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The longest blackout in television-streaming history ended last week when YouTube TV settled a dispute over how much it would pay Disney to air its programming. For 14 days, YouTube TV’s 10 million subscribers kept paying their $83 a month but could not watch any sports hosted by ESPN.

Streaming services made themselves essential by alternately creating and acquiring vast portions of the television market. Unbeknownst to consumers, this great product was insufficiently profitable — but now that it’s become irreplaceable, services like Netflix and YouTube TV raise their prices and worsen their product with impunity.

Disney, one of the players in this debacle, only first turned a profit streaming last year with ESPN+ and still lost money on Hulu and Disney+, according to Forbes.  

Which is to say: They sold their customers a product that didn’t really exist. The cliche remains undefeated; if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.

YouTube announced Nov. 9 that it would offer customers $20 credit to make up for the gap in coverage — but only to those who actively claim it, instead of applying it automatically, according to NBC Sports. It’s another example of the squeeze that exists everywhere in streaming now. 

I remember piling into the car with my siblings to rent DVDs for family movie nights, but options we had then were limited compared to the more or less infinite offerings I can access anytime I want on my computer thanks to streaming. It’s remarkable. 

The convenience and price we were sold was, in fact, too incredible to last. Streaming services are making money now, and as the carriage dispute preventing 10 million subscribers from watching Monday Night Football showed, that’s going to make the product worse. 

Henry Fliflet is a junior studying English.