🎬 Streaming Giants Earnings
🎬 Streaming Giants Earnings
Unpacking at the latest quarter and subscriber trends
Greetings from San Francisco! 👋🏼
Over 93,000 How They Make Money subscribers turn to us weekly for business and investment insights. Glad you're here.
Today, we unpack Streaming Giants Earnings for Premium subscribers.
We'll visualize the recent performances of key market players and examine the broader landscape.
Sports streaming gets a bundle ⚾️🏀🏈
Last month, Disney, Warner Bros. Discovery, and Fox teamed up for a supersized sports streaming service this fall, bundling ESPN, TNT, and Fox Sports.
🎽 Strength in numbers: The new app will combine the sports offerings from ESPN+ and broadcast TV networks. That includes rights to various sporting events from the NFL, NBA, MLB, and NHL.
🏷️ Pricing: Some analysts have suggested the new sports streaming bundle would cost $40 to $50 per month, but there’s no official price yet.
🔮 Forecast: Fox Corp CEO Lachlan Murdock estimates the total addressable market at 60 million US households. On Monday, he said he expects the new bundle to reach 5 million subscribers in the next five years.
🥅 The main goal: Cable is slowly dying. Legacy media companies must deal with streaming churn and retain subscribers all year round as sports events unfold—essentially recreating the cable bundle.
🤔 Who’s buying this? YouTube TV offers most of this sports content in addition to news networks and entertainment channels for $73 per month. It crossed 8 million subscribers in February. Meanwhile, FuboTV (a sports-focused streaming service) has less than 2 million paid subscribers.
♾️ Fubo is not happy about this: The company filed an antitrust lawsuit against the three companies, calling them a “sports cartel.” CEO David Gandler blasted the bundle as an “attempt to monopolize the sports streaming industry and eliminate competition.”
Conversely, Netflix has avoided this fight, focusing on ‘sports entertainment’ with shows like Formula 1: Drive to Survive and by investing $5 billion in WWE over the next ten years. We cover it here. ⬇️
So, what did we learn from media giants this earnings season?
Today at a glance:
Trends and market share.
Disney’s Indian joint venture.
Peacock’s wild card.
Warner’s grim picture.
Roku’s growing pains.
Paramount’s DTC losses.
For a glossary on SVOD, AVOD, OTT, DTC, and more, revisit our Industry Showdown article for an extensive market overview.
1. Trends and market share
The chart below shows the current paid subscriber trends in the past four years. Some only started sharing their membership numbers recently. YouTube Premium, Amazon Prime Video, or Apple TV+ don’t share their numbers quarterly.
Disney will merge its Indian assets with Reliance in 2025. So, I’ve excluded Disney+ Hotstar from the Disney+ subscriber numbers, making it a better comparison.
Churn remains the most important KPI in the streaming market. Customers find it easy to hop between services, so maintaining subscriber loyalty is becoming a critical challenge. Netflix has dominated particularly because of its industry-low churn rate.
The shift from linear TV to streaming has been a high tide lifting all boats, as illustrated by the following chart.