Streaming and Crying

Streaming video tempted us with a utopian dream of unbundling, where modern technology could let us build our own a la carte entertainment packages. Unbundling works for consumers in theory, but in practice, calling up what you want to watch when you want requires subscribing to several different increasingly niche services plus paying to rent or buy programming on top of that. Our new nexus of on demand technology and consumer impatience is somehow worse and often more expensive than when we all had DVD players and overpriced cable packages. Has unbundling failed consumers, artists, and the businesses themselves? If so, why are we doing it? How has it affected the quality of TV we get? And if we don’t want to go backwards, can we move toward a better, more easily shared experience of popular culture? Variety reporter Michael Schneider has covered the television business for 25 years, and joins Brian Beutler this week to talk about how we evolved to this point and what the next iteration might be.