In all of the examples, the smaller competitors banded together. Who are the "smaller competitors" here? Disney certainly isn't smaller than Netflix by any reasonable measure, and Amazon has a built-in customer base because of bundling with the free shipping.

Perhaps all of the "also-ran" services Paramount, Hulu, Peacock will band together, but I wonder how successful that will be vs. just leasing their material to Amazon or Netflix.

Streaming is also interesting because of the less-fungible nature of flagship content. The Witcher is not precisely a substitute for Game of Thrones and Wheel of Time is certainly not a substitute for either. The main reason to not switch from "Bank of my local village" to a Bank of America is friction, and "Bank of your local village" doesn't directly compete with "Bank of my local village" but both compete with B of A, so there is a natural alliance there.

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Also, VCRs; Betamax was more expensive and had a shorter runtime, while quality of self-recorded material was less important to consumers. VHS won by being cheaper and better matching customer use-cases; maybe that was because it was open, but it was not directly because it was open.

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> [Netflix] has pursued the wrong strategy, and doubled down at every opportunity. The company has spent billions of dollars on proprietary films and TV shows in order to create a position of market dominance with a totally closed system. But that was only phase one. We are already in phase two, with Disney, Paramount, and others removing their offerings from the Netflix platform, and trying to create their own powerful fiefdoms.

Netflix would be out of the streaming business today if it hadn't pursued this strategy; the writing was already on the wall for content-owners doing their own streaming before Netflix produced original content. Streaming platforms are being commodified, but streaming content is not.

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> Do you think Netflix can match that with its proprietary approach? The company will be forced to open up its own system, or face inevitable decline, perhaps even obsolescence

Again, Netflix isn't pursuing a "proprietary approach" by choice; if you want to sell Netflix any license for your content (exclusive or otherwise), they are more than happy to do so if the price is right. Look at everything available that isn't "Netflix Original" (and note that even some of that is not exclusive to Netflix, as they may have only partial ownership).

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> Here’s the bottom line: Netflix might be one of the largest companies in the world, but it’s far more vulnerable than it looks at first glance. And it doesn’t have the brand franchises it can milk like Disney—which can churn out Marvel and Stars Wars movies with reasonable assurances of market success.

This is the only paragraph related to Netflix in the entire article that I agree with. I don't know how the author can hold this truth in their head while blasting them for spending money like water trying to generate such a franchise through massive spends on content. If the author's thesis is that Netflix is doomed to fail, then Netflix should just shut down streaming operations right now.

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Isn't Roku already a bit of what the author wants? You can search across multiple streaming services and have them all in one place. Sure you have to actually pay for those services, but most of them can be signed up for in the Roku app, and nobody's giving their content away for free...