Imagine there’s a movie you’ve been interested in watching that has just been released, but you can’t seem to find it on any of your streaming services.

After many fruitless search attempts to locate it on Netflix, Hulu, HBO Max, and Disney+, you find out that you’ll need to purchase yet another subscription for a movie that will inevitably move to another streaming site. 

Long gone are the good old days of buying a simple cable package and watching whatever show or movie came up on the given channels.

In the present, there are a seemingly infinite number of streaming subscriptions that places a multitude of options right into the hands of consumers.

Flexibility, however, isn’t the same as convenience. With each new streaming service, viewers are becoming more and more irritated with having to buy multiple subscriptions just to watch what they want. 

According to eMarketer, a marketing research company, almost 60 percent of households in America have at least one kind of pay TV, but more than half of the consumers surveyed noted they were frustrated by the growing number of subscriptions and plans necessary in order to watch the shows and movies they wanted. 

Although the multitude of streaming sites allow for a larger selection of entertainment, the problem lies in highly sought-after movies and TV shows being scattered randomly throughout the various sites.

It’s frustrating for viewers to figure out which streaming service to pay for, as entertainment keeps getting bounced around from one streaming site to another.

People who desperately want to see that new, exclusive TV show have no choice but to pay for another subscription.

This endless hassle also leads to another problem: illegal video piracy.

Consumers who cannot afford the multitude of streaming sites are forced to turn to illegal websites to watch films and shows for free.

Because of this, people in the film industry must deal with their creative work getting copied and stolen by hackers. These hackers can also use pirated content to spread viruses and malware to vulnerable viewers, dismantling cybersecurity. 

Popular TV shows and movies should be centralized to a few big streaming platforms, instead of being scattered throughout various streaming sites.

The centralization of entertainment should bring about successful search attempts and less video pirating.