Netflix is facing an existential threat: they own basically no durable, quality content licenses. Their early streaming ascendancy was finally eclipsed by the logical conclusion of... each and every content owner building their own competing streaming service, and removing the content from Netflix. So Netflix, which used to be this phenomenal value where, for one $15 or so/mo fee, you could watch a _ton_ of the shows you loved, along with some of their new and interesting original content... now just has... that new and a lot of times not interesting original content.

Being able to obviously read the tea leaves, they started investing insane gobs of money: $17 billion on content in FY21, $18B this year. (It's not clear to me what the breakdown is of that amount on original content vs licensed content.)

But content is all they have. It's all they _can_ have. It's all any of these streaming services can have, but the rest are not purely streaming businesses. Disney is going to spend $33B this year (though $11B of that is sports rights via ESPN). And Disney has... the entire Disney catalog, as well as Marvel AND Star Wars, analogs to which Netflix has precisely zero of. (Disney doesn't even anticipate + being profitable until 2024 at earliest, which is really saying something.)

So it becomes a question of, can you make it back on volume? Can you outrun the giant boulder? And more importantly, is there anything about Netflix that positions them to manage this risk better than any of their competitors? HBOMax has the WB portfolio AND HBO portfolio. Disney is Disney. Peacock is attached to a cable/internet conglomerate and television studio.

I genuinely don't know if their way out here is to keep throwing $20M per special to the likes of Dave Chappell and Louis CK. Investments like Stranger Things feel like a better ROI, especially once you know you have a following, and arguably no one has better data insight than Netflix but I think content costs have spiraled, Netflix is temperamental and sometimes cancels fan favorite series, and sometimes funds series' that make no sense or are effectively obviously clickbait ("How to Build A Sex Room", "Too Hot to Handle", what is this, Cinemax?)

But then, they stumble on the odd mega-hit, like Tiger King or Squid Game or Bridgerton or The Crown. Not even odd hits, then. They do produce hits, and good content. But the question is, is the model itself sustainable? Can you be a pure streaming studio, where your subscriber base outpaces your content and tech costs? That's been the case historically; they've been profitable. But more and more, people are consolidating accounts, leaving after bingeing the few shows they care about, and abandoning Netflix, and Netflix doesn't have a capacious room of other business models they're attached to.

And people are weird creatures. There are plenty of people who consider immediate access to Friends or The Office to be deeply compelling reasons _alone_ to maintain their HBO or Peacock subscription. We know that because Netflix paid $100M for a single additional year of Friends _alone_. And literally $500 MILLION dollars for 5 years of Seinfeld. What's it say about the model that they know that it's worth it to pay half a billion dollars on a single property for all of five years, domestic only? Woof.