Streaming Services Now Outnumber Actual Shows Worth Watching

A new report from media analytics firm Luminate confirms what your credit card statement already told you: the average American household now subscribes to 5.3 streaming services at a combined monthly cost of $78, which — for those keeping score — is more than cable ever was, except now you also have to remember fourteen different passwords and navigate fourteen different interfaces, each worse than the last. The report also found that 61% of subscribers spend more time scrolling through content libraries than actually watching anything, a phenomenon researchers are calling "infinite browse paralysis." Meanwhile, each platform continues to produce approximately 400 original series per year, of which maybe six are good, three are watchable, and the rest exist solely to pad a quarterly earnings call slide about "content investment." The golden age of television, it turns out, is mostly aluminum.