What you need to know about the streaming wars

The streaming video market is evolving, and studios are rewriting the rules on how consumers find content and what they're willing to pay. This report covers the quest for streaming media profits and highlights opportunities for service providers who embrace AI and can build bundles that offer better choices and lower prices.

In addition to the video, please check out Light Reading's more than 15 years of covering the pay-TV industry and all the companies, technologies, and industry moves ripping it apart. Here's a selection of research we used in this video, covering the early days of streaming and ending with the current mix of streamers all using modern tech to recreate old-style cable TV.

Reaching for the Starz

Starz was an early streaming media pioneer with its first direct-to-consumer product, Vongo, in 2006.

Boxee, a startup that offered a streaming platform and a consumer set-top box, sold to Samsung for about as much as it raised during its six years in business.

In 2007, Netflix got into the streaming business.

In 2008, Roku launched its first TV-connected streaming devices with a UI that broke away from the old grid guide and traditional set-top box experience.

In 2007, Hulu was launched by News Corp. and NBC Universal, Providence Equity, and later Disney. Amazon launched Prime Video in 2011, and CBS All Access (now part of Paramount+) arrived in 2014:

TV Everywhere and the demise of pay-TV

While all that was happening, the cable market and pay-TV programmers started to work on TV Everywhere, a scheme to access pay-TV subscriptions on other devices (while keeping customers trapped in cable pay-TV contracts and rate plans).

Next, the first virtual MVPDs (multichannel video programming distributors) started sending live TV to homes via various devices using broadband connections.

The traditional (and now streaming) media giants like Disney and NBCUniversal continue the trend of developing direct-to-consumer services.

No fortune tellers, no profits

Now the big push for streaming media players is to find profitability, and that means cutting programming options, adding more ad-supported subscribers, combating subscriber fatigue and raising prices for everything while battling with writers and actors on labor issues.

As all that gets sorted out, there's a rebundling taking place and the risk of turning streaming media freedom back into the same bloated, overpriced pay-TV services we once shunned.

— Diana Blass, Contributing Editor, Light Reading

Light Reading editors Jeff Baumgartner and Phil Harvey and researcher Erin Barker contributed to this story.