“Well, it’s a bitch,” Netflix Chairman and Co-Chief Executive Reed Hastings said of the results while addressing employees in a town hall on Wednesday afternoon, according to people familiar with his remarks.

One could look at all this market chaos and its disproportionate impact on media companies - if not Netflix in particular (the quote, above)- and broadly conclude that streaming has reached a dead-end. Meaning, declining stock prices now reflect investors no longer believing streaming's business model is the future of content distribution as cord-cutting emerges, either as a growth model or as a business model.

As I argued back in March, I think that is a simplistic conclusion and especially in the case of Netflix and its 220MM subscribers. But, that is also not an unfair conclusion, as I have also long argued with the PARQOR Hypothesis: an optimal media business model in the 21st century will require more attributes than a streaming service, alone. To date, Netflix has struggled to solve for the additional elements of that model.

At a more granular level, Netflix still has an advantage in streaming over other services. All streaming services are each “a walled content garden, blocking out or strictly limiting access to competitors’ content” - as IAB Executive Chairman Randall Rothenberg recently tweeted - but those apps which have the most content are better positioned to succeed than more niche services. His point is that walled gardens are generally, but not always, dead-end experiences for the consumer. 

So, generally speaking there are two dead-ends in the post-”streaming wars” marketplace:

1. At the macro level, the subscription streaming business model hitting a dead-end with investors and potentially consumers (“ Streaming Hits A Dead End”), and 
2. At the consumer level, emerging market and consumer dynamics are being shaped by dead-ends within the streaming consumer experience (“Dead Ends in Streaming”).

These twin dynamics help us to look past the doom-and-gloom of this chaotic market moment, and focus on important market signals about where streaming business models are heading.