| The streamers make some shows that some people want to watch. Netflix’s report, first of its kind, showed 20 titles that you will have never heard of unless you use TikTok. Most people are watching the shows most other people are watching, it’s memetic. People want to feel like they’re a part of something; that is they’re are willing to pay $20/mo in Fear of Missing Out. Nobody has FOMO for old Disney content. The largest expense for Netflix is creating content, all the shows in that report were from 2022 and 2023. The kicker is that it’s the opposite of the top of the Steam charts, indicating how bad of a business the streamers are in. Those games are most free and have been around for a long time, sometimes decades. Both games and TV/movies were threatened by piracy. Yet the result for TV/movies was wildly undercharging for the stuff people were pirating - giving away the old catalogue content on the premise they were competing with $0, simultaneously ceasing to monetize their pay to play audience. Huge mistake: they should have wildly increased enforcement, which would have been much much cheaper and effective. TV/movies just do not have enough secular ways to innovate like games do to completely supplant piracy from a technological and social perspective. Two takeaways: (1) the pay to watch model model was much more sustainable, because most content makes way more sense to sell for those payers, it was non-FOMO content, it was good content. (2) in order to make most of the highly engaged streaming content sustainable, streamers must innovate in monetization, and it’s not obvious if ads will be enough. |