Watching a game should begin with a reasonably simple question: what time does it start?
Where is it streaming? Is that included? Which subscription? Does the app on this television support it? These are less enjoyable questions. They sound like the preliminary stages of filing an expense claim.
There is a particular kind of modern inconvenience in having a magnificent screen, a fast connection and no obvious answer to where the thing you want actually lives.
That is what makes the name of a new industry group worth sitting with.
On September 14, Netflix, Amazon and YouTube launched the Streaming Access and Choice Alliance, led by technology trade association TechNet. As TheWrap reports, the coalition arrives amid American scrutiny of sports rights moving to streaming services.
Its name offers two things almost everybody wants. Access. Choice.
The interesting question is what those words mean from opposite sides of a subscription payment.
More shops, different merchandise
The Wall Street Journal’s account describes the coalition as advocating consumer access to online content. There is nothing inherently objectionable about companies arguing that people should have more ways to watch entertainment.
Nor is there anything mysterious about who is doing the arguing. TechNet describes itself as a network of technology executives and explicitly lists advocacy on behalf of member companies among its services.
This is an industry organization. Its interests may overlap with viewers’ interests, but the overlap needs demonstrating, not assuming.
Consider two versions of choice.
In the first, several services carry the same event. You can compare price, picture quality, accessibility features and reliability, then select the one that suits you. The services compete for your business because they offer substitutes.
In the second, different services control different events you want to watch. Choosing one means missing something on another.
Both arrangements can involve several competing companies. Only the first necessarily gives you a choice of seller for the particular thing you came to buy.
Imagine three grocery stores competing enthusiastically, except one has exclusive rights to breakfast, another controls lunch and the third is the only authorized distributor of dinner. There are certainly more shops. Your weekly errands have not obviously improved.
Entertainment is not food, and nobody needs access to every sporting event. But that does not make the distinction disappear.
Choosing whether to buy something is different from choosing where to buy it.
Sports makes that distinction unusually visible. A viewer can reasonably substitute one comedy for another. A supporter waiting for their team’s match is not necessarily satisfied by an entirely different team playing an entirely different match.
That specificity is part of sport’s appeal. It is also what makes exclusive access commercially valuable.
The founding companies have substantial interests here. In the United States, Amazon carries Thursday Night Football, YouTube carries NFL Sunday Ticket and Netflix carries NFL games, as TheWrap’s reporting explains. These are American distribution examples, not a Canadian viewing guide.
The issue is not that streaming invented exclusivity. It plainly did not. The issue is that a newer delivery system does not automatically create a more open market for the viewer.
Moving the locked door into an app does not remove the lock.
A better test than counting apps
There is a fair argument on the other side.
A market that shuts streaming companies out of bidding would protect established broadcasters, not necessarily audiences. More potential buyers can support investment in coverage, production and distribution. Streaming can also make an attractive standalone offering possible for someone who does not want a larger television package.
For a hypothetical fan whose entire wish list fits inside one affordable service, the arrangement could be excellent.
That person matters. So does the fan whose wish list crosses several services.
The problem with broad promises about consumer choice is that they flatten both people into the same satisfied subscriber.
Neither “streaming is freedom” nor “streaming ruined television” is a particularly useful standard. One mistakes a delivery method for a benefit. The other gives the old television business an undeserved halo.
A better test begins with the viewing experience someone is actually trying to purchase.
What does following a team through a season cost? Can the customer understand what is missing before paying? Are important restrictions visible alongside the price, rather than discovered at kickoff? Can someone leave as easily as they joined?
These are proposed measures of meaningful choice, not claims about commitments the new alliance has made.
They are also more useful to a household than the total number of available apps.
Transparency alone would not solve fragmentation. A perfectly labelled collection of separate subscriptions can still be expensive or inconvenient. But it would at least let customers make decisions without needing to become amateur rights analysts.
Better discovery could help too. A clear answer to “where can I watch this?” has value even when the answer is a service you do not currently buy.
Still, a universal search box cannot manufacture competition where a particular event has only one authorized seller. It can point to the door. It cannot negotiate the admission price.
That is the distinction worth carrying into the debate around this alliance.
A policy that allows more companies to compete for rights might be sensible. It does not follow that every resulting rights arrangement improves affordability, convenience or bargaining power for viewers. Those outcomes require their own evidence.
The companies are entitled to make their case. Viewers are entitled to ask whether “choice” describes the freedom to serve an audience or the audience’s freedom to choose.
Sometimes those will be the same thing.
When they are not, the person holding the remote should not have to pretend that another compulsory stop on the way to the game is a new destination they were delighted to discover.
