The streaming wars have been heating up for years. Initially, it was Netflix’s game, as the popular service effectively defined streaming as we now know it before anyone even tried to compete. But as media companies started launching their own one-stop streamers, the landscape has shifted—slowly at first but increasingly fast of late. So what does that mean for the future of streaming?
If every entertainment company has their own streamer, it becomes harder for any one company to hold onto licensed titles, so virtually every service needs exclusive new content. Can you make do with just one service? Would one main streaming platform and one or two supplemental services do the trick? Are we approaching a new reality with streaming bundles reminiscent of cable packages?
Since it first launched its VOD offerings in 2007, Netflix went largely unchallenged for nearly a decade. Or, at least, that’s the popular narrative. In reality, Hulu launched in 2007, the same year that Netflix expanded and started its streaming service. “The major difference is that Hulu was starting from scratch, establishing its brand out of nothing, then a virtually non-existent eco-system,” says Stanley Miller, a marketing and communications professor at Emerson College. “Netflix was never really the only game in town, but it established its supremacy early on.”
Netflix already had a decade’s head start as a brand tied to home entertainment, beginning as a mail-order video rental service, like a Blockbuster mixed with Amazon. As Netflix grew as a streamer, so did Hulu, where it would eventually be bought by Disney in 2019. In that time, other companies have thrown their hats in the ring, offering either new original content, library titles, or a mix of both. Some crashed and burned, and others have carved out small niches of the market for themselves. But still, others have begun to actually challenge Netflix for the top spot. They’re not there yet, but we’ve seen incredibly rapid change in just the last few years, and that could mean major disruptors in the future of streaming.
Hulu has been Netflix’s main competitor for years. As the playing field began to shift around in 2019 and 2020, Netflix still controlled about twice as much of the streaming market as Hulu, but together, the two streamers accounted for more than half of streaming subscribers in the US. After launching in 2019, Disney Plus has become one of the fastest growing streamers to challenge Netflix in terms of number of subscriptions, providing only exclusively Disney-owned content and specific Disney brands. Amazon Prime Video has existed in some form since 2006, serving as a bit of an outlier as it’s not just a streaming service, it’s wrapped into regular Amazon Prime accounts.
Late entries in the streaming game include HBO Max and Apple TV Plus. Launched in 2020, HBO Max is WarnerMedia’s massive subscription based service that includes HBO titles, films from the Warner archive, and a slew of other licensed and original content, like series Station Eleven, Hacks, The Flight Attendant, and Euphoria. HBO Max also took a bold step to release Warner Bros.’ entire film slate, day-and-date for the entirety of 2021, meaning that subscribers can watch films like Gozilla vs. Kong, The Suicide Squad, and Dune included in their monthy subscription. This move resulted in the streaming service growing and gaining almost 10 million subscribers.
A bit slower to pick up steam, Apple TV Plus has been the fastest growing streaming service in the last year. Unlike most of its competition, Apple focuses almost exclusively on original content. Subscribers can still rent or buy shows and movies on Apple TV, but the Apple TV Plus brand is for in-house productions and exclusive streaming deals. Projects like The Morning Show, Ted Lasso, Severance, and of course, Best Picture winner CODA have allowed Apple TV Plus to more than quadruple its paid subscriber base in the past year, according to Antenna and The Observer.
Companies with smaller libraries than WarnerMedia and Disney have been launching their own dedicated streamers too. NBCUniversal’s Peacock and Paramount’s Paramount Plus are small but mighty additions to the space. There are the smaller services catering to niche audiences as well, such as Mubi and The Criterion Channel. And of course, there are the many live TV streaming services such as Roku TV, FuboTV, and Sling TV, which effectively migrate cable bundles and experiences into the streaming space. In addition to traditional streaming options, Hulu, Apple, and Amazon have also started to include live TV options, including live sports.
Furthermore, a lot of journalists—and the executives who manage them—will head into a decidedly non-traditional competition in 2022, one that won’t necessarily be won with news scoops. They are rushing to produce new kinds of show formats, and relying on anchors both familiar and less so, all in a furious bid to keep a younger generation of consumers from developing new connections with digital upstarts that threaten to siphon them away. The fight is well underway: NBC News continues to toute its still-growing NBC News Now streaming outlet. CNN, meanwhile, is expected to launch a significant marketing blitz behind its soon-to-launch CNN Plus, which will require a monthly subscription fee. ABC News is also trying to launch streaming content in 2022, according to Kim Godwin, president of the Disney unit. “It’s about reaching audiences wherever they are, whenever they want and on whatever device they are on,” she says in an interview with Variety. “Whoever does that the best is going to win this war.”
This many new players means power is shifting, and fast. Antenna, an analytics firm that specializes in subscription streaming services, has reported some major changes to streaming service market shares just in the last year. In 2021 alone, streaming services overall saw a jump of 57% in new subscriptions compared to 2020. Paramount Plus, Apple TV Plus, Peacock, and Discovery Plus represented 82% of that growth. That means that the playing field is leveling, at least a little bit. Bigger streamers like Netflix, Disney Plus, and Hulu barely grew at all in that period.
“The paradigm shift in content consumption has to do with the desires of the average user,” exclaimed Miller. “People no longer want to travel to theaters or wait for their favorite show to air a new episode every week. People want content, and they want it as fast as they can get it.”
The combination of the desires of users in this “peak TV” era and the recent production and release delays as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic has led to an overwhelming amount of content. According to a Nielson report analyzing the state of streaming titled State of Play, almost half of streaming users in the United States say they feel overwhelmed by the sheer amount of programming on streaming services.
The survey reveals that 46 percent of streaming consumers feel overwhelmed by the ever-increasing number of platforms and titles available to them, which can make it tougher to find specific titles in a specific place. And no wonder: As of February, according to Nielsen, there are 817,000 unique program titles (series, movies, specials and other programming) available via streaming services—an increase of some 171,000 titles (26.5 percent) since the end of 2019. The continued increase in the amount of available content has meant a corresponding rise in time spent streaming. Streaming consumption totaled 169.4 billion minutes in February, an 18 percent rise from a year earlier (143.2 billion minutes).
And despite the widespread sentiment that the huge volume of programming feels overwhelming, viewers have no plans to slow down. An overwhelming 93 percent of respondents in Nielsen’s survey said they plan to keep the paid streaming services they have or add more over the next year. The percentage of people who subscribe to four or more streaming services has more than doubled (from 7 percent to 18 percent) in the past three years.
A majority of survey respondents also said that faced with such a high volume of content, a streaming bundle would be an attractive option: Nearly two-thirds (64 percent) of respondents said they’d be interested in a bundled service that allows access to several different platforms—provided they can choose which ones.
In the future, we are likely to see streamers exist in a more diverse ecosystem, with streaming bundles helping us manage our subscriptions. Disney already bundles Disney Plus, Hulu, and ESPN Plus at a discounted rate. And Amazon Prime Video allows you to sign up for individual “channels” like Shudder and Showtime to fill out your subscription with some extra content.
“A lot of production companies already have streaming platforms,” states Miller. “It won’t be long until every content based company joins the market, and right now, we are looking at a content-based Game of Thrones, and there is no telling who comes out on top in the end.”