The wire harness fights back

On 30 Rock, Liz Lemon's formidable one-time boyfriend Dennis Duffy, aka 'The Beeper King', insisted the pager business would boom again because 'technology is cyclical'. Every idea Dennis espoused was meant to be as stupid and willfully ignorant as she was, like when she told Jack Donaghy that, politically, she was a “social conservative, fiscal liberal.”

The world has somehow gone to hell enough that Dennis Duffy today looks more like a prophet than a fool. “Social conservative, fiscal liberal” is basically the GOP platform in 2024, while the TV business proves the cyclical nature of technology by reinventing the bundle of cables everyone cut the cord to escape.

Technically, what we have now are streaming bundles, where you subscribe to multiple services for a supposedly cheaper price than you would pay if you got them individually. In the beginning, there were bundles of streamers that all came under the same corporate umbrella, like paying one price to get all three Disney+, Hulu, and ESPN+. But now rival companies are joining forces like some weird version of streaming The expendable.

Disney and Warner Bros. Discovery has teamed up for an upcoming combined Disney+, Hulu and Max offering. Those companies have also teamed up with Fox for a separate package, called Venu and coming to trial this fall, to offer a wide variety of national sports

, when live sporting events are the main thing keeping more viewers from dropping cable. And these are just the packages announced as I write this column. By the time you read this, there might be an upcoming one that combines, say, Mubi, Crunchyroll, and MHz Choice (three actual streamers whose names I didn't make up).

TNT's pro basketball coverage was supposed to be a core part of Venu, but if WBD ends up overseas looking at the new NBA media rights deal, the package now looks like less of a value proposition.

Editor's Picks How did we get here when just a few years ago it felt like we would forever be free to pay for channels we don't care about in order to get the ones we do? The glory days of the streaming era in the mid-to-late 2010s were, like Netflix's original programming division, built on a house of cards. Netflix has acquired the streaming rights to hit shows like The office and

The friends

before traditional Hollywood studios thought there was real money to be made from streaming. So viewers got used to the idea that they could pay a modest monthly fee to get access to all the series they wanted to watch — every episode available within a few clicks, without commercial breaks, on-screen ads during shows or any other annoyances of traditional linear television.

None of this was sustainable. There were too many streamers and too many shows to watch. Television companies used to have multiple revenue streams, both from advertising and cable fees, and were shocked to find that subscription fees from consumers alone weren't nearly enough. Once Wall Street became more concerned with profitability than subscriber growth, everyone started introducing ad-supported tiers, asking customers to pay extra to keep getting shows and movies without commercial interruption.

Even the endless menu of on-demand options has proven less appealing in a world where there are hundreds of new shows every year. To combat decision fatigue, Disney+ becomes the latest streamer to offer the ability to choose from a curated collection of shows and movies that stream live as you open the app. I believe they are called… channels? Time is a flat circle. Trends Well, not quite. All existing and upcoming streaming packages only provide a few services rather than the dozens or even hundreds of channels that come with a cable package. we are not at the point where your money is subsidizing Real Housewives when all you want is sports or vice versa. At some point, many of the existing services will not be bound so much as merged. someone will buy Paramount in the not-too-distant future, and if they already have their own service, they'll probably absorb it

Star Trek