Max, Netflix, Off-Licensing, and The Real World
我要我的MTV, Rob Tannenbaum and Craig Marks’s rollicking oral history of MTV, chronicles the fumbled founding and turbulent first decade of the pioneering cable TV channel that transcended its “asinine beginnings” to (temporarily) become “the sun around which popular culture rotated.” The authors describe the dubious, but also ingeniously low-stakes gamble on which MTV was founded. Unlike practically any TV network that preceded it, MTV也不会授权, 也不创建自己的内容. 此外, that content would consist of music videos—a new type of programming that few people were making, 要求更少的人, 没有人把生意建立在.
With few available content sources to choose from outside of roughly 30 Rod Stewart songs and a few dozen submissions from British and Australian New Wave bands little known in America, how did MTV plan to fill out the rest of their ambitious 24-hour programming schedule without repeating the same songs every hour or so? 通过问别人, 唱片公司, 制作并支付[视频]费用, 那就免费交给他们,坦南鲍姆和马克斯写道. “That’s not a business model, that’s chutzpah.”
There was arguably nearly as much chutzpah in Netflix’s original business model of trying to kill the Blockbuster down the block with a 3-day-delay mail-order approach, or their attempt to largely phase out physical media in their second phase. 但是回想起来, Netflix的前原创内容, when most viewers subscribed to the service to binge syndicated TV series like 办公室美国的对冲业务比美国的多得多 就是今天我们所熟知和喜爱的Netflix, which has lost money non-stop since they committed to producing their own shows. Their faith in the power of SVOD was laudable, as was their plan to make the content so irresistible and plentiful that the subscription base would eventually grow big enough (and tolerate enough price hikes) to pay for it.
But the most interesting stories in premium SVOD over the last couple of years have involved various 紧缩战略 来弥补这个模式的失败. 第一阶段当然是添加 广告支持层, with Netflix, HBO, and Disney leading the charge.
最近, in the cost-cutting wave that followed the WarnerBros-Discovery (WBD) merger, the new WBD has made some interesting moves (not the least of which was their confounding decision to drop the “HBO” from HBO Max). 去年12月, WBD cleared out some of the platform’s backlist deadwood, as older shows and newly canceled recent hits like 西方世界 开始消失. Much as when baseball players cut from major league rosters are slapped with the dreaded DFA—designated for assignment—tag and dropped to the minors or simply dumped, several post-premium shows were designated for re-release on free-streaming FAST channels.
This wasn’t an entirely unprecedented strategy 为HBO, which has at several times licensed older properties for off-network syndication on lower-rent platforms (among them deals cut with Amazon before Prime threw its hat into the original programming ring).
But perhaps the most surprising HBO outplacement news came in late June, 当时《欧洲杯在哪投注》透露，它正在“谈判” 授权HBO的五季喜剧 不安全的 以及其他DFA授权给Netflix的HBO节目, the first time HBO has ever let a tier-one original content competitor get its hands on HBO content. Like selling ads and staggered season releases for Netflix, 为HBO, cutting such a deal with a premium rival was internally frowned-upon if not strictly verboten until recently.
This move may represent a desperate measure in desperate times, or simply indicate that WBD CEO David Zaslav has the chutzpah to ignore the HBO old guard when only tradition stands in the way of making a profitable content licensing deal. 如果Netflix, 同样的, isn’t signaling a return to the lower-risk strategy of leveraging others’ content creation investments, the deal marks at least a potential course change for both financially insecure premium content powerhouses. 只有时间能证明一切.
相关文章
Netflix reported a strong third quarter after the market closed on Tuesday, with more growth anticipated in Q4 after its Basic with Ads tier launches November 1 in twelve countries as part of a wider development in the streaming ecosystem that will see streaming platforms engage with the metrics of linear broadcast for the first time.
2022年10月18日
What lies ahead for Netflix in the ad-tier/hybrid era?
10月14日2022
美国客户将于2023年夏季开始使用, 这两个应用程序将成为一个统一的服务, with both an "ad-lite" and an ad-free version becoming available. A LatAm expansion follows, and the European market launch is in 2024.
2022年8月26日