Quote:
Originally Posted by jfman
This is the thing. If the market won't sustain dozens of streamers with millions of subscribers each, and I don't believe it will, suddenly £x per month per subscriber to join a wholesale deal or a fixed risk free fee for your content to go onto other platforms is massively appealing.
A deal with Sky and Virgin, for example, at £1 per month would be £150m a year relatively risk free. On the other hand, a fledgling streaming service at £7.99 a month would need 1.8 million subscribers to achieve this once VAT is taken off. Your content, and brands, are now in 12.5 million homes, instead of less than 1.8 million. Gaining more reputation for your content and thus increasing its back catalogue value in the future. You make a dead duck series on a streamer nobody has and it's gone forever.
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But people don't have to subscribe to all those steamers every month. It will likely be a pick and mix situation. As for what's appealing, in the States anyway, people are still cutting the cord and going down the streaming route, so customer action in favour of the streamers is driving the direction this will all go.
Lets go back to the beginning of all this and why all these media companies are joining up with each in the first place and that's because of the existential threat to their business' from the tech giants, especially Netflix.
At the moment it appears that all the Big 5 (as they are now) Hollywood players are going down the DTC route while maintaining their existing relationships with all the various broadcasters over the world. Super RTL being a example in Germany where Disney did a deal with RTL and sold their rights to them, but I don't see how such arrangements are sustainable in the long term in parallel with DTC services.
I would expect (hope) that common sense would win through in the end and that the Hollywood media cos and platforms like VM, BT and Sky can reach an accommodation where the platforms take a cut of the various streaming services and integrate the streamers into their own UIs along with keeping a smaller collection of linear channels.
But I'm sure Disney and all the others have thought very hard about the sort of problem you raise and at least as far as Warner's go, they are not going to risk the revenue from Sky's 22 million customer base in favour of their own streamer (for now) and we'll see what happens with Disney and the others in the coming months.
What's not risk free for Hollywood and hence the catch 22 situation here, is to allow Netflix to continually dominate in the streaming world, but personally I think its too late. Netflix is so far ahead, even the likes of Disney will never catch them now.