Recently, America’s largest entertainment conglomerates have participated in a sometimes exciting quarterly ritual of revealing their latest financial results to the Wall Street community. Their performances have been mixed. Disney – once again led by a smooth CEO Bob Iger– said that it lost subscribers to Disney + for the first time in the last three months of 2022, as its streaming division as a whole was more than $ 1 billion in losses, and ready to 7,000 layoffs in a broader effort to cut costs. Warner Bros. Discovery, whose one-year anniversary is looming, fared slightly better, reporting modest gains at HBO Max, where aggressive efforts to curb spending last year led to smaller streaming losses. “We took bold, decisive action over the past 10 months, and most of our restructuring is behind us,” said the CEO David Zaslav assured investors. Netflix, meanwhile, said that efforts to stop a subscriber last year, which upset the entire industry, have been working. Expressing confidence that the company’s stock will recover from the big drop in 2022, co-CEO Ted Sarandos promised, “We have great growth ahead of us.”
However, tones that were once operatives involved in the early days of the streaming wars, have been notably absent from these carefully worded releases. In this latest installment of Inside the river, Vanity Fair senior media journalist Joe Pompeo and Hollywood journalist Natalie Jarvey talk about what comes next – peak Hollywood TV time (which may have topped last year with nearly 600 total scripted series spinning). As ominous New York Times Suggested headline in late 2022: “The Golden Age of Streaming Is Declining Suddenly.
There are certainly signs that the sun is setting on the golden age of the stream. For the past few years, media companies have invested billions to try to catch up with the real cost of Netflix. But the rough 2022 of the streaming pioneer forced all players with a competitive service to question whether it was really worth pursuing subscription growth at all costs. FX chairman John Landgraf, which measures how many series Hollywood releases each year, recently predicted that the number of shows will start to fall in 2023 as companies pull back on their content budgets .
The cuts have led to a few months of confusion for viewers who, until recently, have enjoyed the ravages of the streaming wars. Buzzy shows how Western world and Super pumped pulling them from streaming services. Netflix is cracking down on password sharing. And it’s more complicated than ever to find out which streamer you need to pay to watch a hit series like, say, Yellow stone. The uncertainty of Hollywood also creates anxiety for the people who make this whole show. TV writers, already frustrated that streaming has shaken up how they get paid, are worried that fewer shows will mean fewer jobs, and as the May 1 deadline for the union contract, some are fighting for a strike that could shut down much of Hollywood. .
It’s all enough to wonder: Is the streaming party over? Listen to the program and let us know what you think.
