Embattled Studios Face a Continued Uphill Battle in 2024
The media sector has little to celebrate this holiday season. As the major studios continue to face depressed share prices, crumbling revenue streams and an uphill battle to push their direct-to-consumer operations into profitability, Netflix’s victory in the streaming wars has become all but assured.
You could easily attribute that victory, or at least trace it back, to Netflix’s decade-long head start on building an audience and investing in the streaming experience. But it helped that its competitors, once they finally got into the SVOD business, bungled their way through nearly every step, from clunky user interfaces to poor branding to misbegotten content investments. (Somehow, Disney managed to turn a winning hand of the biggest franchises in the world into its worst crisis in decades.)
So here we are, more or less back where we started: Streaming is ascendant but unprofitable, theatrical and linear TV are declining, and everyone is licensing content to Netflix, with peak TV demolished and millions of dollars in shareholder value lost along the way.
The question now becomes whether there are any options left that would keep the legacy players competitive in the DTC game.