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from the pray-I-do-not-alter-it-any-further dept.
It's difficult to imagine that Friends, a show that ended 15 years ago, could be of any real importance to a modern streaming giant like Netflix.
In fact the sitcom, which features a bunch of 20-somethings living together in a time before streaming was even invented, is US Netflix's second-most watched show.
Today, Netflix announced that it's poised to lose its rights to broadcast the series to its original parent company, Warner, which plans to launch its own streaming service, HBO Max in the first quarter of 2020.
The blow follows another announcement in June that Netflix's number one series, the US version of The Office, is also being snatched back by its creators, NBCUniversal, to be broadcast exclusively in the US on its own yet-to-be-launched streaming service.
Old media, analysts are noting with no small amount of surprise, is suddenly bringing the fight to Netflix, and it looks like Netflix could be the one that gets knocked out, or at least very knocked around.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 13 2019, @11:58AM (1 child)
The dichotomy here is that competition is good for consumers, but fragmentation is bad for consumers. When one of these Netflix-wannabes runs out of cash, or their parent company decides that the losses can no longer be justified to the "we only care about the next quarterly earnings report" investors, the rights to these exclusive shows will be sold to the highest bidder. This will drive the costs up for the remaining services and will be passed along to the consumers.
I'm not advocating for maintaining Netflix's pseudo monopoly. Just pointing out that this land rush will start with low-priced loss-leader style service packages and a predictable financial bloodbath that ends up splashing the consumers during the consolidation process.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 13 2019, @03:15PM
Competition is good for customers when there's alternatives. You may personally like one of the brands of ketchup, but if it's no longer available or the quality drops, you can just buy a different brand. TV shows and movies are usually not so easily replaced. If there's a particular show you want to watch, that's what you want to watch. You might accept something else because you couldn't get what you wanted, but in many cases people turn to nautical themed sites as shows are not really substitute for each other.
This is more or less what they want, they want for customers to have to sign up for a half dozen different sites with the assumption that most people have large amounts of disposable income and are willing to deal with the hassle of figuring out which service has the show they want. My parents just have Netflix, Sling and Prime and that's almost too much in terms of trying to remember what shows were where. Then there's Prime's annoying habit of making it a pain to find programming that's included as they insist upon mixing the paid content in with the free content.
The solution is pretty simple, prevent the exclusive agreements that allow one or two services to hoard all the programming people might want.