Since Amazon launched Amazon Video on Demand (née Amazon Unbox, now Prime Video) in 2006 and Netflix started streaming in 2007, commercial-free, on-demand content had been the norm. Folks with a few extra bucks of disposable income could get video content delivered straight to their devices. For a price (today it's $8.99 for Netflix basic, and $12.99 for Prime Video, if you are not an Amazon Prime subscriber), people can watch a growing body of content comprising of original episodic programming, programming from the established major networks, original movies, and movies from major studios. All the content on these two services are ad-free.

Hulu went live to the public after almost a year in beta, in 2008. The programming it carried came with ads, making it the first ad-supported streaming service. The number of ads relative to traditional linear TV was limited, but ads were there.

Skip forward over a decade later, and we are in the throes of a streaming service deluge.

It was reported this week that HBO Max has taken in $80 million in the upfront for its ad supported version, to be available in June.

HBO Max is one of the panoply of stand-alone streaming services available to the video content consumer. HBO Max will join Hulu, Peacock, and Paramount + among the major streaming services offering a price break in exchange for running ads in content.

There's nothing unusual about ads in content, of course; we've been exchanging our attention for ads to access content at a discount for decades.

But there are now around 200 streaming services. This is not taking into account the carrier devices like Roku. A number of those content sources, like Pluto TV or Crackle, are free to audiences. Those audiences get content, and that content comes with ads. But of the top 42 streaming sources, each comes with a cost of between $5 and $15 dollars. With so many services available, and many with an ad-free option for a price, ads are starting to become a charge on those unwilling to buy their way out of having to watch them.

Is advertising the price that enough people are willing to pay to keep advertising an important, if smaller, player in the media ecosystem? In what way does this suggest discriminant audiences that are not differentiated by demographics but by their tolerance for advertising?

In a study Deloitte published last summer it was reported that 47% of American consumers use ad-supported, free streaming services. That's almost half of the consumer universe. But it means slightly more than half are using ad-free options. That means getting reach with a few drops of advertising is harder, meaning advertisers have to run more ads in more places to get the amount of reach needed to move the needle on business. The half of the population watching ad-supported streaming outlets are spread out over a lot of those outlets. Getting reach is more difficult now, requiring more moving parts to get the impact an advertiser needs. "Reach engineering" is going to become more important than it has been under the digital-centric era.

As Covid-life has wore on, another trend that has emerged along with the uptick in streaming service use is that subscribers are dropping subscriptions. About 1 in 5 dropped at least one of their subscriptions. The main reason quoted was due to cost, after that, that the trial or discount had ended. This was followed by the content for which one subscribed in the first place had wrapped up or was no longer available.

The marketplace is approaching maximum density with all the streaming options available. There are too many buttons to push and apps to track simply to watch TV. The growing number of points of contact with content are causing an overload. For now, anyway, this means there are a LOT more places to go to find audiences, make the buys, verify the buys, and determine the efficacy of those buys. This in turn leads to questions about inventory counts, measurement standards, currency of exchange (e.g., ratings or impressions; audience or demographics), and pricing. This overload translates to marketers and advertisers working harder to build effective communications plans that maintain status quo, and even harder if they want to grow business.

The proliferation of streaming services is complicating things for the consumer: difficult content discovery, myriad pricing structures and changing costs. It also complicates things for advertisers who need to answer the elements of circumstance for their marketing and media plans: who, what, where, when, and how (they almost never address the most important one -- why -- but that's a topic for another day. And there's a question of equity when you consider advertising in this environment as a tax on the poor. But again, another day...).

If only there was some way of consolidating all the different video content out there and put it in one place for people to find it when they were ready to enjoy it, and made it easier for advertisers to reach their audiences using that content... hmmm.