Just last year, Derek Johnson, professor and chair of the Department of Communication Arts, wrote a chapter about the streaming service Paramount+ for the second edition of “From Networks to Netflix: A Guide to Changing Channels,” an academic review of the modern TV-streaming landscape he edited.
By the time the book left the print shop in 2022, just about everything had already changed.
Such is the volatile nature of the streaming wars in the 2020s, a landscape where a wide range of corporate content providers — Netflix, Amazon Prime, HBO Max (er, Max), Apple TV and Disney+, just to name some of the top players — are competing for viewers in a fractured market that’s changing by the second.
Johnson, whose research focuses on media industries and the culture behind their businesses, is only too happy to try to keep up, even if it’s not always an easy task. In recent months alone, he’s had plenty to track: Disney+ has announced that it is raising rates on its monthly subscription model while simultaneously removing recently produced content; Amazon Prime has spent hundreds of millions of dollars to achieve underwhelming viewership on shows like “Citadel” and “Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power”; and HBO Max, under new corporate leadership, is trying to reinvent itself completely, including a name change.
“I'm concerned with how media people working in these industries see themselves and their work,” says Johnson. “All this TV content and film content — how do streaming services make sense of it? What is going to count as success? They’ve imagined this new media industry into existence, and now everyone — scholars and programming professionals alike — must come up with new ways to make sense of industry practices.”
In some cases, those practices are doubling as pendulum swings or complete about-faces. Netflix, the original stand-alone streaming service, began its life as a subscription-based alternative to ad-supported television but has now introduced a slightly less expensive ad-supported tier (and soon will end password sharing).
“They’ve had to change their story,” Johnson notes. “They’re now trying to tell their story to both advertisers and subscribers.”
HBO Max’s recent move to re-brand, in which the company booted the first part of its name as part of a strategic re-organization of the content it produces and presents, is narratively puzzling to Johnson.
“What’s more important to how you tell your story than your name?” Johnson asks. “They’ve somehow decided that HBO, which, 15-20 years ago, was the name synonymous with quality and prestige in television, is the liability. The fact that they’ve decided to distance themselves from that past and decided the most valuable part of their name is ‘Max’ tells us something about how much has changed so quickly.”
Over at Disney+, the shift seems to be related to tight management of the company’s content libraries, a longtime strategy that dates back to the original Hollywood film distribution model. After years of making the majority of Disney content available to Disney+ subscribers and inundating them with new television shows, the House of Mouse has pulled a list of offerings, including “Willow,” which had only been on the platform for six months. Johnson sees it as a return to the strategy of the 1990s and 2000s, when Disney used to periodically announce it was putting its popular animated films “back in the vault,” creating an imaginary deadline to juice sales of DVDs. Meanwhile, Paramount+ recovered the rights to its “Star Trek” content from Amazon and Netflix, hoping the franchise and possible spinoffs would lure in a loyal subscriber base. (As it turns out, “Yellowstone” was the streamer’s stronger franchise.)
“The impulse to maintain tight control over content has been ingrained in studios’ corporate cultures for a century,” says Johnson. “I don't think it felt good at Paramount or Disney to be reliant on Netflix to bring in all this subscription revenue and not get the lion’s share. They didn’t want to be the ones to supply the content for a bigger fish; they wanted to be the bigger fish.”
These are hardly the only shifts. For decades, TV lovers shelled out sizable monthly fees for a cable bundle that gave them channels they wanted — and a mountain of additional channels they likely didn’t. Streaming services promised an alternative model, but, as Johnson notes, they’ve recently bought back into the bundle business big time. Disney+ offers a bundled service with Hulu and ESPN+, while Paramount+ is asking consumers to fork over extra fees to access Showtime, the legacy prestige cable channel.
“It’s a rollback to the cable model. If you want access to everything, you’re going to have the equivalent of a big monthly cable bill very quickly,” says Johnson.
Johnson agrees that we’ve been on the downside of “Peak TV” for a while now, the recent golden age in which streaming platforms made massive investments in high-quality, scripted content. Now streamers are beginning to question the wisdom of expanding production at all costs.
“It's a market correction, but it’s one that has some potential negative consequences for things like diversity,” explains Johnson. “When all these services were hungry for content, they were willing to spend a lot of money and talk to a lot of creators, and that had an effect of removing some of the barriers to access that made production less inclusive. And I’m a little nervous about what the end of Peak TV will do to that.”
In recent years, Johnson has shifted his research to examine major media companies’ commitment to diversity, and how both audiences and activists are driving it, particularly in relation to major entertainment franchises like Star Wars, the Marvel Cinematic Universe and Harry Potter. Johnson sees these franchises as a potential bridge to something better.
“Here is a particular battleground where the companies want to expand their reach without taking unnecessary risks, and there can be interventions from the outside that work to push that in certain ways,” says Johnson. “There’s a belief that we’ve got to grow, or else there’s going be a problem. Well, diversity is a way to do that. We could see alliances between social movements and these corporate cultures.”