The Medium
The WWE's Path To Market-Making With Netflix & Comcast
Good morning!
The Medium delivers in-depth analyses of the media marketplace’s transformation as creators, tech companies and 10 million emerging advertisers revolutionize the business models for “premium content”.
In last Thursday’s “Lessons on Market-Making from Nielsen's Video Top 10s for 2023”, I concluded “Streaming platforms that have not prioritized market-making technologically and strategically” need help from third parties to scale their best content, new and old. Legacy media can generate recurring revenues by offering a direct-to-consumer subscription service, but some content in their library may be more valuable to consumers on other platforms. As 2023 year-end data from Nielsen reflected, Disney, Warner Bros. Discovery and NBCUniversal have all learned that audiences may prefer to consume their valuable library either in different pay windows or on third-party services elsewhere on the free market.
This story is messy. All of these businesses have similar business objectives for licensing content to third parties. But, they have different business objectives for which valuable library titles they opt to license to third parties and why. For example, Warner Bros. Discovery has a growing need for cash flow while Disney comfortably relies on both its Experiences business (theme parks, cruises) and ESPN for 90% of its operating income.
An easier way to understand how this problem may be solved is through the lens of the WWE’s efforts in streaming. Through four general pivots (actually multiple pivots within multiple territories) of its streaming business model—the last of which is a 10-year deal with Netflix—WWE has quietly become an expert in how to make a market in streaming.
Key Takeaway
Ten years into the streaming business, WWE has pivoted its way into two distribution partnershswith market-making abilities in Comcast (domestic) and Netflix (domestic and global). All available evidence suggests this is a smart deal that is both risky and underpriced.
Total words: 1,600
Total time reading: 6 minutes
Domestic Pivot
The WWE launched the WWE Network as a standalone direct-to-consumer service in 2014 offering access to its content library. Despite being distributed globally, the subscription service never scaled: Its maximum subscriber base was 1.95 million subscribers. It had 1.5 million ...