Pinpointing success is much more difficult than pinpointing what causes a failure. Perhaps, if you identify enough failures, you could assemble a guide on what not to do, a sort of Minesweeper approach to get the most optimal path.
Failures
Yahoo! Screen
Fans of the show Community might remember this one. Yahoo! Screen came around a mere two years after Yahoo bought Tumblr, and it marks one of Yahoo’s biggest failures to expand into a market that they couldn’t compete in right after a series of large financial failures.
What did they do wrong? Nearly everything! They didn’t have the funds. They didn’t have a library built in for themselves, like Paramount or Disney did, because Yahoo wasn’t exactly known for producing movies. They didn’t have the talent or money to create many of their own shows or buy pre-existing ones, like Netflix did. They had Community season 6. Even that they later blamed for their failure because it was expensive, but it was one of their main drawing points! Their reaction to Community’s cost peeved off fans of the show, further nailing the coffin. It was a bad investment and a bad idea. It also proved via example that you really can’t just ‘make a streaming service’. Total failure to launch.
Quibi
Quibi lived in a strange in-between world for two years after it’s founding, only to die less than a year after officially launching services. It was competing with some of the best of the best – other programs launched long before 2020, and were much better-established. It credits part of its failure to the pandemic, which sounds a little odd for a streaming service, who arguably did better than most companies during the pandemic, but it makes more sense when you realize the shows were designed to be watched on the go – and on mobile devices. Every Quibi show had a format of 16:9, designed to be watched on a phone’s screen, not a TV. Episodes were ten or so minutes long. Content like that exists, but much of Quibi’s library had to be made specially for Quibi. Interesting concept, great initial execution, but the idea itself didn’t have legs.
Quibi, who was counting on unrealistically high subscriber counts in order to continue functioning, didn’t draw in nearly enough funding in those first crucial months to make it work like Netflix did. Quibi crashed and burned, and then got sold to Roku. At least they didn’t threaten to drag their investors under, like Yahoo! Screens did.
Quibi might have worked today, with short form videos designed for a user’s phone. The new internet seems to prefer TikTok to Netflix – and the ad formula is even more addictive. On Tiktok, shows are uploaded in one-minute to three-minute chunks, and each episode ends in a cliffhanger. You want to see what happens next!
Successes
Tubi
Tubi gets made fun of for it’s name, but it’s a nice service that offers access for free in a world where you have to subscribe and then also see ads to have access to shows. At least with Tubi, you don’t need to do that. The service is successful – the service is well-loved for having a number of smaller hits that big platforms don’t.
PlutoTV is a similar service, where the ads pay for the viewer, and similar to Tubi, it has a library consisting of smaller, niche hits and TV series to draw in customers.
Netflix
Netflix is one of the first services to ever offer streaming. I’d call it a true success if it weren’t almost always cycling content and bleeding money. Despite this, it runs.
Somehow it keeps happening: they’ll start a series, and end it before it has time to build steam. They’ll make terrible original movies, or make shows out of ideas that should have been shortened to movies. They’ll lose the rights to series they had previously, and buy series that fans love only to not get full permissions and/or sell them right back. And yet, they survived! They renewed and refreshed their funding with plans to introduce tiered viewing, trimming content, and otherwise making much-needed changes as a platform. If they had worthy competitors during this vulnerable period, who knows if they would have made it?
Even though they’re a pretty stable success now, – what does Netflix do wrong?
Selling content to other streaming services could catch up eventually. They seem a little better about starting insanely expensive projects only to not finish the script/the set/the casting/the series beforehand than they were even a couple years ago, but that could always change. There was a time when industry skeptics genuinely thought Netflix was going to die out because it just wouldn’t stop spending on content indiscriminately. Plus, auto-play on the home screen is really annoying.
Hulu
Hulu is functional. Much like Paramount Plus, it offers an even more hybrid model where bottom tier users see ads, the next tier users don’t, and higher tiers include live TV.
However, they’ve also suffered their fair share of struggles. Poor server balancing meant that even customers with good internet were forced to wait for ads to load and their show to buffer. This is obviously bad. The website was still useable, but it was unpleasant when other options existed in the early days, when Hulu had a free option. Nowadays, it’s much more stable, and therefore much more competitive as well.
Hulu originals don’t have the same draw as Netflix or Amazon originals, but producing your own library is only a bad idea if your service doesn’t have the funding – and Hulu has the funding, plus the means to secure content from channels like Adult Swim and Cinemax. That’s impressive. If Yahoo had managed that, it might still be around.
Sources:
https://help.hulu.com/s/article/how-much-does-hulu-cost
https://morningconsult.com/2021/03/01/paramount-plus-streaming-subscriber-demographics
