I recently discovered the greatest TV show of all-time. A TV show that is even better than Lost, Breaking Bad, Game of Thrones, Westworld, Dark Matter, or even my latest obsession, Rick and Morty. A show that is fast-paced and hilarious, featuring razor sharp wit and epic performances. A show that knows no bounds and has no equals. Unfortunately, it’s also a show that most people can’t watch.
A cross between Seinfeld, Mad Men, Sex in the City, and Gilmore Girls you’d be hard-pressed to find a better show that the Emmy award winning Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. And yet there are still a ton of people out there who haven’t seen it and never will. And unless you currently have Amazon Prime you are likely one of those people.
What can you do to change this fact? You could take a page out of Midge’s playbook and make a brisket to offer to Jeff Bezos in hopes of improving your situation. Or you could suck it up and pony up for an Amazon Prime subscription, which is quite frankly, worth having anyway. But if neither of those two options work for you, there really is nothing else you can do, unless if you want to risk trying to stream the show on the dark web through nefarious means.
I get why Amazon does it this way. If you create exclusive content that people just can’t live without, they’ll be forced to sign up for Prime. And the more people that sign up for Prime, the more money you’ll have to create even more programming that people can’t live without, and the cycle will continue.
But this bothers me. Award winning content shouldn’t be hard to find. It shouldn’t be locked away behind a pay wall, available only to those who can afford to watch it. Simply put, this isn’t fair. Because as good as the Marvelous Mrs. Maisel is, it’s not worth busting your budget for. Neither is Stranger Things or anything offered on Showtime or Starz for that matter. Nothing is. And yet there is plenty of content on each of these platforms that is worth watching. For instance, I would have loved to watch the new Star Trek on the new CBS streaming service but I wasn’t going to pay a separate fee to do so. When Disney launches their own stand-alone streaming service in the near future that’ll be yet another service that will feature content that I may be interested in but would never pay for.
Of course, there are some workarounds. You might be able to swap subscription service passwords with a friend. Trading your Netflix password for access to Hulu and vice versa. But that’s not going to cover all your bases. There are too many disparate services nowadays to make swapping a viable option. Not to mention the fact that these services could crack down on that practice if they wanted to. No, what you need is a better option. A way to ensure that you’ll be able to watch content on any platform, any time you want.
What I’m proposing then is the creation of a MoviePass for TV platforms. A monthly subscription (say $20 a month) that will get you limited access to every streaming platform that there is. If you’re a Netflix power user you’d still need to keep your Netflix subscription to ensure that you’ll be able to watch obscure documentaries to your heart’s content. But if you’re not into all that, and you only want to binge watch House of Cards or Orange is the New Black when they come out, then you’d be covered with this cross platform pass that will let you binge a limited number of shows per platform per month. In theory, this pass wouldn’t cut into the existing user bases for these platforms. Rather, they would just add users who wouldn’t otherwise be crossing their borders.
Just think about how great this PlatformPass would be. If you’re politically inclined you could use this pass to watch Who Is America on Showtime and Last Week Tonight with John Oliver on HBO, without having to subscribe to either HBO or Showtime. If you’re a Sci-Fi nerd you can use it to watch Star Trek on CBS, Dark Matter on Netflix, and Future Man on Hulu, all without need to subscribe three different services. It’ll be the dream of A La Carte programming come to life, the dream that we’ve always wanted Cable TV to deliver for us.
Of course PlatformPass will never come to fruition. And even if it did, it probably would never work, ala MoviePass. But that’s not going to stop me from hoping. From wishing that there was a better way. A way for everyone in the world to enjoy the greatness that is the Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, regardless if they have Amazon Prime or not.
Is PlatformPass the Greatest Idea Ever?
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