You know what’s fun about the streaming wars?
We have a lot of strategy to talk about.
I mean, a job/title like mine (“entertainment strategist”) couldn’t really have existed in the 2000s, could it? Most of the major players in entertainment had the same strategy: make lots of movies, then make money in theaters, home entertainment and finally TV. The studio with the most hits wins! In TV, they had mostly the same strategy: own a broadcast channel, some cable networks and an in-house production company. Whoever makes the most popular TV shows wins. And if you got some Emmy nominations or wins, even better!
When Netflix pushed everyone into the streaming era in the 2010s, those strategies fell by the wayside. Every traditional studio had to figure out how to disrupt their own business models. Everyone had to get into streaming. And no two streamers picked the same way to do it. That makes for fun analysis!
That said, maybe I’m being too generous. Until last Thursday, August 4, we didn’t really have a different vision for streaming. Prime Video, Disney+, Apple TV+, HBO Max, Paramount+ and Peacock all launched headlong into streaming, but mostly copied Netflix’ playbook. Essentially, we’re coming after Netflix, but due to our legacy and library content we’ll do it better. (The assumption always that streaming was the future…) Or in Prime Video and Apple’s cases, they can just spend all the monies.
David Zaslav grabbed the mic last week to say, “Not so fast.”
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