Back in late 2019 (the Before Time, as I like to call it) I wrote a blog about Disney Plus and how I didn't think it was going to kill Netflix. My thesis was that with Disney entering the fray (HBO Max and Peacock hadn't launched yet), it was going to be more a case of various services coexisting, but that I didn't see myself cancelling Netflix anytime soon.
Fast forward nearly three years, and now that I'm on pretty much all of those streaming services, my perspective has changed. At the time I said that I didn't care too much about the exclusives, but now I'm not so sure. I'm still not quite ready to cancel Netflix, but I've spent very little time on it, apart from a couple of exceptions.
So what am I watching instead? I've mentioned that I'm spending a lot of time each month checking out what's about to leave from HBO Max. I'm also keeping pace with Obi-Wan Kenobi on Disney Plus, while also finishing up the second season of Luke Cage, after it transferred over from Netflix. Once a week or so, I watch an episode of Star Trek: Voyager on Paramount Plus, after having finished the latest seasons of Lower Decks and Picard; I keep wanting to check out Strange New Worlds, but I'm reluctant to do it now because I don't want to have too many series that I'm watching at a time.
The one thing that got me back onto Netflix was season 4 of Stranger Things, though even there, now that I've finished these first few episodes I'm back to Obi-Wan and Luke Cage as my primary shows. I do have things I want to get to, including the long-awaited fourth season of Borgen, but apart from that last one none of them seems particularly urgent. I did binge season 2 of Jessica Jones before it left in March, in part because it wasn't clear that the Marvel/Netflix shows would end up on Disney Plus.
If I had to choose a streaming service to rank above all the others, it's probably HBO Max at this point in time. It's grown beyond just having HBO content, which was good but a little limited, to having a really good selection of movies and a pretty good selection of TV shows from other sources. A lot of the movies I've been watching before they disappear are from the Turner Classic Movies hub, though in a slightly more adventurous mood last night I watched Hayao Miyazaki's Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind, which sits in the Studio Ghibli hub. Thanks to its tie-up with Warner, HBO Max also has a DC Hub, which is now the home of all the DC Universe shows that I mentioned in my previous post; the best thing is that now, barring a wholesale purge of DC content, I can be pretty confident that the DCAU shows I love are also pretty safe here.
That's also an advantage of Disney Plus. Although it was nice a few years ago to have the MCU movies show up on Netflix or HBO Go from time to time, it's even nicer to have almost all of them here, in one place, along with the original shows. It also helps that these Phase 4 shows have maintained a pretty high level of quality throughout: though none has been quite as good as WandaVision, they've all had some decent parts to them, even Falcon & Winter Soldier, which was my least favorite (the story was fine, it just suffered a bit in comparison with WandaVision and Loki).
The Star Wars shows have been a little more variable in quality, though even the Book of Boba Fett has had some points to recommend it, even beyond it being a backdoor third season for The Mandalorian. Obi-Wan has divided fandom, even without the racist knuckle draggers complaining about Third Sister, but unlike Boba Fett has provided a good bridge between movies, specifically showing what life has been like in the years between Episodes III and IV. I may not whip myself up into a blood frenzy for new Star Wars like I did around the Force Awakens and Rogue One, but I'm cautiously optimistic about the upcoming Andor series.
Peacock is the one I watch least, even less than Netflix, though the presence of Premier League football on that helps it stay kind of near the others. Like my list on Netflix, there are things I want to watch (like the Office or Parks & Rec) but nothing super high-priority. I'm tempted, against my better judgement, by Yellowstone, but it might be back on Paramount by the time I get to it.
Paramount Plus is my go-to for Star Trek, though a friend has recommended the Offer, about the making of The Godfather. It's probably the most frivolous, but since there's enough Trek to keep me busy for a while to come, I'm not in a hurry to cancel it.
And finally, there's Apple TV Plus, which wasn't even on the horizon when I wrote the previous post. I avoided it for a long time, because it didn't seem to have anything, but when I received it for free after buying some Apple gear, some of the shows, mainly Ted Lasso, grew on me. I cancelled it again a few months ago, because I was focusing on other streamers, but it seems to get better every month or two, so I'm expecting to get back on it soon to check out Foundation, For All Mankind and possibly Severance.
With all this stuff to watch, my main misgiving from back then remains, which is finding time to watch it. This is one of the ways in which the streaming wars have shaken out to be a repeat of the situation when you had to have cable to keep up with everything. If you want to be up on the shows that everyone's talking about (or creating memes for, which is kinda the same thing now), you have to be on all these services, plus probably Hulu and Amazon Prime. It does seem that streaming services have consolidated into these bigger ones that have a lot of different content, rather than the hyper-focused ones of a few years ago, which is good for keeping interest (at least, mine).
The upshot, though, is that I'm a little less confident of Netflix's ability to fight off the likes of Disney and HBO. It'll be interesting to see how well it holds people's interest after the final season of Stranger Things comes out.
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