In a recent standup performance, comic John Mulaney said that he used to call Blockbuster to see if a certain movie was in. He asked his audience to think about that sentence—he called on a phone to see if the movie he wanted to watch was available to rent on VHS tape. What?

These days, one need only look online to access almost any movie ever made. If it’s not playing on one of the fifteen streaming services you’re already paying for, you can undoubtedly find it (for a fee) on some other platform.

Back in the olden days, my children, we had to wait all week to see the latest episode of our favorite shows. Now you can watch an entire series in a day or two, depending on your other engagements.

But this brave new world of streaming is also evolving.  At some level, the titans of broadcasting know that the public can’t keep paying for more and more streaming services. These platforms are pricing themselves out of business. It’s a delicate balance. We have seen the recent crackdown on password sharing, which has Netflix saying that their subscriber numbers are way up. But if you have internet service, basic cable, and two or three premium channels, you are paying over $200 a month just to use the internet and watch TV. I’m also noticing more shows deciding to release their episodes old-style, letting us see just one per week. That strategy does keep you watching and paying for that service longer.

Side note: back in the olden days, we watched television for free. Granted, we only got five channels, but it was free. The only thing you had to pay for was the clunky TV set, the antenna, and electricity. 

So what will the future of television look like? How will all these streaming services continue to enrich the hedge fund managers and CEOs while squeezing the writers, actors, and public?

The writers and actors are now on strike, so that may impact streaming in ways we’ve yet to see. What with the future of Artificial Intelligence, perhaps we’ll have robot-written scripts being acted out by AI images of our favorite actors and live human actors will be obsolete. With CGI (computer-generated imagery), almost anything is possible in the movies of today. We live in a world where computers are increasingly doing the jobs that once provided a living for real humans.

Our only hope is that we, the viewers, are not replaced by holograms of our former selves. We may be saved only because we real humans are the ones who pay for these entertainments.