There will always be just a few.

Facebook and Twitter control social media at the moment. Snapchat is there and TikTok is rising until Donald Trump got his government to pass a law to suppress it. Regardless who comes, in the end, only a few will remain. Google has search and Trump doesn’t like their dominant market position, so they have an Anti-Trust hearing happening. But no one is rushing to use the other search engines.

Netflix controlled visual streaming, but COVID-19 has shown how versatile Disney can become, pivoting their company to focus on Disney+ within a matter of months. It’s a big F.U to all the theatres who overcharged anyway and Disney has positioned the company as a proper streaming rival to Netflix. They have seen how much money they have left on the table by not being involved in the streaming market. Even Apple and Amazon have seen how much money is to be made by creating original content. And let’s not forget the biggest one, YouTube.

And the only ones who made money and released new content when COVID-19 hit, were the streaming services.

Of course there will always be other players popping up here and there, but they don’t last forever.

Quibi is one that comes to mind, the 10 minute or less mobile video streaming service created by people who watch documentaries on the History channel and suddenly they thought they knew what the young wanted.

Short episodes to watch on your mobile, while you walk.

And they convinced a lot of entities to invest. Well, it’s dead and buried, taking the $US1.75 billion from investors to start up and then shutting up shop, six months later.

The big labels are down to a few when once upon a time it was many.

Music streaming started off with YouTube.

Then others came like Pandora, Grooveshark, Spotify, Tidal, Apple and Deezer. There are others, but only a few will remain in the end. Pandora is entrenched and so is YouTube. Spotify has decent market share and is continuing to expand. The next step for them would be to produce new music themselves, like a label.

Apple is all about their gadgets and streaming is a means to an end. Grooveshark was found guilty of copyright infringement and closed while Tidal is there for the owners Jay Z and other artists to cash in.

Like the movie Highlander, there can be only one. Maybe two.