This is a BBC story
As the famed and admired early-mover in the high-quality streaming industry, Netflix has built a formidable business worth in the region of $125bn. In the past three months, it added 6.7million new subscribers, bringing its total userbase to 153million worldwide.
But the next three months will prove to be its most challenging yet. Soon, Netflix will be competing with Disney+, HBO Max and Apple+ - all companies with enormous brand recognition and a strong desire to take their own slice of streaming’s riches.
On Wednesday, Netflix wrote to investors to tell them that competition would be a good thing. The rising tide of streaming services would just tempt more people away from “linear TV”, as they term it, and into streaming services.
“Just like the evolution from broadcast TV to cable, these once-in-a-generation changes are very large and open up big, new opportunities for many players,” the company told investors.
“For example, for the first few decades of cable, networks like TBS, USA, ESPN, MTV and Discovery didn’t take much audience share from each other, but instead, they collectively took audience share from broadcast viewing.”
Netflix pointed to the fact that its growth rate in the US and Canada had been almost identical in the past six years, despite only one of those markets - the US - having a significant competitor in Hulu.
That may be the case, but Netflix’s argument neglects to address what will be different about what it can offer subscribers in the years ahead. Netflix’s back catalogue is in the process of being slowly picked to pieces, with competitors taking back shows and movies that they agreed to put on Netflix at a time when they didn’t have a streaming product of their own.
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