The streaming sector has historically been home to no shortage of failures that most people forgot. There was of course Quibi, the $1.75 billion Hollywood streaming project that lasted all of 199 days before executives had to throw in the towel. There was also Verizon’s joint streaming venture with Redbox, which lasted about as long as Verizon’s attempt to run a tech news website did.
Not content with one failure, Verizon failed a second time with Go90, a streaming service that was supposed to appeal to wireless Millennials, but didn’t. Yahoo Screen was a short lived blip on the radar. There are, of course, plenty of others as well, including Sony’s PlayStation Vue, Seeso, Shomi, Hooq, TVision, CNN+, and more. You can soon add Trump Media’s new streaming service to the list.
Now Chik-fil-A (the fast food restaurant that supported right wing politics only to be rewarded for it with a pseudo-controversy over some modest diversity language on its website) has decided to join the fun. The company indicates that they’re in the process of creating a new “family friendly” streaming service that primarily focuses on unlicensed content (read: reality TV):
“Budgets on the unscripted side are believed to be in the range of $400,000 per half-hour. Sources told us the idea is to launch later this year and there’s also talk of scripted projects and animation.”
Chik-fil-A joins a crowded streaming sector just as subscriber growth has started to saturate, and major players have started to embrace pointless mergers, nickel-and-dime users, and stiff artists and employees in order to boost flagging stock valuations. Like traditional media, most of the streaming industry is increasingly consolidating into the hands of fewer and fewer giants with money to burn.
At the same time, users have started to get annoyed with steady price hikes, deteriorating product quality, and paywalled exclusives, so they’ve begun binge watching and cancelling unwanted streaming services at an increased rate. Some are shifting back to piracy. Others, especially younger Americans, increasingly just watch YouTube and TikTok and find traditional television to be a weird relic.
Now just maybe consumers are secretly really hungry for a controversial chicken-sandwich maker to enter this saturated TV business and offer mid-tier quality reality TV programming with an “anti-woke” bent, but it’s not the sort of thing you’d want to place any sort of wager on.
