Unless you’ve been living under a rock the last month, the streaming wars are front and center in every news feed you scroll through. Just in the past few weeks, the battle content attention and subscription share has gotten more gruesome than ever.

For the past few years, trade industry conversations have swirled around cord-cutters, streaming wars, the explosion of over-the-top video, loss of subscribers, bundling and unbundling, and the rise of ad-supported video-on-demand platforms (AVODs). Yet, these topics and conversations usually only touch on the issue that is really driving, and will continue to drive, every part of the industry for several years to come — programming costs.

While there may be hundreds of streaming services today, large and niche and subscription-based and free, that count won’t hold up for long. Our fearless leader Kevin Hill has been in the media and entertainment industry for 20+ years, and has seen it all. He sheds some light on how these services must survive the content provider kiss of death that we know as programming costs.

To read the entire op-ed in full check out the Next TV piece.