In recent weeks, the conversation among users of streaming platforms has been focused on Netflix’s subscription policy change. The increase in prices of its ‘premium’ modality, the additional surcharges to continue sharing access to the same account from different homes or the dissuasive measures for those who did so, but that complicate family situations other than the nuclear home, have not been exactly good welcomed. However, this risky step by the company that has more than 200 million subscribers worldwide is only a symptom of a general rethinking of the sector. Far away from the ‘boom’ of cable television, and after ‘streaming’, which led to talk of a golden age of television series, and also over the gold rush that made more and more players rush to occupy your own space in this promising territory, the bubble has already found its limits. And the operators, many of them at the same time tech giants threatened on many other fronts, are now trying to keep it from blowing up.
On the one hand, with the search for new income with initiatives such as those of Netflix or the incorporation of advertising to diversify the sources of income and retain users who are not willing to multiply their spending. On the other, through cost control via mergers, dismissals, cancellations and adjustment of the (unreasonable until now) volume of production. And finally, with a rethinking of its offer, which we are analyzing today: safe bets, repeated exploitation of consolidated franchises, reduction of creative risk…
Serialized fiction distributed at home has not only left the film industry in a delicate state for having imposed itself on feature films as a format and exhibition halls as a place of consumption. It has also done so for having offered a not insignificant part of the public an adult and quality leisure production from which Hollywood cinema was moving away in favor of spectacle and the repetition of formulas that were less and less surprising each time. maybe that ‘streaming’ seeks its viability in this same hyper-exploited recipe not be the infallible solution. The multiplication of segregated services in recent years has also made another of the tricks that this new form of audiovisual consumption could play more difficult: for a series to become a commonplace of social conversation (which was only possible when the services those to be subscribed to could be counted on the fingers of one hand, not at a time when not only the number of titles, but also the number of installments to be paid, becomes incomprehensible).
At a time of contraction in family spending, subscription offers (leisure, in the field of entertainment or sports, but also information, or access to ‘software’ services) must adjust their pricing policy and look for its raison d’être in its relevance to the user, in tough competition with a multitude of needs, interests, loyalties and temptations. At the moment, investors seem to be rewarding the weight loss cure of the big platforms. It remains to be seen if users will continue to find the same reasons to maintain their loyalty.