Quote:
Originally Posted by ZodWallop
Maybe. But I don't see it happening. Maybe I lack foresight. Maybe.
That's what will likely happen. But various people picking up your service for a free month and then dropping it doesn't seem like a viable long term strategy.
To me, the Netflix catalog isn't declining, but it is changing. To their credit, they have so much original content to watch that I can't keep up with it. I still haven't watched Wild, Wild Country, Stranger Things, The Umbrella Academy, Altered Cqarbon or G.L.O.W. and now there's The October Faction and The Witcher.
Even if the original content stream slows down (which it has to do eventually) there's enough on there to keep me as a subscriber for a good long time.
I do hope the studios are smart enough to keep licensing older movies to third party services. I watched Tremors on Netflix this weekend and enjoyed it. But c'mon, I'm never going to subscribe to Peacock just to watch it.
|
Netflix has a major issue to solve over the next few years, i.e. what to do when their licensing deals expire. According to an article that I read a few months ago, 8 of their top 10 most watched shows are licensed shows such as Friends. Their original content might bring people in to bing, but it won't keep people paying. They have to get a deep enough library to keep subscribers, otherwise they become the stream service that people sign up for a month, binge watch a year's worth of original shows and then drop for a year. Netflix simply can't build a big enough library with original shows.
Apple's problem is they simply don't have anything other than a few original shows. I really think they have a very different business model than the other streaming services. Apple want people to use Apple TV as the one device/app that manages all their video content. From that stand point, the original content is simply a way to get people to buy Apple devices. It's similar to Amazon's Prime Video model. I would not be surprised if Apple at some point copies Amazon's Prime model of rolling all their services into one subscription - Music, cloud storage, TV.
Churn is a fact of life in several industries, however, it's also something that companies manage closely. I think there is a percentage of people who are going to bounce between services, but I think that people who tend to do that, grossly over estimate the number of people who do churn. Most people tend to be creatures of habit and as long as a service has enough content to keep their interest, they will stay with that service. They switch when the services start jacking up the prices or if there is some cool new show that everyone is talking about on a different service.