In Q1 2023, PARQOR will be focusing on four trends. This essay focuses on "The definition of scarcity is continuously evolving away from linear. What happens next?” 

The PARQOR Private Slack now live!

The plan is to test out a few different use cases over the next few months. The primary objectives are to figure out better ways to:

1. Share articles that are must-read and related to PARQOR's Key Trends (#parqor-essays channel)
2. Create an environment for real-time discussion around "seismic shifts", major market headlines and earnings calls in the media marketplace; and
   
3. Build the foundations of a community for quarterly in-person events and education.

So, we are starting simple and small. If you are on the free tier and are interested in testing it with me, please respond to this email.

Both Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav and Disney CEO Robert Iger have been entertaining to follow in this era known as “the streaming wars”. They are big public personalities who have promised big things to investors, with the biggest being a successful pivot of the business model to streaming. To date, Iger has had more success than Zaslav: more scale and subscribers, more international launches, and better and more sophisticated technology.

So, when they admit having made the same mistake in the same week, it is worth stopping to consider that mistake and why they both made it. The overall mistake was the assumption that streaming is a one-size-fits-all model for all content. 

Zaslav was the first to concede that bundling HBO Max and discovery+ is not what its target consumers need. The Wall Street Journal reported that Warner Bros. Discovery plans to keep Discovery+ as a stand-alone streaming service and not integrate it into a single supersized streaming service. It added, “The decision to keep Discovery+ is part of an effort to avoid risking losing a significant chunk of the app’s 20 million subscribers who might not want to pay the higher price to access that content, according to the people familiar with the matter.”

As for Iger, he implicitly conceded on Wednesday's earnings call that having a bundle of Hulu and Disney+ may not be what Disney’s target consumers need: “we’re going to look at the volume of what we make. And with that in mind, we’re going to be fairly aggressive at better curation when it comes to general entertainment because when you think about it, general entertainment is generally undifferentiated as opposed to our core franchises and our brands which because of their differentiation and their quality have delivered higher returns for us over the years.” 

Key Takeaway

Disney's Robert Iger and Warner Bros. Discovery's David Zaslav both begin 2023 digesting the same difficult lesson: the futures of their businesses rely more on feeding consumer passion than they do on aggregating scale.

Total words: 1,500

Total time reading: 6 minutes