)
The first month back from the festive holiday season, yikes. January brings with it the pressure for most to start working towards achieving their ultimate goals for the year. Already, the pressure has been peaking for some within the entertainment industry. You can see who’s been asserting themselves as the top dogs for merchandising performance in January’s Merchandiser of the Month here.
I can’t quite believe it, but I am AGAIN bringing Netflix straight into this monthly review. They are entirely unstoppable and this “talk of the town”, in particular, is going to be quite hard to swallow for some. Apparently Netflix has officially won the streaming wars. Why? The Financial Times reported that Netflix’s rivals, such as Disney, Comcast and Paramount will have had over $5 billion in losses in 2023 (TechSpot, 2023). Not quite finished though, the likes of Max, Disney and Paramount have been under severe pressure from Wall Street, causing these streamers to licence their content to Netflix. Notably, the streaming giant will be licensing Sex and the City, an HBO favourite, from Warner Bros. Discovery (Fast Company, 2024). This is mega news, with Max being a key competitor for Netflix. On top of this, Netflix has just struck a $5bn deal to live stream WWE’s Raw show (Financial Times, 2024).
It’s been a hell of a month for Netflix, and if they are going to be grabbing all of the good stuff, how might this affect their presence and ownership of the digital platforms? Are the other streaming services going to be stranded in the middle of the storefronts, eventually being left to drown due to their lack of appeal, compared to Netflix? You can keep an eye out by taking a look at our Merchandiser of the Month reports each month. Here is our January report to start you off!
Despite what it may look like, Netflix isn’t the only one making moves. A major win for Alphabet’s subscriptions services, including YouTube and Google, was announced this month as they reached a revenue of $15bn (Variety, 2024). YouTube being the key driver, this is five times the amount of revenue that was achieved in 2019, according to CEO Sundar Pichai. That’s some pretty fast movement.
Amazon also announced its plans to set Prime Video’s default mode to ad-supported, the ad-free option now being an extra $3 a month. There have been estimates from the likes of Next TV, that even on the lower end of the scale, believe Prime Video could end up with 60 million ad-supported subscribers in the U.S.. They also stated that even if only half of this figure were to watch content on Prime Video, that it will give the App three times the amount of ad-supported subscribers than Netflix has (Next TV, 2024). Having an impressive slate of highly anticipated original TV series, this stage will be a serious platform to consider for the advertisers.
Wanting to know which Streaming Apps and titles were in the spotlight during January, for digital prominence? You can view our Merchandiser of the Month January report here.
