April saw a rush of game-changing from the major streaming platforms. First came the announcement that Netflix was discontinuing its DVD-mailing service, then came a string of statements from Warner Bros. Discovery’s David Zaslav and Disney’s Robert Iger, followed by a cascade of pronouncements from Amazon’s Prime Video, Apple TV, and Paramount.
Zaslav, wrote The Wall Street Journal, “stopped being a streaming evangelist before it got trendy.” Indeed, Zaslav is said to prefer the “arms dealer approach,” wherein there are lots of bidders for content.
Disney’s Iger followed suit, stating that, “those linear channels and movie theaters still can provide us with a significant amount of monetization capability.” And, he added: “There are opportunities to license to third parties.”
Similarly, Prime, Apple TV, and Paramount are increasingly embracing the theatrical model, in which movies are aired in cinemas before going to streaming.
As explained in the May 2023 Issue of VideoAge, all indications point to the fact that the studios’ obsession with doing away with the middleman has run into a dead end, and recently Amazon’s MGM Studios Distribution set up a unit to license SVoD originals to third parties for the first time.
All this new awareness is not new to VideoAge. Indeed the publication sounded a “screaming” alarm about streaming as early as March 2021, and, in December 2022 warned about the danger of “Wall Street’s infatuation with streaming.” And earlier, in February 2022, on the eve of his taking over Warner Bros., we at VideoAge even sent the following e-mail to Zaslav: “Dear David, [We…] hope that you’ll resist the streaming shaman’s call to sacrifice over $3 billion a year in international content sales knowing well that broadcast TV fare doesn’t bring new subs to international streaming platforms.”
As for Netflix discontinuing its physical DVD distribution business, political cartoonist Ted Rall wrote in the Journal that “of the 23,000-plus movies released in the U.S. since 1899, streaming services offer only 7,300 –– and that includes foreign titles.
This figure, however, doesn’t match other reports, like the one from data aggregator Reelgood that put the number of film and TV shows to a total of 36,674 from the nine largest SVoD services, of which just 11,341 are TV shows, with Netflix topping the list with 2,356 TV shows.
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