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I imagine most people don't want to see everything, but want to see ten things which are split across five different streaming services (with five different bills, five different user interfaces, and five different sets of quirks) by nothing but licensing. Television is not necessarily fungible.

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Indeed. Television is definitely not fungible, and TV shows are not substitute goods. What you want to watch is a combination of your interests and the cultural context in which you want to participate.

If the top 3 shows talked about by my co-workers are each exclusively on a different paid service, you can be sure I'm gonna dig out my trusty Torrent client.

Quite right. Wouldn't it be possible to cut out the middle-man, have a Steam-like storefront producers could unload to? Games are now billion dollar affairs and they don't need to rely on the likes of Viacom or the like.

This is basically what Netflix used to be before the existing distributors realized they wanted in on the new action. The same pattern is playing out in games as well, though slower. Origin, Uplay, Battle.net, and most recently Epic are all trying to cut in on Steam's dominance and using exclusives as leverage to do it.

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