I hope that the ease of competition on the Internet will make it so I can continue watching ad free TV. I expect Netflix to start increasing prices and adding advertising, it seems like it's just a matter of time. But I hope that new smaller competitors will pop up and I'll switch to those and watch their second rate programming; at least some of the time.
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Content exclusivity makes the competitive market really hurt consumers, though. Netflix might stay relatively ad-free as a selling point, but what are you gonna do if Hulu (or one of the dozen other services) steals your favorite show from Netflix while you're halfway through? This has happened to me a couple times now and it's annoying, because I like Netflix, but if I wanna watch certain content I have to watch it on Hulu or whatever because that's the only option.
Point being, the competitive market means there's a strong incentive for services that are noticeably inferior (I'll keep picking on Hulu since they have tons of ads, bad UI, mediocre video quality etc) to license content out from under each other. This is obviously a bad state for the consumer, and clearly the impetus behind streaming services going gangbusters on their own original series, which is at least (mostly?) good for consumers.
Netflix already runs (skippable but autoplaying) ads for its own original content between episodes of other things on its service.
I've never seen that, and we watch a lot of shows on Netflix. That sounds awful.