When Netflix came to Sweden in 2012, many people hoped to compare the service with Spotify: the huge library of clouds that solved the file-sharing issue in one fell swoop and gave users access to pretty much anything they could want.

It's easy to forget, but before 2012 we bought DVD boxes that could cost hundreds of dollars for a single season of a TV series. SEK 79 a month appeared as a chap.

In just a few years , Netflix has reached an unprecedented success: in 2018, 54 percent of online Swedes watched Netflix, according to the survey Swedes and the Internet.

But the dream of the only simple service that would contain everything proved to be untrue. The Netflix comet got a whole tail of hungry competitors after it. In the fall of 2019, we will have at least five streaming services in Sweden.

And today we get another one.

Apple TV + has big plans . In a short time, heavy names such as Steven Spielberg, Oprah Winfrey and M. Night Shyamalan have been contracted. Among the series that premiered today is The Morning Show featuring actors such as Reese Witherspoon, Jennifer Aniston and Steve Carrell. The names are no coincidence: Carell and Aniston are associated with the two most popular series in the world: The Office and Friends.

Also a series like For all Mankind with Swedish Joel Kinnaman is distinguished for its high tail movement. "A Mad Men stuck in space" has been called the series, which speculates on what would have happened if the space race had not ended as the US reached before the Soviet Union to put an old man on the moon's surface.

With executive stars like Zack Van Amburg and Jamie Erlicht, the brains behind series like Breaking Bad and Community, Apple seems to want to take on HBO's position as a prestigious company, aiming for the Emmy nominations next year.

But for Apple , it is not the love of TV shows that comes first. It's that people don't buy iPhones to the same extent anymore. The company has noticed that their services, such as Apple Pay, iTunes and Apple Music are withdrawing more money than their hardware.

So these services are brought television series - original series more specifically. The latter is not unimportant to understand why we ended up here, with a constantly mutating flora of television services.

Netflix showed how much money was in streaming TV. As more people want to take part in the streaming gold, the players are becoming more and more. This has led to what is known in English as the streaming wars.

One example: the most viewed series on American Netflix is ​​The Office. But the rights are owned by NBC, which has now repurchased the series, and will launch it on its own platform, which has its premiere in 2021. Similar purchases and forced transfers apply to series such as Friends (moving to HBO, at least in the US), Seinfeld (moving to Netflix) and Simpsons ( moves to Disney +) - that is, series that are audience favorites and were produced before the streaming services era.

That's why more and more actors are investing in original series - it's much easier. But this is also why services become more when more people want to get subscribers.

Watching streaming TV is simply on the way to becoming quite complicated.

If you want to see Emmy-winning drama comedy Fleabag, you have to get Amazon prime (SEK 60 / month). If you also want to follow series like Handmaid's Tale or Game of Thrones, you must also have a subscription to HBO Nordic (SEK 99 / month). And series like Friends or Orange is the new Black go on Netflix ($ 89 to $ 139). If you like Swedish original series that Love Me, you must have Viaplay (SEK 109 / month). Solsidan? CMore (SEK 139 / month).

Now add Apple TV + which will cost 59 SEK a month, and we have not counted on Disney + which will premiere shortly.

Who can afford to subscribe to all this?

It's a bit back to cable TV days - we will have to choose which series we can afford to follow, or the DVD industry will have an unexpected return.