Key highlights
- Streaming began as freedom; it’s starting to resemble scheduled television in expensive clothing.
- Bigger budgets don’t automatically mean bolder storytelling.
- Your time is the new currency—and platforms are learning to spend it like old TV did.
A decade ago, OTT felt like a rebellion. No fixed slots, no “next week”, no impatient ad breaks deciding your mood. You watched on your terms. That was the promise.
Now notice how the experience has quietly changed as we step into 2026. Home screens look like channels. “Top 10” rows behave like prime-time ladders. Big releases arrive with the same drumroll: posters, countdowns, “event” language, and a marketing push that feels suspiciously like the old TV machinery—only with sharper typography.
The irony is simple: streaming escaped television’s rules, then rebuilt them—because rules make money predictable.
Bigger budgets have also created a strange conservatism. When a platform spends heavily, it wants certainty: familiar faces, familiar emotions, familiar genres. The risk appetite shrinks. You end up with glossy series that look expensive but feel engineered—episodes padded to hit an “optimal” length, twists timed like clockwork, endings designed to keep you subscribed rather than satisfied.
And the viewer—you—are no longer just an audience. You’re a retention graph. If you drop after episode two, the show didn’t merely “lose you.” It failed a metric. That changes what gets commissioned, what gets cancelled, and what gets rewritten mid-flight.
This is the identity crisis: OTT still sells itself as personal freedom, while quietly behaving like TV—structured, managed, “safe”, and increasingly anxious about your attention leaving the room.
It doesn’t mean OTT is dying. It means it’s maturing into something less romantic: a utility. Utilities are useful, but they’re not soulful.
So when you feel that streaming has started to feel like TV with bigger budgets, you’re not being dramatic. You’re noticing the economics. The screens changed. The incentives didn’t. The only real power you still hold is the oldest one: what you choose to finish—and what you abandon without guilt.
