30 My 2¢ YouTube is more popular than any other streaming platform. Late last year, at the Wall Street Journal’s annual Tech Live conference in Laguna Beach, California, Netflix’s co-CEO, Ted Sarandos, was interviewed by WSJ’s editor-in-chief, Emma Tucker, about “The Future for Streaming.” According to Sarandos, “consumers are speaking loud and clear that they prefer streaming.” When I wrote the book TV via Internet in 1999, I predicted that VoD via Internet would be television’s next frontier. At that time, Netflix, which was born in 1997, was a DVD mail order retailer. It entered the SVoD space in 2007. However, back in 1999 I envisioned “TV via Internet” to be an add-on to regular broadcast television, the way home video became an added TV window. Netflix did not have a legacy TV media business, so from the start it focused on streaming activities. When its business model became a success, legacy media wanted to follow Netflix’s expensive and money-losing commercial-free path and neglected their traditional moneymaking businesses like TV advertising and international content sales. Sarandos explained that consumers prefer streaming at a time when all the streaming companies are modeling their businesses on “dying” legacy media entities, complete with advertising, weekly release episodes, and allowing content for international licensing. In effect, only delayed binge-viewing is now possible. Gone are commercial-free screenings, and exclusive rights are no longer required. Plus, Nielsen’s Gracenote research division found that series from linear TV make up 89 percent of major streaming platforms’ content. Going back to the WSJ interview, according to Sarandos, looking at “the monetization model [of YouTube] it isn’t possible [for them] to do something at the scope and scale that we do on Netflix through that model.” And yet YouTube and other similar OTT outlets are viewed as the next generation main form of entertainment. Plus, YouTube is now part of a broadcast channel for some of the most-watched legacy media content in the world. Both streamers and broadcasters see it as an integral part of their social media strategy. Let’s look at some U.S. dollar figures: Legacy TV businesses (broadcast, cable, and pay-TV channels) are reaching $37 billion a year for broadcast and $92 billion for cable TV channels, while streaming TV businesses are reaching $44 billion. In comparison, YouTube business is reaching over $32 billion a year. According to the financial publications WSJ and The Economist, YouTube is more popular than any other streaming platform. Plus, YouTube has paid out an average of $23 billion a year to its platform’s creators, while Netflix is expected to spend $15 billion in 2024 on content. Plus, YouTube shares 55 percent of revenues from ads with its creators’ long-form content, and 45 percent of revenue from ads for short-form videos. Is it possible that today’s SVoD will soon become the legacy business that once was traditional broadcast/cable television, and that YouTube will become the streamer that Sarandos said consumers prefer? Stranger things have happened. Dom Serafini Streaming is a content-delivery model that is now replicating legacy media’s losing content-delivery model in an effort to finally find success. “Remember the good old days when we knew what to watch?’ January 2025
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