After more than 15 years and billions of dollars spent by the world’s largest media companies, Netflix is still here and stronger than ever. The effort to build Netflix-killer copies of Netflix has resulted in only one sure thing, the consumer audience is everything. So, what now?
2023 was a pivotal year for the business of streaming. It represented a major inflection point in the trendlines within which traditional, multi-billion dollar media conglomerates with legacy studios and linear networks learned to compete with Netflix and Amazon. Those two names started the wars over 10 years ago, emerging out of Silicon Valley as tech companies with a disruptive new content distribution method that Hollywood should have, but didn’t see coming. Over the past decade, marquee studios such as Disney, Paramount and NBC/Universal have spent billions of dollars on dedicated, walled-garden-style streaming services and “original” content to acquire a new class of media consumer: the subscriber.
