How Netflix Eats Academy – TechCrunch

This is the night of the Oscars! It interests you? If you are me and / or the statistically average observer, the answer is: a lot less than you had the habit of doing. The number of viewers from last year has reached a record level. Where does Hollywood go, which no longer dominated the cultural conversation as before?

Oh, at first glance, everything is going well – the US box office reached a record high of nearly $ 12 billion last year. But look a little further and the numbers are more troubling. Most of this gain comes from higher ticket prices. The total number of movie tickets sold in the United States has declined by more than 10% over the last 20 years, despite population growth.

"Netflix!", Say, yes, and even more than you think. "Hollywood is now irrelevant", says no less an authority that was once the Hollywood tycoon Barry Diller, currently president of IAC. "Netflix won this game." Streaming is the future, despite the studios' attempt to promote "cloud locker rooms" for movie ownership, with one of them (UltraViolet) having been closed last year. , while others, such as Disney's Movies Anywhere (disclaimer / disclosure: I did some ancillary work for MA during my day job a few years ago) not having exactly conquered the landscape.

In fact, the world's most attentive industry badyst, Matthew Ball former strategy manager at Amazon Studios, says that Netflix has transcended Hollywood so much that its real competition is an entity totally surprising:

He unpublishes this piece in a fascinating piece, surpbaded by his dive in four times in "Netflix Misunderstandings", composed last summer and which has to be read since for each medical chair. an badyst all over the world. Some highlights:

This cash loss only exists because Netflix is ​​funding next year's content against this year's earnings. Netflix could have chosen to stabilize its content offering for 2018 at 2017 levels … and if that had been the case, the company would have generated $ 700 million in cash without losing $ 2 billion.
[…] At a time when most technology companies must be bullied By admitting that it is also about media companies, the technological identity of Netflix is ​​often pbaded in silence. It's just as much a technology company and products as Google, Apple or Amazon.
[…] Hastings knows that if Netflix fails to buy 250MM subscribers, his business will falter. Its expenses are based on the achievement of this degree of scale … Even at the bottom of the scale, Netflix would have achieved a domination superior to that of the media.
[…] The company boasts of launching 700 original series in 2018 (or 14 per week) and offering more than 1,000 by the end of the year. This raises the question of what exactly is an "original" … Understanding this difference is essential for any attempt to compare SVOD services

We can conclude that the restructuring of the visual media industry by Netflix (and, to a lesser extent, Amazon Prime) is just beginning; The first earthquakes are still affecting Hollywood, but we can expect more earthquakes in the years to come.

The big greeting is that the rest of the world is enriching and spending more for Hollywood … although studios only absorb about 25% of gross revenues in China, against 50% at home. Yet 25% of a huge number is still very big, and China is huge . Two of the 15 best world films of last year have won almost everything in China. It seems plausible that The Wandering Earth who raised $ 557 million in China just two weeks, will earn more money this year than supposed 2019 Avengers: Endgame UNITED STATES . ( Infinity War earned $ 679 million in the domestic market.)

So where does Hollywood stay? Netflix and Amazon Prime are gradually disturbing their technical superiors and trying to make up for their losses abroad. But it's not like Netflix does not have a robust international strategy. Hollywood studios are not going anywhere so soon, but, with the possible exception of Disney, they will soon have to get used to becoming mid-level players rather than the kings of the world they once were.