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Netflix Plans To Spend $7 Billion On Content In 2018 (streamingobserver.com)
According to the Streaming Observer, Netflix plans to increase its budget by $1 billion dollars over the next year and spend over $7 billion on content in 2018. Previously, the company paid $6 billion in 2017 and $5 billion in 2016. From the report: While the internet freaks out about Disney ending its streaming agreement with Netflix, the company continues to forge ahead signing high-profile talent and throwing an enormous budget at its original programming. Just days after the Disney turmoil, Netflix's visionary Chief Content Officer Ted Sarandos stated that the streaming leader plans to increase its budget by $1 billion dollars over the next year. As of now, Netflix currently has $15.7 billion in outstanding obligations in deals for new series and films over the next few years. With such an astronomically-large budget, media analysts are already beginning to wonder if Netflix is "rescuing" or "ruining" Hollywood by creating such a singular creator-producer-distributor model. Sarandos counters those claims, however, stating that Netflix is merely on the forefront of what's already a growing trend throughout the media industries: "I would say that the relationship between studios and networks has always been that of a frenemy. Everyone is doing some version of it already. They just have to make a decision for their companies, their brands and their shareholders on how to best optimize the content. We started making original content five years ago, betting this would happen."
Because most of us only have a few hundred hours per year to spend watching anyway.
Get a browser addon that plays video at higher speeds. They're miracle workers. I usually have mine set at 1.2x to 1.4x depending on the content. You quickly get used to it, and you save tons of time.
Yes Disney has some nice content. But looking over things it's not that much compared to what I get from Netflix in terms of original programs...
Also the stuff from Disney tends to be in a certain style, while the Netflix content has been way more varied and differing in topic or target.
I wish Disney good fortune in striking out on their own but I wonder if these days they are as valuable a content commodity as they imagine themselves to be... especially with Netflix spending some percent of that money on original YA programming with more freedom of creative control than Disney is willing to give.
It's kind of like the iTunes/iPod thing is happening all over again except in TV world and this time more people saw the writing on the wall and there are more players than Apple in the game at the ground level. I have cancelled my cable TV subscriptions and mostly watch Netflix, Amazon Prime and YouTube on an Apple TV connected to a TV whose tuner circuitry's only use is to get cursed at whenever I switch to it by mistake when flipping between HDMI inputs. However I could be using any number of other TV streaming boxes which is nice plus you can play games on these things even if they are no high powered consoles. Hulu gets no use because: 'Hulu is unfortunately not available in your region'. I think Amazon Prime and Netflix hit the jackpot when they went for their own content in a big way, didn't license it to the TV mafia but rather offered their services in all regions and relied on original content made by independent contractors to sell their service rather than the old establishment. Netflix/Amazon original content is half of what I watch on those two services even if their original content is still a fairly small portion of their total content catalog.
Well, Disney owns Marvel, so I kinda care.
I suspect this means all Marvel content will eventually be pulled from Netflix. I enjoy most of the Marvel series Netflix currently offer.
And they also own Pixar. I'm a grown man, but I still enjoy Pixar.
- Don't do what I do, it's probably not healthy nor safe. -
I'm assuming you aren't a child.
Every parent will buy most of their movies if they can. My wife loves the old ones, my kids the newer. They are freaky valuable.
They have Star Wars, which sucks (sort of, they are working it and not poorly in my opinion).
But my kids are over Phineas and Ferb (Disney), which is sad as I liked that a lot.
Now we're into Teen Titans Go, which is not Disney, and is awesome for children and adults (they just did a 4 episode run based on the 1980s, a song, The Night Begins to Shine, basically for people my age, the kids liked it as well but didn't understand most of the references).
Ebb and flow. But we won't be taking the Disney streaming river anytime (we have some through cable, but don't watch it much, Cartoon Network rules at this time).
Netflix is kicking ass on original content. I prefer their expansion business model as opposed to the consolidation model existing companies use, Disney being the poster child for such.
BlameBillCosby.com
I still don't quite understand why old content owners are so reluctant to license content to Netflix, especially content that's pre-1975 or so.
Outside of really notable films (Academy Award winners, etc), those films and especially TV shows aren't making any money sitting on the shelf at all and few copies are probably being sold on DVD/BD even if they are available on disc. It literally makes more sense to license them to Netflix than to do nothing.
Even in the case where principals had lucrative deals that would allow them to hold up licensing to streaming/digital formats, a lot of those principals are dead and their inheritors probably aren't either going to object or will accept whatever extra is offered to them for a streaming deal. This would seem to get better as you go further back, not worse. Maybe in some cases it would be worth whatever risk to just run the risk of cutting someone out and pay them off if they object.
Even if $Studio has some kind of vague plans for their own streaming services, we haven't seen any of them do it or if they're still planning to, it's slightly more complicated than just slapping up a web site, meaning there's years before they're able to do it and they could license their content out for a couple of years without risking their own service.
I'm sometimes convinced that Netflix isn't even trying to license this content, they're trying to ween subscribers off other people's content so that in 5 years or whatever nobody (especially young people) will even know that Netflix actually had third party content. Or the other theory, that content owners simply don't want back catalog available because there's so much of it that's worthwhile that it would seriously degrade interest in their new content.