from wikipedia you linked

> tragedy of the commons is a situation in a shared-resource system where individual users, acting independently according to their own self-interest, behave contrary to the common good of all users, by depleting or spoiling that resource through their collective action

The shared resource is the amount of money spent by consumers to watch content.

The individual users are content producers and aggregators.

It is in their self interest to own the last mile of content distribution, as they get more money this way than by licensing to others.

This action, collectively, spoils the shared resource by reducing the amount of money that consumers are willing to spend on watching content. They don't want to maintain multiple subscriptions to watch just one or two shows, or different series of the same show, and so maintain less subscriptions than if there was just one or two services with all the content.

The tragedy of the commons is not just any nonrational behaviour. It's a specific case where there is some property or resource held in common, and actors or agents can act to privatise gains whilst collectivising costs.

The classic case illustrated in Garret Hardin's 1968 essay is a common field, with a fixed carrying capacity, at that carrying capacity, in which one herdsman chooses to run yet more cattle. The total yield goes down, but the defector's yield increases. Since the gain is private and the loss is shared, the net incentive is to overgraze.

Calling the subscription spending market a commons seems a stretch. That's never a shared resource, it's always one which accrues to specific provider(s). Though the tendency is for it to accrue to a winner-takes-all provider.

And more crucially, there's no socialised loss here that I can see. There is a race-to-the-bottom dynamic possible with excessive competition, so long as offerings of one providers catalogue cannot be shared with others.

The problem instead seems to be simply one of falling marginal costs, such that the largest provider has the greatest efficiencies, and that with a sufficiently subdivided market (multiple subscription services), no one provider has a sufficient catalogue to sufficiently interest any one viewer, but the monetary and other costs (choice, selection, management) of multiple services is too high for any one subscriber to choose more than a small subset of services.

That's not a tragedy of the commons, it's a natural (network effects) monopoly situation.

(I'm aware you're not the original poster. I'd hoped they might respond.)

The common here is the set of customers willing to sign up for a subscription nobody owns these people. Staring another service (adding another cow) is a gain for the service owner, but the set of people willing to pay for subscriptions goes down.

If your favorite show goes from service A to service B, you might switch, you might maintain both subscriptions, or you might decide neither is individually worth it, and either stop watching or start pirating.

Even if service A does not lose shows, its no longer getting shows at the same rate, so the quality of that service goes down, with nothing of similar quality to replace it. So again some customers will stop paying and the commons shrinks.

So, I'm considering this, but I really don't see it.

Yes, there's a shared, limited, resource pool. But that's true of any constrained economic resource.

The element of privatised gain / socialised loss is what's missing. Any given entrant has an all-or-nothing proposition. But gains precisely match others losses, assuming a fixed pie.

The marginal/average cost dynamic is a red herring here, so far as ToTC goes.

The privatised gain is that a content producer who was previously licensing their content to a streaming service, and starts their own streaming service, makes more money streaming than by licensing.

The socialised loss is that fragmentation of distribution makes people less likely to pay for any service. By trying to take a bigger slice of the pie, they make the pie smaller.