A small fall in subscriber numbers sent Netflix stock down 25% overnight in what stock market observers are calling the “streaming crash.”
All the companies involved in streaming crashed in sympathy. Paramount was down 11%. Warner Discovery dropped 5%. Disney was down 4% and even Amazon lost 2%.
As usual I was early to this. I wrote about the streaming crash in 2019. “The limits to the streaming market are time and, to a lesser extent, money,” I wrote. If you were reading closely, you’d know the most important limit is time.
My son hardly ever watches TV. He never has. He’s a gamer, and so are most of his peers. My daughter watches TV, but she also multi-tasks with gaming. My wife does neither. She likes books. I am the big spender here, but even I lack the time to buy more than YouTube Premium and Amazon Prime. I like podcasts but don’t have time for even the half-dozen or so I subscribe to.
There are only so many hours in the day. Even if you work from home, the chores mean you may have just 4 hours to entertain yourself. You face a host of good choices for that time, and not everything will get in your door.
This impacts everything. If you’re charging for a lot of stuff, we’re just not buying. This includes news, which has lost its audience to its own paywalls. I can’t justify subscriptions to things I won’t look at.
For 25 years now, I’ve been advocating for per-piece pricing on the content we like but don’t love. You can’t buy a newspaper by the day anymore, so you don’t look at it. You can’t buy a magazine on a whim, so you don’t subscribe. The same attitude is moving to our TV screens, at the same time those who control the programs are demanding subscription revenue. It’s all going the way of newspapers, where just a few are left standing while the rest fall away.
In TV that means cash is king, and the Cloud Czars have the cash. Your entertainment will come from Apple, Google, Amazon and (since we’re so much into gaming) Microsoft. Everyone else is vulnerable unless they figure out how to charge piece rates.
