Netflix has been streaming content for over a decade. Most importantly for our discussion here, multiple studios operated under one channel even if that channel was owned by their archrival (as HBO is owned by Warner). Original content was able to co-exist with studio content and third-party content that was licensed title by title.
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With only their subscribers in mind, they could afford to show edgier content that was too extreme for Free TV and its dependence on advertisers. It’s also important to note that Pay TV companies had great success with producing original content. They would agree on these terms for ten years, go out to a big steak dinner to celebrate and all that was left was film delivery. They would negotiate the Pay TV rights based on the domestic box office of a given film. and several smaller distributors including The Weinstein Company. Starz was in bed with Sony and Disney and Showtime had Paramount (most of the time).
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HBO was owned by Warner so they would license their content along with Universal and Fox. These three companies were focused on both adding new subscribers and retaining the ones they had by licensing box office films from the major studios. I wrote about this moment in time under the alias Fawn Lebowitz here.ĭuring this heyday, the Pay TV world was largely owned by HBO (and their subsidiary Cinemax), Starz and Showtime. This model would later lead into Netflix and Starz licensing content (that Starz had licensed from Sony and Disney) to Netflix’s emerging streaming platform. This allowed Pay TV companies the freedom to focus almost exclusively on the content their members wanted to see and didn’t have to factor in the varying needs of multiple advertisers. Pay TV differentiated itself from linear or “Free TV” as instead of using advertising as revenue, it used subscription dollars.
I am not going to go back to HBO and the 1970s but more the late '90s when cable was at its peak and Pay TV was a huge part of what made cable attractive. There are just going to be too many options and not enough dollars to go around.Īt this point, it's prudent to talk about Pay TV and its history. So, what’s next?Īt this point, most BMD readers are fluent with the different streaming services out there and I have already started to hear growing worries in the comment sections and on social media about the number of services already out there and the new ones coming. Pandora’s Box is already open and we’re not going to be able to go back from subscription. It happened in music first, so it's logical that the media of movies would transition as well.Īs in the music industry, and as I’ve cautioned in this space a lot, moving from transactional where every piece of content has a specific cost to it, to subscription, where the all-you-can-eat platform is the only part that has a specific cost connected to it, just de-values the content. It's all streaming all the time.” The transition wasn’t just from analog to digital but from transactional to subscription. A phrase I’ve used in the past has been “We didn’t know what the world would look like when we transitioned to digital and now, we do. I’ve frequently talked about the transition to digital in these columns.