The Streaming Wars

Ask Skip argues that high churn isn’t necessarily a problem for niche streamers if subscriber lifetime value still exceeds acquisition and reacquisition costs. The real risk comes when replacing or retaining customers costs more than the margin they generate.

JioHotstar's replacing Hotstar in the UK, Canada and Singapore with a 160,000-hour entertainment service that excludes the live sports driving much of its scale in India. JioStar's betting it can monetize its existing diaspora audience and content library at higher…

Netflix turned a six-hour exclusive window for Grand Theft Auto VI: An Extended Look into its most-watched English-language movie of the week, generating 31.1 million views. The launch shows Netflix can turn major third-party product reveals into high-demand programming without…

Roku's updating its Distribution Agreement to give approved publishers more flexibility to sell ads and offer subscriptions inside Roku-owned services without maintaining standalone apps. The changes strengthen Roku's role across discovery, billing, distribution, and monetization while raising its fee on…

Antenna estimates that 31% of traditional pay-TV cancelers add a streaming service within 30 days, five times the normal signup rate. That makes cable cancellation a high-intent window for streamers, broadband providers and TV platforms to capture redirected TV spending.

Sony's turning the PS5 into a FAST distribution and advertising platform, giving it a way to monetize living-room viewing without owning the TV operating system. Live TV creates new ad inventory, gives Sony Pictures and Crunchyroll direct distribution to signed-in…

NBCUniversal is launching Universal+ in Japan exclusively through U-Next, giving it immediate access to more than five million paid subscribers without building a standalone local streaming service. The partnership trades some customer control for local scale while expanding NBCU’s monetization…

Apple and NBCUniversal are using higher standalone prices to make their $14.99 Apple TV and Peacock bundle look increasingly difficult to pass up, with the latest increases expanding the bundle’s displayed savings without lowering its price. The strategy turns list…

Meta’s roughly $10 billion legal expense shows how recommendation systems are becoming direct P&L issues, while YouTube, the BBC, Flipboard, and Roku are fighting over who controls discovery. As algorithms increasingly shape audience, ad revenue, rights value, and distribution, recommendation…

YouTube and Amazon are making creator video shoppable, with YouTube controlling discovery and Amazon handling checkout, fulfillment and customer data. The model gives media companies a simple way to test video commerce while highlighting Amazon's advantage if it extends the…

Basics of Streaming breaks down the technical and economic tradeoffs behind delivering 4K, including encoding, HDR, bandwidth, device compatibility, and CDN costs. For streaming services, the real calculation is whether 4K’s viewer and subscription value justifies the added complexity, especially…

Flipboard's acquiring Graze to let creators, publishers and communities build and monetize their own social feeds, with curators keeping 70% of ad revenue. The deal gives media companies more control over the discovery layer they currently rely on platforms like…