YouTube and TikTok Creators Are Tearing Up Netflix’s Streaming Rulebook
“Premium” creator videos are gobbling up advertiser dollars. With YouTube and TikTok spending nothing on content, who needs a $17 billion production budget?
Rosen is the author of Medium Shift, tracking the transformations underway in the media business.
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Netflix makes no secret of its long-term view that “streaming entertainment is replacing linear TV.” This has always been an elegant vision—the cable bundle is expensive, it isn’t portable across devices and it requires a clunky remote control. The internet, meanwhile, enables on-demand, personalized streaming of TV series and movies on any screen. So the streaming service that best fits and evolves with this new paradigm will win out in the long run.
Until recently, Netflix had the best version of this story: Its streaming model creates the type of consumer demand that drove the need for more TV series and movies, which in turn created a feedback loop—more consumption of old and aging TV and movies, generating more revenue to fund new titles, which attracted new subscribers, who stuck around to watch all the old TV and movies, repeated ad infinitum. Total global investment in TV series and movies will exceed $230 billion this year, according to a projection from research firm Ampere Analysis, nearly double the spending of 10 years ago. Netflix is contributing $17 billion to that figure. Disney recently shared with investors that it has raised its content budget nearly a third to $33 billion, mostly for streaming, while Comcast has doubled its spending on original Peacock content to $3 billion.