Media · Advantages and disadvantages · Band 7
Streaming Services: Pros and Cons
The question, a model answer written to the band 7 descriptors, why it scores that band against the 4 official criteria, topic vocabulary, and a common mistake to avoid.
Advantages and disadvantages
Streaming services have largely replaced traditional television and cinema as the main way many people watch films and series. What are the advantages and disadvantages of this shift? Give reasons for your answer and include any relevant examples from your own knowledge or experience. Write at least 250 words.
Model answer (band 7)
Written to the band 7 descriptors, not by a real examiner. Read it for structure and language, then write your own in your own words. Examiners can tell a memorised essay from an original one.
The shift from scheduled television and cinema visits toward on-demand streaming has transformed how most people consume film and television, offering clear convenience alongside less obvious costs to the wider media industry.
The primary advantage for viewers is control and flexibility. Streaming allows people to watch whatever they want, whenever they want, without being bound to a fixed broadcast schedule or needing to leave home for a cinema screening, and the ability to pause, rewind, or binge an entire series in one sitting has fundamentally changed viewing habits for the better in terms of personal convenience. Streaming platforms also offer vastly more content variety than traditional television ever could, including niche programming and international productions that would rarely have found space on a conventional broadcast schedule.
However, the disadvantages are meaningful. The proliferation of competing streaming platforms, each holding exclusive rights to different content, has fragmented the market in ways that increasingly resemble the costly cable bundles streaming originally promised to replace, with many households now paying for multiple subscriptions to access content once available on fewer channels. Cinemas, meanwhile, have struggled financially as audiences increasingly choose to wait for films to appear on streaming rather than pay for a theatrical ticket, threatening a communal, big-screen viewing experience that many consider genuinely different from watching at home. There are additional concerns about algorithm-driven recommendations narrowing what viewers are exposed to, subtly reinforcing existing preferences rather than encouraging genuine discovery of unfamiliar content.
On balance, I believe streaming has delivered real convenience for viewers, but at a cost to content diversity and the shared cultural experience that cinemas and scheduled broadcasts once provided more naturally.
In conclusion, the shift to streaming offers genuine personal convenience, but its disadvantages for the wider media ecosystem remain significant and largely unresolved.
Why this answer scores band 7
Mapped to the 4 official IELTS Writing criteria.
- Task Response: advantages and disadvantages are both developed with specific mechanisms (subscription fragmentation, algorithmic narrowing) rather than generic claims.
- Coherence and Cohesion: clear benefit-then-cost structure with an 'on balance' paragraph that weighs rather than simply lists the two sides.
- Lexical Resource: precise vocabulary ('on-demand', 'subscription fragmentation', 'algorithm-driven recommendation') used accurately and naturally.
- Grammatical Range and Accuracy: strong control of complex sentence structures, including non-finite clauses, with very few grammatical errors.
Useful vocabulary & collocations
Phrases used in the model answer that lift Lexical Resource naturally.
Common mistake on this type of question
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