Why does the streaming service and video game console industry have titles exclusive to one platform while most music is available on most music platforms?
In: 5
Because of Apple.
In the early 00s Apple released its first iPod. The iPod was a portable digital music player; it wasn’t the first, but it was the first to be released by a big company.
To sell iPods, Apple needed people to have access to music in a digital form, ideally legally. At the time the best way of doing this was to have users rip their CDs onto their computer, and then copy the files across to their iPod (which is one of the key things the early versions of iTunes were designed to do) – although this wasn’t legal everywhere, and it relies on people going out to buy their music on CD from someone else. The other option was for people to download music from websites (or more often, via torrents), but there were very few places offering that legally, and Apple didn’t want to get into legal trouble.
Apple figured the easiest way of pushing iPods was to have an inbuilt digital music store within iTunes, where people could buy music directly, download it direct to their computer or eventually direct to the device. But the major music publishers weren’t interested in this; like most publishers they cared a lot about control and about branding – CDs was how they were used to selling music, they were comfortable with it, they were in control of it.
But Apple wanted to sell more iPods, and they thought their iTunes store idea was the way to do this, so they threatened to buy out the big music publishers if they didn’t go along (as by this point Apple was a far bigger and more valuable company than the main music publishers combined). And the music publishers caved. And once Apple had secured licensing deals with them all, it made sense for them to make similar deals with rivals (to avoid giving Apple too much power). And that led to the current system where consumers expect to get music from different sources.
Without Apple and iTunes we might not have music streaming/downloading services, or if we did they would probably be walled off and publisher-specific, like video games and TV/film streaming.
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This didn’t happen with video streaming. If anything, TV and film streaming happened the other way around; Netflix started out as a service that posted out DVDs of films and TV series to their users, using their online platform to organise it (in the US – this would have been illegal in other countries, particularly the EU). Unlike something like iTunes Netflix didn’t need permission from the film or TV publishers to do this (as it was just posting physical DVDs it had purchased legally). The publishers tried to stop this (by making it harder for Netflix to buy their DVDs) but ultimately failed. Eventually Netflix had a large enough subscriber base to afford to licence content from publishers so they could stream it directly, and at the same time Internet speeds were finally getting to the point where some people could download video in close-to-real-time (YouTube’s success being a proof of concept of sorts).
As Netflix got more popular it had more money available, and was able to licence more content from the film and TV publishers – who weren’t really bothered about what Netflix was doing (online streaming was still this obscure thing nerds were doing, and better they were getting it from Netflix – and paying – than downloading illegally and not).
But as Netflix got more popular they started to care. And they wanted more control, they wanted exclusivity (they didn’t want users to view one of their shows and then be forwarded onto a rival show), and so they started pushing for their own platforms. Unlike with Apple, Netflix didn’t have anything like the power to force the publishers into complying, so the video streaming world fractured, with each publisher wanting their own exclusive streaming service.
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Video games are slightly different, as there are technical differences between the different platforms, meaning games need different coding to run on different services. But ultimately it comes down to market forces and agreements; the different console producers are competing against each other, and one way of securing an advantage is to pay for exclusivity, or to force game developers to only work with one of them (Halo was originally meant to be a Mac game, but Microsoft bought it and made it X-Box-exclusive to help launch the X-Box, similarly the Epic Games Store has been willing to pay developers for exclusivity, to boost their own market share).
The main console producers *could* try to harmonise their systems so that the same code could run on all of them (this is sort of what happened with Apple, where in 2005/6 they switched to using Intel processors, and more cross-platform-friendly operating systems and hardware, making it easier for developers to make software that would work on Macs and other computers). But they don’t want to – as the differences give them more control, more options for exclusivity, and more flexibility in the design.
Similarly, game publishers could make their games available on more stores (as could TV and film publishers), but then they’d lose out on some of the exclusivity deals, and it might mean more work for them.
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