The Medium
Member Mailing: Netflix Disrupts The Great Game, Again
In Q1 2023, PARQOR will be focusing on four trends. This essay focuses on "Media companies have millions of consumer credit cards on file. What happens next?"
Like millions of others (presumably), I watched the Chris Rock comedy special “Selective Outrage” on Netflix last Saturday. My initial reaction was that the viewing experience felt like “The purest uninformed viewing experience that Netflix has offered in the Internet era.”
There was also an intangible feeling that because I was watching this on Netflix I was sharing a moment with millions of viewers worldwide. It was similar to watching global sports events like the Super Bowl or the World Cup, but different in the sense that *everyone* was watching simultaneously *on Netflix*.
So, knowing the scale of Netflix made it all feel like a different collective viewing experience. I’ve watched live performances from the Coachella Valley Music Festival on YouTube before, and fans who tune in know when and where a concert is taking place. But YouTube never has promoted Coachella the way Netflix promoted “Selective Outrage” across the media and within its ecosystem of subscribers.
It certainly helped that it was glitch-free for me. Where Netflix goes from here is anyone’s guess. But the moment and the aftermath — Netflix’s first “water-cooler moment" for a live event — suggests that Netflix now offers the linear model’s value proposition to 230 million subscribers on a single platform globally. The linear and broadcast models now seem outdated. Nothing will be the same again.
A theme in 2023 has been growing uncertainty in the marketplace, and all signs suggest that Netflix’s success disrupted that uncertainty and created more. For this reason, I am going to do something slightly different this week. Rather than write an essay, I am going to lay out how I think the pieces are lining up for the rest of the year through the lens of each of PARQOR’s key trends.
Ideally, I am helping you think these changes through before you discuss them with your managers, clients and/or investors. The objective is to help you create greater certainty in a moment of growing uncertainty. This is the first of a series of four essays this month.
Key Takeaway
After Netflix’s big livestreaming accomplishment, everything in streaming and traditional media seems both possible and at risk of disappearing. The “pathetic dot” helps us to identify where certainty in the marketplace still exists.
Total words: 1,800
Total time reading: 7 minutes
A Framework Q1 2023, to date
Media companies with scaled streaming services now have an asset: millions of credit cards with recurring monthly revenues, impacted primarily by churn rate. But, as AMC Networks Executive Chairman recently wrote to shareholders, “the mechanisms for the ...