"There's Always Money In the Banana Stand."
Or why we shouldn't stress about which streaming platforms will survive or not, regardless of what the New York Times says (or tries to?).
For dramatic purposes I wish I could truthfully state that when I finished a lengthy New York Times story: “The Future Of Streaming (According to the Moguls Figuring It Out),” that I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.
But it was already too late. I had been laughing since the start of the story (and then cringing repeatedly as it went, then laughing more).
The real story was that I was exhausted trying to figure out how to deconstruct and destroy the whole thing, which seemed both too easy and too pointless.
But that’s what the NYT wants you to do. If they keep giving you more stories about Tik-Tok trends, eventually you’ll stop being annoyed and just fold up and accept it. So I thought, nah, I probably should take this one.
Because here was the nation’s biggest paper declaring, in a rambling, snaking, switch-backing ode to a ruined industry, that “not very many” streamers will ultimately survive.
That’s a bold statement.
(And one that comes near the bottom, after you’re dizzy from the story’s ADHD approach to chronicling myriad woes crippling the industry).
But is it right? (No.) Doesn’t the story need a lot of asterisks? (Yes.) Couldn’t an astute observer take away that streaming isn’t killing the industry, mismanagement of multiple aspects of that streaming is killing the industry? (Yes.)
For example, I kept thinking as I read the piece: “It sounds like everyone’s mad because in the past, with the old mechanics of the business, you could fuck up a thousand times over and still print more money than you could spend; but now you have to figure out how to fuck up a whole lot less frequently to be able to print half the money.”
Could the whole problem of the Streaming Era boil down to greed and ineptitude, then? (Probably).
So, yeah, it took a few days but I decided I couldn’t let that damn thing just lay there like the stinking bones of a dubious hot take. So, let’s go:
For starters the NYT was interviewing two 80+ year old billionaires who had made their fortunes in the cable industry, which is now a groaning pile of metal twisting in agony to the ground, flames and screams everywhere. In 2024, it seems, there’s just a lot less yachts, man. The cable-made billionaires seemed incapable of forward thinking, like they were lingering on the regrets of modernity and technology, defeated by and frustrated at Netflix, making ridiculous statements that paint them so far out of touch that you might feel pity were they not filthy rich and astoundingly (but not surprisingly) cocky about fixing the future, without offering much sage advice on how.
It was easier to laugh at the two NYT writers who believed this was a colossally important “get” — sailing on a yacht with three moguls who, contrary to the headline, are decidedly not figuring it out. There was John Malone, 83, who made cable into a cash cow and is now “an influential shareholder in Warner Bros. Discovery and a longtime mentor to its chief executive, David Zaslav,” though the article doesn’t add that Zaslav, he of the “Max” idea instead of HBO, has made a dog’s breakfast of Warner Bros. Discovery, done no favors to HBO, ruined the app that connects all the companies and will, at some point, be last seen jumping off the ship with a golden parachute.
Granted, that’s a lot to add as a descriptor.
Barry Diller, 82, whose 156-foot yacht they were all on in Florida (naturally), is a longtime industry power and current chairman of IAC, a digital media company. The NYT called him “the industry’s most sought after elder statesman” and ends the entire story quoting Diller’s brilliant advice that there’s a future ahead for streamers if they stop trying to be Netflix (although the story itself suggests that’s precisely how to stay alive) and stick to what “has been true since the beginning of time,” which turns out to be this:
A successful TV business “is based on hit programming, making a program, a movie, a something that people want to see.”
Well, Barry, that bolt of lightning will certainly fix things. If only the streamers made “a something that people want to see,” they wouldn’t be floundering. Got it.
Overall the article is a standard albeit thorough recounting of recent industry trends, most of them negative, but it is otherwise maddeningly evasive about having a point. It weaves all over and suggests that to be successful, streamers will dauntingly need 200 million subscribers, a notion agreed to by Amazon and Disney execs, seeing as they both have crested that number and are looking up at Netflix’s 270 million.
The other person on that yacht? Brian Roberts, 64, who took over Comcast from his father, hence being roughly two decades younger than the other sailors. Comcast, which has cable roots, bought NBCUniversal (cable, broadcast, theme parks, etc.). Roberts and co. started the Peacock streaming service, which has decidedly less than 200 million subscribers and, according to this same NYT story, lost $2.7 billion on streaming. Why is he on the yacht?
Of course, the story doesn’t truly explain how Peacock (or any other streaming service) lost money. But here’s a typically damning paragraph in a story that is mostly doom and gloom: “Paramount, the media empire controlled by Shari Redstone, lost $1.6 billion on streaming last year. Comcast lost $2.7 billion on its Peacock streaming service. Disney lost about $2.6 billion on its services, which include Disney+, Hulu and ESPN+.
Warner Bros. Discovery says its Max streaming service eked out a profit last year, but only by including HBO sales through cable distributors.”
Ooooof. The last sentence makes it clear that Warner Bros. Discovery also lost money on streaming because, duh, you can’t count HBO subscriptions sold through cable, so pretty much everyone except Netflix were losers? But how did Disney “lose” $2.6 billion on streaming even after having more than 200 million subscribers, which is suggested to be the safe zone? Again, no explanation.
But here’s a thought: All of those companies are conglomerates, so maybe other pieces of their business besides the actual streaming platforms contributed to the losses? Until we see the accounting, let’s say yes.
The one streamer the story isn’t worried about is Netflix, whose primary business is…streaming content.
(The story just accepts that Amazon Prime is profitable because Amazon the Elder doesn’t report those figures and is tied in, you may know, to a very large company that makes a lot of money selling and shipping things. So, sure, I guess I’ll believe Amazon Prime is making money.)
Even though the story notes Disney lost $2.6 billion last year in streaming, as of May this year, apparently, the various platforms in the company (Disney+, Hulu, ESPN) “eked out a small profit.” That’s quite the turnaround. Or, last year, quite the write-off.
The story annoyingly calls Netflix and Amazon “disrupters,” even though both have been in business and churning out shows for longer than the term seems applicable. The inference is that they are “disrupters” because they are two heavyweights, successfully making it in streaming (although they didn’t disrupt Disney, I guess?) As mentioned above, at moments like these in a very sweeping story, the gut suggests that industry struggles are self inflicted for streamers that are “failing,” not the work of agitating “disrupters.”
Also, let’s be clear: There was cable, then there was Netflix. That’s your disrupter. Everybody after that, Amazon and Apple included, were just additional players.
Ah, Netflix. A few things the story makes clear, stated or unstated: Every publicist at Netflix must have been delighted by this article because 1) Ted Sarandos looks like a legend while Malone and Diller look like vanquished whiners and Roberts the Younger looks like he’s in the wrong story, hanging out with the wrong guys; 2) If this NYT article is saying anything it’s that nobody has an answer for Netflix and, best of all, 3) Sarandos gets to say anything he wants, almost unchecked, and the best thing he says is that nobody else has enough good content to compete. He just says that out loud. If a non-Netflix streamer has a hit, he’s saying, that’s it — once it’s done there’s nothing else to watch there. They just wrote it down and put in the story! It’s kind of ludicrous and mostly untrue, but not entirely untrue; regardless, Sarandos gets to etch it in stone in the NYT. If you’re, uh, Max, the streaming service from the entity known above as Warner Bros. Discovery, you should be livid reading that, because you have an insanely deep vault of shows. Unfortunately, you have no one in this story except “influential shareholder” Malone, who might be mentoring Zaslav but did him no favors in this article.
About that: At some point (for me it was the first paragraph), you realize that the New York Times has a two-person bylined story about major television industry trends and is using, as its main figurines, two guys (Diller and Malone) who came of age in the cable era — that is now over — and who don’t run any of the streaming platforms at the center of this story. Kind of a big deal, maybe? The other guy, Roberts, who, deep in the story seems to realize he’s positioned badly and basically says that Peacock isn’t trying to be Netflix and is doing its own thing (his quote is a word salad of nonsense so I’m just using “doing its own thing” to make him sound better), tossing out this gem — “We all have a different calculus to define success in streaming” — in the same story that says he lost $2.7 billion. Maybe they just used a different calculus?
Roberts the Younger, running a streaming platform that is small, not trying to get large and be Netflix, and using its special calculus, also finds himself on a yacht with a guy (Malone) who said this: “Can your current business be a successful player and have long-term wealth generation, or are you going to be roadkill? I think all the small players will have to shrink down or go away.” Man overboard!
The story is more nutty every time I reread it, mostly because it’s an all everything bagel, but it does finally say that “not very many” streaming platforms will survive, then boldly posits: “That suggests the once-unthinkable possibility, many of the executives said, that there will be only three or four streaming survivors: Netflix and Amazon, almost certainly. Probably some combination of Disney and Hulu. Apple remains a niche participant, but appears to be feeling its way into a long-term, albeit money-losing, presence, which it can afford to do. That leaves big question marks over Peacock, Warner Bros. Discovery’s Max, and Paramount+.”
OK, heavy sigh, about that math: Only three or four? Netflix and Amazon are two. “Probably some combination of Disney and Hulu” — well, they are currently jointly owned but separate and definitely not going away, so now you have four. Whatever weird sentence that is justifying AppleTV+’s existence nevertheless surmises, correctly, that it’s still going to be around. That’s five. Then there are three left, according to this story, and what will happen to Peacock, Max and Paramount+? Well, other than Roberts the Younger raising his hand and wishing he wasn’t in this story any longer, the only thing I’m sure of is that it’s some kind of insanity to think that Warner Bros. won’t have a streaming service for its massive amount of content, no matter how badly Discovery wants to muck that up. So, in this scenarios we’re now at six streaming survivors, not three or four. But it gets worse:
Who is going to tell the New York Times that there are actually more streaming platforms? Awkward.
I’m going to stop right there, even though there’s an endless amount of other oddities in that story. Lots of good information as well, to be fair, and I’m trying to be fair. The biggest problem I had with it — other than the bad math and the dubious yacht stuff — is that the Streaming Wars is an enormously large topic to deconstruct and one story, no matter how many times you switch wildly back and forth, is not going to do justice to the issues that are present. I think the NYT would have been better served — and served its readers better — to do a multi-part series instead of one confusing story. Done that way, the urge to, say, predict survivors when you’re not accurately counting the combatants, would probably not rise up.
On the plus side, what this story did was lay some groundwork on where to start anew on a premise. What if, for example, all the doom and gloom and steep losses say less about the modern day structure of streaming in the industry and more about how badly those inside are running the operations?
Take the yacht out and ponder that.
Netflix had years and years of red ink and just now turn a profit. Why Wall Street ran away from the other stremings before they could start making a profit? I think streaming has a more reliable future than AI right now
I don't want the other streamings to close and I don't wanna only Netflix making shows.
Great takedown. But please tell me the name of the yacht was the Seaward. 😆