In Wednesday’s mailing, I quoted a long Twitter thread from IAC Executive Chairman Randall Rothenberg - “Television Enters the Fifth Dimension” - about the choices consumers face in the post-linear, post-Electronic Programming Guide (EPG) content consumption world:

I can’t help but think that this phenomenon - many, many multiple services, each one looking very much like your old cable universe, but each one actually a walled content garden, blocking out or strictly limiting access to competitors’ content will have as dramatic an effect on television’s economics as the digital platforms have had. Television will no longer be a single coopetitive platform, where 3-10 media giants inhabit the same ecosystem, competing for fractions of share-points against similar rivals which sit next to them, cheek by jowl, in the same EPG, all of it visible to an audience of 100 million households. Rather, there will be many multiple “televisions,” each one striving to keep its own audience - an audience smaller than historical norms -  locked in and blissfully unaware of those other televisions inhabiting other dimensions in different space-time continuums.  

In short, there is a fundamental, if not inherent, limitation to the ability of individual streaming services to scale because they do not communicate with each other. Nor is there an EPG to capture their programming simultaneously (because streaming apps don't all offer live programming). 

Hulu's integration of ESPN+ is a marginal step towards the linear EPG. It gets very little discussion, but may be the future of streaming bundles, especially any that would include Netflix.