The streaming video market is about to get
crowded.
It is a giant arms race.
The streaming landscape has been getting more
competitive.
Linear TV, no offense to what we're doing right
here, is in trouble.
Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime Video and others are
about to come head to head with the likes of
Disney Plus, Apple TV Plus, HBO Max and CNBC's
parent company Comcast NBCUniversal.
It's been dubbed the streaming wars.
A lot of people are figuring out where they want
to position themselves for the future of TV.
In 2017, 61 percent of adults 18 to 29 year olds
said they primarily watched TV through a
streaming service, compared to just 31 percent
who watched cable.
There's gonna have to be winners and losers here.
So who's going to win, what's going to happen to
cable, and what will happen when customers have
to pay just as much, if not more, for all their
streaming services as they would have for cable?
Are we headed toward a future where an aggregator
will simply bundled together popular streaming
services, and will the cost of that be close to
the cost that people pay for cable?
And the answer to that may very well be yes.
Let's start with who's doing what.
Disney announced the details of its Disney Plus
platform in April of 2019, touting all of its
franchises and acquisitions like Marvel, Star
Wars, Pixar, National Geographic and 20th Century
Fox.
Disney has the best chance just because of its
very, very popular content and the money and
distribution and the Disney name it's put it
behind.
That's going to cost customers $6.99
a month or $69.99
a year.
Most recently, Disney announced it will also be
offering a bundle, including Disney Plus, ESPN
Plus, an ad-supported Hulu.
Disney Plus and the bundle will be launching on
November 12th, 2019.
We've partnered with the most thoughtful,
accomplished, and award winning group of creative
visionaries who have ever come together in one
place.
Apple announced Apple TV Plus at a keynote in
March of 2019, which will feature original
content from some of the most prominent producers
and actors like Oprah Winfrey, Steven Spielberg,
Jennifer Aniston and Reese Witherspoon.
Apple TV Plus is set to launch in the Fall of
2019, but the price has not been announced.
HBO Max is slated to launch its beta in late 2019
and will feature content from a variety of assets
owned by its parent company, AT&T and Warner
Media. Warner Media hasn't released the pricing
for HBO Max, though it's expected to be somewhere
around $15 to $18 a month.
It will offer all of the programming you already
get on HBO, which is probably the most
competitive product in terms of quality, plus
it's going to offer you all of the programming
that lives in the Warner Brothers universe,
whether it's Friends or DC Comics, and then you
throw in original programming on top of that.
Viacom and CBS have held extensive merger talks
which would put them in good standing for a
streaming service.
This service could include the Star Trek movies,
programming from Comedy Central and shows that
currently stream on CBS All Access, CBS' current
streaming service that already boasts 8 million
subscribers. CNBC's parent company, NBCUniversal,
is taking a more cable-focused approach, which
makes sense as NBC is owned by cable provider
Comcast. NBCUniversal announced the service would
be free to cable customers, and while it hasn't
announced a cost for cord cutters, sources say it
will probably be $10 or less per month for
customers without cable subscriptions.
NBCUniversal's product will be ad-supported.
So whether you are a cable subscriber and you get
the product for free or you are a cord cutter
paying $10 a month, that product will have
advertisements in it.
All of these streaming services have created
multiple bidding wars from networks to buy back
their content from Netflix.
Warner Media will spend $85 million a year for
the next five years to stream its popular sitcom
Friends. NBCUniversal will shell out $100 million
a year for the next five years to take back the
rights to stream its own show, The Office. And
Disney will be pulling all of its movies from
Netflix in 2019 as it rolls out Disney Plus.
These companies will also be creating content
specifically for their streaming services.
Netflix alone spent $12 billion on original
programming in 2018 and is expected to spend even
more in 2019.
Very, very few companies can match that.
OK, Apple could.
You know much HBO was spending on content?
It's about $4 billion a year, like, Netflix is
actually dramatically outspending them.
Hulu and Amazon invest large sums of money in
original programming, too, and CBS has exclusive
content for its All Access streaming service
that's not available on CBS' TV station, like
Star Trek Discovery.
You absolutely need to have your own original or
at least exclusive content.
That's how are you going to drive people to a
director consumer product when you offer
something that you can't get elsewhere.
Netflix has gone from largely reselling other
people's content to really heavily investing
billions of dollars in original content that
can't be taken away from them.
So why now?
Netflix has been serving streaming content since
2007 and introduced its first original show,
House of Cards, in 2013.
It was clearly on to something, but most content
creators wanted to see if the trend stuck around.
The more successful we were at building an
on-demand subscriber base with content, the more
likely they were gonna be to stop licensing to
us, right?
It's actually one of the reasons why we started
original content in the first place, because we
believed this shift would all happen.
It's just taken many years longer than
we thought.
For several years, while Netflix gained in
valuation, the party line among traditional media
executives was, 'this is a flash in the pan.
What we want to do is protect the cable bundle.
We don't want to self-imposed the destruction of
this. It's our golden goose.'
What has happened in the past couple years is an
evolution of thinking that the bubble in Netflix
is not actually going to burst.
In fact, Netflix stock rose over 2000 percent from
the beginning of 2013 to early August 2019.
Now, with streaming content solidified in the
consumer market, content creators and media
outlets all want a piece of the pie.
The more choice they get, the less they need the
traditional cable bundle.
And so what we should see is more and more people
cutting the cord or cutting traditional cable.
Cord cutting, the process of ditching cable has
been on the rise.
The five biggest cable companies collectively
lost 3.2
million pay TV customers in 2018, and the high
volume of streaming services could push that
number even higher.
All of broadcasting is in danger.
The only people who are willing to watch
commercials are people who can't afford to buy
the goods that are being sold.
That's an existential, long-term issue.
But it's not lights out for cable just yet.
There are things that cable offers that streaming
services don't.
The live news, the live sports, that's not yet
included in these streaming services and it has
kept the traditional cable bundle alive.
It's a jolting experience to have to navigate
multiple apps on a TV, and so high level speaking
cable is a great value proposition from a product
standpoint, bringing it all together.
And because the cable providers are also providing
the internet access to make the streaming
possible, they are at an advantage.
So everyone's talk about cord cutting, cord
shifting, cable companies, their businesses are
just going to cord shift onto a new medium that's
that's Internet based.
'So even if we lose you and we only sell you
broadband internet, we don't care because we're
only breaking even.'
Goldman Sachs calls this the point of
indifference.
Analysts are also speculating how this will affect
big players like Netflix, Hulu and Amazon.
No one's going to compete with Netflix and grow
subscribers. I believe they have won the game.
And I think that there's nothing that I can see
that's going to dislodge them.
There's gonna be a tremendous amount of
competition coming in over the next two to three
years. I wouldn't want to be in a position of
competing against Amazon, Apple, Disney, Comcast,
AT&T.
Not only could streaming cost as much as cable,
but users would also have to navigate a
complicated and segmented landscape of products
to get to the content that they want.
Do people want to sign up for six different
streaming services.
Everything is going to be behind its own silos.
It's just creating a fragmented media world.
There might even be the potential of a company to
bundle all of these products together under one
umbrella product.
Everyone's talking about Apple TV Plus. Where
I put Apple into this fight is there Apple TV
app. Everything can be watched and aggregated
through the TV app.
So what are the benefits?
Well, customers will get to pick and choose what
services they want to spend their money on.
Don't care about Disney movies?
Don't get it service.
It's that simple.
Consumers will have more and more choice on what
they choose to buy.
And maybe they buy three streaming services.
Maybe they buy five.
Maybe they buy one.
We'll have to wait and see how this all shakes
out. But some casualties will be expected.
There are simply too many streaming products that
the entire ecosystem won't work with all of them.
I think some will see return and some will realize
we just put a lot of money into something maybe
we shouldn't have.