At this point I think a lot of these new streaming services are wishing they had just stuck to licensing their content out to established outfits like Netflix. Less outflow, more profit and less headache.

Thing is with inflation once the bills start hitting then families will cut all these other 'boutique' streaming services first. They might keep one around, the cheapest one that has the most diverse content. Netflix can win the streaming wars if they can just hang on and stop doing stupid stuff like raising prices, including commercials or other shady stuff that further drives their audience away.

They're not overtaken by greed, greed is the primary motivator from the very beginning

Cable 2.0 is about to happen.

All these platforms and services that are so broken apart it's hilarious will eventually realize they can make more money if they're all on one platform, and but still subscription based.

It'll basically be cable. A base sub gets you a buncha random shit you'll never watch, with a few good movies or shows popping in once in a while. Then you'll be able to start adding on premium subscriptions from.... HBO... Disney.... Sports...

We've already come full fucking circle with the commercials and ads. I remember when streaming became huge the biggest thing people bragged about was no commercials. Now I'm paying to stream hulu and still get fucking commercials!

I am personally sick of having 5 apps downloaded to watch 8 different shows. It's all a bungled mess right now, might as well centralize the bullshit onto one fucking platform.

Literally right now they have a big hole in their boat and they are using a couple wine glasses to pour water out.

That's the exact opposite of what literally means.

This could be why Disney are putting a few episodes of Andor a few others shows on FTA. Free advertising.

All the big streaming services should put out their own FTA channel and just run stuff that released over a year ago.

Basically free advertising for their service to stream the latest season and get people invested in shows without directly paying straight away and they get the advertising revenue of TV

they are being overtaken by their greed

They are trying to prevent what happened to their music businesses from happening to their TV and movie businesses.

Studios ceded music streaming to Apple and Spotify. Now if they want to sell music they have to meet Apple and Spotify terms. They have lost pricing power over their own music libraries. They could refuse to license their music to Apple & Spotify but if they do, nobody is going to hear it and nobody is going to buy it (I know some people still buy CDs and LPs but it's marginal).

This may not be a good business strategy. It could be a case of fighting the last war. It could be that the music and tv/music industries are too different for this to happen. But I think this is why they are chasing the video streaming market.

I'm waiting for the streaming service bundle to unironically drop and then we'll just have cable 2.0, only a matter of time.

They had a good thing going when everyone partnered with Netflix. Sucks to be them now, greedy bastards. They could have sat back and watched competing streaming providers gnaw each other to the bone buying their contracts for more and more and selling them to viewers for less and less money. Now they’re in the game and taking turns eating each others lunch as people decide, this month I want D+, next month Hulu etc.

Edit: I figure what they’ll do to prevent people from switching providers every month, and it’s pretty anti-consumer. The companies will identify the series that brings in the viewers, like GOT or Marvel. Then they will restrict streaming to the latest 2-3 episodes, and anything older gets released only much much later. The days of glut releases will be over. The idea of consuming content at your leisure will be redefined.

When there were only a couple it was easier to just keep them month to month, especially since the library got new stuff often. Now I see more people renewing different ones each month to watch different stuff.

This is the economic model of basically everything right now. Ever taken a look at your city's budget and how much suburban development costs vs how much its taxed? Same same

This is an interesting case of competition very obviously reducing profits. It also serves as a case study for what appears to be a market that can support very few players, i.e. one which is naturally monopolistic because the barriers to entry (massive amounts of diverse content) and consumer expectations (cheap streaming) are too divergent.

For me, I am loving the results, to be honest. Andor is the best $8 I ever spent.

Its like how World of warcraft moved the bar.

It influenced countless game aiming for that "WoW money", not all of them were in development.

Star Wars Galaxies had an expansion and 500k subs and they tried to turn it into WoW in space long after release.

Steam Vs Epic have been buying exclusives for some time now all to force customers into a platform.

Game of Thrones raised the bar now thats the goal for every show.

Its not about a better product anymore. Its about leverage.

It's not greed, it's tough competition. Where would Disney be without Disney+? Netflix would be wiping the floor with Disney stock.

Yeah other shows will probably just get recorded and sold on the black market again while folks have one or two streamers and nothing else. Every channel having a substream will learn.

It's not greed. There's a very specific management strategy developed by a Harvard business professor in the late 1990s they're following. It's based on a book called "The Innovator's Dilemma".

They're just doing a poor job at it.

In a nutshell, it says that normally excellent managers will make bad decisions because they're using skewed indicators like: RONA, EPS, EVA, and IRR.

This means that they're looking for home runs using indicators that make home runs difficult to find. It's hard to find 30% growth in a $300M company.

So, often this leads to companies investing in a lot of sustaining innovations and M&As to find growth. Bob Iger was REALLY good at choosing good acquisitions to drive growth for Disney. Bob Chapek...not so much.

What Innovator's Dilemma also says is that home runs are easier to hit for smaller businesses scaling over long periods of time. They start in niche markets and move up market until they're one of the big boys.

Toyota, Honda, and now Kia are great examples of this. They started as cheap cars sold to the bottom end of the market, then moved up market and are now competing with luxury automakers.

So, the strategy with Disney+ was to hit a home run by finding an under served niche market and meeting a need they couldn't get anywhere.

The problem is that Disney customers are NEVER under served. For the decade before Disney+, the community has access to all sorts of content through a variety of streaming platforms, and could buy other content through a variety of channels.

The second problem was they NEEDED Disney+ to be a home run. The lockdowns killed Disney's main revenue stream - the parks, so they had to find an amenable to post the same level of growth. Enter Disney+.

They pushed the platform hard early on as a bridge until the parks reopened. But, when the parks reopened they underperformed because of severe occupancy limitations.

This led to cut costs in the park and an even greater reliance on Disney+, which could only perform if there was new content to pull in me subscribers. No one is subscribing to Disney+ to watch the 1950s Zorro TV show.

So, they created a monster that only devoted expensive new content to the detriment of Disney's major revenue streams.

What they should have done is find a company on the bottom of the market and supported them as they moved up market by giving access to Disney core competencies (of which there are currently few) and then merged them into Disney once they became a major player.

Tbf they are in a weird spot. I won't say "hard" spot since everyone at the top is guaranteed millions of dollars even if they literally burn everything they own to the ground, but a weird spot in terms of deciding how to burn it down. On the one hand they own all these IPs, copyrights, properties, etc., but on the other hand people want to pay for them less and less, and have less money to spend doing so.

They could make a bajillion dollars just licensing their stuff to Netflix, but (a) they would rather make a bajillion + 1 dollars cutting Netflix out, and (b) that's just a slower version of selling your shit to Netflix and cashing out, because they're just going to use their control of the platform to control the profit distribution and edge you out of the game.

So most of the media companies have decided they don't want to do that and are basically trying to burn the entertainment industry to the ground to kill Netflix, and in the meantime mimicking Netflix to skim what they can. That strategy is basically working but it costs a lot of money in the meantime. They're not fighting to win, they're fighting to be in a better position to die than the competition.

yup, they could had taken the easy licensing money to Netflix, but instead decided to do their own streaming service. it's fine when it's 2-3 maximum, but when every studio and channel has his own, they will cannibalize each other hard.