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> Competition is fragmentation. No it is not. I don't have to buy a separate car or a separate gas cap or whatever to go fill up my car with gas. There's a s
by reificator 7y ago
> Competition is fragmentation.
No it is not. I don't have to buy a separate car or a separate gas cap or whatever to go fill up my car with gas. There's a standard that car manufacturers follow and a standard that gas stations follow that allow them to interop without issue. I can stop at a Diamond Shamrock, a Wawa, a 7-11, a Sinclair, a Texaco, or a Phillips 66 and get gas at any of them.
And while I'm filling up that gas, I have to pay for it. At most places I can use my Visa, my Discover, my MasterCard, or walk inside and pay cash. American Express is of course the outlier here.
Competition can exist and flourish despite agreed upon standards. A standard to watch all your video from one app despite buying/renting/subscribing to multiple services does not mean an end to competition. To the contrary it would make me significantly more likely to try new services.
In fact Amazon's model for this proves it can work. It's just that their frontend is tied to their subscription service, rather than being its own entity. But I watched Ash vs Evil Dead on Amazon by buying a Starz subscription. I watched Game of Thrones by buying an HBO subscription on Amazon. It was seamless from my perspective and I was able to watch in my favored player.
Now we just need something that can do that but is not tied to a specific service. We'll call it MetaPlayer. I open up MetaPlayer and search for Stranger Things. Since I have a Netflix subscription, I watch it and that's it. I then search for The Simpsons. I don't have Hulu, so I'm prompted to sign up, preferably with one click, and then I can watch the Simpsons the exact same way I watched Stranger Things. And so on.
- elichamberlin 7y agoThere kinda is a metaplayer, its called reelgood