| > That’s still a small number of players dominating the market. That’s the definition of an Oligopoly, and the Disney/HBO offerings very much fall into that. The market is “content”. Netflix competes with YouTube content producers, TikTok and it even said that one of its biggest competitors is Fortnite. > This is probably due to the characteristic that producing goods (decent original content) This goes back to YouTube. You and I may not think that YouTubers and TikTokkers are producing “decent original content”. But there is a generation that spends hours on both. Besides that, there were over 550 original series being produced last year (https://collider.com/too-many-tv-shows-550-series-2021/). Competition is much fiercer for your attention than it was when you only had the three major networks producing content and everyone else buying rights to show reruns. There are bidding wars between all of the streaming services for new content from producers. Competition is more fierce than ever. The price of streaming before was never sustainable. Netflix was borrowing billions a year for years to produce and obtain content. Disney+ was never going to be profitable selling its service at the introductory price. It’s not “collusion”. Every company has to turn a profit eventually. Yes I realize that Netflix was “profitable” by GAAP standards. But it was getting deeper in debt every year. |
It competes with these for screen time, not for content.
Meanwhile Disney owns how much content (movies, series and related IP)?