Quote:
Originally Posted by leebase
It will be interesting to see how this plays out. Myself....I will keep Netflix (most likely) and Prime Video (it’s included with Prime that I subscribe for the shipping benefits). I get a year of AppleTv due to the iPhone purchase.
Everything else is subscribe:binge:unsubscribe. I did that with Game of Thrones and Westworld. Just waited for the season to be over and subscribe for a month...kind of like renting a movie.
Disney will likely get a few months from me just to watch a movie or two.
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Interesting indeed.
It is going to get bloody:
- Netflix has 150M subscribers
- Amazon has 105M
- HBO has 135M total and 10M on HBO NOW. (So HBOmax starts with ten on day one.)
- Hulu has 26M
- CBS has 4M
Add in CW, CWSEED, Pluto, Imdb TV, RokuTV, Tubi, Peacock and dozens of small narrow interest services plus ABC, FOX, NBC, CBS, and the "TV EVERYWHERE" apps and it's going to get crowded.
And then there's the live TV streamers: Philo, Sling, YoutubeTV, ATT TV, and more to come.
There's only so many eyeball hours to go around and churning (subscribing to a service for a month or two and cancelling to subscribe to another before eventually returning) is a *very* common strategy.
There is going to be a lot of money in streaming but not enough to support all the pretenders. Not right away but not everybody can drop $1-2 billion a year in new content and draw upon 10,000 hours worth of video libraries.
Netflix and Prime saw this coming and prepared for it, but the cablecos didn't.
Since 2016 they've lost $10B in revenue and are bleeding subscribers by the tens of thousand each month. No end in sight.
Not everybody will survive.
CBS/VIACOM know CBSAA isn't enough, which is why they bought Pluto.
Apple is (mostly) giving it away for free while they grow their libraries because 10-20 shows and their Brand isn't going to go far against Disney and WarnerMedia. One month worth of subscription once a year will exhaust their library.
They need to buy somebody.
Columbia Pictures (now Sony) is their best hope (Spiderman franchise not included) and Sony did just shut down Vue and sell control of Crackle so Columbia is doable. It won't be cheap but it will let them play withtbebig boys and their massive backlists.
Lionsgate is also in play ($6B in debt) but word is CBS/Viacom has dibs.
Doesn't leave much else in play.
Apple had better consider going ad-supported. NbcUniversal is, and they have a library. Just not Disney/Warner sized.
Everybody smaller is in trouble.
There will be blood.
Others may survive as ad-supported streaming services