In its earliest days, cord cutting was simple and inexpensive. You saved big bucks by dropping an overpriced cable TV subscription and used Netflix and/or Hulu for content, perhaps supplemented with season passes for your favorite network shows from iTunes or Amazon.

That was back when cord cutters were few and far between. Today, enough people have dropped cable TV in favor of streaming to the point that big players smell money. Like sharks chasing chum in the water, they’re closing in.

While cord cutting couldn’t quite be called mainstream — a solid majority of households in the United States still subscribe to cable TV — the writing is on the wall. You need look no further than Comcast’s fourth-quarter earnings report, issued last week, that showed the company lost 29,000 TV subscribers but gained 351,000 new internet customers.

That’s one reason NBCUniversal, which Comcast owns, is planning its own streaming service. Comcast is skating to the where the puck will be.

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The problem is that there will be a lot of sticks fighting for a slap shot.

It’s one of several new streaming offerings expected to debut soon. They all represent an attempt to grab a share of a growing pie, but ultimately it could end up being a costly and confusing mess for consumers.

“As consumers, we like choice and flexibility,” said Dan Rayburn, a principal analyst who studies the streaming market for the research firm Frost & Sullivan. “But the problem we have now is there is so much fragmentation in the market. It’s hard to tell what’s available on what platform.”

The highest-profile player jumping into streaming is Disney, which will debut sometime this year a service called Disney+. It is expected to be an instant contender, thanks to the deep trove of intellectual property the company owns.

Besides traditional Disney movies and TV shows, the company has been buying up big franchises. It now owns comic book titan Marvel, with the Avengers, X-Men and Captain America in its stable. It owns Lucasfilm, which includes the Stars Wars and Indiana Jones franchises. And Disney recently acquired the content of 21st Century Fox, a deal that’s expected to close in the next month or two.

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The movies and TV shows under Disney’s control are expected to be pulled from the current streaming platforms that offer them and concentrated on Disney+. In some cases, that process has begun.

For example, many of the Marvel shows that initially debuted on Netflix — including “Daredevil,” “Luke Cage” and “Iron Fist” — have been canceled, though there’s been no official statement that Disney+ is the reason. However, Marvel issued a cryptic statement after the cancellation of “Daredevil” that its characters would return.

Disney, by the way, is also a shareholder in Hulu, and it owns ESPN+, a stand-alone streaming version of the popular cable sports channel.

AT&T-owned Warner Media says it will bring a streaming service online in late 2019 that includes content from HBO, Warner Bros. and Turner. That includes franchises such as Harry Potter, some of the D.C. Comics movies and even the Lego cartoons.

And that Comcast/NBCUniversal service will be an interesting creature, free to Comcast cable subscribers and available for a fee to everyone else. It will feature original movies and TV as well as older content. And it will have ads, just as commercial and cable TV do. It won’t launch until early 2020.

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Finally, Apple is expected sometime this year to launch its own streaming service. It has been hiring big-name talent — Steven Spielberg is among the folks creating shows for it. At the CES trade show in January, it was revealed that Apple’s iTunes was coming soon as an app for Samsung TVs, considered by many analysts to be the foundation for a streaming service that would not be limited to Apple’s own hardware.

All these new players are going to be reaching out for your wallet. Want to watch Star Wars movies and big-name superhero films? You’ll have to pay up for Disney+. Are you a fan of old Warner Bros. movies or their classic cartoons? You’ll be shelling out to AT&T’s Warner Media service. Want to see “The Office,” currently one of the most popular shows on Netflix? You may have to subscribe to the NBCUniversal offering to get it.

Suddenly, your TV habit just got a lot more expensive. Throw in some subscriptions to your favorite pro sports apps, maybe sign up for CBS All Access so you can watch “Star Trek: Discovery” and “The Good Fight,” and suddenly you’re a frugal cord cutter paying cable TV prices once again.

“To see what you want, you’ll have to sign up for Apple, Hulu, Sling TV, Disney+, the MLB service if you like baseball,” Rayburn said. “Pretty soon, you’re spending just much as you did when you had a cable subscription.”

For years, cable customers have complained that they were being charged exorbitant prices for bundled channels they never watched. They wanted to be able to watch their favorite shows and channels a la carte. With this fragmentation in the streaming arena, that’s just what’s happening. And it’s going to cost you.

Be careful what you ask for.

Dwight Silverman is the technology editor for the Houston Chronicle and the grillmaster for the TechBurger tech news site. Follow him on Twitter and Facebook.

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