No Choice Entertainment

Finding forcing functions for abundant content

Netflix, Disney+, Apple TV+, ESPN+, HBO Max, Amazon Prime Video, YouTube TV, Hulu, Peacock. Currently, we have some tier of each of these video streaming services. No, I don’t want to add up how much I’m paying for all of them in our post-cable world. Yes, it’s a problem.

Cost aside, the day-to-day problem we now have is a weird one. One of abundance. There’s simply too much content to watch, so how do you choose?

The answer is often to wait for either friend or cultural recommendations (mainly via Twitter or other social channels) to come in. But even these are a challenge to sift through because there’s just so much across so many services. Aside from a very small handful of shows — Ted Lasso being one! — no one seems to be watching anything at the same time. Again, how do you choose?

Recently, during some shelter-in-place trips around the Bay Area, we’ve stayed at a few places without great WiFi. And while that itself has obviously not been great, it has been a nice forcing function in an odd way. It has made it so we had to watch whatever I downloaded to my iPad before we left.

I tend to download things before we go somewhere on a just-in-case basis. And in this case, it was smart. But it was also nice. Because for once, we didn’t have to choose from an effectively infinite supply of content. We could choose between three or four things. It was great.

This sounds ridiculous because it is ridiculous. But that doesn’t mean it’s any less real. In our world of content abundance, these types of forcing functions are refreshing. They lift the weight of choice.

Another example I’ve grown to love recently: the lists of movies leaving Netflix (and other services) at the end of each month (a lot of sites now highlight this). Most of these have to do with license rights and/or windowing restrictions. Still, knowing a movie or show is going away shortly is a great catalyst to get you to watch. Again, it removes some element of choice from the equation. Which, again, is refreshing in a weird way.

All of the above is why I also believe the concept of “new” is so powerful. It’s a curation layer of sorts. (It also helps that something which is ‘new’ is less likely to have the “taint” of being deemed ‘good’ or ‘bad’ already. You can decide for yourself.) It’s also why the concept of releasing shows on a weekly basis, even after Netflix “disrupted” that model, makes some sense again.

That’s it. That’s the post.