Streaming wars, episode 317
This week's episode of the streaming wars has been an eventful one. CNN announced a streaming service (?), Netflix paid almost $700m to acquire the works of Roald Dahl and Disney announced that its streaming subscriber growth was likely to slowdown this year.
A golden ticket
The most notable of those headlines is almost certainly the £500m ($680m) that Netflix spent to acquire the works of Roald Dahl — the author behind books such as Matilda, Charlie & The Chocolate Factory, Fantastic Mr. Fox and many others.
Spending the best part of $700m for creative control of Dahl's works is a huge bet, even for a streaming giant like Netflix. That number doesn't include any future production costs of actually making the shows, movies or merchandise — confirming that Netflix is looking to ramp its content spending back up, after a lull during the pandemic. In its most recent quarter Netflix spent more than $4bn in cash on content assets, close to its quarterly record from 2019.
Handing over the money is, of course, the easy bit. Getting good value for every dollar spent on content is the hard part — even if you have access to the viewing habit data of more than 200 million subscribers, as Netflix does.
If your family owns the rights to some popular characters or stories, you might want to give Netflix / Disney / Amazon / Apple a call.
