Like everything else, it was a year of rising prices and mergers, a year when companies looked at their streaming services and realized that they weren't as profitable as they'd hoped. Things had to change. The result was services dropping popular titles to license to ad-supported channels. Hundreds of free channels became available if you were willing to sit through commercials. Streaming services were still cheap if you were willing to take your content with a big dose of ads. Otherwise, you would pay dearly for uninterrupted content.