Are You Ready for Some Streaming Chaos?
The NFL has (mostly) transitioned to streaming, but the user experience is a mess that the streamers are not incentivized to fix.
If you have dropped your pay-TV service since last football season, your first NFL Week 1 on streaming probably wasn’t too bad:
The NFL and sports media outlets do a great job communicating what networks and streamers are broadcasting each game.
The NFL is cheap on streaming: Paramount+ is $5.99 a month, Peacock is $5.99 a month, and the Fox Sports app is free. Thursday Night Football is on Amazon’s Prime Video, which you probably already have. The major catch is Monday Night Football, where most of the games are exclusive to ESPN and only a handful are on ABC and ESPN+.
Those streamers are on every major TV platform (Samsung, Roku, Apple TV, etc.) — with most games streaming in 4K — and on every major phone and tablet OS.
Disney locking away most Monday Night Football games on cable-only ESPN is an annoyance, and the only way to get every game is the $400 NFL Sunday Ticket package on YouTube, but the NFL and its broadcast partners have done a great job making the biggest games easily and inexpensively available on streaming.
That’s the good news. The bad news? The NFL streaming user experience and the TV streaming user experience in general sucks.
As tech writer Charlie Warzel wrote in The Atlantic (subscription required) last week:
We are living in a streaming paradox. As both an entertainment business model and a consumer experience, streaming has become a victim of its own success. It is a paradigm shift that is beloved for giving us more choices than ever before, while also making it harder than ever to actually enjoy that abundance.
I concur.
Cable Still Beats Smart TVs for User Experience
Warzel mentions a number of factors — too many shows spread across too many streamers, monthly subscription costs ratcheting up, worsening economics for writers and actors — but the user experience of every TV platform and every app on that TV platform having its own user interface is the worst.
The major streamers — Netflix, Max, Hulu, Disney+, Peacock, Paramount+ and Prime Video — have all adopted a roughly similar interface with categories like Movies, TV Shows, Sports, etc., down the left side of the screen and content rows like Continue Watching, My List, Trending, etc., across the middle.
But (1) they’re different enough from each other to frustrate any muscle memory you develop about what the back button does or how many down-clicks it takes to get to the Continue Watching Row and (2) nobody wants to sit down on a Sunday afternoon and cycle through apps to find a game to watch.
On cable, those games are all in one interface — either on a programming guide or on a Sports tab as on the Xfinity Stream app that has a row of all of the current live games. On streaming, it’s a half-dozen apps that all have their own interfaces on a TV platform that has its own interface.
I’d love to chalk it up to newness and say the TV-platform designers and streaming-app designers are on an arc toward figuring out a unified interface and will get there soon enough, but that is almost certainly not going to happen anytime soon because the streaming-app designers are focused almost entirely on keeping you from ever leaving their app.
Incentives Are Not Aligned for Better UX
Netflix, Max, Hulu, Disney+, Peacock, Paramount+ and Prime Video don’t want the TV platforms to homogenize them into Content™ because Warner thinks that whatever makes Max Max and Disney thinks that whatever makes Disney+ Disney+ will get flattened into algorithmic goo and you’ll stream less of their titles and more of everyone else’s.
The TV platforms — Apple TV and Google TV in particular — have brought some cross-streamer synergy to the ecosystem by corralling the shows you’re currently watching and making recommendations from across the streamers you subscribe to into a unified experience that deep-links into specific titles and episodes on the streamers without you having to navigate through that streamer’s interface to get there.
If you want an elegant user experience that integrates your apps, you should buy an Apple TV 4K right now and make it the default power-on input on your TV. Netflix has largely opted out of that unified user experience, but every other major streamer is on board. Apple TV’s Sports makes it easy to switch from game to game across different apps and even shows you the scores.
At present, the CEOs of Warner, Disney, Comcast, Paramount, and the other media companies that have pumped billions of dollars into their own streamers are invested in the success of those streamers and not in their subscribers’ overall TV experience. They know you subscribe to multiple services, but they’d rather you didn’t.
The TV platforms are in the best position to improve the overall user experience, but — in my assessment, at least — the platforms with the biggest chunk of household market share have done a poor job of designing their interfaces for consumers who want their TV time to be great than the sum of their streamers.
Roku and Samsung are still mainly organized around individual apps, and Amazon’s Fire TV is somewhat accommodating to third-party streamers but still mainly a clutter-y billboard for Amazon’s many video services (Prime Video, FreeVee, VOD, FAST channels, etc.). Apple TV and Google TV do the best job of delivering a unified experience, though Netflix has mostly refused to play nice with those features.
I’m Optimistic Because Scale Usually Wins
There are some signs of a better user experience to come:
Apple, Amazon and Google are huge companies — massively bigger than the media companies — and they’re all invested in making TV viewing a part of their overall consumer ecosystems. They know what consumers want and have the market power to continue moving in that direction.
Charter’s carriage agreement with Disney that the companies announced on Monday will put ad-supported Disney+ on Charter’s main cable plan and, presumably, into Charter’s main interface. Pay TV may be in irrevocable decline, but it’s still in 72 million U.S. households that should continue to see streaming get more integrated into their cable plans.
Hollywood’s reduced output because of the strikes will likely continue as reduced output after the strikes. The focus on fewer, better movie and TV titles will help reduce consumer decision fatigue by putting more marketing on fewer choices. Fewer choices sounds bad, but better choices and better awareness is better TV.
I don’t want to overstate the case. As I’ve written before, TV is fucking great:
Yes, there are too many streaming services. Yes, too many of them are too expensive. Yes, picking a new TV show is hard. Yes, last year’s TV sticks are slow and unresponsive.
You know what? I don’t care. There has never been a better time in the history of the universe to watch TV.
But the user experience could definitely be better.