HBO Max, Netflix, Disney+ and the day streaming died

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The date engraved on the tombstone will be May 23, 2023. That is the day hbo max—a streaming service with a name that would be inscrutable if it didn’t have “HBO”—became Max. The day that, while Max’s news was trending online and the Max app was crashing, Netflix silently tried to start limit who could share passwords. It was the day streaming died.

Perhaps this statement is wildly hyperbolic. But in the midst of what appears to be a moment of panic in the streaming industry, it doesn’t feel too bad either. In the last three years, services like Netflix, Disney+and a dozen other offerings with silly titles have lost captivity COVID-19-Audiences blocked only to find a churn of subscribers caused by an excess of options.

TO stop loss of income, many (Netflix, Disney+, HBO Max) released ad-supported levels. That saved some people some money and generated cash for corporations, but it also came at a time when streamers’ ever-changing lineups of shows and movies left many viewers confused about what they were getting for their money. For a long time, it felt like a reckoning was coming. This week came.

Sarah Henschel, a principal analyst at Omdia who closely watches the streaming market, agrees that this is an inflection point. “We’re seeing a lot of these services come of age, whereas the last 10 years it’s been like the Wild West,” she says. “Everyone is starting to face the reality that they have to make money now and that they can no longer give away all the content in the world for $5.”

Ever since Netflix started streaming movies and TV shows, and then creating original content like house of cards, the landscape has been changing. While tech companies like Netflix and Amazon were rushing to get into the Hollywood production game, Hollywood itself was scrambling to catch up with streaming. New players poured millions into developing original movies and shows. Established studios launched their own streaming services (Disney+, Paramount+, Hulu) and in the process reclaimed content they had produced for themselves. The office went to peacock Friends went to (HBO) Max.

The name of the game was Get Subscribers. And it worked, for a while. But it was very expensive, and soon streaming services found themselves in the position of needing to offer ad-supported options to recoup costs and keep customers, or remove things from their libraries. Netflix, long reticent of commercials, released an ad-supported level by the end of 2022. Meanwhile, programs like Western world disappeared from Max and licensed to third parties amid talks about tax deductions for parent company Warner Bros. Discovery.

Suddenly, the bold new world of streaming felt like the old established world of TV, where shows were bouncing around syndication and a small handful of players competed to be the big three emission (minus the actual emission). “There was unbundling at the beginning of the streaming era,” Henschel says, pointing to the announcement earlier this month that Disney add Hulu to Disney+ later this year. “Now we are in the regrouping phase.”