For years consumers have enjoyed seemingly limitless streaming options, with media companies throwing huge sums of money at wildly ambitious TV series, one-off projects, documentaries and countless other initiatives meant to lure viewers onto digital services.
Well, those days appear to be pretty much done:
[The] war to win over subscribers at any cost is over.
Disney is hiking prices after losing a ton of money on its various streaming services. Netflix recently jacked up prices and is cracking down on password sharing. Warner Bros. Discovery, CNN's parent company, is scrapping films and series left and right and reversing its controversial everything-under-one-streaming-roof strategy. All three services are expanding their ad-supported offerings.
"The streaming wars are over because subscriber growth has come to a halt," Michael Nathanson, a media analyst at MoffettNathanson, told CNN Business. "You're fighting a war in a land that has no more resources in it."
Yep. For years the streaming companies have been going at it like this:
Now that everything's cooling off, they're all just left standing around like:
The problem was, the economics of the older model were just not achievable on the long-term:
Streaming trained millions of viewers around the world to expect a lot of ad-free content for an inexpensive price. But that expectation was unsustainable, according to Nathanson.
"Wall Street just paid people for subscribers, and because it paid people for subscribers, companies did not care about the economics," he said. "They were willing to do whatever they could to chase subscribers."
In other words, the grow-at-any-cost strategy could never last, and now we're at a point where companies and Wall Street are looking at balances sheets and focusing on profitability and revenue as much as scale.
It's not like the streamers are really sweating over this, though:
"Video remains the most popular leisure activity in the world," Ball said. "Streaming may change, but consumers will adapt. They love video too much."
Media executives be looking at you like:
Be prepared to shell out more money for less streaming!
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