Hagan Wells

Executive Media Editor

Remember the good old days when the only streaming service you needed was Netflix?

The days when everything worth watching was in one place, and you did not have to pay some unreasonable price to get access. Yeah, those days were great, but they’re long gone.

Right now, I have five apps on my phone all just to watch videos. I don’t use YouTube Red, because it’s definitely not worth the monthly fee, but at least once a day, I’ll watch the videos of my favorite YouTubers.

Then, there’s Netflix, which at this point, is mostly good for Netflix Originals and movies. Hulu is the latest addition, purely because it came free with the Spotify student discount, but also it has all the shows that Netflix stupidly took off, plus their own Hulu Originals.

Oh, I cannot forget about The CW app: the only free app that I’ll mention that can do no wrong, besides the advertisements that seem to last a lifetime.

Plus, the HBO Now app is a necessity if I want to know what happens on Game of Thrones or Westworld before Twitter spoils the entire show for me. That’s a lot of apps for essentially ten television shows.

The worst part is that the situation is only going to get worse.

Right now, you can stream most of your favorite Disney content on Netflix. But by 2019, Disney is going to make their own streaming service and will probably take all of their content with them.

On top of that, DC Comics is going to make their own streaming service as well, with their first live-action exclusive, Titans, maybe tying in with The CW shows like Arrow and The Flash.

Between the $4.99/month for Spotify & Hulu, $10.99/month for Netflix (which seems to be slowly increasing more and more), and $15/month for HBO Now, the future of having money for a rainy day might soon fade.

Considering that more streaming services are in the works and more companies like the idea of having their own, consumers are strapped into the rollercoaster and are just waiting for the 40-foot drop.

Of course, no one’s going to do anything to stop this. No one will refuse to watch Netflix because they took off all of the Fox shows like Prison Break, which drives people over to Hulu.

No one is going to protest how expensive HBO Now is because of how high quality their shows are and their underrated library of films.

So, until that day when people are being hit with bills as expensive as cable, we’ll just gladly download these apps until we run out of storage on our phones.