and consolidate, so that a cartel can more easily raise prices.

Yugos would be considered great cars if that's the only thing consumers can buy. Public school systems work this way. Socialized medicine works this way. Entrenched monopolies in the private sector work this way. Henry Ford saw no reason that cars should be any color other than black, which made things simpler for his assembly lines. But Henry Ford had real competitors.