The Streaming Business Model Is Hitting Its Half-Life
As decay sets in, will our favorite products survive?
Rosen is the author of Medium Shift, tracking the transformations underway in the media business.
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There is a big question lurking in the background of the media business’s ongoing production budget cuts, layoffs and general sense of struggle: What if the entertainment we love simply can't survive anymore—and what if it’s streaming’s fault?
That question might read as extreme. Cable networks still serve 60 million homes in the U.S.—more than 80 million if we include satellite and virtual cable networks—even if that’s nowhere near their peak in 2010, when more than 105 million households had cable. Streaming services such as Netflix and Disney+, meanwhile, reach hundreds of millions of customers worldwide, and even the smaller apps still have subscriber counts in the high double-digit millions. Warner Bros. Discovery, for instance, counts 96.1 million users, while Paramount+ has 56 million.
In other words, there is plenty of scale. Why would anything fail to thrive when there are still that many eyeballs to serve?