Churn, Baby, Churn: Streaming Services Gird For A Challenging 2022

Deloitte just served the streaming industry a very difficult meal, garnished with a couple of scary big numbers to digest over 2022: a projected 150 million cancellations, and a churn rate north of 30 percent. Call it The Nightmare Before Christmas, But Also For A Long Time Afterward.

That very big number is just one indicator of an industry moving beyond the excitement and lowered expectations of the past two years (we’ll call it the Great Launch) to a new era where Wall Street will be looking at more than subscriber ads in evaluating “success.”

Churn rates are particularly problematic for a sector that, in the lucrative but saturated U.S. market, has seen subscriber growth flatten even as the number of competitors has expanded. That’s why services are trying to get global as fast as they can.

But it’s clear that services will need to do more to get a churn rate like Netflix and Disney Plus (the two services least vulnerable to high churn, according to Deloitte). Other services are facing the prospect of audiences dropping in and out of their subscriptions repeatedly as they chase the latest hot show. They just better not be relying solely on tricks they learned in the broadcast and cable businesses to succeed in the streaming era, which is turning out to be a very different world.

The media companies are routinely giving into the temptation to keep things mostly old-school, fueled by their huge investments in broadcast and pay-TV. But how you gonna keep audiences on legacy farm when they’ve seen the bright lights of SVOD?

One legacy leftover: living like viewers are still locked on the grid, rather than freed with binge at will with countless on-demand shows. You do that when you don’t have enough good and eye-catching originals to keep people coming back regularly. That was partly a function of pandemic impacts on production, but also of companies underestimating how much programming they truly need to compete. The result, though, audiences have to remember when that show they enjoyed last week is coming back in the next week, and the week after.

That approach makes some sense when, as Comcast does with NBC/Peacock, or ViacomCBS does with CBS/Paramount Plus, shows run on broadcast then stream within 24 hours. It amortizes each company’s programming investment, but likely does little to attract or retain most subscribers. There’s not a lot of stickiness with such an approach.

But even original programming gets the once-a-week treatment, fueled by traditionalists who say it helps little-known new shows find an audience, while building a bigger cultural footprint for the long run.

I’m not sure I completely buy that. How many streaming-first/-only new series have made a true splash in the cultural conversation? A few come to mind, such as Squid Game, Bridgerton, Ted Lasso, The Morning Show, The Mandalorian, Hacks, The Flight Attendant, and maybe WandaVision. 

Maybe creating giant hits is a lot more difficult when audiences have to remember week after week to keep finding your show among dozens of other options old and new.

There are other retention tactics, including giveaways, like Paramount Plus’ new one-month-free offer, or Hulu’s offer over Black Friday Weekend of 12 months for $12. Speaking of old strategies in new wrappers, services are creating tiers with cheaper or free ad-supported offerings, which other than price brings audiences few of streaming’s benefits. 

And of course, as TVREV Sensei Alan Wolk has prognosticated for quite awhile now, we’re going to see more bundling, of several kinds, including all those add-ons for hardware and wireless carrier contracts.

Comcast and ViacomCBS showed one smart way to do it with their multiple European partnerships announced this summer. Importantly, those deals are safe from increasingly skeptical antitrust regulators in the United States and Europe.

Recent regulator intervention on deals involving Facebook and Giphy, and Nvidia with ARM Holdings suggest the time is past for big media/tech deals like Disney’s 2019 Fox acquisition, the last era’s big idea for building an audience. Amazon is still using that strategy with its still-not-approved, but highly strategic $8.5 billion MGM acquisition.

That again suggests old-school ways to grow and sustain a streaming business won’t work, especially as the traditional movie business continues to sputter, and likely will continue to do for quite some time to come, according to a new study by three marketing and branding agencies. Roughly half of pre-pandemic moviegoers still aren’t back in theaters, and one in 12 likely will never return, the study says.

Facing yet another eroding financial bulwark, studios have all the more incentive to figure out new ways to make both engaging original series and feature-length programming that can attract audiences to their DTC operations, and keep them around.

HBO Max uncovered one such approach when, almost exactly a year ago, WarnerMedia CEO Jason Kilar enraged much of Hollywood when he decided to release the entire Warner Bros. 2021 slate on the streamer the same day they hit theater screens. 

Those top-notch movies made HBO Max far more attractive to subscribers at a crucial time, despite the service’s steep price, light initial lineup, and branding confusion. 

 “It was great for the service, especially during a time where schedules were not fully populated because of COVID-related production delays,” said Casey Bloys, the HBO/HBO Max chief content officer, speaking recently to my long-ago colleague Joe Adalian. “It was just a great steady source of movies that people loved. Going forward in ’22, hopefully we’re going to be in a world where people are going back to theaters and not worrying about the pandemic.” 

HBO Max won’t be doing the same thing next year, but it will beef up its programming with 50,000 Discovery episodes, and plans to release roughly a dozen new Warner movies made for direct release on HBO Max. The company also permanently shifted its movie releases to a 45-day theatrical window before sending them straight to Max.

“That is a massive shift because the pay-one window — which is what HBO typically got —  was eight months after release,” Bloys said. “So you’re going from eight months to 45 days. That’s huge. So I believe it’s going to work really well because people who want to go to theaters and experience a movie theatrically get to do that— and then 45 days later, it’s on Max. That, to me, seems like a really great situation.”

Netflix is changing its strategy, too, if only modestly, as exemplified by the huge success of Red Notice, Bloomberg’s Lucas Shaw noted in a column this week. Basically, the company is taking bigger swings, but slightly fewer of them, because Netflix global film chief Scott Stuber says his unit makes too many of the darn things.

“I think one of the fair criticisms has been we make too much and not enough is great,” Stuber said of the 90(!) feature-length shows the company is releasing this year. Enlisting big-name stars like Dwayne Johnson, Gal Gado, and Ryan Reynolds in Red Notice paid off with record viewership. Expect to see more big swings in the months to come, and maybe only 80 films a year.

In an amusing inversion, Netflix is reportedly in discussions, again, with major theater chains about showing more of its movies. The theater chains might need the volume Netflix can provide to fill up all their screens with some of the many genres the Hollywood studios don’t make anymore. The chains just have to get over their reflexive distaste for the streaming service. That would be yet another way a streaming service is expanding its reach in innovative way.

Expect lots more such strategies as companies try to stay out of the Churn Zone. They all have one goal in mind.

“So my hope is that, a year from now, we’re cementing our place as one of the must-have services,” Bloys said. “Because we’re all in this race to end up as one of the top streaming services. It is a race. Not everybody’s going to survive, and my hope is that our programming makes us one of the must-haves.”