The state of streaming TV in 2023

It seems like a distant memory now, that moment when Netflix-and-chill started popping up in text messages and BuzzFeed posts galore. Partly, that’s because it was something like eight years ago—sufficiently far enough in the past to qualify as distant. More importantly, though, consumers have since been inundated with so many platforms and so much content that the idea of Netflix or anyone else being synonymous with the very concept of a streaming library now seems surreal; not so much a memory, but a dream.

In 2022, Netflix had a rather abrupt wakeup call. It was the kind that happens in a Scorsese movie, where a character opens their eyes and there’s a gun in their face. After a decade of unrelenting growth, the prototypical streaming juggernaut started bleeding subscribers. A lot of them. Stock drops and layoffs inevitably followed. Perhaps even worse, though, for the first time ever, Netflix appeared to be officially past its prime. (Though still ahead of Amazon Prime, of course.) Fortunately for the company, just a few zeitgeisty hit series later, and Netflix appears to have recovered much of its lost momentum. For now, anyway. Considering how many competitors have modeled at least part of their approach on peak-spendthrift Netflix, however, 2022 should be taken as a wakeup call for the entire industry. Yes, the Scorsese kind of wakeup call.

Here are seven takeaways from the most chaotic year yet in the streaming era.

1. Walmart vs Wawa

Walmart beefed up its riff on Amazon Prime earlier this year by building into the deal a Paramount+ subscription in lieu of its own digital library. It’s a rather anticlimactic dip into the streaming space, considering that, since at least 2018, the dominant goal of Netflix and its imitators is to be considered the Walmart of streaming content.

Several services openly aspire to be one-stop shopping destinations for all your entertainment needs. They want to plant their flag as the premier place for reality TV, blockbuster movies, standup comedy, children’s programming, beloved old sitcoms, and the FOMO-inducing prestige series that no one at the office will shut up about. However, 2022 turned out to be the year that the staggering extent to which Netflix’s blank-check spending outpaced its subscription revenue finally caught up to it. Following months of stock turbulence and layoffs, the company put a $17 billion cap on its budget for the next few years, which still sounds way too high. But that figure seems even higher when considering how well the opposite of the Walmart strategy—the Wawa approach—seems to be working for others.

If you’re unfamiliar with Wawa, well, that’s perfectly fine with Wawa. The venerable chain of gas stations and convenience stores is restricted to the East Coast, and thus is definitionally not for everyone. But just try telling that to the fiercely loyal customers who defend it with extreme prejudice. Those folks don’t kid themselves that they can find everything they might ever need at a Wawa, but they know they’ll find exactly what they want in an environment they enjoy being in, so they make it a point to stop by as often as they can.

Wow Presents Plus, the subscription service of RuPaul’s World of Wonder, operates this way. So does the horror hub Shudder, although that streamer’s fortunes may be turning. Although Apple TV+ hasn’t quite induced a Wawa-level wave of affinity just yet, it seems well on its way. This year, the service expanded beyond its signature hits, The Morning Show and Ted Lasso, delivering buzzy, Emmy-attracting series such as Severance and Pachinko right after winning the Best Picture Oscar—for the film, Coda—that has eluded Netflix like Moby Dick to Captain Ahab. Apple has the money to license a warehouse worth of content, but it would rather instead keep an accessible convenience store of well-curated goods.

Disney+ is similarly comfortable being a place to visit only for certain items, rather than one-stop shopping. It just so happens that those items include Star Wars and Marvel, each the franchise equivalent of its own Walmart.

2. If you build brand loyalty, you best maintain it

I have watched precisely one Discovery Channel show ever, and it’s called Trixie Motel. Perhaps I’m in the minority, but I have a hard time fathoming how Discovery’s content could possibly be so popular as to rival all Warner Bros properties, let alone dictate the direction of the recently-merged Warner Bros Discovery’s streaming service, HBO Max. And yet here we are.

Ever since CEO David Zaslav took over the conglomerate in April, HBO Max has slowly but surely loosened the bolts on all the goodwill that it’s accrued over the past two years. The company canceled much of the original programming that helped establish the streamer’s burgeoning identity, scrapped several HBO series, including Westworld, so as to license them out to other services, and axed a Batgirl movie and the second season of Max Original Minx when both were well into production. All to make room for a zillion episodes of Property Brothers and Naked and Afraid, coming to the almost certainly renamed service sometime in 2023.

With these moves, Warner Bros Discovery has sent a signal to creators that they’re just interchangeable digits dancing on the company bottom line–and a signal to viewers that they needn’t bother getting too comfortable with any one show, since it might be gone in a blink. A similar culling occurred at Netflix as the company attempted to recoup some of its costs; however, Netflix has had an itchy cancel-finger for so long—despite frequently rescuing unjustly canceled shows like Manifest and turning them into hits—that instability is already baked into the brand.

3. The future of streaming is cable TV

The most cost-effective way for a Wawa streamer to become a Walmart is through partnerships. Hulu shells out for a big selection of cable and network shows shortly after they air—including an exclusive deal with FX, which paid off big time this year through word-of-mouth hits The Bear, Reservation Dogs, and Fleishman Is In Trouble. Also, if a vast digital library is incompatible with a platform’s mission, it can simply offer access to a partner’s catalog for an extra monthly fee. Amazon Prime offers deals to upgrade with other channels, including Starz and Showtime, while Disney+ has several bundling options.

That’s right, the streamers have reinvented cable TV. Sure, $82.99 a month sounds like exactly the kind of monthly fees from which cord-cutting was supposed to liberate us, but a package that includes ad-free Hulu with live TV, Disney+, and ESPN+ (with ads) sure covers a lot of bases. 

Speaking of live TV . . . .

4. Live to the fullest

Live events enfold viewers in a larger community, forging a sense of togetherness much lamented since the death of monoculture. Anyone waiting for the next The White Lotus, a galvanizing hit which had social media in a chokehold at a level that eluded both Rings of Power and House of the Dragon, might be waiting a long time. All sorts of unifying live sports are on TV every week, though–and increasingly they’re also on streamers. Apple TV+ kicked off its MLB partnership with Friday Night Baseball earlier this year, and hopes to keep the World Cup soccer party going in 2023 with Apple’s Major League Soccer season pass. Similarly, Amazon introduced its Thursday Night Football broadcast of NFL games this past fall, and more recently rolled out a live, 12-hour content block called Sports Talk. Peacock—the NBC service whose critical hit, Girls5Eva, just graduated to Netflix—also has a toe dipped into live sports, with golf, Premier League, and NFL games on tap. Beyond sports, Hulu livestreamed Lollapallooza this past summer for a second year in a row, and Netflix is set to release its first-ever live comedy special, from Chris Rock in March 2023. (Obviously, Netflix has also expressed interest in getting in on the sports bonanza as well. Because that’s what Walmart would do.)

5. Abandon the idea of the streaming blockbuster

The two biggest horror hits of the year almost weren’t hits at all. Or rather, they were almost that nebulously defined commodity, the streaming hit, where you sort of just have to take the platform’s word for it. In any case, both Airbnb horror flick Barbarian and the supremely creepy Smile were originally headed to Hulu and Paramount+, respectively. After both did “crazy well” in test screenings, though, they were sent on the theatrical track, where Barbarian went on to make $45 million, and Smile took in an astounding $216 million. Eventually, when the former landed on HBO Max and the latter on Paramount+, both were greeted with fanfare that would have surely eluded them had they skipped theaters, bringing in a second rush of viewership.

As Netflix recently demonstrated with its thoroughly odd strategy around the release of Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery, the rules are changing around what goes into theaters and what merely streams. While a Judd Apatow-produced star-making rom-com like Bros and David O. Russell’s ensemble epic, Amsterdam, might have once automatically merited theatrical runs, their studios could have saved them from the stigma of flop status by sending them right to streaming. One wonders whether those films tested crazy well, too, or merely “positive.”

Meanwhile, Disney left some money on the table—something the company is famously loathe to do—by releasing Hocus Pocus 2 on Disney+, where it immediately became the streamer’s most watched movie ever, along with Disenchanted, the sequel to the similarly titled Amy Adams hit from 2007. If only the company had traded those films’ streaming releases with that of its latest animated offering, Strange World, a Thanksgiving theatrical bomb that might have instead been a happy surprise for Disney+ menu-dwellers to stumble upon.

As release strategies continue to evolve, though, it might be time to abandon the dream of the streaming blockbuster. Making first-rate movies that go right to streaming is smart. HBO Max’s timely Kimi, starring Zoe Kravitz, and the Andy Garcia-led remake of Father of Bride both had a big-ticket feel—that ineffable quality of not having been “made for TV”—but felt like the right scale for a home-viewing experience. However, movies like Netflix’s The Gray Man, which aimed to blow out TV screens with its inherent immensity, failed to generate the kind of conversation commensurate with its $200 million price tag. If that action flick had got butts in seats in a wide release, it would have earned way more attention when it landed at Netflix however many weeks later. If it doesn’t seem like the kind of movie that could provoke that level of reaction, however—that is, if it didn’t test “crazy well”—why does anyone participate in the fiction that audiences should be thrilled to be able to skip the theater and watch it right at home?

6. We have somehow still not hit the peak of IP-mining

Did you like Jackass Forever? How about a reboot of the TV show on Paramount+? Did you miss Pitch Perfect? What about a spinoff Peacock series just about Adam Devine’s character? Were you absolutely clamoring for a new remake of Cheaper by the Dozen? Disney+ has got your back, ditto dozens of Star Wars shows, and even more Marvel ones. Can I interest you in Hulu’s gender-flipped How I Met Your Father? Peacock’s dramatic reinterpretation of the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air? The return of Willow? Beavis and Butthead? Frasier? Extended universes for Yellowstone, Bosch, and Stranger Things? Did you like The Batman? How about an entire That Batman universe, including a show about Colin Farrell’s Penguin, a show about Gotham PD, a show about Arkham Asylum, and, of course, a sequel or two? Let’s do a prequel series for the remake of Dune, on the same streamer—whatever HBO Max ends up being called—that’s also creating a prequel series for the remake of It. Why not? Somebody always loves everything.

7. Prepare for the plateau

While we have still not yet managed to hit the peak of sequels, spinoffs, and reboots, we may have finally arrived at the saturation point on streamers themselves.

Let’s face it: There are a finite number of potential subscribers out there, and no one streamer will ever get them all—no matter how many annual billions it sinks into its content machine. As Netflix’s troubles began earlier this year, the analysts at MoffettNathanson published a report claiming the streamer has tapped “about half of its total potential broadband-based subscribers while barely scratching the surface of the world’s lower RPU [revenue per user] mobile subscribers.”

But that sounds like a fantasy. Perhaps Netflix could have maintained its unimpeded ascent forever in the absence of competition, but it’s foolish to expect continuous growth in a Streaming Wars environment. At some point—and that point may be right now for Netflix—the goal has to become retention, something that is about to become a lot more complicated.

According to a report cited by The Verge, as of December 2021, 85% of U.S. households were subscribed to a streaming service. Just as there are a finite number of potential subscribers out there, though, there is a finite amount of money they can reasonably be expected to pay in monthly fees. Unfortunately for all parties involved, those subscribers may have finally hit their limit in 2022—the same year that every single major streamer announced a price hike. (Well, except for Peacock, which weirdly slashed the price of its premium tier back in August.) Although nearly all of these services now offer a more affordable, ad-supported tier—including longtime holdout, Netflix—the entire playing field rising at once should send even the more comfortable multi-subscription households into a cost-benefit analysis spiral. And anyone who can only afford to watch streamers while being flooded with ads the whole time will likely be pining for the halcyon days of cable TV with one or two premium channels.

The state of streaming now is such that FOMO is no longer enough of a pull. People are learning their limits and learning to live with them. For instance, there is currently a show on Hulu in which Steve Martin and Martin Short goofily attempt to live out their true-crime obsession, everybody says it’s great, and I have not yet watched it because I currently no longer have Hulu. And I am fully comfortable with that! I’ll probably get Hulu again someday—I can’t even remember what made me pare it down early in the pandemic—but I’m in no rush. That seems to be the boat a lot of people are in these days. The bar is set incredibly high. What could have been your favorite show if it came out 15 years ago might barely make a dent these days.

Therein lies the main problem of the streaming wars’ plateau era. Back when “Netflix and chill” had just been coined, the question that potential subscribers had was: Is it possible for a streaming service to produce amazing content? As Netflix and its many competitors have all since demonstrated, the answer is a resounding yes. The goal posts have clearly moved by now, however, and the new question is whether it’s possible for a streamer to be consistently indispensable.

Much like many shows I’d hoped to get around to watching this year: that remains to be seen.