Many people don't know it, but the almighty service of streaming Netflix started out as a DVD movie rental company. The idea was simple. Like now, you had to choose what to watch on a computer connected to the Internet. The difference comes in what happened afterwards: the film was brought to your home, via post and with the return postage already paid. The year was 1998 and little could its CEO, Reed Hastings, imagine that two decades later that company that started with 30 employees would be disbursing billions of dollars in the production of series, films and documentaries. Despite its huge debt and the appearance of more competitors, for this 2020 Netflix plans record spending. A full-fledged rain of Netflix money.
Netflix is going to spend a lot of money. Specifically, some 17.300 million dollars this year only in the creation of own content, as we read in Deadline based on predictions by Dan Salmon of BMO Capital Markets. It is important to note that his analyzes of previous years were not wrong at all.
Netflix, which seems never to run out of money, has already chained five consecutive years of frantic spending and we who celebrate it. The company invested just over 15.000 million in 2019, 12.000 million in 2018 and 8.900 million in 2017. Let's remember, and it all started with a video store with a catalog of 925 DVDs.
One sentence is well worth summarizing the whole thing. Netflix today is a company that, in addition to having the best? offer of series, films and documentaries, allowed to melt 160 million euros in the latest caper of Martin Scorsese, The Irish.
Table of Contents
The golden age of Don Dinero Netflix?
In addition to the numbers, Netflix's recent catalog screams by itself that something is changing. Only in the last quarter of 2019 have we been able to enjoy The two potatoes, The Irish, Marriage Story or the surprising Don't fuck with cats. Not to mention little gems, something less recent, like Bird box: Blindfolded, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, Rome. If we include the series in the equation, the matter gets out of hand: Mindhunter, The Witcher, The Crown, House of Cards, Stranger Things, Narcos… We would have titles to make scroll a good time. And it's not a plan either.
That said, let's not go crazy too soon. To the debt of more than 13.000 million dollars that Netflix has, we must add the call streaming wars which, now yes, is going to implode throughout this 2020. Those who think that in this video-on-demand ecosystem there is no longer room for anyone else (HBO, Amazon Prime, Disney Plus in March) tie the males. In the United States, where the popular Hulu also operates, they are about to welcome HBO Max, Peacock (from NBC, the name refers to the peacock in its logo) and Quibi. It is also said that something called Sky circulates around there.
How many platforms streaming fit in the market?
Techradar sums it up nicely: In 2020 we'll learn how many streaming services are too many.
"Streaming TV used to be so much simpler. While having choice is often good for the consumer, whether that's the case here remains to be seen, even if it means having more great content than we can watch. The dominance of giants like Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, and Hulu puts your favorite shows in a finite number of places. In 2020, if you want to see everything in the US, it's just going to cost you more money."
TechRadar
Twenty years ago, in the United States, stretching the limit status quo it meant being able to ask The big lebowski To the postman. If we had never believed it possible to have such a repertoire of companies desperate for us to choose them to give the play, perhaps today we are not in a position to project the panorama that awaits us. Some days ago Vox published an article that may serve as a clue: 25% of Netflix viewers on iPhone also watch Disney+.
What if the answer to this war is that there need be no war? Is there really cake for everyone? Is there really time to see it all?
Consume, devour everything. What chapter are you going for? A new premiere every day. No time to assimilate. Screens wherever you look. Eat and don't look back.