Apple, Netflix, Peacock set to offer a combined service where all of your stuff is in one place. This feels familiar.

Wait…..so there’s going to be a new service, that consolidates frequently used apps, so all of your stuff is in once place, for one price? Huh.

Let me take you back to 2016 for a brief moment. I was just north of 30 years old and hadn’t yet reached a point where sleeping in a weird position wrecked my back and neck for a week. Better times. I had just received my monthly cable bill, which had once again gone up $4-$6 with zero explanation. That brought my TV/Internet bill to about $225. I had had enough. I was ready to cut the cord.

At that point in time, TV streaming services were in their infancy. Netflix was already a giant, but beyond that, I don’t think my wife and I subscribed to any other ‘streaming’ service. I saw an advertisement for an app called ‘Sling TV.’ At the time, it was $19.95 a month. It had maybe 25 or 30 channels, but the most important part of their service in that space and time was that they had Fox Sports Wisconsin. So we would have access to all of the Bucks and Brewer games.

Well, $60 for internet service, $10 for Netflix, $20 for Sling? $90 a month feels a lot better than $225. So we made the move. Internet only, Sling, Netflix. Saving $135 a month which equals $1,620 a year. Absolute no brainer.

Now both my wife and I knew that gravy train wasn’t going to last forever. More and more people would make the move we were making, and eventually the cable/entertainment companies would find a way to recoup their losses. Internet prices would go up, streaming service prices would go up, more streaming services would pop up and have certain shows or sports we wanted to see, etc.

And that’s precisely what happened. We had a good run of about 2 years where we were at that $90-ish a month rate. Those were good times! I remember them fondly.

Slowly but surely, internet prices went to $65, then $75, and now $85. Sling lost Fox Sports Wisconsin so we had to move to Hulu Live which was double the price. The problem with Hulu Live is that a hole gets ripped in the space-time continuum any time you try to change the channel, so we moved to DirecTV. But we still needed Hulu to watch certain shows. So we scaled down to the base level of Hulu, added DirecTV, in addition to Netflix. Eventually DirecTV lost the rights to Fox Sports Wisconsin/Bally, so we ended up having to pay for a Bally Sports subscription and an app that works 40% of the time. Somehow we switched from DirecTV to Youtube TV and added HBO/Max for certain shows (which led to having to create an account on the HBO/Max app). So now we have Netflix, Hulu, Youtube TV, Max, and Bally. Then Ted Lasso took the world by storm and MLB started to send certain Brewer games to Apple TV. What the hell! Let’s add that too! Big Ten football available on Peacock only?? NFL on Amazon Prime?? Okay, spread it on!

The bottom line is this: We’re basically back at the $200-$225 range, with the added inconvience of having to open and close 15 different apps to watch all of our sports and shows. At least with cable you got everything in one place as you continued to get price-gouged.

Which leads us to yesterday’s annoucement that Apple/Netflix/Peacock are aligning to offer all of their programming for one price on (presumably) one app. We’ve come full circle friends.

Honestly, I long for the days of one remote and a cable box. But I’m not even sure I can get that back at this point. If you stuck with cable and your cable box, I think you’re grandfathered in, but I’m almost certain that if we were to order new service from a cable company, they would just tell us to download a U-Verse app or a Spectrum app to access their channels. On that fateful day in 2016, I’m pretty sure I heard, “you’re going to miss me when I’m gone,” whispered to us from this:

You were right, cable. You were right.

PS: Correct:

Double PS: One of my buddies from college, Nick, is someone who stuck with cable. I went up to his place to watch a wrestling PPV a while back, and just being back to one remote and one thing to turn on was pure BLISS.