Netflix Wanted to Become HBO. Now It Has to Consider Becoming Amazon

The New York Times reported that Netflix execs have discussed making services including Peacock and Fox One available inside the Netflix app. It would be irresponsible for Netflix not to have those conversations. A company with roughly 330 million subscription households, one of the most valuable entertainment interfaces in the world and a growing advertising business should be evaluating every credible way to monetize its distribution.

Netflix has made no commitment to aggregation. There’s no imminent deal, no settled model, and these discussions may never produce a consumer-facing product.

The rationale for exploring it is straightforward: Netflix could use its audience, interface, recommendation engine and billing relationship to distribute services it doesn’t own, earning more from its distribution without assuming the full programming costs behind them. Amazon has already shown how valuable that position can become.

Aggregation Lets Netflix Monetize Scale Without Owning Every Show

Netflix built its streaming audience on licensed libraries from other media companies, then used that scale to justify a massive original-programming operation.

Instead of licensing individual shows and movies, Netflix can use its interface, recommendation engine and customer base to distribute entire streaming services. A channel-store model could add subscription revenue sharing, billing relationships and merchandising economics without requiring Netflix to finance the underlying programming. Deeper content integration could increase engagement, advertising inventory and retention by giving subscribers more reasons to open Netflix.

The economics depend on the structure, but both approaches reduce the amount of programming Netflix has to own to increase the utility of its service.

Amazon has already demonstrated the value of that position. Antenna estimates Prime Video add-on subscriptions accounted for one in four U.S. SVOD signups during the first quarter of 2025. Prime Video now sells access to more than 100 streaming subscriptions in the U.S., including Peacock, Fox One, HBO Max, Paramount+ and Apple TV.

Amazon gets paid when someone subscribes to another company’s service while strengthening Prime Video as the place that customer starts watching. Its broader strategy increasingly treats the streaming checkout as an asset in its own right.

The TF1 Experiment Already Put Another TV Business Inside Netflix

Since June, Netflix members in France have had access to TF1’s live channels and TF1+ programming directly inside Netflix as part of their existing subscription. The arrangement adds news, entertainment, sports and other local programming without requiring users to leave the Netflix interface.

Greg Peters told investors in July that the early results were “very promising” and said Netflix would consider additional partnerships that work for members, partners and Netflix. He also described Netflix’s global reach and monetization capabilities as a way for outside producers and services to find larger audiences.

The TF1 structure doesn’t make Netflix a conventional channel store. Netflix members aren’t separately subscribing to TF1+. TF1’s branded programming instead sits persistently inside the Netflix experience while remaining distinct from Netflix’s own programming.

That gives TF1 more distribution and advertising reach while Netflix controls the account environment, home screen, recommendations and discovery around the programming. The French partnership demonstrates how a local broadcaster can gain scale while moving part of the audience relationship into Netflix’s interface.

Selling Peacock or Fox One would add another layer to that relationship. Netflix could move from distributing third-party programming to distributing third-party subscriptions.

Netflix Became HBO. The Bigger Opportunity May Be the Storefront

Ted Sarandos described Netflix’s original-programming ambition in 2013 with a line that became shorthand for its strategy: “The goal is to become HBO faster than HBO can become us.”

Netflix accomplished the important part of that transformation. It became a global commissioner, producer and distributor of premium programming while traditional media companies built streaming services designed to compete with Netflix.

Amazon and YouTube don’t need every major streaming service to lose for their own entertainment businesses to gain value. They can make Peacock, Fox One, Paramount+ and other services more useful inside their own distribution environments, then monetize the discovery, subscription, advertising or billing activity around them.

Netflix now faces strategic pressure from Amazon and YouTube becoming storefronts through which consumers reach everyone else.

YouTube is already pushing deeper into that position. Peacock and Fox One are available through its Primetime Channels marketplace, and eligible YouTube Premium subscribers will gain access to ad-supported Peacock Premium beginning in 2027. YouTube has been turning discovery, viewing and paid subscriptions into a single demand layer.

Netflix has one of the strongest entertainment home screens in the world, but it mostly monetizes what Netflix itself sells. Opening that screen to third-party services increases the number of transactions the company can capture from the audience it already has.

Peacock and Fox One Have Reasons to Give Netflix a Cut

Peacock needs profitable subscriber growth and broader distribution. NBCUniversal already sells Peacock through Amazon, YouTube and other partners, demonstrating a willingness to trade some control over the customer relationship for reach, acquisition and reduced friction.

Fox One launched into an environment where consumers already maintain multiple streaming subscriptions and where Amazon and YouTube can put the service beside other premium offerings in a familiar account. Netflix could offer another large acquisition channel without Fox having to create that audience from scratch.

A customer acquired inside an aggregator can be more valuable to the distributor than one acquired directly because the distributor controls more of the discovery, merchandising and payment relationship. Media companies spent heavily building direct-to-consumer businesses partly to own those functions themselves.

Streaming recreated enough fragmentation that bundling and aggregation have become tools for reducing acquisition friction and subscription complexity. For services willing to give up some economics and customer ownership, Netflix could provide another large source of demand.

The Streaming Wars Take

A Netflix channel store would force media companies to put an explicit price on the direct customer relationship they spent billions building.

Peacock, Fox One and other services can keep paying for app development, marketing, billing infrastructure, discovery and customer acquisition entirely on their own, or they can surrender part of the economics to distributors that already have hundreds of millions of users ready to transact.

Netflix already has global scale, a heavily used TV interface, personalization infrastructure, advertising technology and an existing billing relationship with roughly 330 million households. Adding third-party subscriptions would let it earn more from those assets without carrying the full programming cost attached to every incremental hour of entertainment.

The companies that once supplied Netflix with licensed shows could increasingly supply it with entire streaming services. Netflix used outside libraries to build scale, then invested in originals to control more of its programming economics. Aggregation would let it monetize outside supply again, this time through the customer relationship and transaction itself.

A channel store would turn Netflix’s roughly 330 million subscription households into a customer-acquisition channel for other streamers, with Netflix collecting economics on the transaction. That gives Netflix another business line built on distribution without requiring it to own the programming being sold.