The 21st century’s watercooler is streaming – we all love watching movies and TV programs on streaming platforms. But is there anyone that doesn’t hate at least part of the experience of streaming?
Given AI’s potential for disrupting every aspect of the media business, maybe it can help ease the friction and frustration about something as seemingly simple as finding a show you want to watch. We’re even going back to the moon after 50 years – can’t we use tech to rationalize content discovery?
A fall 2025 report from Nielsen’s Gracenote gives some dimension to the amount of consumer dissatisfaction with the streaming market that likely mirrors the experience of many of us. Forty-five percent of consumer survey respondents in the U.S., U.K., Germany, France, Brazil and Mexico say the streaming experience is overwhelming. Even among 25-34-year-olds, who have grown up in a fractious media environment, 40% say that the fragmentation of content and services has a negative impact on their TV viewing experience.
Too often it just takes too much time to find something you want to watch when you’re ready to watch. According to Gracenote, Consumers on average spend 14 minutes searching for content. In the U.S. it’s only 12 minutes, but that is up 15% in two years. Forty-nine percent of consumers say they are willing to cancel a service due to the difficulty in finding the right content.
And an increase in consumer choices around streaming packages aren’t going to make the process easier. The rigidity of the big cable bundle and its ever-increasing price has fomented consumer frustration for decades. But is this environment what consumers wanted as alternative?
The development of the market is going to put more not less stress on the “paradox of choice.” YouTube TV announced an upcoming launch of ten genre-specific packages including sports, combinations of sports and news, or family and entertainment content. bundle DirecTV launched a group of niche-focused content tiers last year including MyKids, MyEntertainment and MyCinema as an alternative to its traditional big bundle. Sling TV, which calls itself the “most flexible live streaming platform,” launched its Select offering, which provides a “curated” mix of some but by no means all entertainment channels at a low price point.
After the collapse of Venu Sports, the now-defunct Disney-Fox-Warner Bros. Discovery joint venture that sought to create one uber sports tier, we now have a flood of new sports-focused content options. Of course, Disney launched the ESPN standalone app last year, which is separate from the ESPN channel and the ESPN+ service that comes with the Disney+ bundle. DirecTV has MySports, which includes ESPN Unlimited, also not to be confused with ESPN+. Comcast launched its Sports & News TV, which doesn’t have entertainment in the title but includes all of the entertainment from the broadcast networks. And Comcast is also now offering World Soccer Ticket, which presumably has a lot of soccer content not available on the Sports & News TV package. I hope you’re all keeping score here.
The landscape has a bunch of media companies, content producers and sports leagues all trying to figure out the future of their business models. But locating the content that you want to watch and figuring out what engages you from which platform at which times can be brutal. What consumers need is someone and something focused on the actual experience of traversing the fractured content universe.
The driver of most consumer interaction with streaming content is through algorithmic-based recommendation engines. But these recommendations seem far more attuned to the promotional needs of the streaming platform (The Rip on Netflix anyone?) and your past behavior rather than the current mood of the viewer. Just because you may have tried a horror movie last week (which you ended up hating), that doesn’t mean that today, after a miserable day of work and doom scrolling that another set of mediocre horror flicks align with your current content search.
One the keys to enhancing the user content search experience is moving a consumer’s actual intent to a more significant role in formulating content recommendations. Despite having binge watched fifteen straight hours of HBO Max’s The Pitt, and maybe for exactly that reason, the last thing you might be in the mood for is an intense, emotionally fraught, close-your-eyes-from-the-blood medical drama. What if your next search reflected what you at least think you’re in the mood for? Sounds pretty helpful, no?
The good news is at least a few green shoots of hope in this lush content field, all driven in some fashion by a greater infusion of AI to enhance content recommendations and selection. Innovations here are not surprisingly arising out of tech-first companies rather than traditional media companies, but hopefully these types of innovations will spread across the streaming world.
Google’s Chromecast has now incorporated Gemini into its search function, allowing users to use voice activation to find content more suited to their current preference rather than only past behavior or promoted favorites. Amazon Fire TV integrates Alexa+ into its user interface, permitting consumers to direct program choices based on their mood, and overall Amazon claims that its new UI increases speed of usage of its home screen by 20-30%. Roku has enhanced the functionality of Roku Voice to permit not just one-way but two-way communications with the AI-powered platform including customizing content searches. Samsung TV Plus is also leveraging AI to personalize the home screen experience and drive more tailored content choices, although it’s not clear that it will connect with a user’s preferences in any moment in time. And among other original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), LG is also driving more AI functionality to enhance the customization of audio and visual preferences of users, if not yet an alignment of content recommendations with mood shifts.
All of these solutions have been developed independently and consumers in every case will have to adjust to the specific capabilities and tendencies of these new applications. But at least there is some movement on enhancing the experience not just the accumulation of content itself on these platforms. In the absence of the universal superbundle experience where all of your content is in one place and you can find it with the touch of one remote – oh wait, that’s cable – then we’ll have to hope consumer frustrations continue to drive more tech innovation from today’s major streaming gate keepers.
