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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."
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.
I don't like Disney, but the problem is they're hijacked so much culture now that it's hard to avoid them. This is precisely why Disney shouldn't be allowed to keep buying IPs - they're just too big.
They started out and grew by taking popular public domain stories, wrapping their own designs around them, then claiming them as their own, even suing people who then dare to try and make their own adaptations of the public domain content in some cases, thus effectively engaging in cultural theft.
But then they bought things like Pixar, Marvel, and Star Wars with their ill gotten gains, so other major IPs are now controlled by them.
Any other purchase of media companies by Disney should be blocked as anti-competitive in any sane market. You can argue this would go against the free market, but Disney's whole existence has been about manipulating the market to their own advantage with frivolous lawsuits and IP law lobbying to bend the free market away from being free in the first place. In a free market free of IP law manipulation by the likes of Disney, 90% of Disney's IP would now be just as free for making derivative works of as the stories Disney created most their IP from in the first place.
Unfortunately even some of Netflix's originals are based on Disney IP, so Disney pulling out puts some of their best original content at risk. Disney is the too big to fail equivalent of the entertainment world, and if something is too big to fail it needs to be broken up until it's not.